train backed slowly into the station and an aeroplane swooped overhead.  At Drury Lane one would have said that the staging had been overdone, that the clothes were too ragged, the men too gaunt and too much wounded, and that by no stretch of imagination could a band be playing “God save the King” while a square painted train called “Lou-lou” steamed in, looking like a child’s giant gaudy toy, and an aeroplane fussed overhead.

Everyone had stories to tell, but I think the best of them concerns the arrival of the wounded last night.  All the beds in Lady Bagot’s little hospital were full, and the Belgians who occupied them insisted on getting up and giving their places to the English.  They lay on the floor or stood on their feet all night, and someone told me that even very sick men leapt from their beds to give them to their Allies.

God help us, what a mixture it all is!  Here were men talking of the very sound of bayonets on human flesh; here were men not only asphyxiated by gas, but blinded by the pepper that the Germans mix with it; and here were men determined to give no quarter—­yet they were babbling of Loch Lomond’s side and their mothers, and fighting as to who should give up their beds to each other.

Of course the day ended with the exchange of souvenirs, and the soldiers pulled buttons off their coats and badges out of their caps.  And when it was all over, every mother’s son of them rolled round and went to sleep.  Most of them, I thought, had a curious air of innocence about them as they slept.

27 May.—­I took a great bundle of newspapers and magazines to the “Jellicoe” men to-day.  English current literature isn’t a waste out here, and I often wonder why people don’t buy more.  They all fall upon my tableful, and generally bear away much of it.

The war news, even in the ever optimistic English press, is not good, but not nearly as bad as what seems to me the real condition of affairs.  The shortage of high explosives is very great.  At Nieuport yesterday Mrs. Wynne said to a French officer, “Things seem quiet here to-day,” at which he laughed, and said, “I suppose even Germans will stop firing when they know you have no ammunition.”

[Page Heading:  SLACKERS IN GLASGOW]

In France the armament works are going night and day, and the men work in shifts of 24 hours—­even the women only get one day off in a week—­while in Glasgow the men are sticking out for strict labour conditions, and are “slacking” from Friday night till late on Tuesday morning, and then demanding extra pay for overtime.  And this in face of the bare facts that since October the Allies have lost ground in Russia; in Belgium they remain as they were; and in France they have advanced a few kilometres.  At Ypres the Germans are now within a mile of us, and the losses there are terrible.  Whom shall we ever see again?

Men come out to die now, not to fight.  One order from a sergeant was, “You’ve got to take that trench.  You can’t do it.  Get on!”