nails!' Its staff then consisted of 6 officers and 91 N.C.O.'s and men--its permanent staff at present is about 500. All the drivers of some 20,000 motor vehicles--nearly 40,000 men--are tested here and, if necessary, instructed before going up to the fighting lines; and the depôt deals with 350 different types of vehicles. In round figures, 100,000 separate parts are now dealt with, stored, and arranged in the depôt. The system of records and accounts is extraordinarily perfect, and so ingenious that it seems to work itself.

        Meanwhile Colonel B.'s relations with his army of chauffeurs, of whom about 1000 are always housed on the premises, are exceedingly human and friendly in spite of the strictness of the army discipline. Most of his men who are not married, the Colonel tells me, have found a 'friend' in the town, one or other of its trimly dressed girls, with whom the English mechanic 'walks out,' on Sundays and holidays. There are many engagements, and, as I gather, no misconduct. Marriage is generally postponed till after the war, owing to the legal and other difficulties involved. But marriage there will be when peace comes. As to how the Englishman and

the French girl communicate, there are amusing speculations, but little exact knowledge. There can be small doubt, however, that a number of hybrid words perfectly understood by both sides are gradually coming into use, and if the war lasts much longer, a rough Esperanto will have grown up which may leave its mark on both languages. The word 'narpoo' is a case in point. It is said to be originally a corruption of 'il n'y a plus'--the phrase which so often meets the Tommy foraging for eggs or milk or fruit. At present it means anything from 'done up' to 'dead.' Here is an instance of it, told me by a Chaplain at the Front. He was billeted in a farm with a number of men, and a sergeant. All the men, from the Chaplain to the youngest private, felt a keen sympathy and admiration for the women of the farm, who were both working the land and looking after their billetees, with wonderful pluck and energy. One evening the Chaplain, arriving at the open door of the farm, saw in the kitchen beyond it the daughter of the house, who had just come in from farm work. She was looking at a pile of dirty plates and dishes, which had to be washed before supper, and she gave a sigh of

fatigue. Suddenly in the back door on the other side of the kitchen appeared the sergeant. He looked at the girl, then at the dishes, then again at the girl. 'Fattigay?' he said cheerfully, going up to her. 'Narpoo? Give 'em me. Compree?' And before she could say a word he had driven her away, and plunged into the work.

        The general relations, indeed, between our soldiers and the French population could not be better. General after General, both in the Bases and at the Front, dwelt on this point. A distinguished General commanding one of our Armies on the line spoke to me of it with emphasis. 'The testimony is universal, and it is equally creditable to both sides.' The French civilian in town and country is, no doubt, profiting by the large demand and prompt payments of the British forces. But just as in the case of the women munition-workers, there is infinitely more in it than money. On the British part there is, in both officers and men, a burning sympathy for what France has suffered, whether from the outrages of a brutal enemy, or from the inevitable hardships of war. The headquarters of the General I have mentioned were not more than

fifteen or twenty miles from towns where unspeakable things were done by German soldiers--officers no less than men--in the first weeks of the struggle. With such deeds the French peasantry and small townsfolk, as they still remain in Picardy and Artois, can and do contrast, day by day, the temper, the courtesy, the humanity of the British soldier. Great Britain, of course, is a friend and ally; and Germany is the enemy. But these French folk, these defenceless women and children, know instinctively that the British Army, like their own, whether in its officers, or in its rank and file, is incapable, toward any non-combatant, of what the German Army has done repeatedly, officially, and still excuses and defends.

        The signs of this feeling for and sympathy with the French civils among our soldiers are many. Here is one slight but illuminating story told me by an eye-witness. She is one of a band of women under a noble chief, who, since very early in the war, have been running a canteen for soldiers, night and day, at the large railway-station of the very Base I have been describing, where trains are perpetually arriving from and departing to the Front. In

the early days of the war, a refugee train arrived one afternoon full of helpless French folk, mainly of course women and children, and old people, turned out of their homes by the German advance. In general, the refugees were looked after by the French Red Cross, 'who did it admirably, going along the trains with hot drinks and food and clothing.' But on this occasion there were a number of small children, and some of them got overlooked. In the hubbub, 'I found a raw young Scotchman, little more than a boy,' belonging to a Highland regiment, with six youngsters clinging to him, for whom he peremptorily demanded tea. 'He had tears in his eyes and his voice was all husky as he explained in homely Scotch how the bairns had been turned out of their homes--how he couldn't bear it--and he would give them tea.' A table was found. 'I provided the milk, and he paid for bread and butter and chocolate, and waited on and talked to the six little French people himself. Strange to say, they seemed to understand each other quite well.'

(III)

concerned. All the afternoon of our second day at -- was spent in seeing a fine Red Cross hospital in the town, and then in walking or driving round the endless reinforcement and hospital camps in the open country. Everywhere the same vigourous expanding organisation, the same ceaselessly growing numbers, the same humanity and care in detail. 'How many years have we been at war?' one tends to ask oneself in bewilderment, as the spectacle unrolls itself. 'Is it possible that all this is the work of eighteen months?' And I am reminded of the Scotch sergeant's reply to his German captive who asked his opinion about the duration of the war. 'I'll tell you what--it's the furrst five years that'll be the worrst!' We seem--in the Bases--to have slipped through them already; measuring by any of the ordinary ratios of work to time. On my return home, a diplomat representing one of the neutral nations, told me that the Military Secretary on his staff had been round the English Bases in France, and had come back with his 'eyes starting out of his head.' Having seen them myself, the phrase seemed to me quite natural.

        Then, last of all, as the winter evening fell,

we turned toward the canteen at the railway station. We found it going on in an old goods' shed, simply fitted up with a long tea and coffee bar, tables and chairs, and some small adjacent rooms. It was filled from end to end with a crowd of soldiers, who after many hours of waiting, were just departing for the Front. The old shabby room, with its points of bright light, and its shadowy sides and corners, made a Rembrandtesque setting for the moving throng of figures. Some men were crowding round the bar; some were writing letters in haste to post before the train went off; the piano was going, and a few, gathered round it, were singing the songs of the day, of which the choruses were sometimes taken up in the room. The men--drafts going up to different regiments on the line--appeared to me to come from many parts. The broad Yorkshire and Cumbrian speech, Scotch, the Cockney of the Home Counties, the Northumberland burr, the tongues of Devon and Somerset--one seemed to hear them all in turn. The demands at the counter had slackened a little, and I was presently listening to some of the talk of the indefatigable helpers who work this thing night and day. One of

them drew a picture of the Canadians, the indomitable fighters of Ypres and Loos, of their breathless energy, and impatience of anything but the quickest pace of life, their appetites!--half a dozen hard-boiled eggs, at threepence each, swallowed down in a moment of time; then of the French-Canadians, their old-world French, their old-world Catholicism, simple and passionate. One of these last asked if there was any chance of his being sent to Egypt. 'Why are you so anxious to go to Egypt?'--'Because it was there the Holy Family rested,' said the lad, shyly. The lady to whom he spoke described to him the tree and the Holy Well in St. Georgius, and he listened entranced.

        Sometimes a rough lot fill the canteen, drawn from the poorest class, perhaps, of an English seaport. They hustle for their food, shout at the helpers, and seem to have no notion that such words as 'please' and 'thank you' exist. After three or four hours of battling with such an apparently mannerless crew, one of the helpers saw them depart to the platform where their train was waiting for them, with very natural relief. But they were no sooner gone, when a

guardsman, with the manners, the stature, and the smartness of his kind, came back to the counter, and asked to speak to the lady in charge of it. 'Those chaps, Miss, what have just gone out,'--he said apologetically,--'have never been used to ladies, and they don't know what to say to them. So they asked me just to come in and say for them they were very much obliged for all the ladies' kindness, but they couldn't say it themselves.' The tired helper was suddenly too choky to answer. The message, the choice of the messenger, as one sure to do 'the right thing,' were both so touching.

        ... But there was a sudden movement in the crowd. The train was up. We all surged out upon the platform, and I watched the embarkation--the endless train engulfing its hundreds of men. Just as I had seen the food and equipment trains going up from the first Base laden with everything necessary to replace the daily waste of the Army, so here was the train of human material, going up to replace the daily waste of men. After many hours of travelling, and perhaps some of rest, these young soldiers--how young most of them were!--would find themselves face to

face with the sharpest realities of war. I thought of what I had seen in the Red Cross Hospital that afternoon--'what man has made of man'--the wreck of youth and strength, the hideous pain, the helpless disablement.

        But the station rang with laughter and talk. Some one in the canteen began to play 'Keep the Home Fires burning'--and the men in the train joined in, though not very heartily, for as one or two took care to tell me, laughingly--'That and "Tipperary" are awfully stale now!' A bright-faced lad discussed with D-- how long the war would last--'And shan't we miss it when it's done!' he said, with a jesting farewell to us, as he jumped into the train which had begun to move. Slowly, slowly it passed out of sight, amid waves of singing and the shouting of good-byes....

        It was late that evening when after much talk with various officers, I went up to my room to try and write, bewildered by a multitude of impressions. Impressions of human energy, human intelligence, human suffering. What England is doing in this country will leave, it seems to me, indelible marks upon the national character. I feel a natural pride,

as I sit thinking over the day, in all this British efficiency and power, and a quick joy in the consciousness of our fellowship with France, and hers with us. But the struggle at Verdun is still in its first intensity, and when I have read all that the evening newspapers contain about it there stirs in me a fresh and deeper realisation of the meaning of what I have been seeing. In these great Bases, in the marvellous railway organisation, in the handling of the vast motor transport in all its forms, in the feeding and equipment of the British Army, we have the scaffolding and preparation of war, which both in the French and English Armies, have now reached a perfection undreamt of when the contest began. But the war itself--the deadly struggle of that distant line to which it all tends? It is in the flash and roar of the guns, in the courage and endurance of the fighting man, that all this travail of brain and muscle speaks at last. At that courage and endurance, women, after all, can only guess--through whatever rending of their own hearts.

        But I was to come somewhat nearer to it than I thought then. The morrow brought surprise!

No. 5.

(I)

        But after a third of the journey was over, the snow began to lessen and the roads to

clear. We dropped first into a seaport town which offered much the same mingled scene of French and English, of English nurses, and French poilus, of unloading ships, and British soldiers, as the bases we had left, only on a smaller scale. And beyond the town we climbed again on to the high land, through a beautiful country of interwoven downs, and more plentiful habitation. Soon, indeed, the roads began to show the signs of war:--a village or small town, its picturesque market-place filled with a park of artillery waggons; roads lined with motor lorries with the painted shell upon them that tells ammunition; British artillerymen in khaki, bringing a band of horses out of a snow-bound farm; closed motor-cars filled with officers hurrying past; then an open car with King's Messengers, tall soldierly figures, looking in some astonishment at the two ladies, as they hurry by. And who or what is this horseman looming out of the sleet?--like a figure from a piece of Indian or Persian embroidery; turbaned and swarthy, his cloak swelling out round his handsome head and shoulders, the buildings of a Norman farm behind him? 'There are a few Indian cavalry about here,' says our guide

--'they are billeted in the farms.' And presently the road is full of them. Their Eastern forms, their dark, intent faces pass strangely through the Norman landscape.

        Now we are only some forty miles from the line, and we presently reach another town containing an important headquarters, where we are to stop for luncheon. The inn at which we put up is like the song in Twelfth Night, 'old and plain'--and when lunch is done, our Colonel goes to pay an official call at Headquarters, and my daughter and I make our way to the historic church of the town. The Colonel joins us here with another officer who brings the amazing news that G.H.Q. (General Headquarters)--that mysterious centre and brain of all things--invites us for two days! If we accept, an officer will come for us on the morning of March 1st to our hotel in --, and take us by motor, some forty miles, to the guest-house where G.H.Q. puts up its visitors.

        'Accept'! Ah, if one could only forget for a moment the human facts behind the absorbing interest and excitement of this journey, one might be content to feel only the stir of quickened pulses, of gratitude for a further opportunity so tremendous. As it

was, I saw all the journey henceforward with new eyes, because of that to which it was bringing us.

        On we sped, through the French countryside, past a great forest lying black on the edge of the white horizon--(I open my map and find it marked Bois de Crécy!)--past another old town, with Agincourt a few miles to the east; and so into a region of pine and sand that borders the sea. Darkness comes down, and we miss our way. What are these lines of light among the pinewoods? Another military and hospital camp, which we are to see on the morrow--so we discover at last. But we have overshot our goal, and must grope our way back through the pinewoods to the sea-shore, where a little primitive hotel, built for the summer, with walls that seem to be made of brown paper, receives us. But we have motored far that day and greet it joyfully....

        The following morning we woke to a silvery sunlight, with, at last, some promise of spring over a land cleared of snow. The day was spent in going through a camp which has been set down in one of the pleasantest and healthiest spots of France, a favourite haunt

of French artists before the war. Now the sandy slopes, whence the pines, alack, have been cut away, are occupied by a British reinforcement camp, by long lines of hospitals, by a convalescent depôt, and by the training-grounds, where, as at other bases, the newly arrived troops are put through their last instruction before going to the Front. As usual, the magnitude of what has been done in one short year filled one with amazement. Here is the bare catalogue: Infantry base depôts, i.e. sleeping and mess quarters for thousands of men belonging to the new armies; sixteen hospitals with 21,000 beds; three rifle ranges; two training-camps; a machine-gun training-school; a vast laundry worked by French women, under British organisation, which washes for all the hospitals, 30,000 pieces a day; recreation huts of all types and kinds, official and voluntary; a cinema theatre, seating 800 men, with performances twice a day; nurses' clubs; officers' clubs; a supply depôt for food; an Ordnance depôt for everything that is not food; new sidings to the railway, where 1000 men can be entrained on the one side, while 1000 men are detraining on the other, or two

full ambulance trains can come in and go out; a convalescent depôt of 2000 patients, and a convalescent horse depôt of 2000 horses!--etcetera. And this is the work accomplished since last April in one camp.

        Yet, as I look back upon it, my chief impression of that long day is an impression, first, of endless hospital huts and marquees with their rows of beds, in which the pale or flushed faces are generally ready--unless pain or weariness forbid--as visitor ventures timidly near, to turn and smile in response to the few halting words of sympathy or enquiry which are all one can find to say; and, next, of such a wealth of skill, and pity and devotion poured out upon this terrible human need, as makes one thank God for doctors and nurses, and bright-faced V.A.D.'s. After all, one tremblingly asks oneself, in spite of the appalling facts of wounds, and death, and violence in which the human world is now steeped, is it yet possible, is it yet true, that the ultimate thing--the final power behind the veil--to which at least this vast linked spectacle of suffering and tenderness, here in this great camp, testifies--is not Force, but Love? Is this the mysterious message which seems to

breathe from these crowded wards--to make them just bearable?

        Let me recollect the open door of an operating theatre, and a young officer, quite a boy, lying there with a bullet in his chest, which the surgeons were just about to try and extract. The fine, pale features of the wounded man, the faces of the surgeon and the nurses, so intent and cheerfully absorbed, the shining surfaces and appliances of the white room--stamp themselves on memory. I recollect, too, one John S--, a very bad case, a private. 'Oh you must come and see John S--,' says one of the Sisters. 'We get all the little distractions we can for John.' 'Will he recover?' 'Well, we thought so--but'--her face changes gravely--'John himself seems to have made up his mind lately. He knows--but he never complains.'

        Knows what? We go to see him, and he turns round philosophically from his tea. 'Oh, I'm all right--a bit tired--that's all.' And then a smile passes between him and his nurse. He has lost a leg, he has a deep wound in his back which won't heal, which is draining his life away--poor, poor John

S--! Close by is a short plain man with a look of fevered and patient endurance that haunts one now to think of. 'It's my eyes. I'm afraid they're getting worse. I was hit in the head, you see. Yes, the pain's bad--sometimes.' The nurse looks at him anxiously as we pass, and explains what is being tried to give relief.

        This devotion of the nurses--how can one ever say enough of it! I recall the wrath of a medical officer in charge of a large hospital at Rouen. 'Why don't they give more Red Crosses to the working nurses? They don't get half enough recognition. I have a nurse here who has been twelve months in the operating theatre. She ought to have a V.C.! It's worth it.' And here is a dark-eyed young officer who had come from a distant colony to fight for England. I find him in an officers' hospital established not long after the war broke out, in a former Casino where the huge Baccarat room has been turned into two large and splendid wards. He is courteously ready to talk about his wound, but much more ready to talk about his Sister. 'It's simply wonderful what they do for us!' he says, all his face lighting up--

'when I was worst there wasn't an hour in the day or night my Sister wasn't ready to try anything in the world to help me. But they're all like that.'

        Twenty thousand wounded!--while every day the ambulance trains come and go from the Front, or to other bases--there to fill up one or other of the splendid hospital ships that take our brave fellows back to England, and home, and rest. And this city of hospitals, under its hard-pressed medical Chief, with all its wealth of scientific invention, and pain-saving device, and unremitting care, with its wonderful health and recovery statistics, has been the growth of just twelve months. The mind wavers between the two impressions--the hideous havoc of war, on the one hand; the power of the human brain, and the magical energies of human feeling on the other.

(II)

We put up at one of the old commercial inns of the town (it is not easy to find hotel quarters of any kind just now, when every building at all suitable has been pressed into the hospital service)--and I found delight in watching the various types of French officers, naval and military, who came in to the table d'hôte, plunging as soon as they had thrown off their caps and cloaks, and while they waited for their consommé, into the papers with the latest news of Verdun. But we were too tired to try and talk! The morning came quickly, and with it our escort from G.H.Q. We said good-bye to Colonel S., who had guided our journey so smoothly through all the fierce drawbacks of the weather, and made friends at once with our new guide, the staff officer who deals with the guests of G.H.Q. Never shall I forget that morning's journey! I find in my notes:--

        'A beautiful drive--far more beautiful than I had expected; over undulating country, with distant views of interlocking downs, and along typical French roads, tree- or forest-bordered, running straight as a line up hill and down hill, over upland and plain. One exquisite point of view especially comes

back to me, where a road to the coast--that coast which the Germans so nearly reached!--diverged upon our left, and all the lowlands westward came into sight. It was pure Turner:--the soft sunlight of the day, with its blue shadows, and pale blue sky; the yellow chalk hills, still marked with streaks of snow; the woods, purple and madder brown; the distances aetherially blue; and the villages, bare and unlovely, compared with the villages of Kent and Sussex, but expressing a strong, old, historic life, sprung from the soil, and one with it. The first distant glimpse, as we turned a hill-corner, of the old town which was our destination,--extraordinarily fine!--its ancient church a towered mass of luminous grey under the sunshine, gathering the tiled roofs into one harmonious whole.'

        But we avoided the town itself and found ourselves presently descending an avenue of trees to the eighteenth-century château, which is used by G.H.Q. as a hostel for its guests--allied and neutral correspondents, military attachés, special missions, and the like. In a few minutes I was standing, bewildered by the strangeness and the interest of it all, in a charming Louis-Quinze room, plain

and simple, in the true manner of the genuine French country house, but with graceful panelled walls, and old armoire of the date, windows wide open to the spring sun, and a half-wild garden outside. A femme de ménage, much surprised to be waiting on two ladies, comes to look after us. And this is France!--and we are only thirty miles from that fighting-line, which has drawn our English hearts to it all these days!

        A map is waiting for each of us downstairs, and we are told roughly where it is proposed to take us. A hurried lunch, and we are in the motor again, with Captain -- sitting in front. 'You have your passes?' he asks us, and we anxiously verify the new and precious papers that brought us from our last stage, and will have to be shewn on our way. We drive first to Arques, and Hazebrouck, then south-east. At a certain village we call at the Divisional Headquarters. The General comes out himself, and proposes to guide us on--'I will take you as near to the fighting line as I can.'

        On we went in two motors; the General with me, Captain -- and D. following. We passed through three villages and after the first we were within shell range of the German

batteries ahead. But I cannot remember giving a thought to the fact, so absorbing to the unaccustomed eye were all the accumulating signs of the actual battle-line; the endless rows of motor lorries, either coming back from, or going up to the Front, now with food, now with ammunition; reserve-trenches to right and left of the road; a 'dump' or food-station, whence carts filled from the heavy lorries go actually up to the trenches; lines of artillery waggons, parks of ammunition, or motor-ambulances, long lines of picketed horses, motor cyclists dashing past. In one village we saw a merry crowd in the little place gathered round a field kitchen whence came an excellent fragrance of good stew. A number of the men were wearing leeks in their ears for St. David's Day. 'You're Welsh, then?' I said to one of the cooks--(by this time we had left the motor and were walking). 'I'm not!' said the little fellow, with a laughing look. 'It's St. Patrick's Day I'm waitin' for! But I've no objection to givin' St. David a turn!' He opened his kitchen to show me the good things going on, and as we moved away there came up a marching platoon of men from the trenches, who had

done their allotted time there, and were coming back to billets. The General went to greet them. 'Well, my boys!--you could stick it all right?' It was good to see the lightening on the tired faces, and to watch the group disappear into the cheerful hubbub of the village.

        We walked on, and outside the village I heard the guns for the first time. We were now 'actually in the battle,' according to my companion, and a shell was quite possible though not probable. Again, I can't remember that the fact made any impression upon us. We were watching now parties of men at regular intervals, sitting waiting in the fields beside the road, with their rifles and kits on the grass near them. They were waiting for the signal to move up toward the firing-line as soon as the dusk was further advanced. 'We shall meet them later,' said the General--'as we come back.' At the same moment he turned to address a young artillery officer in the road. 'Is your gun near here?' 'Yes, sir, I was just going back to it.' He was asked to show us the way. As we followed I noticed the white puff of a shell, far ahead, over the flat, ditch-lined fields; a captive balloon was

making observations about half a mile in front; and an aeroplane passed over our heads. 'Ah, not a Boche,' said Captain -- regretfully. 'But we brought a Boche down here yesterday, just over this village--a splendid fight.'

        Meanwhile, the artillery fire was quickening. We reached a ruined village from which all normal inhabitants had been long since cleared away. The shattered church was there, and I noticed a large crucifix quite intact still hanging on its chancel wall. A little farther and the boyish artillery officer, our leader, who had been by this time joined by a comrade, turned and beckoned to the General. Presently we were creeping through seas of mud down into the gun emplacement, so carefully concealed that no aeroplane overhead could guess it. There it was--how many of its fellows I had seen in the Midland and northern workshops!--its muzzle just shewing in the dark, and nine or ten high explosive shells lying on the bench in front of the breech. One is put in. We stand back a little, and a sergeant tells me to put my fingers in my ears and look straight at the gun. Then comes the shock--not so violent as I

had expected--and the cartridge case drops out. The shell has sped on its way to the German trenches--with what result to human flesh and blood? But one did not think of that--till afterwards. At the time, the excitement of the shot and of watching that little group of men in the darkness held all one's nerves gripped.

        In a few more minutes we were scrambling out again through the deep muddy trench leading to the dug-out, promising to come back to tea with the officers, in their billet, when our walk was done. Now indeed we were 'in the battle.' Our own guns were thundering away behind us, and the road was more and more broken up by shell-holes. 'Look at that group of trees to your left--beyond it is Neuve Chapelle,' said our guide. 'And you see those ruined cottages, straight ahead--and the wood behind?' He named a wood thrice famous in the history of the war. 'Our lines are just beyond the cottages, and the German lines just in front of the wood.' 'How far are we from them?' 'Three-quarters of a mile.' It was discussed whether we should be taken zigzag through the fields to the entrance of

the communications-trench. But the firing was getting hotter, and Captain -- was evidently relieved when we elected to turn back. Shall I always regret that lost opportunity? You did ask me to write something about 'the life of the soldiers in the trenches'--and that was the nearest that any woman could personally have come to it! But I doubt whether anything more--anything, at least, that was possible--could have deepened the whole effect. We had been already nearer than any woman, even a nurse, has been, in this war, to the actual fighting on the English line; and the cup of impressions was full.

        As we turned back, I noticed a little ruined cottage, with a Red Cross flag floating. Our guide explained that it was a Field Dressing station. Some serious 'casualities' had been brought there the night before, and had not yet been removed. It was not for us--who could not help--to ask to go in. But the thought of it pursued me as we walked on through the beautiful evening. A little further, we came across what, I think, moved me more than anything else in that crowded hour--those same companies of men we had seen sitting waiting in the fields, now marching quietly, spaced one

behind the other, up to the trenches, to take their turn there. Every day I am accustomed to see bodies, small and large, of khaki-clad men, marching through these Hertfordshire lanes. But this was different. The bearing was erect and manly, the faces perfectly cheerful; but there was the seriousness in them of men who knew well the work to which they were going. I caught a little quiet whistling sometimes, but no singing. We greeted them as they passed, with a shy 'Good luck!'--and they smiled shyly back, surprised, of course, to see a couple of women on that road. But there was no shyness towards the General. It was very evident that the relations between him and them were as good as affection and confidence on both sides could make them.

        I still see the bright tea-table in that corner of a ruined farm, where our young officers presently greeted us; the General marking our maps to make clear where he had actually been; the Captain of the battery springing up to shew off his gramophone; while the guns crashed at intervals close beside us--range-finding, probably--searching out a portion of the German line, under the direction

of some hidden observer with his telephone. It was over all too quickly. Time was up, and soon the motor was speeding back towards the Divisional Headquarters. The General and I talked of war, and what could be done to stop it. A more practical religion, 'lifting mankind again'?--a new St. Francis, preaching the old things in new ways? 'But in this war we had and have no choice. We are fighting for civilisation and freedom, and we must go on till we win.'

(III)

said Captain --, evidently in the best of spirits. 'We have taken back some trenches on the Ypres-Comines canal that we lost a little while ago, and captured 200 prisoners. If we go off at once, we shall be in time to see the German counter-attack.'

        It was again fine, though not bright, and the distances far less clear. This time we struck north-east, passing first the sacred region of G.H.Q. itself, where we shewed our passes. Then after making our way through roads lined interminably, as on the previous day, with the splendid motor lorries laden with food and ammunition, which have made such a new thing of the transport of this war, interspersed with rows of ambulances and limbered waggons, with flying-stations and horse lines, we climbed a hill to one of the finest positions in this northern land; an old town, where Gaul and Roman, Frank and Fleming, English and French have clashed; which looks out northward towards Yser and Dunkirk, and east towards Ypres. Now, if the mists will only clear, we shall see Ypres! But, alas, they lie heavy over the plain, and we descend the hill again without that vision. Now we are bound for Poperinghe, and must go

warily, because there is a lively artillery action going on beyond Poperinghe, and it is necessary to find out what roads have been shelled. On the way we stop at an air station, to watch the aeroplanes rising and coming down, and at a point near Poperinghe we go over a casualty-clearing station--a collection of hospital huts, with store-houses and staff quarters--with the medical officer in charge. Here were women nurses, who are not allowed in the Field dressing-stations nearer the line. There were not many wounded, though they were coming in, and the Doctor was not for the moment very busy. We stood on the threshold of a large ward, where we could not, I think, be seen. At the farther end a serious case was being attended by nurses and surgeons. Everything was passing in silence; and to me it was as if there came from the bowed heads of the distant group a tragic and wordless message. Then, as we passed lingeringly away, we saw three young officers, all wounded, running up from the ambulance at the gate, which had just brought them, and disappearing into one of the wards. The first--a splendid kilted figure--had his head bound up, the others were apparently

wounded in the arm. But they seemed to walk on air, and to be quite unconscious that anything was wrong with them. It had been a success, a great success, and they had been in it!

        The ambulances were now arriving fast from the field dressing-stations close to the line; we hurried away, and were soon driving through Poperinghe. Here and there there was a house wrecked with shell-fire. The little town indeed with its picturesque place is constantly shelled. But all the same, life seems to go on as usual. The Poperinghe boy, like his London brother, hangs on the back of carts; his father and mother come to their door to watch what is going on, or to ask eagerly for news of the counter-attack; and his little brothers and sisters go tripping to school, in short cloaks with the hoods drawn over their heads, as though no war existed. Here and in the country round, poor robbed Belgium is still at home on her own soil, and on the best of terms with the English Army, by which indeed this remnant of her prospers greatly. As I have already insisted, the relations everywhere between the British soldier and the French and Belgian populations

are among the British--or shall I say the Allied?--triumphs of the war.

        In one street a company from a famous regiment, picked men all of them, comes swinging along, fresh from their baths--life and force in every movement--young Harrys with their beavers on. Then, a house where men have their gas-helmets tested--a very strict and necessary business; and another, where an ex-Balliol tutor and Army Chaplain keeps open doors for the soldier in his hours of rest or amusement. But we go in search of a safe road to a neighboring village, where some fresh passes have to be got. Each foot now of the way is crowded with the incidents and appurtenances of war, and war close at hand. An Australian transport base is pointed out, with a wholly Australian staff--'Some of the men,' says our guide, 'are millionaires'; close by is an aeroplane descending unexpectedly in a field, and a crowd of men rushing to help; and we turn away relieved to see the two aviators walking off unhurt. Meanwhile, I notice a regular game of football going on at a distance, and some carefully written names of by-paths--'Hyde Park Corner,'--'Piccadilly,'

--'Queen Mary's Road,'--and the like. The animation, the life of the scene are indescribable.

        At the next village the road was crowded both with natives and soldiers to see the German prisoners brought in. Alack, we did not see them. Ambulances were passing and repassing, the slightly wounded men in cars open at the back, the more serious cases in closed cars, and everywhere the same va-et-vient of lorries and waggons, of staff-cars and motor cyclists. It was not right for us to add to the congestion in the road. Moreover, the hours were drawing on; and the great sight was still to come. But to have watched those prisoners come in would have somehow rounded off the day!

(IV)

was a flat green space--three or four soldiers playing football on it!--and an old windmill, and farm-buildings. We sheltered behind the great beams supporting the windmill, and looked out through them, north and east, over a wide landscape; a plain bordered eastward by low hills, every mile of it, almost, watered by British blood, and consecrate to British dead.

        As we reached the windmill, as though in sombre greeting, the floating mists on the near horizon seemed to part, and there rose from them a dark, jagged tower, one side of it torn away. It was the tower of Ypres--mute victim!--mute witness to a crime, that, beyond the reparations of our own day, history will avenge through years to come. A flash!--another!--from what appear to be the ruins at its base. It is the English guns speaking from the lines between us and Ypres; and as we watch we see the columns of white smoke rising from the German lines as the shells burst. There they are, the German lines--along the Messines ridge. We make them out quite clearly, thanks to a glass and Captain --'s guidance. Their guns too are at work, and a couple of their shells are

bursting on our trenches somewhere between Vlamertinghe and Dickebusche. Then--the rattle of our machine-guns--as it seems from somewhere close below us, and again, the boom of artillery. The counter-action is in progress, and we watch what can be seen or guessed of it, in fascination. We are too far off to see what is actually happening between the opposing trenches, but one of the chief fields of past and present battle, scenes which our children and our children's children will go to visit, lie spread out before us. Half the famous sites of the earlier war can be dimly made out, between us and Ypres. In front of us is the gleam of the Zillebeke Lake, beyond it Hooge. Hill 60 is in that band of shadow; a little farther east the point where Prussian Guard was mown down at the close of the first battle of Ypres; further south the fields and woods made for ever famous by the charge of the Household Cavalry, by the deeds of the Worcesters, and the London Scottish, by all the splendid valour of that 'thin red line,' French and English, cavalry and infantry, which in the first battle of Ypres withstood an enemy four times as strong, saved France, and thereby England, and thereby

Europe. In that tract of ground over which we are looking lie more than 100,000 graves English and French; and to it the hearts of two great nations will turn for all time. Then--if you try to pierce the northern haze beyond that ruined tower, you may follow in thought the course of the Yser westward to that Belgian coast where Admiral Hood's guns broke down and scattered the German march upon Dunkirk and Calais; or if you turn south you are looking over the Belfry of Bailleul, towards Neuve Chapelle, and Festubert, and all the fierce fighting ground round Souchez and the Labyrinth. Once English and French stood linked here in a common heroic defence. Now the English hold all this line firmly from the sea to the Somme; while the French, with the eyes of the world upon them, are making history hour by hour at Verdun.

        So to this point we have followed one branch--the greatest--of England's effort; and the mind, when eyes fail, pursues it afresh from its beginnings when we first stood to arms in August 1914, through what Mr. Buchan has finely called the 'rally of the Empire,' through the early rush and the rapid growth of the New Armies, through the

strengthening of Egypt, the disaster of Gallipoli, the seizure of the German Colonies; through all that vast upheaval at home which we have seen in the munition areas, through that steady, and ever-growing organisation on the friendly French soil we have watched in the supply bases. Yet here, for us, it culminates; and here, and in the North Sea, we can hardly doubt,--whatever may be the diversions in other fields--will be fought, for Great Britain, the decisive battles of the war. As I turn to those dim lines on the Messines ridge, I have come at last to sight of whither it all moves. There, in those trenches is The Aggressor--the enemy who has wantonly broken the peace of Europe, who has befouled civilisation with deeds of lust and blood, between whom and the Allies there can be no peace, till the Allies' right arm dictates it. Every week, every day, the British armies grow, the British troops pour steadily across the Channel; and to the effort of England and her Allies there will be no truce till the righteous end is won.

        But the shadows are coming down on the great scene, and with the sound of the guns still in our ears we speed back through the

crowded roads to G.H.Q. One more scene--before the wonderful day is over. A mesage from an important Headquarters brings us to a halt there on our way back. The pleasant upper room in the old French house with its going and coming; the interest of watching the Army Commander himself--strong, weather-beaten figure!--as he stood receiving reports from his A.D.C.s, including the 'German wireless' just picked up, on the fighting of the morning; the happy bearing of the young officers, as they arrived in haste, one after another; the appearance in the group of a second General, whose name will be for ever associated with some of the most brilliant deeds of the war; and finally, the courtesy with which, at a first moment of leisure, on a day of action, a woman writer was received, merely for her errand's sake, as simply and kindly as though we had been all standing in Kensington or Belgravia:--these things remain engraved on memory. The fine grizzled heads of the older men; the radiant looks of the younger; the talk--reticent, quietly confident, humane:--they are with me still. It was war, one aspect of it, seen from close by, and in undress. An

Englishwoman left it behind her, prouder even than before that--

'Chatham's language was her mother tongue,
And Wolfe's great name compatriot with her own.'

        Now all that I have to do is to take you, far away from the armies, into the homes whence the men fighting here are drawn, and to shew you, if I can, very shortly, by a few instances, what rich and poor are doing as individuals, to feed the effort of England in this war. What of the young, of all classes and opportunities, who have laid down their lives in this war? What of the families who reared them, the Schools and Universities which sent them forth--the comrades who are making ready to carry on their work? You ask me as to the spirit of the nation--the foundation of all else. Let us look into a few lives--a few typical lives and families, and see.

No. 6.

love of 'grousing' as the individual British soldier shews in the trenches.

        Let me however go back and recapitulate a little. In the first of these letters, I tried, by a rapid 'vision' of the Fleet, as I personally saw an important section of it amid the snows of February, to point to the indispensable condition of this 'effort,' without which it could never have been made, without which it could not be maintained for a day, at the present moment. Since that visit of mine, the power of the Fleet, and the effect of the Fleet have strengthened week by week. The blockade of Germany is far more effective than it was three months ago; the evidence of its growing stringency accumulates steadily, and at the same time the British Foreign Office has been anxiously trying, and evidently with much success, to minimise for neutrals its inevitable difficulties and inconveniences. Meanwhile, as Mr. Asquith will explain next Tuesday, the expenditure on the war, not only on our own needs--but on those of our Allies is colossal--terrifying. The most astonishing Budget of English history, demanding a fourth of his income from every well-to-do citizen, has been brought in since I began to write these letters, and quietly

accepted. Five hundred millions sterling (2500 million dollars) have been already lent to our Allies. We are spending at the yearly rate of 600 millions sterling (3000 million dollars) on the Army; 200 millions on the Navy, as compared with 40 millions in 1913; while the Munitions Department is costing about two-thirds as much (400 millions sterling) as the rest of the Army, and is employing close upon two million workers, one-tenth of them women. The export trade of the country, in spite of submarines and lack of tonnage, is at the moment greater than it was in the corresponding months of 1913.

        As to what we have got for our money, Parliament has authorised an army of four million men, and it is on the question of the last half million that England's Effort now turns. Mr. Asquith will explain everything that has been done, and everything that still remains to do, in camera to Parliament next Tuesday. But do not, my dear friend, make any mistake! England will get the men she wants; and Labour will be in the end just as determined to get them as any other section of the community. Meanwhile, in France, while we seem, for the moment, to be inactive, we are in reality giving the French at

Verdun just that support which they and General Joffre desire, and--it can scarcely be doubted--preparing great things on our own account. In spite of our failure in Gallipoli, and the surrender at Kut of General Townshend's force, Egypt is no longer in danger of attack, if it ever has been; our sea-power has brought a Russian force safely to Marseilles; and the possibilities of British and Russian collaboration in the East are rapidly opening out. As to the great and complex war-machine we have been steadily building up on French soil, as I tried to shew in my fourth letter, whether in the supply bases, or in the war organisation along the ninety miles of front now held by the British armies, it would indeed astonish those dead heroes of the Retreat from Mons--could they come back to see it! We are not satisfied with it yet--hence the unrest in Parliament and the Press--we shall never be satisfied--till Germany has accepted the terms of the Allies. But those who know England best have no doubt whatever as to the temper of the nation which has so far 'improvised the impossible,' in the setting up of this machine, and means, in the end, to get out of it what it wants.

        The temper of the nation? In this last letter let me take some samples of it. First--what have the rich been doing? As to money, the figures of the income-tax, the death-duties, and the various war loans are there to show what they have contributed to the State. The Joint War Committee of the Red Cross and the St. John's Ambulance Association has collected--though not, of course, from the rich only--close on four millions sterling (between 18 and 19 million dollars), and the Prince of Wales' Fund nearly 6 million (30 million dollars). The lavishness of English giving, indeed, in all directions during the last two years, could hardly I think have been outdone. A few weeks ago I walked with the Duke of Bedford through the training and reinforcement camp, about fifteen miles from my own home in the country, which he himself commands and which, at the outbreak of war, he himself built without waiting for public money or War-Office contractors, to house and train recruits for the various Bedfordshire regiments. The camp holds 1200 men, and is ranged in a park where the oaks--still standing--were considered too old by Oliver Cromwell's Commissioners to furnish timber for the English Navy. Besides

ample barrack accommodation in comfortable huts, planned so as to satisfy every demand whether of health or convenience, all the opportunities that Aldershot offers, on a large scale, are here provided in miniature. The model trenches with the latest improvements in plan, revetting, gun-emplacements, sally-ports and the rest, spread through the sandy soil; the musketry ranges, bombing and bayonet schools are of the most recent and efficient type. And the Duke takes a keen personal interest in every man in training, follows his progress in camp, sees him off to the Front, and very often receives him, when wounded, in the perfectly equipped hospital which the Duchess has established in Woburn Abbey itself. Here the old riding-school, tennis court and museum, which form a large building fronting the abbey, have been turned into wards as attractive as bright and simple colour, space, flowers, and exquisite cleanliness can make them. The Duchess is herself the Matron-in-charge, under the War Office, keeps all the records, is up at half-past five in the morning, and spends her day in the endless doing, thinking, and contriving that such a hospital needs. Not very far away stands another beautiful country house rented

by Mr. and Mrs. Whitelaw Reid when they were in England. It also is a hospital, and its owner, Lord Lucas, not a rich man, has now given it irrevocably to the nation for the use of disabled soldiers, together with as much land as may suffice a farm colony chosen from among them. The beautiful hospital of 250 beds at Paignton, in Devonshire, run entirely by women of American birth now resident in Great Britain, without any financial aid from the British Government, was another large country house given to the service of the wounded by Mr. Singer. Lady Sheffield's hospital for twenty-five beds at Alderley Park is an example of how part of a country house with all its green and restful surroundings may be used for those who have suffered in the war; and it has many fellows in all parts of England. Altogether about 700 country houses large and small have been offered to the War Office.

        But money and houses are the very least part of what the old families, the rich manufacturers, or the educated class generally have offered to their country in this war. Democracy has gone far with us, but it may still be said that the young heir to a great name, to estates with which his family has been con-

nected for generations, and to the accumulated 'consideration' to use a French word in a French sense, which such a position almost always carries with it--has a golden time in English life. Difficulties that check others fall away from him; he is smiled upon for his kindred's sake before he makes friends for his own; the world is over-kind to his virtues and blind to his faults; he enters manhood indeed as 'of one our conquerors'; and it will cost him some trouble to throw away his advantages. Before the war such a youth was the common butt of the Socialist orator. He was the typical 'shirker' and 'loafer,' while other men worked; the parasite bred from the sweat of the poor; the soft effeminate creature who had never faced the facts of life and never would. As to his soldiering--the common profession of so many of his kind--that was only another offense in the eyes of politicians like Mr. Keir Hardie. When the class war came, he would naturally be found shooting down the workmen; but for any other war, an ignorant popinjay!--incompetent even at his own trade, and no match whatever for the scientific soldier of the Continent.

        Those who knew anything of the Army

were well aware long before 1914 that this type of officer--if he still existed, as no doubt he had once existed--had become extraordinarily rare; that since the Boer War, the level of education in the Army, the standard of work demanded, the quality of the relations between officers and men had all steadily advanced. And with regard to the young men of the 'classes' in general, those who had to do with them, at school and college, while fully alive to their weaknesses, yet cherished convictions which were more instinct than anything else, as to what stuff these easy-going, sport-loving fellows might prove to be made of in case of emergency.

        Well, the emergency came. These youths of the classes, heirs to titles and estates, or just younger sons of the old squirearchy of England, so far as it still survives, went out in their hundreds with the old and famous regiments of the British line in the Expeditionary Force, and perished in their hundreds. Forty-seven eldest sons, heirs to English peerages, had fallen within a year of the outbreak of war; among them the heirs to such famous houses as Longleat, Petworth, and Castle Ashby, and such names as Grenfell, Hood, Stuart, Bruce, Lister, Douglas Pennant, Worsley,

Hay, St. Aubyn, Carington, Annesley, Hicks Beach; together with men whose fathers have played prominent parts in the politics or finance of the last half-century. And the first ranks have been followed by what one might almost call a levée en masse of those that remained. Their blood has been spilt like water at Ypres and La Bassée, at Suvla and Helles. Whatever may be said henceforward of these 'golden lads' of ours, 'shirker' and 'loafer' they can never be called again. They have died too lavishly, their men have loved and trusted them too well for that; and some of the working-class leaders, with the natural generosity of English hearts, have confessed it abundantly.

        And the professional classes--the intellectuals--everywhere the leading force of the nation--have done just as finely, and of course in far greater numbers. Never shall I forget my visit to Oxford last May, in the height of the summer term; just at that moment when Oxford normally is at its loveliest and fullest, brimming over with young life, the streets crowded with caps and gowns, the river and towing-path alive with the 'flannelled fools,' who have indeed flung back Rudyard Kipling's gibe--if it ever

applied to them--with interest. For they had all disappeared. They were in the trenches, landing at Suvla, garrisoning Egypt, pushing up to Baghdad. The colleges contained a few forlorn remnants--under age, or medically unfit. The river, on a glorious May day, shewed boats indeed, but girls were rowing them. Oriel, the college of Arnold, of Newman, of Cecil Rhodes, was filled with women students, whose own college, Somerville, had become a hospital. The Examination Schools in the High Street were a hospital, and the smell of disinfectants displaced the fragrance of lilac and hawthorn for ever associated in the minds of Oxford's lovers with the summer term. In New College gardens, there were white tents full of wounded; and I walked up and down that wide deserted lawn of St. John's, where Charles I. once gathered his Cavaliers, with an old friend, an Oxford tutor of forty years' standing, who said with a despairing gesture, speaking of his pupils, 'So many are gone--so many!--and the terrible thing is that I can't feel it as I once did. As blow follows blow one seems to have lost the power.'

        Let me evoke the memory of some of them. From Balliol have gone the two Grenfell brothers, vehement, powerful natures, by the

testimony of those who knew them best; not delightful, perhaps, to those who did not love them, not just, often, to those they did not love, but full of that rich stuff which life matures to all fine uses. The younger fell in the attack on Hooge, July 31st, last year; the elder, Julian, had fallen some months earlier. Julian's verses, composed the night before he was wounded, will be remembered with Rupert Brooke's sonnets, as expressing the inmost passion of the war in great hearts. They were written in the spring weather of April 1915, and a month later the writer had died of his wounds. With an exquisite felicity and strength the lines run, expressing the strange and tragic joy of the 'fighting man' in the spring, which may be his last--in the night heavens--in the woodland trees:--

The woodland trees that stand together
    They stand to him each one a friend;
They gently speak in the windy weather;
    They guide to valley and ridge's end.

The kestrel hovering by day
    And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they
    As keen of ear, as swift of sight.

The blackbird sings to him, 'Brother, brother,
    If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another;
    Brother, sing.'

---

Page 166

In dreary, doubtful waiting hours,
    Before the brazen frenzy starts,
The horses show him nobler powers;--
    O patient eyes, courageous hearts!

And when the burning moment breaks,
    And all things else are out of mind,
And only Joy of Battle takes
    Him by the throat and makes him blind,

Through joy and blindness he shall know
    Not caring much to know, that still
Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so
    That it be not the Destined Will.

The thundering line of battle stands,
    And in the air Death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
    And Night shall fold him in soft wings.

may be said, as his Oxford contemporaries said of Sir Philip Sidney,

Honour and Fame are got about their graves,
And there sit mourning of each other's loss.

        'To-night the bell tolls in the brain (haud rediturus) over one of the noblest--if it be not a treason to discriminate--of all the dead one has known who have died for England. Graciousness was in all his goings and in all the workings of his mind. The music and gymnastic whereof Plato wrote, that should attune the body to harmony with the mind, and harmonise all the elements of the mind in

a perfect unison, had done their work upon him. He seemed--at any rate, to the eyes of those who loved him, and they were many--to have the perfection of nature's endowment: beauty of mind knit to beauty of body, and all informed by a living spirit of affection, so that his presence was a benediction, and a matter for thanksgiving that God had made men after this manner.... His tutor had once written in his copy of the Vulgate: "Esto vir fortis et pugnemus pro populo nostro et pro civitate Dei nostri." He was strong; and he fought for both.'

        Another Oxford man, Gilbert Talbot, a youngest son of the much-loved Bishop of Winchester, will perhaps stand for many, in coming years, as the pre-eminent type of first youth, youth with all its treasure of life and promise unspent, poured out like spikenard in this war at the feet of England. Already assured at Oxford of a brilliant career in politics, a fine speaker, a hard worker, possessing by inheritance the charm of two families always in the public eye and ear, and no less popular than famous, he had just landed in the United States when the war broke out. He was going round the world with a friend, youth and ambition high within him. He turned back without a moment's hesitation, though

soldiering had never been at all attractive to him, and after his training went out to France. He was killed in Flanders in July last. Let me give the story of his identification after death on the battle-field, by his elder brother, an Army Chaplain, and ex-Balliol tutor, as Canon Scott Holland gave it in the Commonwealth:--

        'The attack had failed. There was never any hope of its succeeding, for the machine guns of the Germans were still in full play, with their fire unimpaired. The body had to lie there where it had fallen. Only, his brother could not endure to let it lie unhonoured or unblessed. After a day and a half of anxious searching for exact details, he got to the nearest trench by the "murdered" wood, which the shells had now smashed to pieces. There he found some shattered Somersets, who begged him to go no farther. But he heard a voice within him bidding him risk it, and the call of the blood drove him on. Creeping out of the far end of the trench, as dusk fell, he crawled through the grass on hands and knees, in spite of shells and snipers, dropping flat on the ground as the flares shot up from the German trenches. And, at last, thirty yards away in the open... he knew that he was

close on what he sought. Two yards farther, he found it. He could stroke with his hand the fair young head that he knew so well; he could feel for pocket-book and prayer-book, and the badge and the whistle. He could breathe a prayer of benediction ... and then crawl back on his perilous way in the night, having done all that man could do for the brother whom he had loved so fondly; and enabled, now, to tell those at home that Gilbert was dead indeed, but that he had died the death that a soldier would love to die, leaving his body the nearest of all who fell, to the trench that he had been told to take.'

        Again:--of Charles Alfred Lister, Lord Ribblesdale's eldest son, an Oxford friend says--'there were almost infinite possibilities in his future.' He was twice wounded at the Dardanelles, was then offered a post of importance in the Foreign Office, refused it, and went back to the Front--to die. But among the hundreds of memorial notices issued by the Oxford Colleges, the same note recurs and recurs, of unhesitating, uncalculated sacrifice. Older men, and younger men, Don, and undergraduate, lads of 19 and 20, and those who were already school-mastering, or practicing at the Bar, or in business,--they

felt no doubts, they made no delays. Their country called, and none failed in that great Adsum.

        Cambridge of course has the same story to tell. One takes the short, pathetic biographies almost at random from the ever lengthening record, contributed by the Colleges. Captain J. Lusk, 6th Cameronians, was already director of an important steel works, engaged in Government business when war broke out, and might have honourably claimed exemption. Instead he offered himself at once on mobilisation, and went out with his battalion to France last spring. On the 15th of June at Festubert, he was killed in volunteering to bring what was left of a frightfully battered battalion out of action. 'What seems to me my duty as an officer,' he once wrote to a friend, 'is to carry my sword across the barriers of death clean and bright.' 'This,' says the friend who writes the notice, 'he has done.' Lieutenant Le Blanc Smith, of Trinity, machine-gun officer, was struck in the forehead by a sniper's bullet while reconnoitring. His General and brother officers write--

        'he was a very fine young of officer. Everyone loved him. His men would do anything for him....'

and the sergeant of his machine-gun brigade says--

        'Although only a non-commissioned officer myself, I feel I have lost my brother, because he was so awfully good and kind to me and us all.'

        Lieutenant Hamilton, aged 25, says in a last letter to his father--

        'Just a line while the beginning of the great battle is going on. It is wonderful how peaceful one feels amid it all. Any moment one may be put out of action, but one does not worry. That quiet time alone with God at the Holy Communion was most comforting.'

appalling. In an ordinary way one loses one killed to eight or nine wounded, but in this war the number of Cambridge men killed and missing practically equals the number of wounded.' Of the effect upon the University an eyewitness says--'...Eighty per cent. of the College rooms are vacant. Rows and rows of houses in Cambridge are to let. All the Junior Fellows are on service in one capacity or another, and a great many of the Seniors are working in Government Offices or taking school posts--so that the school education of the country may be carried on. Altogether, nearly 12,000 Cambridge men are serving; 980 have been wounded, 780 have been killed, 92 are missing.'

        As to one's friends and kinsfolk, let me recall the two gallant grandsons of my dear old friend and publisher, George Murray Smith, the original publisher of Jane Eyre, friend of Charlotte Brontë, and creator of the Dictionary of National Biography. The elder one, who had just married, fought in the Household Cavalry all through the retreat from Mons, and fell in one of the early actions on the Flanders front. 'He led us all the way,' said one of his men afterwards. All the way!--all through the immortal rearguard

actions of August--only to fall, when the tide had turned, and the German onslaught on Paris had been finally broken! 'In all my soldiering,' writes a brother officer, 'I have never seen a warmer feeling between men and their officer.' 'Was he not,'--asks a well-known Eton master, 'that tall, smiling, strong, gentle-mannered boy at White-Thomson's?--possessing an affectionate regard and feeling for others, which boys as boys, especially if strong and popular, don't always, or indeed often possess.' The poor wife and parents were uncertain as to his fate for many weeks, but he finally died of his wounds in a hospital behind the German lines. Then, little more than six months later came the second blow. Geoffrey, the younger brother, aged 19, fell on September 29th, near Vermelles. Nothing could be more touching than the letters from officers and men about this brave sweet-tempered boy. 'Poor old regiment!' writes the Colonel to the lad's father--'we were badly knocked about, and I brought out only three officers and 375 men, but they did magnificently, and it was thanks to officers like your son, who put the honour of the regiment before all thought of fatigue or personal danger. Such a gallant lad! We all loved him.' A private, the

boy's soldier-servant, who fought with him, writes--'I wish you could have seen him in that trench.... All the men say that he deserved the V.C.... I don't know if we are going back to those trenches any more, but if we do, I am going to try and lay Mr. Geoffrey to rest in some quiet place.... I cannot bear to think that I shall not be able to be with him any more.'

        But how they crowd upon the mind--the 'unreturning brave'! Take our friends and neighbours in this quiet Hertfordshire country. All round us the blows have fallen--again and again the only son--sometimes two brothers out of three--the most brilliant--the best beloved. And I see still the retreating figure of a dear nephew of my own--Christoper Selwyn--as he vanished under the trees waving his hand to us in March last. A boy made of England's best--who after two years in Canada, and at the beginning of what must have been a remarkable career, heard the call of the Mother-Country, and rushed home at once. He was transferred to an English regiment, and came to say good-bye to us in March. It was impossible to think of Christopher's coming to harm--such life and force, such wisdom and character also,

in his strong, handsome face and thoughtful eyes! We talked of the future of Canada; not much of the war. Then he vanished; and I could not feel afraid. But one night in May, near Bailleul, he went out with a listening party between the trenches, was shot through both legs by a sniper, and otherwise injured--carried back to hospital, and after a few hours' vain hope, sank peacefully into eternity, knowing only that he had done his duty, and fearing nothing. 'Romance and melodrama,'--says Professor Gilbert Murray, in one of the noblest and most moving utterances of the war--'were once a memory--broken fragments living on of heroic ages in the past. We live no longer upon fragments and memories, we have entered ourselves upon an heroic age. As for me personally, there is one thought that is always with me--the thought that other men are dying for me, better men, younger, with more hope in their lives, many of them men whom I have taught and loved.' The orthodox Christian--'will be familiar with that thought of One who loved you dying for you. I would like to say that now I seem to be familiar with the thought that something innocent, something great, something that loved me, is dying, and is dying

daily for me. That is the sort of community we now are--a community in which one man dies for his brother; and underneath all our hatreds, our little anger and quarrels we are brothers, who are ready to seal our brotherhood with blood. It is for us these men are dying--for the women, the old men, and the rejected men--and to preserve civilisation and the common life which we are keeping alive, or building.'

        So much for the richer and the educated class. As to the rank and file, the Tommies who are fighting and dying for England in precisely the same spirit as those who have had ten times their opportunities in this unequal world, I have seen them myself within a mile of the trenches, marching quietly up through the fall of the March evening to take their places in that line, where, every night, however slack the fighting, a minimum of so many casualties per mile, so many hideous or fatal injuries by bomb or shell fire, is practically invariable. Not the conscript soldiers of a military nation, to whom the thought of fighting has been perforce familiar from childhood! Men, rather, who had never envisaged fighting, to whom it is all new, who at bottom, however firm their will, or wonder-

ful their courage, hate war, and think it a loathsome business. Yet as to their temper and demeanour on the battle-field, think of Anzac and Suvla, of the stubborn heroism of the retreat from Mons, of the three weeks' immortal fighting--one man to four!--which we call the first battle of Ypres, of the splendid attack at Neuve Chapelle, 'when there was not room on the firing positions for all who burned to take part in the action, and one man would pull another down crying that it was his turn for a shot'--when 'the wounded, even the desperately wounded, retired with jokes on their lips, telling each other the wild incidents of the day.' A correspondent whose brilliant work shows a remarkable sympathy with and understanding of the British soldier, describes, as an eye-witness, the coming back of the survivors--men of the Royal Fusiliers, and the Northumberland Fusiliers--from a dash into the German line, through what seemed impregnable defences, near St. Eloi, on March 31st last. 'They were cheerful and proud men ... in a mud-stained kit that would shock the dirtiest of tramps, yet walking as jauntily as though it were St. James's Street. Some of them, indeed, could barely crawl for wearines,' but--'they were wonderful to see

--and not the foulest horrors of war can break such a spirit as I saw in the eyes of all those boys who were coming back from the fields of death.' To me too it was given to see that spirit in the eyes of our men--before the fight--within a mile of the firing line; and--after the fight--in the exultant bearing of the young wounded officers whom we watched at the Casalty Clearing Station near Poperinghe.

        Day after day, week after week, indeed, the same spirit sustains the British Army, in that long battle-field, where apart from the special and conspicuous actions of the war, fighting never ceases, nor, with the fighting, wounds and death. In comparison with 'the ribbon of land 400 miles long' where the Allies, on the West, stand face to face with the enemy, says another eye-witness, 'all the battle-fields of the world are no more than playgrounds.' We at home 'should think of it only with reverence, and speak of it with awe.' 'I do not find it easy,' writes a chaplain at the Front who knows his men and has shared all the dangers of their life, 'to give incidents and sayings. I could speak of the courage of the wounded brought in after battle. How many times has one heard them telling the doctor to attend to others

before themselves! I could tell you of a very shy and nervous boy who, after an attack, dug, himself alone, with his entrenching tool, a little trench, under continuous fire, up which trench he afterwards crept backwards and forwards carrying ammunition to an advanced post; or of another who sat beside a wounded comrade for several hours under sniper's fire, and somehow built him a slight protection until night fell and rescue came. Such incidents are merely specimens of thousands which are never known. Indeed it is the heroism of all the men all the time which has left the most lasting impression on my mind after thirteen months at the war. No one can conceive the strain which the daily routine of trench life entails, unless one has been among the men. They never show the slightest sign of unwillingness, and they do what they are told when and where they are told without questioning; no matter what the conditions or dangers, they come up smiling and cheery through it all--full of 'grouse' perhaps, but that is the soldier's privilege!' ... 'It is, I think, what we all are feeling and are so proud of--this unbreakable spirit of self-sacrifice in the daily routine of trench warfare. We are proud of

it because it is the highest of all forms of self-sacrifice, for it is not the act of a moment when the blood is up, or the excitement of battle is at fever heat--but it is demanded of the soldier day in and day out and shewn by him coolly and deliberately, day in and day out with death always at hand. We are proud of it too because it is so surely a sign of the magnificent "moral" of our troops--and moral is going to play a very leading part as the war proceeds.... What is inspiring this splendid disregard of self is partly the certainty that the Cause is Right, partly it is a hidden joy of conscience which makes them know that they would be unhappy if they were not doing their bit--and partly (I am convinced of this, too) it is a deepening faith' in their religion, and its Founder--the Man of Sorrows, Who suffered for men.

        A few days ago, I accompanied a woman official distributing some leaflets on behalf of a Government department in some visits to families living in a block of model dwellings somewhere in South London. We called on nine families. In every single case, the man of the family had gone, or was expecting to go, to the war, except in one case, where a man who out of pure patriotism and at great

personal difficulty had joined the Volunteer Reserve at the outbreak of war, had strained his heart in trench digging, and was now medically unfit, to his own bitter disappointment. There was some grumbling in the case of one young wife that her husband should be forced to go, before the single men whom she knew; but in the main the temper that showed itself bore witness both to the feeling and the intelligence that our people are bringing to bear on the war. One woman said her husband was a sergeant in a well-known regiment. He thought the world of his men, and whenever one was killed, he must be at the burying. 'He can't bear--you know'--she added shyly--'they should feel alone.' She had three brothers-in-law 'out'--one recently killed. One was an ambulance driver under the R.A.M.C. He had five small children, but had volunteered. 'He doesn't say much about the war, except that "Tommies are wonderful. They never complain."' She notices a change in his character. He was always good to his wife and children--'but now he's splendid!' The brother of another woman had been a jockey in Belgium, had liked the country and the people. When war broke out he 'felt he must fight for them.'

He came home at once and enlisted. Another brother had been a stoker on a war-ship at the Dardanelles, and was in the famous landing of April 25. Bullets 'thick and fast like hailstorm. Terrible times collecting the dead. Her brother had worked hard forming burial parties. Was now probably going to the Tigris. Wrote jolly letters!'--

        Then there was the little woman born and bred in the Army, with all the pride of the Army--a familiar type. Husband a sergeant in the Guards--was gymnastic instructor at a northern town--and need not have gone to the war, but felt 'as a professional soldier' he ought to go. Three brothers in the Army, one a little drummer-boy of sixteen badly wounded in the retreat from Mons. Her sailor brother had died--probably from exposure, in the North Sea. The most cheerful, plucky little creature! 'We are Army people, and must expect to fight.'

        Well--you say you 'would like America to visualise the effort, the self-sacrifice of the English men and women who are determined to see this war through.' There was, I thought, a surprising amount of cheerful effort, of understanding self-sacrifice in those nine homes, where my companion's friendly talk

drew out the family facts without difficulty. And I am convinced that if I had spent days instead of hours in following her through the remaining tenements in these huge and populous blocks the result would have been practically the same. The nation is behind the war, and behind the Government; solidly determined to win this war, and build a new world after it.

        As to the work of our women, I have described something of it in the munitions area, and if this letter were not already too long, I should like to dwell on much else--the army of maidens, who, as V.A.D.'s (members of Voluntary Aid Detachments), trained by the Red Cross, have come trooping from England's most luxurious or comfortable homes and are doing invaluable work in hundreds of hospitals; to begin with, the most menial scrubbing and dish-washing, and by now the more ambitious and honourable--but not more indispensable--tasks of nursing itself. In this second year of the war, the first army of V.A.D.'s, now promoted, has everywhere been succeeded by a fresh levy, aglow with the same eagerness and the same devotion as the first. Or I could dwell on the women's hospitals--especially the

remarkable hospital in Endell Street, entirely officered by women; where some hundreds of male patients accept the surgical and medical care of women doctors, and adapt themselves to the light and easy discipline maintained by the women of the staff, with entire confidence and grateful goodwill. To see a woman dentist at work on a soldier's mouth, and a woman quartermaster presiding over her stores, and managing besides everything pertaining to the lighting, heating, and draining of the hospital, is one more sign of these changed and changing times. The work done by the Scottish Women's Hospital in Serbia will rank as one of the noblest among the minor episodes of the war. The magnificent work of British nurses, everywhere, I have already spoken of. And everywhere, too, among the camps in England and abroad, behind the fighting lines, or at the great railway stations here or in France, through which the troops pass backwards and forwards, hundreds of women have been doing ardent yet disciplined service--giving long hours in crowded canteens or Y.M.C.A. huts to just those small kindly offices, which bring home to the British soldier, more effectively than many things more ambitious, what the

British nation feels towards him. The war has put an end, so far as the richer class is concerned, to the busy idleness and all the costly make-believes of peace. No one gives 'dinner-parties' in the old sense any more; the very word 'reception' is dying out. The fashionable restaurants are full, but a great deal of the entertaining there consists of festas, arranged for the son or brother or friend, home from the Front on short leave, for whom nobody feels they can do enough; and the pretty dresses of the women, the food and drink, the gaiety and chatter, are often, if one interprets them justly, but the symbols of feeling, sharp indeed, but patriotically--tenderly--hidden. Meanwhile the common experience is that the war is biting far deeper this year into ordinary life than it has done yet. Taxation has grown much heavier, and will be more and more severely felt. Yet very few grumble, and there is general and determined cutting down of the trappings and appendages of life, which is to the good of us all.

        As to dress, there are foolish women in all classes, who still follow foolish fashions. But there is also a fashion in 'old clothes,' and a pride in wearing them. The high wages that employment in munition factories has brought

to the women of the working class, shew themselves often no doubt in forms of spending, that are extravagant or ugly. 'You should see the hats round here on a Saturday!' said the manager of a Midland factory. But I am bound to say he spoke of it proudly. The hats were for him a testimony to the wages paid by his firm; and he would probably have argued, on the girls' part, that after the long hours and hard work of the week, the hats were a perfectly legitimate 'fling,' and human nature must out. Certainly the children of the workers are better fed and better clothed, which speaks so far well for the mothers; and recent Government enquiries seem to shew that in spite of universal employment, and high wages, the drunkenness of the United Kingdom as a whole is markedly less, while at the same time--uncomfortable paradox!--the amount of alcohol consumed is greater.

        Undoubtedly, there is a very warm and widespread feeling among us that in this war the women of the nation have done uncommonly well! You will remember a similar stir of grateful recognition in America after your War of Secession, connected with the part played in the nursing and sanitation of

the war by the women of the Northern States. The feeling here may well have an important social and political influence when the war is over; especially among the middle and upper classes. It may be counterbalanced to some extent in the industrial class, by the disturbance and anxiety caused in many trades, but especially in the engineering trades, by that great invasion of women I have tried to describe. But that the war will leave some deep mark on that long evolution of the share of women in our public life, which began in the teeming middle years of the last century, is, I think, certain.

        May 2nd.--So I come to the end of the task you set me!--with what gaps and omissions to look back upon, no one knows so well as myself. This letter starts on its way to you at a critical moment for your great country, when the issue between the United States and Germany is still unsettled. What will happen? Will Germany give way? If not, what sort of relations will shape themselves, and how quickly, between the Central Empires and America?

        To express myself on this great matter is no part of my task; although no English man or woman but will watch its development