It was all intensely interesting, and we left the positions with great reluctance, to return through the moonlit pine-woods till we reached our cart.  We had indeed made a night of it, for it was five o’clock in the morning when we got back to the train once more, and both the doctor and I were on duty again at eight.  But it was well worth losing a night’s sleep to go up to the positions during a violent German attack.  I wonder what the general would have said if he had known!

We finished our forty-eight hours’ duty and returned once more to Zyradow.  I was always loth to leave Radzivilow.  The work there was splendid, and there more than anywhere else I have been to one feels the war as a High Adventure.

War would be the most glorious game in the world if it were not for the killing and wounding.  In it one tastes the joy of comradeship to the full, the taking and giving, and helping and being helped in a way that would be impossible to conceive in the ordinary world.  At Radzivilow, too, one could see the poetry of war, the zest of the frosty mornings, and the delight of the camp-fire at night, the warm, clean smell of the horses tethered everywhere, the keen hunger, the rough food sweetened by the sauce of danger, the riding out in high hope in the morning; even the returning wounded in the evening did not seem altogether such a bad thing out there.  One has to die some time, and the Russian peasants esteem it a high honour to die for their “little Mother” as they call their country.  The vision of the High Adventure is not often vouchsafed to one, but it is a good thing to have had it—­it carries one through many a night at the shambles.  Radzivilow is the only place it came to me.  In Belgium one’s heart was wrung by the poignancy of it all, its littleness and defencelessness; in Lodz one could see nothing for the squalor and “frightfulness”; in other places the ruined villages, the flight of the dazed, terrified peasants show one of the darkest sides of war.

* * * * *

It was New Year’s Eve when we returned to Zyradow, and found ourselves billeted in a new house where there was not only a bed each, but a bathroom and a bath.  Imagine what that meant to people who had not undressed at night for more than three weeks.

Midnight struck as we were having supper, and we drank the health of the New Year in many glasses of tea.  What would the lifted veil of time disclose in this momentous year just opening for us?

It did not begin particularly auspiciously for me, for within the first few days of it I got a wound in the leg from a bit of shrapnel, was nearly killed by a bomb from a German Taube, and caught a very bad chill and had to go to bed with pleurisy—­all of which happenings gave me leisure to write this little account of my adventures.