"
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.
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