...  The guns are booming heavily this morning.  Nothing seems to correspond.  Are men really falling and dying in agonies quite close to us?  I believe we ought to see less or more—­be nearer the front or further from it.  Or is it that nothing really changes us?  Only war pictures and war letters remain as a fixed blazing standard.  The soldiers in the trenches are quite as keen about sugar in their coffee as we are about tea.  No wonder men have decided that one day we must put off flesh.  It is far too obstrusive....

...  To comfort myself I try to remember that Wellington took his old nurse with him on all his campaigns because she was the only person who washed his stocks properly....

...  Surely the expense of the thing will one day put a stop to war.  We are spending two million sterling per day, the French certainly as much, the Germans probably more, and Austria and Russia much more, in order to keep men most uncomfortably in unroofed graves, and to send high explosives into the air, most of which don’t hit anything.  Surely, if fighting was (as it is) impossible in this flooded country in winter, we might have called a truce and gone home for three months, and trained and drilled like Christians on Salisbury Plain!...

...  Health—­i.e., bad health—­obtrudes itself tiresomely.  I am ill again, and, fortunately, few people notice it, so I am able to keep on.  A festered hand makes me awkward; and as I wind a bandage round it and tie it with my teeth, I once more wish I was a Belgian refugee, as I am sure I would be interesting, and would get things done for me!

A sick Belgian artist, M. Rotsartz{3}, is doing a drawing of me.  I go to Lady Bagot’s hospital, where he is laid up, and sit to him in the intervals of soup.  That little wooden hospital is the best place I have known so far.  Lady Bagot is never bustled or fussy, nor even “busy,” and her staff are excellent men, with the “Mark of the Lamb” on them.

I gave away a lot of things to-day to a regiment going into the trenches.  The soldiers were delighted with them.

11 March.—­There was a lot of firing near La Panne to-day, and a British warship was repeatedly shelled by the Germans from Nieuport.  I went into Dunkirk with Mr. Clegg, and got the usual hasty shopping done.  No one can ever wait a minute.  If one has time to buy a newspaper one is lucky.  The difficulty of communicating with anyone is great—­no telephone—­no letters—­no motor-car.  I am stranded.

[Page Heading:  FRENCH MARINES]

I generally go in the train to Adinkerke with the French Marines, nice little fellows, with labels attached to them stating their “case”—­not knowing where they are going or anything else—­just human lives battered about and carted off.  I don’t even know where they get the little bit of money which they always seem able to spend on loud-smelling oranges and cigarettes.  The place is littered with orange-skins—­to-day I saw a long piece lying in the form of an “S” amid the mud; and, like a story of a century old, I thought of ourselves as children throwing orange-skins round our heads and on to the floor to read the initial of our future husband, and I seemed to hear mother say, “‘S’ for Sammy—­Sammy C——­,” a boy with thick legs whom we secretly despised!