Firing ceased about 5 o’clock this afternoon, but we are short of news.  The English papers rather annoy one with their continual victories, of which we see nothing.  Everyone talks of the German big guns as if they were some happy chance.  But the Germans were drilling and preparing while we were making speeches at Hyde Park Corner.  Everything had been thought out by them.  People talk of the difficulty they must have had in preparing concrete floors for their guns.  Not a bit of it.  There were innocent dwelling-houses, built long ago, with floors in just the right position and of just the right stuff, and when they were wanted the top stories were blown off and the concrete gun-floors were ready.  There were local exhibitions, too, to which firms sent exhibition guns, which they “forgot” to remove!  While we were going on strike they were making an army, and as we have sown so must we reap.

One almost wonders whether it might not be possible to eliminate the personal element in war, so constant is the talk about victorious guns.  If guns decide everything, then let them be trained on other guns.  Let the gun that drives farthest and goes surest win.  If every siege is decided by the German 16-inch howitzers, then let us put up brick and mortar or steel against them, but not men.  The day for the bleeding human body seems to be over now that men are mown down by shells fired eight miles away.  War used to be splendid because it made men strong and brave, but now a little German in spectacles can stand behind a Krupp gun and wipe out a regiment.

[Page Heading:  PROTECTION OF LIFE OR PROPERTY]

I suppose women will always try to protect life because they know what it costs to produce it, and men will always try to protect property because that is what they themselves produce.  At Antwerp our wounded men were begging us to go up to the hospital to fetch their purses from under their pillows!  At present women are only repairers, darning socks, cleaning, washing up after men, bringing up reinforcements in the way of fresh life, and patching up wounded men, but some day they must and will have to say, “The life I produce has as much right to protection as the property you produce, and I claim my right to protect it.”

There seems to me a lack of connection between one man’s desire to extend the area he occupies and young men in their teens lying with their lungs shot through or backs blown off.

19 October.—­Our time is now spent in waiting and preparing for work which will probably come soon, as there has been fighting near us again.  One hears the boom of guns a long way off, and always there is the sound of death in it.  One has been too near it not to know now what it means.

Yesterday I went to church in an empty little building, but a few of our hospital men turned up and made a small congregation.  In the afternoon one or two people came to tea in my bedroom as we could not make our usual expedition to de Poorter’s bunshop.  The pastry habit is growing on us all.