re, and, out of
compliment to the English, played "God Save the King." All the dirty
bandaged men stood at attention. As they did so an armoured train backed
slowly into the station and an aeroplane swooped overhead. At Drury Lane
one would have said that the staging had been overdone, that the clothes
were too ragged, the men too gaunt and too much wounded, and that by no
stretch of imagination could a band be playing "God save the King" while
a square painted train called "Lou-lou" steamed in, looking like a
child's giant gaudy toy, and an aeroplane fussed overhead.

Everyone had stories to tell, but I think the best of them concerns the
arrival of the wounded last night. All the beds in Lady Bagot's little
hospital were full, and the Belgians who occupied them insisted on
getting up and giving their places to the English. They lay on the floor
or stood on their feet all night, and someone told me that even very
sick men leapt from their beds to give them to their Allies.

God help us, what a mixture it all is! Here were men talking of the very
_sound_ of bayonets on human flesh; here were men not only asphyxiated
by gas, but blinded by the pepper that the Germans mix with it; and here
were men determined to give no quarter--yet they were babbling of Loch
Lomond's side and their mothers, and fighting as to who should give up
their beds to each other.

Of course the day ended with the exchange of souvenirs, and the soldiers
pulled buttons off their coats and badges out of their caps. And when it
was all over, every mother's son of them rolled round and went to sleep.
Most of them, I thought, had a curious air of innocence about them as
they slept.

_27 May._--I took a great bundle of newspapers and magazines to the
"Jellicoe" men to-day. English current literature isn't a waste out
here, and I often wonder why people don't buy more. They all fall upon
my tableful, and generally bear away much of it.

The war news, even in the ever optimistic English press, is _not_ good,
but not nearly as bad as what seems to me the real condition of affairs.
The shortage of high explosives is very great. At Nieuport yesterday
Mrs. Wynne said to a French officer, "Things seem quiet here to-day," at
which he laughed, and said, "I suppose even Germans will stop firing
when they know you have no ammunition."

[Page Heading: SLACKERS IN GLASGOW]

In France the armament works are going night and day, and the men work
in shifts of 24