lling-houses, built long ago, with floors in just the right
position and of just the right stuff, and when they were wanted the top
stories were blown off and the concrete gun-floors were ready. There
were local exhibitions, too, to which firms sent exhibition guns, which
they "forgot" to remove! While we were going on strike they were making
an army, and as we have sown so must we reap.

One almost wonders whether it might not be possible to eliminate the
personal element in war, so constant is the talk about victorious guns.
If guns decide everything, then let them be trained on other guns. Let
the gun that drives farthest and goes surest win. If every siege is
decided by the German 16-inch howitzers, then let us put up brick and
mortar or steel against them, but not men. The day for the bleeding
human body seems to be over now that men are mown down by shells fired
eight miles away. War used to be splendid because it made men strong and
brave, but now a little German in spectacles can stand behind a Krupp
gun and wipe out a regiment.

[Page Heading: PROTECTION OF LIFE OR PROPERTY]

I suppose women will always try to protect life because they know what
it costs to produce it, and men will always try to protect property
because that is what they themselves produce. At Antwerp our wounded men
were begging us to go up to the hospital to fetch their purses from
under their pillows! At present women are only repairers, darning socks,
cleaning, washing up after men, bringing up reinforcements in the way of
fresh life, and patching up wounded men, but some day they must and will
have to say, "The life I produce has as much right to protection as the
property you produce, and I claim my right to protect it."

There seems to me a lack of connection between one man's desire to
extend the area he occupies and young men in their teens lying with
their lungs shot through or backs blown off.

_19 October._--Our time is now spent in waiting and preparing for work
which will probably come soon, as there has been fighting near us again.
One hears the boom of guns a long way off, and always there is the sound
of death in it. One has been too near it not to know now what it means.

Yesterday I went to church in an empty little building, but a few of our
hospital men turned up and made a small congregation. In the afternoon
one or two people came to tea in my bedroom as we could not make our
usual expedition to de Poorter's bunshop.