inging in some other country? I don't know. I don't
know.

Only I do know this--I am sure of it now for the first time, and it is
worth while spending a long, long winter within the sound of guns in
order to know it--that death brings release, not release from mere
suffering or pain, but in some strange and unknown way it brings
freedom. Soldiers realise it: they have been more terrified than their
own mothers will ever know, and their very spines have melted under the
shrieking sound of shells, and then comes the day when they "don't
mind." Death stalks just as near as ever, but his face is suddenly quite
kind. A stray bullet or a piece of shell may come, but what does it
matter? This is the day when the soldier learns to stroll when the
shrapnel is falling, and to look up and laugh when the murderous bullet
pings close by.

[Page Heading: SOUVENIRS]

War souvenirs! There are heaps of them, and I hate them all; pieces of
jagged shell, helmets with bullets through them, pieces of burnt
aeroplanes, scraps of clothing rent by a bayonet. Yesterday, at the
station, I saw a sick Zouave nursing a German summer casquette. He said
quietly, being very sick: "The burgomaster chez moi wanted one. Yes, I
had to kill a German officer for it--ce n'est rien de quoi--I got a ball
in my leg too, mais mon burgomaster sera tres content d'avoir une
casquette d'un boche." Our own men leave their trenches and go out into
the open to get these horrible things, with their battered exterior and
the suggestion of pomade inside.

Yesterday, by chance, I went to the "Ierlinck" to see Mr. Clegg. I met
Mr. Hubert Walter, lately arrived from England, and asked him to dine,
so both he and Mr. Clegg came, and Madame van der Gienst. It was _so_
like England to talk to Mr. Walter again, and to learn news of everyone,
and we actually sat up till 10.30, and had a great pow-wow.

Mr. Walter attaches great importance to the fact that the Germans are
courageous in victory, but their spirits go down at once under defeat,
and he thinks that even one decisive defeat would do wonders in the way
of bringing the war to an end. The Russians are preparing for a winter
campaign. I look at all my "woollies," and wonder if I had better save
some for 1916. What new horrors will have been invented by that time? I
hear the Germans are throwing vitriol now! In their results I hate hand
grenades more than anything. The poor burnt faces which have been
wounded by them a