r and sordidness, this
thing they were going to.

War is not two great armies meeting in a clash and frenzy of battle.
It is much more than that. War is a boy carried on a stretcher,
looking up at God's blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to
close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been wounded by a
shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting
for death; war is the flower of a race, torn, battered, hungry,
bleeding, up to its knees in icy water; war is an old woman burning a
candle before the Mater Dolorosa for the son she has given. For King
and Country!

CHAPTER I

TAKING A CHANCE

I started for the Continent on a bright day early in January. I was
searched by a woman from Scotland Yard before being allowed on the
platform. The pockets of my fur coat were examined; my one piece of
baggage, a suitcase, was inspected; my letters of introduction were
opened and read.

"Now, Mrs. Rinehart," she said, straightening, "just why are you
going?"

I told her exactly half of why I was going. I had a shrewd idea that
the question in itself meant nothing. But it gave her a good chance to
look at me. She was a very clever woman.

And so, having been discovered to be carrying neither weapons nor
seditious documents, and having an open and honest eye, I was allowed
to go through the straight and narrow way that led to possible
destruction. Once or twice, later on, I blamed that woman for letting
me through. I blamed myself for telling only half of my reasons for
going. Had I told her all she would have detained me safely in
England, where automobiles sometimes go less than eighty miles an
hour, and where a sharp bang means a door slamming in the wind and not
a shell exploding, where hostile aeroplanes overhead with bombs and
unpleasant little steel darts, were not always between one's eyes and
heaven. She let me through, and I went out on the platform.

The leaving of the one-o'clock train from Victoria Station, London, is
an event and a tragedy. Wounded who have recovered are going back;
soldiers who have been having their week at home are returning to that
mysterious region across the Channel, the front.

Not the least of the British achievements had been to transport,
during the deadlock of the first winter of the war, almost the entire
army, in relays, back to England for a week's rest. It had been done
without the loss of a man, across a channel swarming with hostile
su