We went back to the hospital for dinner, and then went out into crisp, beautiful moonlight, and motored back to the Red Cross camp.  I had a little hut to sleep in, which had just been built.  It contained a bed and two chairs, upon one of which was a tin basin!  The cold in the morning was about as sharp as anything I have known, but everyone was jolly and pleasant, and we had a charming time.

The Count told us of the old proud Georgians when there was a famine in the country and a Russian Governor came to offer relief to the starving inhabitants.  Their great men went out to receive him, and said courteously, “We have not been here, Gracious One, one hundred or two hundred years, but much more than a thousand years, and during that time we have not had a visit from the Russian Government.  We are pleased to see you, and the honour you have done us is sufficient in itself—­for the rest we think we will not require anything at your hands.”

On Monday I motored with the others out to the ferry; then I had to leave them, as they were going to ride forty miles, and that was thought too much for me.  Age has no compensations, and it is not much use fighting it.  One only ends by being “a wonderful old woman of eighty”:  reminiscent, perhaps a little obstinate, and in the world to come—­always eighty?

Came back to Batoum with Count Stanislas Constant, and went for a drive with him to see the tea-gardens.

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[Page Heading:  TIFLIS]

Christmas Eve at Tiflis, and here we are with cars still stuck in the ice thirty miles from Archangel, and ourselves just holding on and trying not to worry.  But what a waste of time!  Also, fighting is going on now in Persia, and we might be a lot of use.  We came back from Batoum in the hottest and slowest train I have ever been in.  Still, Georgia delighted me, and I am glad to have seen it.  They have a curious custom there (the result of generations of fighting).  Instead of saying “Good-morning,” they say “Victory”; and the answer is, “May the victory be yours.”  The language is Georgian, of course; and then there is Tartar, and Polish, and Russian, and I can’t help thinking that the Tower of Babel was the poorest joke that was ever played on mankind.  Nothing stops work so completely.

What will Christmas Day be like at home?  I think of all the village churches, with the holly and evergreens, and in almost every one the little new brass plates to the memory of beautiful youth, dead and mangled, and left in the mud to await another trumpet than that which called it from the trenches.  There is nothing like a boy, and all the life of England and the prayers of mothers have centred round them.  One’s older friends died first, and now the boys are falling, and from every little vicarage, from school-houses and colleges, the endless stream goes, all with their heads up, fussing over their little bits of packing, and then away to stand exploding shells and gas and bombs.  No one except those who have seen knows the ghastly tale of human suffering that this war involves every day.  Down here 550,000 Armenians have been butchered in cold blood.  The women are either massacred or driven into Turkish harems.