she
said:

"No. I was suffering from a nervous breakdown, so I came out here. What
is your _war_ is my _peace_, and I now sleep like a baby."

I want adjectives! How is one to describe the people who come for
one brief visit to the station or hospital with an intense
conviction that they and they only feel the suffering or even notice
the wants of the men. Some are good workers. Others I call
"This-poor-fellow-has-had-none." Nurses may have been up all night,
doctors may be worked off their feet, seven hundred men may have passed
through the station, all wounded and all fed, but when our visitors
arrive they discover that "This poor fellow has had none," and firmly,
and with a high sense of duty and of their own efficiency, they make the
thing known.

No one else has heard a man shouting for water; no one else knows that a
man wants soup. The man may have appendicitis, or colitis, or
pancreatitis, or he may have been shot through the lungs or the abdomen.
It doesn't matter. The casual visitor knows he has been neglected, and
she says so, and quite indiscriminately she fills everyone up with
soup. Only she is tender-hearted. Only she could never really be
hardened by being a nurse. She seizes a little cup, stoops over a man
gracefully, and raises his head. Then she wants things passed to her,
and someone must help her, and someone must listen to what she has to
say. She feeds one man in half an hour, and goes away horrified at the
way things are done. Fortunately these people never stay for long.

Then there is another. She can't understand why our ships should be
blown up or why trenches should be taken. In her own mind she proves
herself of good sound intelligence and a member of the Empire who won't
be bamboozled, when she says firmly and with heat, "Why don't we _do_
something?" She would like to scold a few Generals and Admirals, and she
says she believes the Germans are much cleverer than ourselves. This
last taunt she hopes will make people "_do_ something." It stings, she
thinks.

I could write a good deal about this "solitary winter," but I have not
had time either to write or to read. I think something inside me has
stood still or died during this war.

_21 February, Sunday._--The Munro corps has swooped down in its usual
hurry to distribute letters, and to say that someone is waiting down
below and they can't stop. They eat a hasty sardine, drink a cup of
coffee, and are off!

To-day I have made thi