Friday
following the raid I have described I went out of town for a week-end,
and returned on Tuesday to be informed that a shell had gone through the
roof outside of the room I had vacated, and the ceiling and floor of the
bedroom of one of the officers who lived below. He was covered with dust
and debris, his lights went out, but he calmly stepped through the
window. "You'd best have your dinner early, sir," I was told by the
waiter on my return. "Last night a lady had her soup up-stairs,
her chicken in the office, and her coffee in the cellar." It is worth
while noting that she had all three. Another evening, when I was dining
with Sir James Barrie, he showed me a handful of shrapnel fragments.
"I gathered them off the roof," he informed me. And a lady next to whom
I sat at luncheon told me in a matter-of-fact tone that a bomb had fallen
the night before in the garden of her town house. "It was quite
disagreeable," she said, "and broke all our windows on that side."
During the last raids before the moon disappeared, by a new and ingenious
system of barrage fire the Germans were driven off. The question of the
ethics of reprisals is agitating London.

One "raid," which occurred at midday, is worth recording. I was on my
way to our Embassy when, in the residential quarter through which I
passed, I found all the housemaids in the areas gazing up at the sky, and
I was told by a man in a grocer's cart that the Huns had come again. But
the invader on this occasion turned out to be a British aviator from one
of the camps who was bringing a message to London. The warmth of his
reception was all that could be desired, and he alighted hastily in the
first open space that presented itself.

Looking back to the time when I left America, I can recall the
expectation of finding a Britain beginning to show signs of distress.
I was prepared to live on a small ration. And the impression of the
scarcity of food was seemingly confirmed when the table was being set
for the first meal at my hotel; when the waiter, who chanced to be an
old friend, pointed to a little bowl half-full of sugar and exclaimed:
"I ought to warn you, sir, it's all you're to have for a week, and I'm
sorry to say you're only allowed a bit of bread, too." It is human
perversity to want a great deal of bread when bread becomes scarce; even
war bread, which, by the way, is better than white. But the rest of the
luncheon, when it came, proved that John