Ye gods, what a faith!  What an acrobatic performance to try and reconcile a Father’s personal care for His poor little sparrows and His indifference at seeing so many of them stretched bleeding on the ground!

Religion so far has been a success where martyrs are concerned, but we must go on with courage to something that teaches men to live for the best and the highest.  This should come from ourselves, and lead up to God.  It should not require teaching, or priests, or even prayer.  Humanity is big enough for this.  It should shake off cords and chains and old Bible stories of carnage and killing, and get to work to find a new, responsible, clean, sensible, practical scheme of life, in which each man will have to get away from silly old idols and step out by himself.

There is nothing very difficult about it, but we are so beset by bogies, and so full of fears and fancies that we are half the time either in a state of funk, or in its antithesis, a state of cheekiness.  Schoolmaster-ridden, we are behaving still like silly children, and our highest endeavour is (school-boy-like) to resemble our fellows as nearly as possible.  The result is stagnation, crippled forms, wasted energy, people waiting for years by some healing pool and longing for someone to dip them in.  All the release that Christ preached to men is being smothered in something worse than Judaism.  We love chains, and when they are removed we either turn and put them on again, or else caper like mad things because we have cast them off.  Freedom is still as distant as the stars.

5 November.—­Yesterday we lunched with the English chaplain, Mr. Lombard.  He and I had a great talk walking home on a dark afternoon through the slush after we had been to call on the Maxwells.  I think he is one of the “exiles” whom one meets all the world over, one of those who don’t transplant well.  I am one myself!  And Mr. Lombard and I nearly wept when we found ourselves in a street that recalled the Marylebone Road.  We pretended we were in sight of Euston Station, and talked of taking a Baker Street bus till our voices grew choky.

How absurd we islanders are!  London is a poky place, but we adore it.  St. James’s Street is about the length of a good big ship, yet we don’t feel we have lived till we get back to it!  And as for Piccadilly and St. Paul’s, well, we see them in our dreams.

Our little unit has not found work yet.  I was told before I joined it that it had been accepted by the Russian Red Cross Society.

[Page Heading:  “CHARITY” AND WAR]

I have been hearing many things out here, and thinking many things.  There is only one way of directing Red Cross work.  Everything should be—­and must be in future—­put under military authority and used by military authority.  “Charity” and war should be separate.  It is absurd that the Belgians in England should be housed and fed by a Government grant, and our own soldiers are dependent on private charity for the very socks they wear and the cigarettes they smoke.  Aeroplanes had to be instituted and prizes offered for them by a newspaper, and ammunition wasn’t provided till a newspaper took up the matter.  To be mob-ridden is bad enough, but to be press-ridden is worse!