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 depot, 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 Depots, i.e. sleeping and mess quarters, for thousands of men belonging to the new armies; 16 hospitals with 21,000 beds, 3 rifle ranges; 2 training-camps; a machine-gun training-school; a vast laundry worked by Frenchwomen 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 Depot for food; an Ordnance Depot for everything that is not food; new sidings to the railway, where 1,000 men can be entrained on the one side, while 1,000 men are detraining on the other; or two full ambulance trains can come in and go out; a Convalescent Depot of 2,000 patients, and a Convalescent Horse Depot of 2,000 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 a visitor ventures timidly near, to turn and smile in response to the few halting words of sympathy or inquiry 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