is big enough for this. It should shake off cords and chains
and old Bible stories of carnage and killing, and get to work to find a
new, responsible, clean, sensible, practical scheme of life, in which
each man will have to get away from silly old idols and step out by
himself.

There is nothing very difficult about it, but we are so beset by bogies,
and so full of fears and fancies that we are half the time either in a
state of funk, or in its antithesis, a state of cheekiness.
Schoolmaster-ridden, we are behaving still like silly children, and our
highest endeavour is (school-boy-like) to resemble our fellows as nearly
as possible. The result is stagnation, crippled forms, wasted energy,
people waiting for years by some healing pool and longing for someone to
dip them in. All the release that Christ preached to men is being
smothered in something worse than Judaism. We love chains, and when they
are removed we either turn and put them on again, or else caper like mad
things because we have cast them off. Freedom is still as distant as the
stars.

_5 November._--Yesterday we lunched with the English chaplain, Mr.
Lombard. He and I had a great talk walking home on a dark afternoon
through the slush after we had been to call on the Maxwells. I think he
is one of the "exiles" whom one meets all the world over, one of those
who don't transplant well. I am one myself! And Mr. Lombard and I nearly
wept when we found ourselves in a street that recalled the Marylebone
Road. We pretended we were in sight of Euston Station, and talked of
taking a Baker Street bus till our voices grew choky.

How absurd we islanders are! London is a poky place, but we adore it.
St. James's Street is about the length of a good big ship, yet we don't
feel we have lived till we get back to it! And as for Piccadilly and St.
Paul's, well, we see them in our dreams.

Our little unit has not found work yet. I was told before I joined it
that it had been accepted by the Russian Red Cross Society.

[Page Heading: "CHARITY" AND WAR]

I have been hearing many things out here, and thinking many things.
There is only one way of directing Red Cross work. Everything should
be--and must be in future--put under military authority and used by
military authority. "Charity" and war should be separate. It is absurd
that the Belgians in England should be housed and fed by a Government
grant, and our own soldiers are dependent on private charity for the
very so