I am amazed at the good health we all keep with this big volume of work and the long hours.  Not a man nor a woman has been ill a day.  I have known something about work and the spirit of good work in other organizations of various sorts; but I never saw one work in better spirit than this.  And remember, most of them are volunteers.

The soldiers here complained for weeks in private about the lethargy of the people—­the slowness of men to enlist.  But they seemed to me to complain with insufficient reason.  For now they come by thousands.  They do need more men in the field, and they may conscript them, but I doubt the necessity.  But I run across such incidents as these:  I met the Dowager Countess of D——­ yesterday—­a woman of 65, as tall as I and as erect herself as a soldier, who might be taken for a woman of 40, prematurely gray.  “I had five sons in the Boer War.  I have three in this war.  I do not know where any one of them is.”  Mrs. Page’s maid is talking of leaving her.  “My two brothers have gone to the war and perhaps I ought to help their wives and children.”  The Countess and the maid are of the same blood, each alike unconquerable.  My chauffeur has talked all day about the naval battle in which five German ships were lately sunk[68].  He reminded me of the night two months ago when he drove Mrs. Page and me to dine with Sir John and Lady Jellicoe—­Jellicoe now, you know, being in command of the British fleet.

This Kingdom has settled down to war as its one great piece of business now in hand, and it is impossible, as the busy, burdensome days pass, to pick out events or impressions that one can be sure are worth writing.  For instance a soldier—­a man in the War Office—­told me to-day that Lord Kitchener had just told him that the war may last for several years.  That, I confess, seems to me very improbable, and (what is of more importance) it is not the notion held by most men whose judgment I respect.  But all the military men say it will be long.  It would take several years to kill that vast horde of Germans, but it will not take so long to starve them out.  Food here is practically as cheap as it was three months ago and the sea routes are all open to England and practically all closed to Germany.  The ultimate result, of course, will be Germany’s defeat.  But the British are now going about the business of war as if they knew they would continue it indefinitely.  The grim efficiency of their work even in small details was illustrated to-day by the Government’s informing us that a German handy man, whom the German Ambassador left at his Embassy, with the English Government’s consent, is a spy—­that he sends verbal messages to Germany by women who are permitted to go home, and that they have found letters written by him sewed in some of these women’s undergarments!  This man has been at work there every day under