The matron told me to-day that last night a man came in from Nieuport with the base of a shell ("the bit they make into ash trays,” she said) embedded in him.  His clothing had been carried in with it.  He died, of course.

One of our friends has been helping with stretcher work, removing civilians.  He was carrying away a girl shot to pieces, and with her clothing in rags.  He took her head, and a young Belgian took her feet, and the Belgian looked round and said quietly, “This is my fiancee.”

[Page Heading:  THE “LUSITANIA”]

11 May.—­To-day being madame’s washing day—­we ring the changes on the “nettoyage,” “le grand nettoyage,” and “le lavage”—­everything was late.  The newspaper came in, and was full of such words as “horror,” “resentment,” “indignation,” about the Lusitania, but that won’t give us back our ship or our men.  I wish we could do more and say less, but the Press must talk, and always does so “with its mouth.”  M. Rotsartz came to breakfast.  The guns had been going all night long, there was a sense of something in the air, and I fretted against platitudes in French and madame’s washing.  At last I got away, and went to the sea front, for the sound of bursting shells had become tremendous.

It was a sort of British morning, with a fresh British breeze blowing our own blessed waves, and there, in its grey grandeur, stood off a British man-of-war, blazing away at the coast.  The Germans answered by shells, which fell a bit wide, and must have startled the fishes (but no one else) by the splash they made.  There were long, swift torpedo-boats, with two great white wings of cloven foam at their bows, and a great flourish of it in their wake, moving along under a canopy of their own black smoke.  It was the smoke of good British coal, from pits where grimy workmen dwell in the black country, and British sweat has to get it out of the ground.  Our grey lady was burning plenty of it, and when she had done her work, she put up a banner of smoke, and steamed away with a splendid air of dignity across the white-flecked sea.  One knew the men on board her!  Probably not a heart beat quicker by a second for all the German shells, probably dinner was served as usual, and men got their tubs and had their clothes brushed when it was all over.

I went down to my kitchen a little late, but I had seen something that Drake never saw—­a bit of modern sea-fighting.  And in the evening, when I returned, my grey mistress had come back again.  The sun was westering now, and the sea had turned to gold, and the grey lady looked black against the glare, but the fire of her guns was brighter than the evening sunset, and she was a spit-fire, after all, this dignified queen, and she, “let ’em have it,” too, while the long, lean torpedo-boats looked on.

I went to the kitchen; I gave out jam, I distributed socks, I heard the fussy importance of minor officials, but I had something to work on since I had seen the grey lady at work.