would be blood; but she didn't see it; she saw white, very white
bandages, and greyish white, sallow-white faces that had no features that
she knew. She hadn't really thought so very much about the war; there had
been too many other things to think about. Their seven weeks' training at
Coventry, the long days in Roden and Conway's motor works, the long
evenings in the ambulance classes; field practice in the meadow that
John's father had lent to the Red Cross; runs along the Warwickshire
roads with John sitting beside her, teaching her to steer and handle the
heavy ambulance car. An endless preparation.

And under it all, like a passion, like a hidden illness, their
impatience, their intolerable longing to be out there.

If there had been nothing else to think about there was John. Always
John. Not that you could think about him without thinking about the war;
he was so thoroughly mixed up with it; you couldn't conceive him as left
out of it or as leaving himself out. It had been an obsession with him,
to get into it, to get into it at once, without waiting. That was why
there was only four of them. He wouldn't wait for more volunteers. They
could get all the volunteers they wanted afterwards; and all the cars,
his father would send out any number. She suspected John of not really
wanting the volunteers, of not even wanting Gwinnie and Dr. Sutton. She
could see he would have liked to have gone with her alone. Queer, that so
long as she had thought he would be going without her, she had been
afraid; she had felt certain he would be killed or die of wounds. The one
unbearable thing was that John should die. But after it had been settled
that she was to go with him as his chauffeur she hadn't been afraid any
more. It was as if she knew that she would keep him safe. Or perhaps all
the time she had been afraid of something else. Of separation. She had
had visions of John without her in another country; they were coloured,