Yesterday, by chance, I went to the “Ierlinck” to see Mr. Clegg.  I met Mr. Hubert Walter, lately arrived from England, and asked him to dine, so both he and Mr. Clegg came, and Madame van der Gienst.  It was so like England to talk to Mr. Walter again, and to learn news of everyone, and we actually sat up till 10.30, and had a great pow-wow.

Mr. Walter attaches great importance to the fact that the Germans are courageous in victory, but their spirits go down at once under defeat, and he thinks that even one decisive defeat would do wonders in the way of bringing the war to an end.  The Russians are preparing for a winter campaign.  I look at all my “woollies,” and wonder if I had better save some for 1916.  What new horrors will have been invented by that time?  I hear the Germans are throwing vitriol now!  In their results I hate hand grenades more than anything.  The poor burnt faces which have been wounded by them are hardly human sometimes, and in their bandages they have a suggestion of something tragically grotesque.

26 May.—­We had a great day—­rather, a glorious day—­at the station yesterday.  In the morning I heard that “les anglais” were arriving there, and, although the news was a little startling, I couldn’t go early to Adinkerke because I felt so seedy.  However, I got off at last in a “camion,” and when I arrived I found the little station hospital and salle and Lady Bagot’s hospital crowded with men in khaki.

We don’t know yet all that it means.  The fighting has been fierce and awful at Ypres.  Are the hospitals at the base all crowded?  Is there no more room for our men?  What numbers of them have fallen?  Who is killed, and who is left?

All questions are idle for the moment.  Only I have a postcard to say that Colin is at the front, so I suppose until the war is over I shall go on being very sick with anxiety.  At night I say to myself, as the guns boom on, “Is he lying out in the open with a bullet through his heart?” and in the morning I say, “Is he safe in hospital, and wounded, or is he still with his men, making them follow him (in the way he has) wherever he likes to lead them?” God knows, and the War Office, and neither tells us much.

[Page Heading:  GAS-POISONING]

The men at the station were nearly all cases of asphyxiation by gas.  Unless one had actually seen the immediate results one could hardly have credited it.  In a day or two the soldiers may leave off twitching and shuddering as they breathe, and may be able to draw a breath fairly, but an hour or two after they have inhaled the deadly German gas is an awful time to see one’s men.  Most of them yesterday were in bed, but a few sat on canvas chairs round the empty stove in the salle, and all slept, even those in deadly pain.  Sleep comes to these tired soldiers like a death.  They succumb to it.  They are difficult to rouse.  They are oblivious, and want nothing else.  They are able to sleep anywhere and in any position, but even in sleep they twitch and shudder, and their sides heave like those of spent horses.