October 3rd. All the morning we had been hard at work amongst our blessÉs. It is odd how soon they endear themselves to everyone. There is the little wizened bit of humanity who gazes all day long into space with a horror-stricken look, or falls asleep, half on the floor, half on the bed, until aroused. The unearthly green pallor of his face is not accounted for by his slum upbringing alone, but by the German gas and the fact that he has twice been blown heavenwards by exploding mines. There is the finely built Canadian—one of the first contingent who have all "seen hell with the lid off," to use their own terminology—who, when the pain of his rheumatic limbs allows, is so very precise in his toilet. He changes his shirt frequently, gloating over the neatly folded bundles in which repose his requisites with the air of a miser, never forgetting to clean his boots and call for a glass by which to shave. He is "some" smart, and, judging by the crested seal and gold watch-chain dangling from his waistcoat pocket, must be a sahib at home. To us he is most remarkable for his expression—the grimmest I have ever seen.

Then there is the "buffoon" of the place, who yarns lengthily about the four times he has been hit (though his record only points to once), and invariably sets out to sing comic songs when the rest of the community is preparing to sleep.

The men are full of their glimpses of enemy trenches and methods; of how they found quite a number of Germans chained to their own machine-guns, which reminds me of the most dramatic side of warfare.

Very little is told of courts martial, very little is known of courts martial, except to those whose duties bring them in contact with the relentlessness of discipline. To realise one must see.

Until quite recently a blue-eyed, fair-haired boy lay in the end bed of an airy ward in B—— Hospital. In spite of his extreme reticence he won the affection of both nurses and patients. His wound was healing quickly, but he only shook his head when they spoke of getting home.

One day as dinner was being taken round he asked for a second helping of meat and pudding.

"Why, whatever is the matter?" exclaimed the kindly nurse. "Are you very hungry?"

"Not very, Sister; but it's my last dinner!" came the quiet answer.

Not understanding, the Sister repeated the remark to the Medical Officer.

It was quite true. The boy's wounds were self-inflicted. It was a case for court martial. Next day he was gone.

October 10th. It was in the midst of serving out the dinners that two friends turned up on their way home to England.

Hungry and travel-stained though they were, we were too busy to do more than hurl a frying-pan and eggs into their hands, with injunctions to help themselves until the rush was over and we could attend to them. How they admired our ward and its now stained, polished floors, for which we found a solution of brunswick black and turpentine so efficacious! The afternoon being slack, we hied into the town to pay a long promised visit to a naval friend, and were entertained right royally, enjoying to the full the childish pleasure of having to scale ungainly ladders from boat to boat, and listening to the conversation between our host and the ship's captain in a jargon edifying but utterly incomprehensible to the mere landlubber.

We wandered round the quay, along the roads on which stand well-guarded, but by no means hidden, 5-inch guns, their attendant "caterpillars," and, in the trains, loads of ammunition. As we watched cranes lifting great weapons of destruction off the boats the significance of this war of cold steel against quivering human flesh was borne upon us. We sauntered round, marvelling at the wonderful method by which, in less than a year, the British have created a whole small city out of nothing.

Gangs of khaki-clad workmen dwell here, utterly oblivious, no doubt, of the wonderful sunsets and Turneresque light effects as they work amidst the stores of rations destined daily for the trenches, or the picric acid, petrol and other explosives that lie by the sea.

My friends' enthusiastic anticipation of home was infectious, and it needed much will-power to withstand their pleadings to get leave too. And as the boat that carried them home grew into a faint speck on the horizon, involuntarily our thoughts went with them, past the brightly coloured villas, for all the world like the sugar-candy edifices of fairy-tales, to the land where nothing is changed. Yes! There are hours when one would gladly relinquish the necessities of life for a few of its luxuries. Chief and foremost of these, needless to say, would be an unlimited supply of those hot baths we were wont to accept as our birthright, and are only just beginning to value at their true worth. I wonder if anyone who has not spent a bleak winter in the jerry-built summer residences of a French watering-place, whose eyes have not been continually offended by the salmon-pink walls and hideous rococo cupids on low ceilings, can realise the true joy of living once more in a house, no matter how modest, but a house built to withstand the weather?

October 13th. The British advance on the outskirts of Hulluch—the village of Loos, the progress near Hooge, the French capture of that ghastly Souchez cemetery, their valiant fighting in Champagne, are things of the past. It is the Hohenzollern Redoubt that is on everyone's lips now, and Vermelles. Our own men—the hospital orderlies, that is to say—who spend all their spare moments at the hut, are quite worn out by this rush of work, which nevertheless seems to have put new life into them.

Many grouse at the R.A.M.C. Few people realise the deference due to those devoted men who, day and night, are working to alleviate suffering. They number amongst their ranks many well-born men, who joined that corps at the first call in the hopes of "getting out soon," and many who gave up excellent posts to enlist are undergoing undreamt-of hardships with a stoicism that is admirable.

After all, which lot is preferable? That of the man who, after running risks in the trenches for six days, finds himself in billets the succeeding week, able to enjoy his liberty with the consciousness of having earned it—or the man who has had steadily to perform the same menial jobs for fifteen unrelieved months, running no risk, it is true, save that of infection, but subject to the obloquy of those he is serving because he has never been in the trenches? As an R.A.M.C. orderly, who has made three unsuccessful attempts to transfer into a combatant unit, remarked to-day, the Base has well been described as "the place where they keep you until you are so fed up that the Front is a treat!"

A hundred temptations assail them, and men who had never before felt the least inclination towards drink find themselves drifting by degrees into those enticing-looking little French cafÉs not yet closed by the authorities.

And it is to detract from the attractions of these dens that we work to keep the men amused.

Said one onlooker to-day pityingly: "I hear you have such a bad set of men—drunkards and all sorts of undesirables!"

With truth I could rejoin: "Not nearly bad enough. It's the worst we want, for they need helping most."

October 19th. There is no end to the gamut of emotions one traverses during the space of an ordinary day. To close one's eyes and look back over the kaleidoscopic events of the week is almost bewildering.

The picture of Second Lieutenant Jones, lately junior clerk at Messrs. Morells, steamship owners, being brought face to face with his former employer, Sir Cuthbert Morell, private, A.S.C., is inexpressibly funny.

Private Morell accords the Tommy's salute to his officer, who seems to have lost all his customary swagger and starch for the moment.

Lieutenant Jones stops. "I—I hope you're getting on all right—sir," he stammers.

The grey-haired private, master of millions, with shooting-boxes, country seats, town houses that a prince might envy, replies to his £100 per annum clerk and superior officer that all is well. For a moment they gaze at each other speechless. Then the topsy-turvydom of it all grows too much for them, and, to the astonishment of the onlooker, the adjutant of Jones's regiment, they burst into a roar of laughter that, contrary to all military etiquette, ends in a hearty handshake.

October 20th. Whilst we were still a hospital, and our work temporarily paralysed, a new hut was opened. In a state of great indignation some of the men clustered round to reassure us as to their patriotism to the old place.

"You needn't fear no rivalry," exclaimed one; "they've got the wrong class o' person doon there."

"This is our hut, and you make us feel as if we belonged to the place and it to us," said another.

If their loyalty warmed our hearts, it did not in the least facilitate the task of explanation that our Association fears no rivalry, that it is not attempting to run a cheap cafÉ, and rather than be thought to outbid anyone else would pack up its traps and depart.

Such is the spirit of the institution for which we are working. And perhaps I may whisper it in my diary that in one place, when some unscrupulous folk were bribing unwary men with free drinks to spread abroad that the Association tea was of an inferior quality to theirs, with their truly magnanimous spirit the Y.M.C.A. did walk out of the camp, and yet continued to supply the said unscrupulous folk with all the stores they required.

Oh, yes, we're all inordinately proud to be working under the sign of the Red Triangle!

Many, no doubt, have used the institution for the purpose of gratifying their curiosity, more as a means of playing their rÔle in the Great Game, and most, maybe, will sever their connection with the Association to which they owe so much with the cessation of hostilities; but those who have been vouchsafed an insight into the methods of the Y.M.C.A., the dominating spirit that has driven it into the position of responsibility it now holds—in face of the derision with which its rise was first greeted—will not forget that the Y.M.C.A. has never yet failed where it was most needed, never shown anything but the greatest magnanimity of spirit. Entirely undenominational, it throws its doors open to every sect under the sun, its buildings have been lent to Jews and Catholics, Mohammedans and others alike; and just because of its broadness and the largeness of its vision it is having an evangelising power undreamt of by any religious inquisition of the Middle Ages. There will be many, after this war, who will be able to say:

"I grew religious because I saw what a wonderful thing active religion can be"; and though the members of this Association—which has a way of giving the humbler born leaders of men an opportunity of leading—may never hear of all this, it will be inscribed to their favour on the Day of Reckoning! And surely the very silence of its workings is sufficient testimony of its strength, as its growth is of its utility.

Does the world know, I wonder, how daily improvised centres are springing up nearer and nearer the Front, to the men's delight, until the old familiar sign of the Red Triangle—not Bass's Pale Ale, be it noted—but the Red Triangle, that symbolises "Body, Mind and Spirit," is to be found even in dug-outs?

Nor is the institution behindhand in Egypt or the Near East or Gallipoli.

Only to-day we heard of a secretary (originally here with the Indian force) who, on landing at Gallipoli, was greeted by the C.O. with a cheerful:

"And what are you looking for?"

"A place with no shells flying about, sir, to start a Y.M. centre!"

"Why, that's what everyone on the Peninsula is looking for!" exclaimed the Colonel. "If you can find it, by all means keep it!"

October 28th. All things considered, the resignation of the French Ministry is causing far less comment here than such a move in England would make, though in Paris we hear there is quite an upheaval. Internal politics in France are so entirely subservient to the international issues at stake.

One would not want those at home to know all there is to know of modern warfare—of the vast pestilential graveyard that is Belgium—yet one cannot help wishing that some of the vibrations of these strenuous times could be more clearly felt by them, that they would cease to see things as they wish to see them, and realise that the worst is yet to come—that we must brace ourselves to face it.

Not only the spirits of the fallen heroes of our little insignificant Western Front cry out to be avenged, not only the scarce human prisoners, dying in hundreds of cold and hunger in disease-ridden concentration camps; the girl mothers of Belgium, the murdered innocents, the crucified Canadians; men burned by liquid fire, suffocated by poison gas, parched men dying of thirst on the arid plains of the East; but every forbear of our gallant race warns us that the end is not yet, that to safeguard the future of our children the nation must turn its whole attention to the work in hand.

How can we blame the slackers who, for want of confidence, refused to throw in their lot with what seems to them a wild-goose chase—until fetched? We must blame the slothful system that allows one man to profit by another's patriotism.

We must not lay the blame of any one failure at the door of any one particular man, but attribute it to the fault we are most often apt to exalt as a virtue—as if by so doing we exonerated our mistakes—our slack unpreparedness.

Surely, until we are animated by one great unity of purpose, one great desire to sink personal in national interests, even as our dead heroes have done, there can be no end.

Surely if our Russian Allies could achieve in one day what reformers had scarce hoped to see effected in a hundred years, and by one fell swoop convert herself into an abstemious country, animated with but one desire—to conquer—we should be able to attain a little more unity, a little less slackness?

October 29th. The news of the King's accident whilst reviewing the troops is the one thing one hears discussed on all sides. Exactly where he will be taken seems as yet indefinite, but the orderlies from the Officers' Hospital opposite are fully convinced that their wards are being prepared for his reception. The French seem almost as upset as we are, for their love of our Royalty remains as staunch as during the life of King Edward, whom they worshipped, and the Prince of Wales—of whom we have caught an occasional glimpse on his way to and from the Front—vies in popularity with his genial grandfather.