d bits of uniform, passed unrebuked. We had to raid the
neighbouring towns for food, to send frantic embassies to London for bread
and meat; to turn out any sort of shed to house them. Luckily it was
summer weather; otherwise I don't know what we should have done for
blankets. But nobody 'groused.' Everybody worked, and there were many who
felt it 'the time of their lives.'"

And yet England "engineered the war!" England's hypocrisy and greed
demanded the crushing of Germany--hence the lying "excuse" of
Belgium--that apparently is what all good Germans--except those who know
better--believe; what every German child is being taught. As I listen to
my companion's story, I am reminded, however, of a puzzled remark which
reached me lately, written just before Christmas last, by a German nurse
in a Berlin hospital, who has English relations, friends of my own. "We
begin to wonder whether it really was England who caused the war--since
you seem to be so dreadfully unprepared!" So writes this sensible girl to
one of her mother's kindred in England; in a letter which escaped the
German censor. She might indeed wonder! To have deliberately planned a
Continental war with Germany, and Germany's 8,000,000 of soldiers, without
men, guns, or ammunition beyond the requirements of an Expeditionary Force
of 160,000 men, might have well become the State of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. But
the England of Raleigh, Chatham, Pitt, and Wellington has not generally
been reckoned a nation of pure fools.

The military camps of Great Britain tell the tale of our incredible
venture. "Great areas of land had to be cleared, levelled, and drained;
barracks had to be built; one camp alone used 42,000 railway truck-loads
of building material." There was no time to build new railways, and the
existing roads were rapidly worn out. They were as steadily repaired; and
on every side new camps sprang up around the parent camps of the country.

The Surrey commons and woods, the Wiltshire downs, the Midland and
Yorkshire heaths, the Buckinghamshire hills have been everywhere
invaded--their old rural sanctities are gone. I walked in bewilderment the
other day up and down the slopes of a Surrey hill which when I knew it
last was one kingdom of purple heather, beloved of the honey-bees, and
scarcely ever trodden by man or woman. Barracks now form long streets upon
its crest and sides; practise-trenches, bombing-schools, the stuffed and
dangling sacks for bayonet training,