DEAREST BELLE,

Amongst the parcels given me to bring from London was a pair of field glasses sent to a little subaltern, for field glasses are almost impossible to buy now, as there are none left in Paris; and one of the girls who had laden me down with messages offered to pay my way around Paris for the delivery of these things, thinking that cabs would be rare. So I took a carriage and devoted the entire day to these little commissions. The man I used to employ has gone to the war; forty horses have been taken from that stable and only two left, and I had one of those two---a broken---down old black thing---driven by a man on the pleasant side of sixty, I should say.

After clattering around for some time, I found a little old pharmacien and his little old wife, far down on the Boulevard du Temple, sitting over their soup au choux at mid-day. They had both been weeping, and when I knocked at the door, they started up in, I think, alarm lest it might be one of those dreaded announcements: "Tué à l'ennemie." They were so old both of them, their voices were well-nigh gone. They looked such pitiable objects of humanity, everything worn away by the years but their power of suffering, and their love. Over my shoulder was slung the pair of field-glasses sent by the daughter---a French maid to Lady C. in London---to her brother on the field, and I could hardly give them without tears. I do not think I did. I had only seen the maid once, she was nothing to me, and when she asked me to carry those field-glasses it was one more packet where I had already so many. They were always in the way when I wanted to unbutton my coat and get out my purse, and bothered me on the whole journey, but when I took them off and handed them to the parents, and saw their delight, and gave them the message from London, well, I have not done one little thing which has given me so much pleasure in a long while.

After that, Webb and I drove through the Marché du Temple, and I bought all the vegetables for the soup and our luncheon myself, and the whole luncheon that day only cost me a franc. I cooked it myself, and it showed me how much money is continually wasted on food.

Upstairs, in the office of the Matin, I stood with Le Roux's secretary before a big military map on Robert's desk, and saw how he had followed day by day and week by week the campaigns of that soldier son, marking with blue pencil from Paris north to Toul; and I saw the big ring around Toul, and the letters by the side of that map, ranged so carefully, to his father; and the letters on the other side, ranged so carefully, day by day, to his sister, and day by day to the young girl whom he should have married the night before he left for the front---and my heart ached. It all seems such a cruel, dreadful waste, although out of it heroes will rise, and new events and new destinies will make new powers, and the new "couche" will be better than the old---with what blood and tears the flowers are watered; and I thought of Robert hurrying down over those encumbered roads, with his breaking heart, for he certainly loved his children most deeply.

How profound and touching everything is in these days!

It is full moon again, and it rises over these grey roofs and over these lovely trees with the same tranquil beauty as before. They do not light the clock in the Chambre des Députés, the hours are no longer luminous---one might say; everywhere and everything seems to be watching and waiting---but the clock speaks just the same and marks the hours.

When you think that what I saw yesterday was only the picture of one afternoon in one military hospital, it makes you shudder to imagine the anguish that is spread over four countries at this present moment.

When I went in yesterday, taking with me Miss Arkwright, a nurse from Guy's Hospital, London, to Mrs. Vanderbilt, I found that she had picked me out of the bandage room (probably because I made such poor bandages), and appointed me to Ward 69. I assure you, when I heard then that I was actually going into a hospital ward for the first time in my life, you could have bought me for twenty-five centimes. I have always gone past surgical wards with my eyes straight in front of me, but when Mrs. V. fixed me with her serene look, I did not dare to flinch. Why should I? I had come for work. As we walked through those interminable halls together, she said calmly, "It is the worst ward in the hospital; you have had some experience, haven't you?" And I said, "Only home nursing, but I am not afraid;" and, singularly enough, I was not. It was up to me, and I would not have flinched for anything in the world.

When the door opened on Ward 69 you could have cut the atmosphere of that room with a knife! Never, never have you dreamed of such an odour! There were only seven men in that room, and five women nurses. "Pretty good average," you would say. Well, from the moment I entered that room at two o'clock until I left it at seven, not one of us had sat down once.

I was presented to the head nurse---such an angel! A Canadian, of course---I am crazy about Canadians, men and women; there is something superb about them. Then another London nurse, a French-Canadian, and an exquisite little French lady, not more than sixteen---think of it---a little sweet, angel-faced aide, and myself.

Well, these were the patients:

A Welsh boy, a handsome young fellow, with double fracture and leg showing signs of gangrene; a Frenchman over in one corner, whose trouble I do not know; a nigger from South Africa with shell wounds and doing fairly well. He had not spoken one word since he entered the hospital the week before; his poor little barbaric language could not be understood by any one near. Then a pitiful object, to whom I was asked to give sips of water, boasting of not less than five wounds in his legs; another riddled with bullets and a fractured arm and leg; and a lieutenant from Lyons the colour of an orange, his leg amputated in the middle of the thigh. Almost as soon as I entered the room he asked me if I was French, and I told him that I was a Parisienne just to comfort him. And lastly, Thomas, to whom we owed all the discomfort of our ward. The whole of his left side was gangrened, and he had been there a week in that putrid, dreadful state---and those women bore it without a word. During the day he said to me in his muffled voice: "I lies here, trying not to give no trouble; I don't call no one, so as not to disturb these ladies; sometimes I think I am too good." This, of course, was said at intervals, and, he added, looking at the head nurse with positive adoration, "I jes' loves my nurses."

The ward was beautifully fitted, of course, yet ---it seems hard to believe---there was not enough of anything, even of scissors or alcohol, and there was only one pair of gloves for that infected room. I am going to take a supply to-day, if they can be bought in Paris. One of the nurses had a newly-made cut on her arm; she was impervious to the danger. "You must be careful," I said, and bound up her arm for her; and she smiled and responded: "Careful in this room?" ---as much as to say, it is fate if it goes wrong.

I think Mrs. Vanderbilt put me in there to see what I could stand, or how soon she could get rid of me. Naturally, I might have done a great deal more than I did, if it had been even a second day, but, to my tremendous surprise, I found myself able to bear a very great deal. I assisted at two of the dressings without feeling the slightest atom of nausea, and carried away pile after pile of that loathsome, infected linen; but I will not go into further details, for what is the use?

I also bandaged one of the men's legs, and I could not sleep last night for fear my first dressing might have slipped. Heavens! if U should have done any harm.

Every little service paid so richly. Oh, you would never dream that such courage could exist, never! Several times I felt, not like fainting, but like weeping my heart out.

We had Dr. Blake in there, four or five American doctors, and two big Frenchmen; and, naturally, it was terribly interesting, only one must get over the last little remnant of delicacy, and have one's nerves and stomach well screwed down. One of the big French doctors made successfully six capital wound washings and dressings; then he sat down. His face was a study. I said to him, "This is my début," and he looked at me with a strange smile. "I congratulate you," he said, "it is a strong beginning, "in a way that it was God's mercy that I got out as I did. I speak of "fraternising" with the nurses; the faces of all those who had begun already to look upon me as a friend will be written for years in my mind as their eyes followed me to the door. I held back and said to Mrs. Vanderbilt, "Oh, please leave me here."

I found myself in Ward 63, as aide to the head nurse---in the chic room of the hospital. Oh, Heavens! what a difference, at the other end of the wing and a whole corridor away. There the atmosphere was almost Paradise. There were four English officers and three French high-class men, two of them just about going away---lucky dogs! I won't go into details of these little wards, where all the ladies come, and where superb fruit and flowers are in sight all the time.

My head nurse is a delicious little person, a trained nurse for thirty-three years---think of it! ---and capability itself; she is very sweet to me. Mrs. Austin is with her in the morning, and I come on from two to seven.

I will just give you the salient points:

Captain K. is a handsome young man, soft and gentle of speech. He thinks I am a subordinate---I do not know why---and treats me de haut en bas in a way that would make any spoilt American woman's blood boil, but it just amuses me to death.

Next to him is a gentle lamb of a French boy, about thirty. I wish you could see him, with his tanned face and his eager eyes; he was shot through the shoulder and arms, and all he cares for at all is to brush his teeth about forty times every second and be clean! There you go for dirty Frenchmen, and he was as clean as a sheaf of wheat on a bright summer's day!

During the day I got interested in a young lieutenant from Guernsey, who had gone through a severe attack of appendicitis on the field and been carried off. When I took my leave that night, the head nurse said that the boy was to be operated on in the morning.

I had never seen an operation, and if you will' remember the state I was in last winter at the idea of their cutting you up, you can guess how the whole thing affects me; but as I returned home last evening I determined that, cost what it would, I was going to stand by that boy for his own sake and for the sake of the people in Guernsey who do not know where he is.

Although my duties do not begin till two, I was at the hospital at eight in the morning, and asked Dr. Blake as he came in if I could assist at the operation on Lieutenant C.

On my arrival in my ward, I saw Lieut. C. being pushed out on the rolling chair, accompanied by an orderly. At first we went into the big antechamber. (Everything at the hospital here is on a large scale and perfectly appointed.)

. . . I talked to him about all kinds of things, and went out for a second to get him a blanket. As I did so, the doctor of my old infected ward was speaking to one of the surgeons in the corridor. "Can't you operate on him at once?" I heard him ask. "It is hemorrhage, and he cannot last if you don't." Then they rolled in poor Charlie Hern, the boy from my first ward---the Welshman who wanted to give his lemonade to his friend. It was horrible, that is the only word for it. In four days he had gone down to death. His condition was so appalling that I am not going to describe it to you, and I did not dare to approach him as he was one mass of infection, and my boy by whom I stood was so clean; but I smiled at Charlie, and he looked at me and knew me, and I felt as I went into the next room by the side of C. that I was deserting a ship going down in the storm.

It took a long while to get the young lieutenant under the influence of an anæsthetic, he was so strong and so normal. Without the slightest feeling of emotion other than interest, I watched Dr. Blake operate from beginning to end. Right out of a clear sky as one might walk in from the street, with no preparation, I saw the whole thing! It was a very bad operation, as the appendix lay well up under the peritoneum. There were seven doctors watching Dr. Blake, who is a perfect marvel, and, as we stood there, Charlie Hern's frail barque had touched the Port, and when we came out again they had taken him away.

That afternoon one of our empty beds was filled by a Marine Commandant---a man of sixty, who had one foot amputated and the other leg shot, so you can imagine his condition, if you like. Whilst they dressed his amputated foot he held both my hands in his big grip, trying not to scream aloud.

Well, I can stand it, I have proved that; and I must tell you that there is a great fascination in it all. There are interminable walks from my ward to the far kitchen, walks that take me through both the principal wards in which there are at least two hundred patients. Even those walks have become a sort of distraction---think of it! One of the nurses wears a pedometer, and yesterday she found that she had walked twenty kilometres during the way.

Now I want to speak of Vera Arkwright, who replaced me in the gangrene ward. She is perfectly beautiful, full of sympathy and sweetness, and a warm friend of Bridget Guinness. I got her into the hospital with a vague feeling that she was simply going to flirt with the officers and perhaps make me regret. Well, well! Vera has been in that ward now from eight in the morning until half-past six every night. I wish you could see her---with crimson cheeks and a floating veil, carrying the vilest of linen and oilcloth---not to throw away, but to wash it herself with a scrubbing brush. She has a keen sense of humour, and even amid the horrors it shines forth.

Yesterday she was heartbroken over Hern, and told me that the bullet in one of his wounds had severed a vein, and when she came in on duty this terrible hemorrhage had flooded the bed and the floor, and it was she who cleaned all that up. Yes, and she gathered up his little treasures to save for his people, and going into the linen room, from under all the filthy bandages extracted the poor little tin cigarette case which had been thrown out as rubbish.

Last night, at half-past ten, my bell rang, and poor Vera blew in asking for a morsel of food, as when she came out from duty every restaurant in Paris was shut. So my maid and I fed her up and sent her home. She certainly is a brick, and Glory Hancock, if she comes, will be another.

Don't think for a moment that this same thing is not going on everywhere; only not everybody has time to make pictures of it.

In one of the big wards there is a little Spahi from Morocco, black as coal. He has a bayonet wound and cannot live. He wants some of his own Morocco food and what it is, God knows, but, of course, he cannot explain, and the sweet little girl who is taking care of him told me that he is just as cross as he can be, and waves her away every time she comes near with his black hands, saying: "Pas ça, pas ça." He calls the head nurse, "Mamma," and will only eat when she feeds him.

One man told me that he lay wounded in the arm for two days, his companions on each side shot under his eyes; then, alone, he dragged himself across the field to the ambulance. He will never go back either to England or the field---his fields are farther on, and, God knows, dearly won!

Another has been twelve days in the trenches, with the dead and dying on every side.

DEAR ANNA,

The days will soon begin to repeat themselves, and I will continue to note, whilst they still have colour to me, various scenes in the hospital.

I am in my snobbish and select ward. Would you ever believe that I could make a good trained nurse? Never. Well, I am a bully trained nurse! You cannot hear me move about that ward---not a sound. I don't think I have dropped a thing since I went into the hospital, and I've never forgotten anything, and I am sure that pedometer would have registered 17 kilometres on me today, for the head nurse doesn't mind sending me up and down those interminable stairs to that diet kitchen, and Heaven knows where not! with great big iron brocs full of hot and cold water, and I never show the slightest sign of having too much of the job. I can do all the tricks and stunts now pretty clearly, lift them up in bed, wash them and comb them, and, you know, I am a very good masseuse. The thing that has surprised me most of all is that it does not make me nervous or restless, and, honestly, not even very tired. I went on to-day at twelve and came off at 6.30, and, after a hot bath, here I am sitting, fresh as a daisy, except for my feet which are a little bit tired.

Thank God, there are convalescents in this ward, some going to England, some to recuperate at Versailles, and some back to the Front.

Into our ward three days ago was brought, oh, such a wonderful old man---a magnificent, rugged Commandant, K.C.B., pilot of the naval aeroplanes. Only four days ago he was rushing in his motor, with his young son, who was on the Staff, across these scarred and dreadful fields and roads. In the night they drove against some obstacle, their motor was overturned, and they were imprisoned under it. The General came to his senses to find that he could not move and his son was groaning near him. In order to free himself to get to his boy, he tried to cut off his own foot, but failed, and lay waiting till morning, when he was found, and taken to the nearest ambulance where his foot was amputated; and now he lies here maimed for ever, with his other leg fractured from thigh to ankle. Of course, his agony has been terrible. His greatest anxiety at first was that they should find his gold monocle which he had dropped when he was wounded, poor darling! When they did find it, he looked so smart and so pathetic lying there; and then his aides came in, and he gave them minute directions how to make the necessary arrangements in London, so that when he could stump about on his foot, and his leg got well, he could go on flying. Think of it! His spirit had not lost its wings, at any rate. His son lay wounded in another hospital here, and he wanted news of him, and he was dead! Well, yesterday, after they had dressed his dreadful wound, I saw the orderly tell him. The Commandant never said one single word, he just lay there, that monocle staring into the room. Then they left him alone. Is not human nature strange? That virile officer who screamed when they dressed his leg, and clung to a woman's hands, never turned a hair or wept a tear when they told him that his only boy lay dead! He was too proud to show his grief in the hospital ward, surrounded by junior officers, and never will I forget the silhouette of that finely cut face---he looks a little like Nelson---and the high-piled bedclothes over that disfigured body. Well, his wife came presently. She had hurried from England to her mutilated husband and had just heard this crushing news. I put the screens around them; I gave her the eternal cup of tea, and left them quiet and controlled. The English are certainly wonderful. That was yesterday; in our presence he has not shed a tear.

I like him best of anybody in the ward---better even than my little blonde French officer, whom I massaged with alcohol, and my appendicitis boy.

The Commandant said to me to-day, "Are you 'Marie Van Vorst' ?" and I said, "Yes." Then he said: "I have read your books," and that sounded strange; but the strangest thing of all was when his wife came again and suggested fetching some little delicacy, he said very firmly, "Never mind, my dear, I am in the hands of professionals, and I do not want any amateur affairs;" and he said to me very feelingly, "Amateur nurses are all very well, but when you have professional care like this it spoils you for anything else."

Now what can I say more? Don't you think I have won my spurs? I smiled feebly, and did not give myself away.

One can help in a thousand ways---and the men are so wonderful, the Americans there, who have given their services to do the most menial and dreadful offices for these men. You see bankers and men that you have seen in society, in their white uniforms, bending over the sick, running miles for the needful offices, and oh, so kind and so useful!

Over the sofa in my little study that I love so much is an enormous war map now, and its history will take its place with many other memories in this room; and outside the windows are the English and French and Belgian flags.

I am prepared every day to be thrown out of my smart ward, and if I have to go back to that charnel house I hope that God will give me grace. Vera said to-day, "It is discouraging to work for people whom you know will all be dead in a week." You remember in the Roman games how the gladiators used to cry, "Ave Cæsar, those who are about to die greet you." So those poor creatures seem to salute the country for which they have fought, and surely we can help them as they go.

My lieutenant with the amputated leg in the other ward has gone to-day. That is four out of that infected ward, and three nurses are sick in bed with violent fever from it. Yet Vera is going on like a house on fire at her job. The poor lieutenant died as she was feeding him, and that girl did all the solemn and dreadful offices for him. She is wonderful.

The other day I was lunching at Larue's in my uniform, when a gentleman turned to me and asked: "Could you use ten ambulance automobiles?" Well, I have never seen the time yet when I could not use what was offered me. As we had been saying that very day, if the wounded could only be brought to us direct from the firing line, without this heart-rending transportation in cattle trains, herded together, we might stand less chance of gangrene and save more lives. I said, "Of course I can use the ambulance motors, and if you will give them to me, with the drivers, and all in perfect order for the field I will guarantee their proper use---"

I have been mad for an automobile for years, I have almost prayed for one. I certainly have wished for one on every haystack, but I didn't know that I was going to have ten, and I don't think I prayed for quite this kind.

Events and impressions crowd thick and fast in these days, and if I don't write immediately the contour and the outline is lost.

To Miss B. S. Andrew; N. Y.

DEAREST BELLE,

One wonders if one has forgotten how to feel and how to suffer, because it seems strange to go on existing when on all sides the horror and the agony is so intense. To people living their normal and calm lives in countries as yet untouched by these cataclysms, the words "battle" and "death" have only the usual significance. They cannot, even remotely, suffer with us---or, I should say, with them, for I suppose that you will retort to me that they are not my own people. Even down here in the little coast countries, life goes on more or less as it did, and even London pursues the tenor of its way. Paris, too, is more normal, and yet within a few miles is all that conglomerate suffering, and that long-drawn-out horror.

You will forgive me if I speak of my own sex. Later on, I suppose, will be told more fully what they are doing in this war. They are wonderful ---wonderful indeed, in every rank. The patience and the dignity of these French women at home, of those who have their own sous-le-feu, as they call it, awakens a never-ending admiration. The quiet industry that continues without any apparent change, only the resigned faces and the sudden flashing of the eyes as you ask them: "Have you any one at the firing line?" The question tells.

Then the women who are nursing the wounded everywhere, and yet, enormous as that response is, it is not great enough; the need, the call, is far reaching and tremendous. I have always thought well of the women, but never so well as I do now.

And those women of my own class, those who have not the scientific training, nothing but their natural aptitude and their beautiful tenderness, they are lessons indeed. You see them everywhere. Groups of nuns have come back to Paris now that banishment seems forgotten, and you see them in their pretty dresses in the streets going to take up their service, and at these sinister railroad stations, where they hover like ministering birds from one dreadful shed to another. And the women in their snow-white dresses, and their white coifs with the Red Cross; ladies and professionals ministering everywhere. I do not think you realise how truly they are risking their lives; many of them have been killed. The British and the French Red Cross have quite a list of those shot upon the battlefield, intentionally and by accident; others whom shells have killed at their duty; others who have died of fever already---and yet the need is unmet and overwhelming. These English women of station and position are doing magnificent work, all of them.

Robert's brother-in-law has had 30,000 wounded this month pass under his hand---a thousand a day for a month---and while he was selecting from those maimed and ghastly files those who were to go on and those who were to remain behind, they came to tell him that his only son had fallen. He went on with his pitiful work, and then his wife and he together took the train for the distant battlefield, where his boy was buried. They disinterred him and the father put that poor body on some straw in a cart and drove with it eight miles, holding meanwhile his son's dead hand in his, and they buried him in a little country churchyard until after the war.

All day long before this station---Juvisy---these trains pass. They have been packed in them like sardines, with every kind of ghastly wound. When there are two million men fighting, within a hundred miles, on one side and three million on the other, there are a good many wounded to be taken care of. Try to think a little of it as it stands, and not as you read about it in the papers. Then try to realise the way the women feel over here, and also try to realise that, when you are told they are nursing the wounded, they are not doing it from any motive but one of human tenderness---to impute to them anything else is singularly obtuse, to say nothing else.

I can understand how one must be "fed up" with the war when one is of none of the countries that are fighting, and that the same vivid interest cannot be taken in it; but what is one to write about from over here? You see, the shops are closed, there is no commerce; every woman you see has all she loves either directly affected by this tragedy or else at the Front; therefore life is not normal with us. So you must try to understand the pitch at which we are living, and if we seem egoists in the way we suffer for the convulsed nations, you must forgive. You see, we cannot grasp American interests either now, it takes so long to get news and the papers have none.

There are beautiful things to see here. In the first place, the weather continues to be divine, summer-like, and exquisite, and there are picturesque groups everywhere. Of the flowers there are chrysanthemums of varied and sombre hue, and there is a quantity of fruit in the streets, and the colours are rich and delicious. And there are constant processions of military funerals---poor and rich alike, burying their glorious dead.

Oct. 15

MY DEAR MOTHER,

I wish I had the power to describe the Aubervilliers Station as I saw it to-day. I went with the American ambulances early in the morning through the crowded Paris streets to this big station, where they select from the trains of wounded those who are to come to Paris. The station, some few miles from the city, is fenced off and guarded by Reservists in red trousers and blue coats. Here are a corps of military doctors who receive the long lines of trains from the north bringing in their ghastly loads, and these loads are ghastly enough, God knows! Only the desperate cases are taken out, those whom a few miles more would finish for ever.

We run our ambulance into line and climb down into the courtyard full of slightly wounded men waiting to be transported to other parts of France. Along the platforms are ranged a row of neat tents---two of them booty taken from the Germans. One is a little operating-room, another a dressing-room, the third a kitchen with quantities of good things. Then there is a tent for the dead, one for the dying, and one for those who are to be given a few hours of repose before being sent on to the provinces, and in front of those mobile houses, waiting for the trains, are the women nurses---knitting, reading, resting, quiet and dignified, and with that look that all women wear here now---of patience and strength.

Among those little groups of wounded are several whose good fortune it is to be Parisian, and who have been permitted to see their wives and families. I saw one of these meetings. She came hurrying along, a little woman of the people, with her market basket on her arm, breathless, eager, and her husband whom she had not seen since the beginning of the war stood waiting for her. He had only a slight injury. She flew to his arms and he was able to embrace her and lead her away.

In the big station itself all picturesqueness is lost. There is nothing but odour, flies, mosquitoes, and crowds upon crowds of beds.

The room apart is in semi-darkness, and there must be 250 beds there, and all full. There are wounded Turcos from Algeria, there are black Soudanese from the peaceful sands of the Upper Nile, there are Frenchmen, there are English. They wear still the field bandages, put on in some cases by Red Cross First Aides under fire. We want some of these badly wounded men, and we say so, and we get two of them---shattered, maimed, half-conscious. They are carried into our khaki-covered ambulance and carefully placed on the stretchers, and we are off with them over the road we travelled before---this time at a reduced speed; back again through Paris, and beyond the gates.

Yesterday I went to a very long and trying operation, and the little soldier who underwent it was so thin and small that I could almost have lifted him from the stretcher to the operating table without any help. A woman doctor gave the anæsthetic, a fine Brooklyn woman.

You will be interested to know that my Commandant has gone to England. I helped to put him in the ambulance to-day that drives him to Rouen. I wish you could have seen him lying there, so dignified and patient, with his naval cap jauntily on his head, his single eyeglass in his eye, and those poor helpless limbs! He came to France alert, agile, full of manly interest and power, with his son, a member of the General Staff; and he goes back to England a cripple for life and his son a glorious name, that is all!

Bessie's experiences at Toul have been interesting. Twenty-five days she was there, in a tiny country hotel, the only civilian woman in the place---permitted to remain solely because she was so gentle and unassuming; hidden in the different rooms, when the police made their visits, by the landlady, who adored her. There was neither butter nor milk; the food was almost uneatable; she went to bed in her clothes; she knitted fifteen mufflers, over twenty yards of woollen goods, and learned the Bible by heart in chapters. She had no books, could write and receive no letters; could not go to the hospital to visit the sick; and the wounded came in like a crimson flood from the trenches---thousands upon thousands, a pitiful spectacle in that fourteenth century town. And the beautiful little mediæval church in the shadow of the October evening at Vespers---one half of the church filled with soldiers, the other with the villagers, most of them mourning for their dead; and without, the birds, brushing their wings against the old window-panes; and the tolling of the mellow bell, and the elevation of the Host in the misty light at the altar above those heads, many of them to be bowed so shortly in an eternal submission.

She only saw Robert for an hour at lunch time. During those weeks he slept in a cellar on bags containing apples and pears, with his son's leaden coffin by his side. He had been obliged to order it the first day he came to Toul, and slept beside it all the time. Think of that ghastly experience! And toward the end the boy asked his father to read him fairy tales, and only to read the ones that ended happily; so, hour after hour, he told him children's stories without end. He says that his son never spoke of France once until his last day on earth; then he turned to his father and said: "Elle est plus grande, la France?" And then "Combien de mètres carrés ?"---meaning how many feet have the soldiers gained---and closed his life saying: "Elle est plus grande."

Robert Le Roux, jun., made a brave and beautiful military career. He had charge of a regiment and led his men up a slope. The contingent knew before they started that they had been sent out to deceive the enemy and that their charge meant death. It was as heroic an effort as could be conceived. They had to go up the hill on their bellies, dragging their guns, and when young R. saw that they hesitated to advance, he stood up in the full fire and told his men that if they did not advance he would go up on foot---which meant to certain and immediate death. Then they moved, and he shook them by the shoulders and called to them, encouraging them to go on. He was shot whilst giving a glass of water to his Commander, who was mortally wounded, and he lay on the field for hours. One of his soldiers, who had been a rascally fellow and difficult to deal with, came crawling up to him and tried to drag his superior officer out of the firing line, but R. made him go back. You know the rest of the story---how he was finally carried out because an unknown voice from the battlefield said: "Take that one, he is engaged to be married." In the hospital, where there were seven hundred wounded and only three nurses, he lay for six days without having his human wants attended to, and you can imagine the state his father found him in.

There have been some appealing and terribly funny negroes from the Soudan in the hospital. It took four men to hold one poor fellow in bed whilst his dreadful wounds were dressed. Finally he covered each wound with both his hands and prayed over them, and when his prayer, his queer, uncouth prayer was finished, he then allowed the doctor to dress the wound. I am glad to say that the surgeon was patient enough to spend three-quarters of an hour over this single barbarian brought from so far to suffer so much in the land of culture and civilisation.

PARIS, Nov. 7th, 1914.

DEAR ANNA,

In the contemplation of the great griefs of those who have lost their own, of those who have given their all; in the contemplation of the bravest country in the world---Belgium---ravaged from frontier to frontier, laid barren and waste, smoked, ruined, devastated and scarred by wholesale massacre of civilian women and children, our hearts have been crushed. Our souls have been appalled by the burdens of others, and by the future problems of Belgium, not to speak of one quarter of France. Much of the north has been wiped out, and the stories of individual suffering and insults too terrible to dwell upon, you will say.

One of my old clerks in the Bon Marché has had his little nephew come back to him from Germany---a peaceful young middle-class man pursuing his studies in a German town---with both his hands cut off!

The other day in the Gare du Nord, waiting for a train, there was a stunning Belgian officer ---not a private---he was a captain in one of the crack regiments. His excitement was terrible, he was almost beside himself with anguish and with anger. In a little village he had seen one woman violated by seven Germans in the presence of her husband; then the husband shot, the woman shot, and her little baby cut in four pieces on a butcher's block. You can hardly call this the common course of war. He was a Belgian gentleman, and I should consider this a document of truth.

But there are so many that I cannot prolong, and will not---what is the use? Every now and then a people needs to be wiped off the face of the earth, or a contingent blotted out that a newer and finer civilisation shall prevail. Certainly this is the case with Germany. They say here that the Emperor and Crown Prince will be tried by law and sentenced to death as common criminals, the Emperor as a murderer and the Crown Prince as a robber, for his goods trains were stacked with booty and loot. Think of it, a Prince! Everywhere the Germans pass they leave their filthy insults behind them, in the beautiful châteaux and in the delicate rooms of the French women---the indications of their passing, not deeds of noble heroism that can be told of foes as well as of friends, but filthy souvenirs of the passing of creatures for whom the word "barbarian" is too mild!

Here is a more spiritual picture.

Robert Le Roux, jun., was buried yesterday. You will have read in the previous pages here the story of his exploits on the battlefield---the closing of his young life in bravely leading his troops up the hill to certain death. And yesterday I went to St. Germain to his funeral.

We left Paris at eight o'clock to go to St. Germain, which, in normal times, takes thirty-five minutes; yesterday it took us two hours by train.

France and Paris now are sacred. Even the station of St. Lazare, so often marked with partings for America, sunderings and farewells on one side, and then happy returns after months of work. St. Lazare station has for me a particular individuality, and you know they call that big stone waiting room there the "Salle des pas perdus,"---"The room of lost footsteps," and it will seem to me to echo always the footsteps of those soldiers who have gone.

We knitted in the train our woollen comforters for the soldiers, and read the war news and talked. The last time I had seen young Robert he was a little boy, in short breeches and socks. His mother brought him to Versailles and he played with us in the garden there---a strong, splendid looking young French boy. Now I was going to his funeral, and he was engaged to be married, with all his hopes before him, and on this same train was his little fiancée, in her long crêpe veil, brokenhearted; and his little sister, and the father, who had followed his son's campaign with such ardour and such tenderness; and his uncle, Dr. D., of whom I spoke previously-the splendid sergeant-major whose only son had just been killed by the enemy. A train of sorrow!---and only one of so many, so many.

The church at St. Germain is simple and very old. The doors were all hung with heavy snow-white cloth, and before the door stood the funeral car drawn by white horses, all in white, and instead of melancholy hearse plumes there were bunches of flags, and over all hung the November mist enveloping, softening, and there was a big company of Cuirassiers guarding the road.

We went in, and the church was crowded from the nave to the doors, and all the nave and the little chapels were blazing with the lily lights of the candles. It was all so white and so pure, so effulgent, so starry. There was an uplift about it, an élan; tragic as it all was, there was ever that feeling of beyond, beyond!

Before the altar lay the young man's coffin---that leaden coffin that had stood by his father in the fortress of Toul for three weeks, waiting for the dead. It was completely covered by the French flag, and the candles burnt around it.

Beside me was a woman with her husband. She wept so bitterly through the whole service that my heart was just wrung for her, and her husband's face, as his red-lidded eyes stared out in the misty church, was one of the most tragic things I ever saw. I wept, of course, and I have not cried very much since the war broke out, but her grief was too much for me. Finally she turned to me and said: "Madame, I only had one son, he was so charming, so good; he has fallen before the enemy, and I don't know where he is buried!" Just think of it! There she was, at the funeral of another man's son because he was a soldier! Link upon link of sorrow and suffering---such broken hearts.

The service was musical, violins and harps---quiet and sweet---and that little group---Le Roux with his daughter and the little fiancée---touched me profoundly. In the coffin lying under the flag Bessie had placed at Toul her little silk pillow for the young soldier's head, and his love-letters in a little packet lay by his side. Around his arm he had worn a little ribbon taken from the hair of his sweetheart, and at the very last when he was dying and the hospital nurse was about to' unknot it---I don't know why the boy put up his feeble hand to prevent her; of course they buried it with him, and, as you think of it, you can hear that unknown voice on the battlefield, that, as the stretcher-bearers came to look for the wounded, called out: "Take him, he is engaged to be married; and leave me."

Oh, if out of it all arise a better civilisation, purer motives, less greed for money, more humanitarian and unselfish aims, we can bear it.

I think of America with an ever-increasing love; I am proud to belong to that young and far-off country, but if our voice is raised now in encouragement for Belgium, encouragement for the Allies, and in reprobation of these acts of dishonourable warfare and cruel barbarism, I shall love my country more.

How superb the figure of the Belgian king is, standing there among the remnant of his army, and surrounded by his destroyed and ruined empire, and the cries of the people in his ears---a sublime figure. When the war is over I hope they will make him king of France and Belgium and Germany---that would be a fitting reward. He is certainly one of the biggest figures in history.

PARIS, Oct. 1914.

MY DEAR MARY,

. . . In June last, driving home from the Bois, I noticed a beautiful building in process of construction at Neuilly----a very good example of a château of the time of François Premier, pink bricks and white filling, turrets, terraces, etc. I was told it was the Lycée Pasteur, a college for boys, supposedly to open in the month of October to receive the young students. Little did I think what a different aspect the place would wear when I should see it again on the day when I drove up to offer my services as a Red Cross nurse! All along the front now were the ranged khaki-coloured motor ambulances, all bearing the sign of the inevitable Red Cross; private ambulances too, attached to the hospital for service, decorated with the flags of France and England and the red and white flag of the Red Cross. And here and there across the courtyard flitted the nurses in their snow-white uniforms, with the Red Cross on their breast. On the terraces of the boys' school were grouped the invalid and convalescent soldiers in their khaki-coloured dressing-gowns, red or yellow fezzes on the heads of some of them, and taking care of them, in her white uniform with the Red Cross on breast and coif, their nurse.

I went into the entrance of the hospital, which was full of animation: orderlies in their white linen uniforms, and the little boy scouts, young sons of gentlemen, too young to go to war and whom their mothers had permitted to leave school in order that they might serve their country; gallant little fellows, working day and night, out in the rain and the cold, their little bare knees reddened and chafed with exposure, and some of them wearing, when on their bicycles, silk and woollen wristlets knitted over here by the American women.

At the desks were groups of men I had known in the world, occupied with the duties of the organisation. I sat down on a bench to wait and waited a long time; and just here I want to give you a little picture.

We used to see, sitting on the same bench for five days running, a tiny little French child---poor little thing---a mite of a girl, brought by her mother and seated there to wait while the mother went upstairs, day after day, to see her man in the wards. He was hopelessly wounded; there wasn't a stray hope for him. Whilst he was there, he was decorated with the Military Medal for his services on the field. Little did the child, waiting there day after day, know what was going on upstairs; and we were so struck by her docility and patience, by those little clasped hands in her lap, and those tiny little legs so high above the floor. She was there for hours whilst her mother spent those last hours of life with her husband. One of the orderlies went up to the little girl and said to her, just for something to say: "What do you think of the hospital?" And she looked up at him with a sweet smile and answered (in French, of course) : "I think it is a very nice place, only there aren't any dolls here." That was what the little thing was thinking about, and you can imagine that the next day when she came to wait, she didn't make the same complaint, for beside her sat the biggest and handsomest doll that the orderly could find. And so she waited whilst her father "passed on" and her little heart was comforted as she unconsciously kept watch with her mother.

I became impatient at waiting so long. The excitement was tense and very keen, and I couldn't put up then with formalities; so without asking any further questions, I pushed the door open and went myself in search of Mrs. Vanderbilt, and for the first time, on the other side of that door, I felt I was part of a hospital. I found Mrs. Vanderbilt standing at the door of the operating-room. In my blue uniform with brass buttons and the Badge of the Red Cross (of a private detachment), I looked what I was not---useful and competent---and why she ever took me, I fail to know. Some time I shall ask her! She must have felt my enthusiasm and intense interest, but I think the real reason that I was accepted was that there were not enough nurses to care for the wounded who were being brought in.

I have always wanted to know Mrs. Vanderbilt. The first thing I ever heard about her was that she was doing good. It impressed me in a vague way. And then I heard again that she was doing more and greater good; until finally she grew to stand for me as some one constantly doing good everywhere---a most enviable reputation! I grew to think of her, not as a figure of a society woman. I forgot her vast wealth and her position, and I thought of her only as a great human heart, as a woman of broad and generous sympathies, occupied with the sufferings of others and giving herself to humanity. I used to ask about her from others who knew her whenever I had the opportunity; but I must confess that I hardly expected ever intimately to cross her path.

When I pushed open that door at the American Ambulance and went in and found myself actually standing before Mrs. Vanderbilt, without any introduction, I did not realise even then that a long-looked-for moment had come. Even in that moment, I forgot who she was, eager in my desire to become sensibly part of that great machine, the American Ambulance; and I forgot that the quiet, dignified woman in her nurse's dress was the great and celebrated Mrs. Vanderbilt. I think that in a moment, however, a sympathy was established between us. I hope so and I believe it. I told her that I had made some studies in Red Cross work and that I wanted to join the auxiliaries here. Mrs. Vanderbilt was president of the auxiliaries and had the whole corps under her charge. I did not know this, but was so fortunate as to come immediately to the right source, and, as I said before, she took me immediately.

At first I was put in the bandage-room, but very shortly Mrs. Vanderbilt transferred me to the gangrene ward. As I went into that ward and shut the door behind me, my heart would have sunk if it had had time, but it never did. The odour seemed a conglomeration of every foul and evil thing---penetrating, dank; and from then on that terrible odour seemed to penetrate to my very bones, and when I went out into the streets of Paris I wondered what had happened to the city. When I got home I dropped my garments in an anteroom. Fancy living in that, day after day, as those nurses do; and you never get used to it ---never! Into that ward were put all the worst cases of gangrene, and when I went in there were seven men in those beds all infected, terribly infected; and the only hope was to save as many as could be saved from putrefaction and death; and that is what the American Ambulance is doing.

My first thought was that the things were not properly cleansed, and I said to the head nurse, who barely had time to give me a nod and greet me: "May I burn something here?" I wish you could have seen her look at me---not unkindly. "Why, yes; you can burn anything you like." You will hardly believe it, but I burned some paper! I heard one nurse say to another; "She doesn't know what it is," and then they went on with their duties. The work never stopped in the gangrene ward---never.

When finally they took me from the gangrene ward, I was loth to go---I didn't want to leave it,

I begged to be allowed to stay. It doesn't seem possible, does it?

Well, I worked during that first day, performing the services asked of me, and I found out what distances and what real fatigue meant. (One day I borrowed a pedometer, and found that I had walked twelve miles that day, besides attending to my various duties.) It was nearly six o'clock and I hadn't seen a single wound, and what I was going to do when I did, I didn't want to think. One of the chief surgeons came in to attend to the dressings. We were the last on his list; we had to be---we were so infected and undesirable. Nothing could be done after us---we were the limit. So the poor surgeon, after attending to all his other duties and performing his operations, came in here to our poor men. . . 

From the gangrene ward to Miss Curphey's ward was transposition into paradise. Here is the smart, chic ward of the hospital and there are eight officers in it. I left my obnoxious men with great regret. And I am afraid Miss C. didn't want to have me! She thought me only an auxiliary of no use; but when she found I was serious and determined and had no thought but to serve her, we became great friends and I can never forget what she has taught me. She is charming and pretty and one of the best nurses in the hospital.

I want to tell you of the picturesqueness and interest of the first room from the receiving hall where, direct from the trenches, the men are carried in from the motors---a long line of stretchers with their pitiful burdens, the men with their wounds dressed on the field, men who have not had their boots off, or their clothes, for three weeks, some of them with grey, strange faces---such anxious looks, such pallor! And those dreadful dressings that have been on for days. I shall never forget the courage it took to take the safety-pins out of a gangrened wound for the first time: it wasn't pleasant.

Miss Curphey's ward is full of beautiful flowers and beautiful fruits. There are no disagreeable smells there. It is as fresh as a daisy. And out of the windows we can see the roofs of several houses and the waving trees and the church, whose bell tolls constantly---every day for too many hours---although the mortality is not great.

It is wonderful to find how completely you can forget yourself in this hospital, and how every thought of personal disinclination disappears before the needed service. But it is hard work. When I go home at night, I feel like the little boy whose mother made his trousers and he said he didn't know whether he was coming or going. I can scarcely move from fatigue. At the end of the day, an extra demand is sometimes almost more than flesh and blood can bear. The other day I had just served the eight men their suppers and was going home---blissful words !---when Captain K., who is a regular spoilt darling, sat up in bed and called to me as I was slipping through the door: "Oh, I say, nurse, do you think I could have a little jam?" Now that doesn't sound like anything to you, does it? but it meant about four minutes' walk over those stone floors, up and down stairs. It was a tragedy to me. Of course I started off for the jam, and when I brought it back encountered my superior, Miss C., who gave me an icy glance and said: "You had no right to go and get jam without permission." And that doesn't sound much, but a reproof from a superior nurse is a very serious thing; it hurts and upsets you horribly, and you wish you were dead, and that you had never worked in a hospital, and all sorts of foolish things; and you blush and want to throw the jam at the soldier's head, even though he is a magnificent military man. But here is the point of the story. The captain, who was frightfully wounded and had shown the courage of a lion, heard it. He could stand before the German guns, but he couldn't face his head nurse's displeasure. I, anxious as to the result, answered: "Of course I got it, Miss C., because Captain K. wanted it and---" What was my horror to hear him say: "Oh no, I didn't---I never asked for anything of the sort!" He couldn't face Miss C.! The next day, out of the hour, I laughed at it and told her about it. I said: "I was really too furious for anything when that Englishman asked for jam." And she looked at me reproachfully and said: "Remember, he is one of our wounded heroes." And of course I did. He has jam every night now. . .

All the northern part of France is devastated and in ruins. Twenty-one departments are in the hands of the invaders. Famous industries, whose beauty and grace and utility you have loved and proved, are no more. There is no more linen, no more beautiful glass, no more wool. The new and the ancient patterns, the exquisite moulds, are all wiped oft the face of the earth. These are some of the material disasters . . . . Of the industrious, peace-loving inhabitants, hundreds and thousands are captives, hundreds and thousands are utterly homeless, destitute, hungry and unclothed. . .

EDGWARE, Oct. 22nd, 1914.

DEAREST BELLE,

Thank you so much for your letter, so unique these days that I shall put it under glass---the first one received for too long to count!

I returned here last night after a three weeks' absence, to find London celebrating Trafalgar Day, the city gay and everything going strong---even the Russian Ballet. The recruiting is going well, so one can't blame the spirit of the times which keeps its temper up, and after all, it is no doubt better to be normal as long as possible. But coming to England, as I did, from sights that England could not wish to see, from the bedside of men that England loves and honours, I could not help but feel the great pathos of it. Even the white and crimson flag in flowers, as it lay across the iron flank of the big lion at the base of Nelson's monument, was like the red cross on the snowy hospital sheet---lilies and blood. And if it is all glorious, as indeed it is, Death is so irreparably over it all that high-hearted courage is sometimes apt to fail.

I came out here to little Edgware, at 11 o'clock at night, through streets scarcely lighted, where tramways and omnibuses are illuminated by muted lamps and ghastly blue lights, where the road is scarcely safe to travel for its forced darkness, and all along the wayside the little cottage windows, with their deepest lights, seemed to call the sons home again-and so vainly! And before my eyes, as it will often come, I saw the face of Charlie Hern as he lay in Ward 69. It was one of his good days; the ghastly colour had not yet spread into his cheeks; and in his dialect, hard for me to understand, he kept repeating the name of his home---"Mountain Ash"; and you'd scarcely have known the word, it sounded so strange in his country tongue. He'd written to them, but he hadn't heard. Would I write? And I promised. And the next time I saw him was down in the operating-room, when they wheeled him in and he was too infected and dangerous for me to dare to approach, standing as I was by my sound, healthy Guernsey boy. Individual cases, if you like; but I thank Heaven that I can feel their appeal. Women make better nurses who do. You needn't be a sickly sentimentalist; they're no good; but unless the human heart remains deep and its expression free, the world isn't worth living in. Arras, Rheims, and the beauties that have gone out for ever would have been spared by a race where there was less science and more heart.

It's all very well to laugh at amateur nurses, and if you will recall one of my letters, written in London during the times of my Red Cross examinations, you will see that I laughed first and with you. But that is all changed. The auxiliaries and the amateurs at the American Ambulance have done perfectly marvellous work. Those ladies gifted first with intelligence and tenderness, common sense and dignity, are now difficult to distinguish---some of them---from the professionals; and even as far as the battle line, lying so red and so trampled in Belgium, they have done superb work.

I crossed this time with the wife of an Irish major in one of the big regiments. She had come from the Astoria Hotel, where her husband was lying wounded. She said to me: "My husband asked to have the two French lady auxiliaries to take care of him---two charming Frenchwomen, kind and gentle beyond words---because the English-trained nurses were so anxious to be out at the front and in the trenches, that they couldn't give him the care he needed." At the Astoria were two nurses who had come in from the battle of the Aisne---one of them with her arm blown off and the other with both legs injured for life. This lady on the boat had seen and talked to both these women, and they told her that the Germans had systematically shelled the Red Cross hospitals where they worked, and nearly all the wounded soldiers were killed.

Of course there is a great deal of inefficient help offered, that goes without saying; but it is quickly weeded out and cast away, as nothing but an iron constitution and real devotion could stand the strain.

My Guernsey boy got well fast. That is the happy note in it all---when they get well fast and go home. And I assure you it was a picturesque thing to see him sitting there by the bedside, my dear, getting into those colossal boots and into his khaki clothes that had been stripped off the night he came. He was big and tall and the convalescence had done him good, and he went oft weak but happy to Guernsey---to the fruits and flowers and the sea air---for a month, and then back again.

After leaving my French lieutenant for two weeks whilst they operated on more important people, they finally decided to get the ball out of him, and I decided that I was going to see it done---not for curiosity---there's plenty to satisfy that in these wards !---but because he was a sensitive boy, scarcely more than a child, and I determined that I would not leave him, and I told him so. I must confess that it seemed to help the thing along to know that he was going to be taken down from his bed and brought back there by his own nurse. We stood with him in the antechamber of the operating-room from one to four, on our feet, the orderly and I, I mean. Quite a time, hey? Do you know, it was quite a fortunate wait. The lieutenant got over his nervous strain, and I warmed his feet and hands; and by the time they came round for us, we were laughing and talking about all kinds of things. So we went in. This was my second operation, and a very mild one, for the ball was only under one of the ribs and involved simply an opening of the shoulder and extraction. Dr. Dubouchet is a perfect marvel. He is the president of the hospital, and went through the Russo-Japanese War and the Abyssinian massacres, and is altogether a very charming person. Dr. Dubouchet, when he had fished out the ball, took it with his fingers right out of the wound and threw it across the floor, all covered as it was with blood, and I picked it up and had it washed. The first thing that the boy said when he came to his senses was: "Show me the ball." And I had it there for him, wrapped up in a little bit of cloth. He had a temperature and looked so blond, and so appealing, in his poor little hospital jacket, so at the mercy of these contending forces, such a light bit of humanity to stand against the battle fire. And he kept on saying: "Il faut être vainqueurs! Dites-moi que nous sommes vainqueurs! Qu'importe si moi je meurs, si les nouvelles sont bonnes?" It happened that the news was bad, but I assured him to the contrary, and stayed there far beyond my time until he was somewhat soothed.

Don't think for a moment that I am going to describe at length all the hospital cases, repeating myself ad infinitum; but these are just little thumb notes of the war of 1914, and may be of interest some day.

The little flat on the Place du Palais Bourbon had many pretty pictures in it, some of those last evenings before I left, I assure you. I wish that you could have brushed aside the veil of distance and have looked in on my little study, untouched and unchanged, for I have never put anything away in it. It is just as it was, excepting that the big war map covers the wall and the flags flutter outside the window. There was a bright fire on the hearth---you know its changing colours, its lilac and its ruby flames. And there on the sofa was Madelon Hancock, in her dark blue and white dress, with the Red Cross on her breast; and sweet little nurse Wells, in the lilac and white of the London Hospital, with the fluttering folds of the veil-cap on her head; and I wore the white of the American Ambulance. We were smoking, of course, and talking, and the two of them had just come from Antwerp, where they had been from the beginning in the British Field Hospital. Theirs are tales that make mine absolutely pale. When the Germans came within range they destroyed the aqueducts, and these nurses, with their 170 patients, were almost without water. Just think what that means in a hospital! The little they used had to be carried from distant wells. Madelon and the chief doctor together dug a cesspool for the refuse in the garden, and as they dug the shells flew about them, the bullets snipping the leaves from the trees; and they were such veterans by then and so hardened that they laughed even over their putrid work. These two women, with the other nurses, evacuated the hospital, packing those miserable, mutilated bodies like sardines in the omnibuses which a few weeks before had been rolling around with the travelling public in London. And Madelon and Miss Wells were fifteen hours travelling through the day and night with their poor suffering load---the bandages soaked and soaked again; the dangling limbs, just amputated, some of them, and scarcely dressed. Think of it---all the courage and fortitude demanded of these women, and the nerve! They were obliged to make detours to escape the live electric wires placed by the Germans across the road. Their last omnibus had scarcely left the pontoon bridge across the Scheldt, when it was blown up behind them. Through the noise of war, with the wounded in the buses groaning and crying out, themselves wet nearly to the bone and icy cold, they drove to Ghent, placed their charges in safety there, only to be told to evacuate again. On to Ostend---on to the boats for England. Out of the 170, only three died on the way, and these girls, with a few others, brought their hurt children safely into port. There were, these sane and normal women found, humorous sights even in this horror. On the boat, they had scarcely lain down to snatch a moment's rest when they were called to a cabin where a woman refugee was in labour! Miss Wells is, of course, a regular nurse, but Madelon knows little more about the birth of children than you do. Yet the baby was born and Madelon received it, washed it in a steamboat cuspidor, holding it between her knees and powdered it with Colgate's tooth powder. Miss Wells says that she will never forget it as long as she lives---that morsel of humanity, holding with its tiny little hands on to the edges of the cuspidor.

I think you can imagine that, although the waiting list at the American Ambulance is enormous, Madelon and Nurse Wells were taken on immediately. I have now three nurses there belonging to my section of the Entente Cordiale. Mrs. Vanderbilt has joined and I am going to ask Dr. Dubouchet to join as well.

I am awfully sorry that the little bird is dead, but I am glad it was the lady bird. They can be spared better now than the boy birds! And I suppose that this one has now fulfilled all his promise and is sporting a long plume.

Of course, I am sure that you all think of us. One knows that. But you can form no possible conception of the atmospheric and psychological state of things, and how difficult it is to form an opinion of the value of anything when one is in the midst of it.

I didn't care at all about the Times clipping. They always treat me perfectly rottenly. They've never given me a good criticism. I never read book criticisms or subscribe to them anyway. George Eliot always said that the ones that praised her she didn't believe, and the ones that criticised her made her mad; and I feel the same way.

Here in London all the shops are open and the fabric gloves in the Burlington Arcade will soon be no more. The fabric was made in Germany and put up here, and is now exhausted. The man has laid aside all his remaining stock of your size---a couple of dozen pairs---and if you want them, will you write to him direct, as there won't be any more, and the price has not gone up, for a wonder.

In Paris everything is opening slowly, although there is no trade whatsoever, and no one would want to dress and go about like a jay when every second person you see is in mourning.

The German losses amount now to nearly 800, 000, the French probably to 500, 000 and these figures were given some time ago.

Dresses are very short, up to the tops of the boots, and the whole style military; and gaiters are worn---long gaiters, which would please you, only there's no one to wear them, as I said.

Creed is closed as tight as a drum. All the salesmen are at the front, in different armies. Paquin is open, and the dear old Hotel du Rhin is just exactly as it always has been, excepting that it is closed and Hoffmann a mystery. Nobody knows. I wonder if we shall ever know what became of him?

I have had two offers to go to the front.

It must be too much fun to have Bunny with you---darling little boy! And who keeps the geraniums blooming in the window boxes? I am deeply interested in all the things you do over there, and it is a great rest to read about them. That's all for the present.

PARIS, Nov. 11th, 1914.

DEAR VIOLET,

You ask me to tell you something of Glory Hancock. She made a wonderful record for herself at the American Ambulance, where they loved her, from the humblest to the highest. The patients simply adored her. With her dark blue field ambulance dress and her splendid carriage, she was a fine, impressive figure. Heaven knows she had enough to do in her ward of forty men ---a terrible number---and if she had not been so restless she could have stayed on and been invaluable to the end. Her little friend, Miss Wells of the London Hospital, is a perfect nurse, and they made a fine running team. Imagine what a void they left! And now they are back at the front---"Somewhere in Flanders!"

Oh, it's a great time, my dear, if you are working in it. I had really hoped that yesterday would be my last day at the hospital, because I am aching to write; but I absolutely hadn't the courage to tell them when I went up yesterday that I wouldn't come again. There's no one to take my place in two wards on the third floor, and until there is I simply must go on. So I have girded up my loins and I feel a little more rested to-day and shall return for a few days at least. On Monday I think there will be three auxiliaries.

In my ward I have three men from Tunis and one of them has two frightful wounds---they beggar description. Yesterday I kept covering his eyes with my hands all the time they were dressing them, as he tried to peer round like a poor little monkey. His body is chocolate colour, and on the skin, soft as silk, his great, terrible open-mouthed wounds make a strange effect. I guess he thought so too, poor dear! When the doctors came to dress them, he had to be held in order to keep him from grabbing the doctor. Every now and then during the dressings he would kiss my hands. Of course you can't get sentimental! With seven men to attend to, you don't shed tears over one poor little nigger from Tunis; but your heart's stirred all the time. . . .

Paris is growing normal. Shops are opening. Everything promises a loosening of the tension. I have filled my cellar with coal and wood, as they say the supply is going to lack. As for my own plans, they are just now more than sketchy. I want to go to Rome and to America, and I will let you know definitely which I am going to do when I know myself.

I hope you will like the little book of poems. I have paid for them on this side, so anything you sell them for will be clear profit and just send the money to whatever Belgian fund you are interested in.

Thank you for offering to send the nurse. For Heaven's sake, do!

Last night, at the end of the hospital day, I brought down with me in a tiny motor belonging to Vera Arkwright the head nurse of the hospital, Miss Devereux, who has charge of the American Hospital in times of peace. She was so exhausted and worn out with the terrible day that she could hardly speak. The fresh air and the drive down began to rest her, and when she got here in my little study, before the fire, so quiet and so sweet, with a good little dinner, and with Bessie's society and mine to cheer her, she bloomed out like a flower. She is a New York hospital nurse, and gave me another picture to remember in the little study, under the war map, all in snow white, with no cap, and just the gold medal of the New York hospital round her neck. Such a fine spiritual face; such a strong, dignified woman! We didn't talk much of the hospital, but we talked, all three of us, of spiritual things, and it was a wonderful thing to find her one of those simple Christians, full of the very light of God, strong in the best sense of the word, living by faith. I don't think I have enjoyed any evening half so much for a long time. I am sure that you will respond to this note and care too. It is fine to feel that the hospital there is under the spell of this noble woman who "believes in fairies," as Barrie's play says---who believes in miracles. There wasn't a discordant second in the long evening and she went back with pink cheeks and bright eyes to those wards where three were to die that night and she had to go on her noble watch. She spoke in an especially kindly way of the auxiliaries and of their extraordinary powers of endurance. She said that she would not have believed that women of the world unused to discipline or to concentrated effort, could have been what these women have been at the Ambulance. Vera Arkwright, for instance, has not missed a single day since she went there.

The dressing carts are so picturesque. You see, I naturally see the notes of colour that things make---I can't help it---and when I went out from the hospital, Vera stood there in her blue dress, with her tiny little cap on her head---she is faultlessly beautiful, and very celebrated for her looks ---and all around her was a pile of the most dreadful bandages you ever saw. (I won't describe them.) She was gathering them up to destroy them and to prepare her cart for the next trip. Both she and Madelon are able to do their dressings themselves.

I am mailing this week a letter to the New York Times, making an appeal for the American Ambulance. It is a poor letter---couldn't be worse---but still, it is a very hard thing to write. I hope you'll see it and speak to people, though I know you hate to ask for donations of any kind.

Nov. 20th, 1914.

MY DEAR BROTHER,

I wonder, as I sit here, in one of those rare, quiet moments that fall in a nurse's day, whilst I am preparing my charts, what they are thinking of in this silent room.

This group is singularly silent. They do not talk from bed to bed, as some of the more loquacious do. Directly opposite is one of those fragile bits of humanity that the violent wind of war has blown, like an unresisting leaf, into the vortex. Monsieur Gilet is a humble little school teacher from some humble little village school in a once peaceful commune, where in another little village school his humble little wife teaches school as he does. He is so light and so frail that I can lift him myself with ease. He has a shrapnel wound in his side and they have not found the ball. His thin cheeks are scarlet. He is gentleness and sweetness itself. What has he ever done to be crucified like this? Monsieur Gilet is not thinking of his burning wound. He is thinking of the little woman in the province of Cher. How can she come to see him? She has no congé. When will she come to see him? For his life is all there in that war-shattered country. She has a baby twelve weeks old, born since he went to battle. That's what he is thinking of. When will she come?

"I WONDER THEY ARE THINKING OF IN THIS SILENT ROOM"

"HE WILL NEVER SEE HIS GARDENS AGAIN''

On his right is a superb Arab, with an arm and hand so broken and so mutilated that it is hard to hold it without shuddering when the doctors drain it. On his head I have carefully adjusted a bright yellow flannel fez. His mild docile eyes follow the nurse as she does for him the few little things she can to make him more at ease. For every service done, he thanks her in a sweet, soft voice. Just now, when I left him to come over here and sit down before my table, his eyes filled with tears. He can say a few words of French. He kisses my hand with oriental grace. "Merci, ma mère."

On Monsieur Gilet's left lies a man whose language is as hard to understand, very nearly, as the Arab's---almost unintelligible---a patois of the Midi. He is a gardener, used only to the care of plants and flowers. He is a big, rugged giant, and so strong, and so silent a sufferer that since his entrance to the hospital he has not made one murmur or one complaint, or asked one service, and excepting when spoken to, he never says a word. Then he gives you a radiant smile and some token of gratitude. They operated on him to-day. There is shrapnel in his eye. He will never fully see his gardens again, and he is so strong and so patient and so able to bear pain, that they operated on him without anæsthetics, and he walked to and from the operating room---a brave, silent, docile giant, singularly appealing. . . .  He is thinking of his gardens, trodden out of all semblance of beauty, for he had been working in the north before the heel of the barbarian crushed out his flowers for ever and blotted out his sight.