For women, even the apparently merely out-of-door hunting games-playing women, have arrived at a high state of sophistication; and this life they now lead is a community life reduced to its essentials. And a community life, though the building up of it marked the first stages of civilisation, is, to the perfected product of civilisation, anathema. Individuals had to combine to make the world, but now that it is made, all the instincts of the most highly developed in it are towards complete liberty as regards the amount of social intercourse in which he or she wishes to indulge. We have fought through thousands of years for a state of society so civilised that it is safe to withdraw from it and be alone without one's enemy tracking one down and hitting one over the head with an axe.
This right, fought for through the ascending ages, these girls have deliberately forgone, as every man in the Army has to forgo it also. Were they aware of this? Or did they, after all, like it, unthinkingly, without analysis?
I had wondered as I saw my previous convoys and camps, and I had wondered again as I saw over this convoy--saw the usual tiny cubicles, with gay chintz curtains and photographs from home, and the shelf of books, saw the great bare mess-rooms, the sitting-room, bright with cushions, cosy with screens and long chairs, saw the admirable bath-rooms, with big enamelled baths and an unlimited supply of hot water, saw the two parks where the great ambulances were ranged, shadowy and huge in the growing gloom and thick downpour of rain. Everywhere smiling faces, uplifted voices, quick steps--yet I wondered.
Was it possible this malaise of community life never weighed on their souls? And, if possible--was it good that it should be so?
I managed, stumblingly, to convey something of my thought, of the depression which had been eating at me--not, as I tried to explain, that I didn't admire them all, Heaven knew, rather that I must be, personally, such a weak-kneed, backboneless creature to feel I couldn't, for any cause on earth, have stood it. And I wanted--how I wanted--to know how it was they did ... whether they really and actually could like it...? "Of course, I know," I ended apologetically, "some people like a community life----"