“A car was to have picked me up,” she said, “but I have walked and walked and it has not come.  And I am so cold.  Is that tea?  And may I come to the fire?”

So they settled her comfortably, with her feet thrust out to the blaze, and gave her hot tea and plenty of bread and butter.

“It is like the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice in Wonderland,” said one of the officers gaily.  “When any fresh person drops in we just move up one place.”

The novelist sipped her tea and told me about her soup kitchen.

“It is so very hard to get things to put into the soup,” she said.  “Of course I have no car, and now with the new law that no women are to be allowed in military cars I hardly know what to do.”

“Will you tell me just what you do?” I asked.  So she told me, and later I saw her soup kitchen.

“Men come in from the front,” she explained, “injured and without food.  Often they have had nothing to eat for a long time.  We make soup of whatever meat we can find and any vegetables, and as the hospital trains come in we carry it out to the men.  They are so very grateful for it.”

That was to be an exceptional afternoon at the naval air-station.  For hardly had the novelist been settled with her tea when two very attractive but strangely attired young women came into the room.  They nodded to the officers, whom they knew, and went at once to the business which had brought them.

“Can you lend us a car?” they asked.  “Ours has gone off the road into the mud, and it looks as though it would never move again.”

That was the beginning of a very strange evening, almost an extraordinary evening.  For while the novelist was on her way back to peace these young women were on their way home.

And home to them was one room of a shattered house directly on the firing line.

Much has been said about women at the front.  As far as I know at that time there were only two women absolutely at the front.  Nurses as a rule are kept miles behind the line.  Here and there a soup kitchen, like that just spoken of, has held its courageous place three or four miles back along the lines of communication.

I have said that they were extraordinarily dressed.  Rather they were most practically dressed.  Under khaki-coloured leather coats these two young women wore khaki riding breeches with puttees and flannel shirts.  They had worn nothing else for six months.  They wore knitted caps on their heads, for the weather was extremely cold, and mittens.

The fire was blazing high and we urged them to take off their outer wraps.  For a reason which we did not understand at the time they refused.  They sat with their leather coats buttoned to the throat, and coloured violently when urged to remove them.

“But what are you doing here?” said one of the officers.  “What brings you so far from P——­”

They said they had had an errand, and went on drinking tea.