k of youth
and strength, the hideous pain, the helpless disablement.

But the station rang with laughter and talk. Some one in the canteen began
to play "Keep the Home Fires Burning"--and the men in the train joined in,
though not very heartily, for as one or two took care to tell me,
laughingly--"That and 'Tipperary' are awfully stale now!" A bright-faced
lad discussed with D---- how long the war would last. "And _shan't_ we
miss it when it's done!" he said, with a jesting farewell to us, as he
jumped into the train which had begun to move. Slowly, slowly it passed
out of sight, amid waves of singing and the shouting of good-byes....

It was late that evening, when after much talk with various officers, I
went up to my room to try and write, bewildered by a multitude of
impressions--impressions of human energy, human intelligence, human
suffering. What England is doing in this country will leave, it seems to
me, indelible marks upon the national character. I feel a natural pride,
as I sit thinking over the day, in all this British efficiency and power,
and a quick joy in the consciousness of our fellowship with France, and
hers with us. But the struggle at Verdun is still in its first intensity,
and when I have read all that the evening newspapers contain about it,
there stirs in me a fresh realisation of the meaning of what I have been
seeing. In these great bases, in the marvellous railway organisation, in
the handling of the vast motor transport in all its forms, in the feeding
and equipment of the British Army, we have the scaffolding and preparation
of war, which, both in the French and English Armies, have now reached a
perfection undreamt of when the contest began. But the war itself--the
deadly struggle of that distant line to which it all tends? It is in the
flash and roar of the guns, in the courage and endurance of the fighting
man, that all this travail of brain and muscle speaks at last. At that
courage and endurance, women, after all, can only guess--through whatever
rending of their own hearts.

But I was to come somewhat nearer to it than I thought then. The morrow
brought surprise.

V

Dear H.

Our journey farther north through the deep February snow was scarcely less
striking as an illustration of Great Britain's constantly growing share in
the war than the sight of the great supply bases themselves. The first
part of it, indeed, led over solitary uplands, where the chained wheels of
th