Part 17

Almost it makes me long to be there lying sweetly and unconsciously beside the quiet dead.

I have no letters from Himself. Where he is--whether alive or dead--how can I tell? I haven't even the poor consolation of writing to him--because I have no address.

There is no glory in war for women's hearts, Cornelia. To-day I am neither proud nor glad, but only sorry to be a soldier's wife.

*XV*

I have been reading over your last letter and find that my impassioned tirade about Food left many of your questions unanswered.

What you tell me about the present state of your war activities takes me back about three years to the time when we were at the same stage. Have you noticed that one woman's matrimonial experience is not of the slightest use to another? It doesn't even help her to avoid quite obvious pitfalls. War seems to me to be a little like that. Every country has to "dree her own weird" in it--grope for her soul in her own particular way.

One of Lloyd George's speeches put the matter in a nut shell: "To peace-loving peoples war is a trackless waste--an undiscovered country through which a pathway has to be made."

That being so, there must of necessity be side tracking. I see your George stamping about in righteous indignation because things are not being "put over" with the rapidity and despatch which seem to him essential. Tell him he'll just have to possess his soul in patience, and don't let him do anything foolish. He'll only hinder thereby.

I do hope and pray most fervently, however, that you are exaggerating the state of affairs. I wonder why it is that the war machine has such a tendency to become unwieldy. It needs not any vivid imagination, nor a particularly brilliant intelligence to grasp the magnitude of your war task.

You have almost everything the old world now lacks, your trouble is to co-ordinate your forces from sea to sea, and get them into line. Colossus can't move with the agility of his lesser brethren, we must comfort ourselves and stay our impatience with that reflection. I am sure you will hate leaving your lovely home, but Washington will have compensations. I could not, somehow, imagine or contemplate existence for myself very far from London, in wartime, at least for any length of time.

I don't agree with all you say about the mobilisation of your women for war.

There is no other way of doing it; and the things you tell me are only the excrescences of a great forward movement, the shock of which will soon make itself felt throughout the entire country.

We, too, had the kind of women you criticise so severely. I knew one whose first act of war service for her country was the purchase of a red cross of rubies to wear with her uniform. She went to France with it, but abandoned it before very long. The real cross, when she came up with it, red with the blood of brave men, put her to shame. She has won the saint's crown out there, and her name has been on a hundred dying lips.

So don't worry about these little things, Cornelia, they will pass as a tale that is told. The best will remain--the things that cannot be shaken, and which are the same in all countries, and of all peoples.

God, how I cling to that text. I have to say it over and over a hundred times a day. We are getting so badly shaken here that sometimes we feel as if we had no foundation whatsoever.

I don't know whether I have made you understand that a big section of England now is as truly the war zone as that across the Channel.

The air raids are increasing in number and intensity; this week we had four nights in the cellar.

There are not so many oddities about the proceedings now we have settled in to the game in dead earnest. When we get the warning we act with as little delay as possible, seek one nearest available shelter, where we sit down to endure the strain as best we can.

There is precious little badinage now about the Zeppelin parties; we all feel that they have long passed the amusing stage.

Can you read between the lines? I wonder have you grasped the fact that the strain is becoming almost more than we can bear? I have the dreadful feeling that perhaps I myself will not be able to hold out.

You know I never could do without sleep; my too active brain has always demanded its full measure, and rebelled when cheated of it.

A Zeppelin night means anything from seven or eight o'clock at night till four in the morning--the strain of tension and fear never relaxed for a moment. Always you are listening, listening--and the gunfire never ceases. It is punctuated by the noise of the explosions following the bomb dropping, which means, though it may be a good many miles from you, that somebody is being punished.

We still speak about the Zeppelins, though they don't come any more. Their successors, the Gothas, are not less terrible; in fact they seem to be more daring, more destructive, faster and less vulnerable.

Also they are equipped with all kinds of new and terrible death-dealing weapons.

A very strange one descended on our little town night before last. We heard a noise like a rushing mighty wind or an express train, going at lightning speed through the air. It was not the usual steady whir of the Gotha's engine. The thing fell in a garden at the top of Queen's Hill and then exploded, doing much damage to houses, though mercifully no one was killed. They say it was an aerial torpedo which travels through the air by its own momentum. If this is true, imagine what magnitude this form of attack might achieve and how much we may yet have to suffer!

How often one is appalled by this dedication of human will and mind power to the devil's service. Is there to be no limit set to it? Is it the beginning of the terrors which will make men call on the rocks to cover them? You have no idea, Cornelia, what a weak helpless thing humanity is until it is subjected to this sort of thing. It isn't clean fighting; it makes brave men desperate.

I think on the whole the women bear it better. They are more used to suffering and never forget to be protective. All sorts of moving things happen about the children. One poor woman stretched herself over her two children on the floor as the torpedo was coming, hoping to receive the brunt herself. None of them were hurt.

But these things are getting home, Cornelia, they are telling on us all. Little portents show the weakening of the fibre here and there. I am feeling it myself, while all the time fighting against it.