a line of
rails. God help us! What a year this has been! It tires me even to think
of being happy again, cheerfulness has become such an effort.

_10 May._--I went to see my Scottish gunner at the hospital to-day. He
said, "I can't forget that night," and burst out crying. "That night" he
had been wounded in seven places, and then had to crawl to a "dug-out"
by himself for shelter.

Strong healthy men lie inert in these hospitals. Many of them have face
and head wounds. I saw one splendid young fellow, with a beautiful face,
and straight clear eyes of a sort of forget-me-not blue. He won't be
able to speak again, as his jaw is shot away. The man next him was being
fed through the nose.

The matron told me to-day that last night a man came in from Nieuport
with the base of a shell ("the bit they make into ash trays," she said)
embedded in him. His clothing had been carried in with it. He died, of
course.

One of our friends has been helping with stretcher work, removing
civilians. He was carrying away a girl shot to pieces, and with her
clothing in rags. He took her head, and a young Belgian took her feet,
and the Belgian looked round and said quietly, "This is my fiancee."

[Page Heading: THE "LUSITANIA"]

_11 May._--To-day being madame's washing day--we ring the changes on
the "nettoyage," "le grand nettoyage," and "le lavage"--everything was
late. The newspaper came in, and was full of such words as "horror,"
"resentment," "indignation," about the _Lusitania_, but that won't give
us back our ship or our men. I wish we could do more and say less, but
the Press must talk, and always does so "with its mouth." M. Rotsartz
came to breakfast. The guns had been going all night long, there was a
sense of something in the air, and I fretted against platitudes in
French and madame's washing. At last I got away, and went to the sea
front, for the sound of bursting shells had become tremendous.

It was a sort of British morning, with a fresh British breeze blowing
our own blessed waves, and there, in its grey grandeur, stood off a
British man-of-war, blazing away at the coast. The Germans answered by
shells, which fell a bit wide, and must have startled the fishes (but no
one else) by the splash they made. There were long, swift torpedo-boats,
with two great white wings of cloven foam at their bows, and a great
flourish of it in their wake, moving along under a canopy of their own
black smoke. It was the smoke of good Bri