for a week's holiday.

_14 January._--I went home _via_ Calais. Mr. Bevan and Mr. Morgan took
me there. It was a fine day and I felt happy for once, that is, for once
out here.

Some people enjoy this war. I think it is far the worst time, except
one, I ever spent. Perhaps I have seen more suffering than most people.
A doctor sees a hospital, and a nurse sees a ward of sick and wounded,
but I see them by the hundred passing before me in an endless train all
day. I can make none of them really better. I feed them, and they pass
on.

One reviews one's life a little as one departs. Always I shall remember
Furnes as a place of wet streets and long dark evenings, with gales
blowing, and as a place where I have been always alone. I have not once
all this time exchanged a thought with anyone. I have lived in a very
damp attic, and talked French to some kind middle-class people, and I
have walked a mile for every meal I have had. So I shall always think of
Furnes as a wet, dark place, and of myself with a lantern trudging about
its mean streets.

CHAPTER IV

WORKING UNDER DIFFICULTIES

I have not written my diary for some weeks. I went home to England and
stayed at Rayleigh House. On my way home I met Mr. F. Ware, who told me
submarines were about. As I had but just left a much-shelled town, I
think he might have held his peace. The usual warm welcome at Rayleigh
House, with Mary there to meet me, and Emily Strutt.

I wasn't very tired when I first arrived, but fatigue came out on me
like a rash afterwards. I got more tired every day, and ended by having
a sort of breakdown. This rather spoilt my holiday, but it was very nice
seeing people again. It was difficult, I found, to accommodate myself to
small things, and one was amazed to find people still driving serenely
in closed broughams. It was like going back to live on earth again after
being in rather a horrible other world. I went to my own house and
enjoyed the very smell of the place. My little library and an hour or
two spent there made my happiest time. Different people asked me to
things, but I wasn't up to going out, and the weather was amazingly
bad.

I was to have gone back to work on the Thursday week after I arrived
home, but I got a telegram from Madame Sindici saying Furnes was being
shelled, and the hospital, etc., was to be evacuated. Dr. Perrin, who
was to have taken me back, had to start immediately without me. It was
difficult to get new