fairy non-existent Hollow Land. Landscapes grew blurred with the speed
of our passage. They loomed up on us like waves, stayed with us for a
second and vanished. The staff-officer, who was my conductor, drowsed
on his seat beside the driver. He had wearied himself in the morning,
taking me now here to see an American Division putting on a manoeuvre,
now there to where the artillery were practising, then to another
valley where machine-guns tapped like thousands of busy typewriters
working on death's manuscript. After that had come bayonet charges
against dummies, rifle-ranges and trench-digging--all the industrious
pretence at slaughter which prefaces the astounding actuality. We
were far away from all that now; the brown figures had melted into the
brownness of the hills. There might have been no war. Perhaps there
wasn't. Never was there a world more grey and quiet. I grew sleepy.
My head nodded. I opened my eyes, pulled myself together and again
nodded. The roar of the engine was soothing. The rush of wind lay
heavy against my eye-lids. It seemed odd that I should be here and
not in the trenches. When I was in the line I had often made up life's
deficiencies by imagining, imagining.... Perhaps I was really in
the line now. I wouldn't wake up to find out. That would come
presently--it always had.

We were slowing down. I opened my eyes lazily. No, we weren't
stopping--only going through a village. What a quaint grey village
it was--worth looking at if I wasn't so tired. I was on the point
of drowsing off again when I caught sight of a word written on a
sign-board, _Domrémy_. My brain cleared. I sat up with a jerk. It was
magic that I should find myself here without warning--at Domrémy, the
Bethlehem of warrior-woman's mercy. I had dreamed from boyhood of this
place as a legend--a memory of white chivalry to be found on no map,
a record of beauty as utterly submerged as the lost land of Lyonesse.