I want to tell Tabby how immensely pleased everyone is with her slippers.  The men who have stood long in the trenches are in agonies of frost-bite and rheumatism, and now that I can give them these slippers when they arrive at the station, they are able to take off their wet boots caked with mud.

If J. would send me another little packet of groceries I should love it.  Just what can come by post.  That Benger’s Food of hers nearly saved my life when I was ill at Dunkirk.  What I should like better than anything is a few good magazines and books.  I get Punch and the Spectator, but I want the English Review and the National, and perhaps a Hibbert.  I enclose ten shillings for these.  What is being read?  Stephen Coleridge seems to have brought out an interesting collection, but I can’t remember its name.  I wonder if any notice will be taken of “They who Question.”  The reviews speak well of the Canadian book.

Love to you all, and tell Alan how much I think of him.  Bless you, my dears.  Write often.

Yours as ever,
SARAH.

* * * * *

1 March.—­Woe betide the person who owns anything out here:  he is instantly deprived of it.  “Pinching” is proverbial, and people have taken to carrying as many of their possessions as possible on their person, with the result that they are the strangest shapes and sizes.  Still, one hopes the goods are valuable until one discovers that they generally consist of the following items:  a watch that doesn’t go, a fountain-pen that is never filled, an electric torch that won’t light, a much-used hanky, an empty iodine bottle, and a scarf.

5 March.—­I went as usual to-day to the muddy station and distributed soup, which I no longer make now that the station has become militarised.  My hours are from 12 noon to 5 o’clock.  This includes the men’s dinner-hour and the washing of the kitchen.  They eat and smoke when I am there, and loll on the little bench.  They are Belgians and I am English, and one is always being warned that the English can’t be too careful!  We are entertaining 40,000 Belgians in England, but it must be done “carefully.”

[Page Heading:  THIEVING AND GIVING]

It is a great bore out here that everything is stolen.  One can hardly lay a thing down for an instant that it isn’t taken.  To-day my Thermos flask in a leather case, in which I carry my lunch, was prigged from the kitchen.  Things like metal cups are stolen by the score, and everyone begs!  Even well-to-do people are always asking for something, and they simply whine for tobacco.  The fact is, I think, the English are giving things away with their usual generosity and want of discrimination, and—­it is a horrid word—­they are already pauperising a nice lot of people.  I can’t help thinking that the thing is being run on wrong lines.  We should have given or lent what was necessary to the Belgian Government, and let them undertake to provide for soldiers and refugees through the proper channels.  No lasting good ever came of gifts—­every child begs for cigarettes, and they begin smoking at five years old.