“ I was afraid to go into the kitchen, knowing what the nature of his wounds had been, but so cleverly, wonderfully, had he been handled by these heaven-born surgeons who repair the waste and wreckage of war that he looked much as of yore, though with some deep scars where part of a new jaw had been grafted on. He was very quiet, as those are who have been long in the midst of unspeakable things, but when I asked him whether he was willing to go back, he just smiled.
"There is nothing else to be done," he answered. ”

“ No women, but we two. I was so thankful to have Effie. Her gay inconsequence, her complete disregard of everything but the great adventure, helped us over every stony bit of the ground. Gendarmes, sentries with fixed bayonets, grumpy passport and permit officials—she captured them all. Youth is quite invincible, and when its smile is sweet like hers obstacles melt like mist before the rising sun. If I had even attempted that wonderful journey through the war zone without her I should either have been shot as a spy, or interned for the duration. ”

“ Born in England of German parents, she is loyal to the core, and rejoices that she has never even seen Germany. She loathes the war and all it stands for, and she will never give her son until she is obliged to; she is the living personification of the line, "I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier." She can't understand, though she is a dear soul, the thrill and the pride with which we can give and give and give, not money, but our heart's blood till there is nothing left.
It is the waste of war which terrifies her. You see, she has no hope or belief in anything beyond this life. ”

“ I never got him back, Cornelia, not as I had him once. He went out very soon into the world of men, and the things he met there I could not share. No woman can. When a man fails his young son during those moulding years of destiny, there is no retrieval. It is the greatest failure in history or in life.
Mine did not fail his son, and I stood by a little wistfully sometimes, bolstering my heart with a vision of the days to be, when the grown man, a child at heart, would creep back to his mother's arms. ”

“ The world is full of words—but there do not seem to be any to fit this case. But I must try. I have been sitting ever so long, looking out to the sea, which is no longer a pathway to the sun, but a menacing grey highway across which awful shapes may at any moment race to destroy our peace, and fill us with terror and dismay. To the left, as I turn my eyes, through the window I see the gleaming nozzle of one of the big guns, with the gunners ready beside it. They are there night and day. So even our summer home is in the grip of the war monster from which there is no escape. ”

“ It took the whole long, long day, Cornelia, and when he went out for his lunch I sat among the ruins, and ate the dry sandwich Florence had put up for me. I fear I watered it with my tears. I never knew there could be so many tears in the world. I had none to shed when the Boy went away; but somehow this has unsealed the fount. It is a different kind of grief; it tears you a thousand ways; sometimes you are shaken with an impotent rage. Of course it means that it will be more evanescent.
The heart can only stand a certain number of vital, staggering blows. ”

“ And I am in it now, Cornelia, up to the neck in it. Having filled many rôles, I have now become a food expert, from whose lips calories and proteids and other heathen words ought to flow glibly. Only they don't. I am a plain woman and most people are plain in the same sense. They hate camouflage; it worries and wearies them. I am trying to tell as simply as I can, how they may make up with other things, for the things that are not there.
It does not read very clearly or convincingly, does it? But that is my job.
It is not easy. Food is not an inspiring theme. ”

“ On the 12th Effie came home from France in her first leave from active service. You can imagine the excitement in the household, the somewhat tremulous expectancy of Himself and myself.
The one ewe lamb, as you know right well, is a kind of desperate possession. Once or twice I have recalled your warning counsel not to let her leave us; but, my dear, you would have to be here to understand the strange new blood that is firing the veins of both youth and maturity and age, the red blood of patriotism. She was very young to go out to that strange awful sublime place they call the war zone. ”

“ In the early days you could play upon their mobile hearts as on a harp of ten strings; tears and laughter and smiles we had then, all side by side, with the most glorious courage the world has ever seen.
In some of the battalions now you find the fathers of the boys who sleep in Flanders and in France.
Oh, Cornelia, the waste, the wanton waste and cruelty of war. Where is it tending? Where shall we be brought before it is over? Sometimes my brain reels at the thought. ”

“ I think I see you gasp, but Cornelia, in these words lie hidden one of the first elemental truths of existence and of happiness. It is what we were made for—to be mothers of men, and when for one reason or another we miss, or shirk that high destiny, we have got to pay the price. What can match the flowers of the field for beauty and strength? Their sweetness is flung ungrudgingly on a desert world; no man prunes, or trains or troubles about them; they are the children of mother earth and greatly do her credit. ”

“ There was the usual hustle and delay, but at last the signal blew and the snorting engine dragged them away to the tunnel which swallowed the hearts of half the women left behind. It was an awful moment, just black darkness that could be felt. There is something wrong, Cornelia, something terribly wrong with a world in which such things are possible. People can't have been meant to suffer so much, yet somehow I feel that we have not come to the end of the pain yet. ”

“ Now perhaps you will understand, Cornelia,—the home we all loved together—though often belittling it in the grumpy Scotch way—is dead. It will never be ours any more. Its roof can never shelter those we love, nor its walls echo the happy laughter which doeth good like a medicine. ”

“ The more you cut and gave away the more persistently they insisted upon coming on; not in single spies, but in battalions.
The old walled vegetable garden which you so loved, being invariably found, when missing, between its box hedges, surpassed itself. We could not use the stuff. Our Belgian household over the way, of whose doing and being I as chairman of the Belgian Guest committee have written you so much, had access to the garden to help themselves. It is a royal memory we have; but only a memory. Sometimes it seems as if soon, all life would be only a memory. ”

“ Sometimes I have the awful feeling that Effie has passed out of the region of my love and care. Yet how dare I intrude these little personal fears upon a world's sorrow?
Every day I am writing letters to fathers and mothers whose darlings have gone forever "where, beyond these voices, there is peace."
One grows heart weary of the task, and even the balm of Gilead seems to have lost its power to soothe or heal. ”

“ I am waiting for Effie's next leave, when we will go up together. Meanwhile I must hold the fort here, or all the wrong wall papers will go up, and there might even be structural undoing if the workmen were left to their own sweet wills. But it is an empty life, Cornelia, out of which the soul has gone. Even the picture in uniform, on my desk, the man of the house at war, fails to afford the uplift or the comfort once imagined. I must get through with this reconstruction job as it affects material things, and start the reconstruction of my own inner life. I, too, must go to the war. ”

“ I knew one whose first act of war service for her country was the purchase of a red cross of rubies to wear with her uniform. She went to France with it, but abandoned it before very long. The real cross, when she came up with it, red with the blood of brave men, put her to shame. She has won the saint's crown out there, and her name has been on a hundred dying lips.
So don't worry about these little things, Cornelia, they will pass as a tale that is told. The best will remain—the things that cannot be shaken, and which are the same in all countries, and of all peoples. ”

“ I went into the garden through the gap, and round about, to the river's brim, thankful to find little damage, except much trampling of the lawns. The gardeners, I think, had gone to their breakfast—at least, I did not see either of them. All the time I kept my eyes averted from the house; but when I came behind the cedar tree, half of which was torn away, showing a hideous scar all over its beautiful body, I could not help seeing. I gripped myself tight, and ran, just ran up the sloping lawn across the terrace, and right in. I don't know how I can describe it. I feel as if I must not even try. ”

“ It is the man's life, the big grey splendid thing which we are outside of, not once in a while, but forever and ever.
He has changed, Cornelia—not to me, but he has gotten the vision of the fierce arena where men are fighting and dying that Liberty may live; has not only gotten the vision, but has become part of it. ”

“ Did you not put your hand over my mouth when I audibly wished that my mauve thistle spare bedroom had been a more spacious chamber, where you could sit or stand at an angle immune from draughts, or from bumping against some aggressive article of furniture.
I often apologised for the one bathroom, small at that, and for the inadequate supply of hot water. Then you would point to the moss-grown terrace at the back, the cedar tree on the lawn, sloping to the winding river, and the delicate vistas beyond. "Oh yes," I said, "it is the only garden in the world, but the house could be improved on." ”

“ It is a slice of No Man's Land that has never grown anything but weeds. It is relieved by a background of trees, our own chestnuts, Cornelia, whose glory of pink-and-white cones we used to watch till they were mirrored in all their majesty in the clean depths of the backwater above the fall.
When I want positively to revel in heartbreak, to be homesick and unashamedly miserable (which I fear I am most of the time, since Himself retired from the scene) , I go to the uttermost edge of my No Man's Land, where I can hear the rush and tumble of the waterfall, though I cannot see its foaming tears. ”

“ As I ride through the wind and rain between the long lines of tin and wooden huts, see the felled timber, the burned heather, all the ugly features of the military camp, I chalk up more and more against the makers of war. ”

“ We heard a noise like a rushing mighty wind or an express train, going at lightning speed through the air. It was not the usual steady whir of the Gotha's engine. The thing fell in a garden at the top of Queen's Hill and then exploded, doing much damage to houses, though mercifully no one was killed. They say it was an aerial torpedo which travels through the air by its own momentum. If this is true, imagine what magnitude this form of attack might achieve and how much we may yet have to suffer!
How often one is appalled by this dedication of human will and mind power to the devil's service. ”

“ Then sometimes it was the right thing for the bomb to be thrown.
Peace at any price is not the best always; it can be the very worst. And now he is away where there are no letters to answer, not even mine. I haven't had a message of any kind for six weeks—I don't even know where he is.
We live through these things. Thousands of women are eating their hearts out all over the world, just as I am. It is the price of war.
What you tell me about your Anne fills me, not with your disquiet, but with an understanding sympathy. ”

“ His missus has never been found—she has gone down in the underworld, urged there by the very same temptations which made Dan's wife say she had no more use for Dan. Tasting independence of action and of purse for the first time, she lost her sense of proportion. With the well-to-do, it is the sweets of independence that is testing them—with the other sort, the lure of the separation allowances, which means more money in hand than they had ever dreamed of before in their poor, narrow, sordid lives.
There's something all wrong with life, Cornelia. ”

“ The spirit is fine among the women munitioners but sometimes they get tired and discouraged and long for the old sweet peace of home, and the cheerful comradeship of the fireside. It is then that the welfare superintendents, watching with unsleeping vigilance, call to the helpers outside to come and do their bit. I was to speak to them at the lunch hour, half past two in the morning, just to remind them that they are in the trenches too and that they must stand solid and unflinching behind the men who are laying down their lives for us. ”

“ When we are in trouble, his own affairs, however urgent, have to stand by. It is wonderful to have friends like that. They are a shield and buckler in the day of trouble.
Well, I laughed out loud when I read George's cablegram and it did me so much good that I wish he would think up a new one every day, each one more violent than the other. It would never exceed or even fit the crime. Perhaps you wonder how I can joke and play about with words in the midst of what is happening. I have to, Cornelia. ”

“ I seem to have reached the end of my letter just about the time I wrote to you last and the doctor, whom in the absence of Himself, I had to call in, ordered me to go away and take a complete rest—you know the formula—but dear God, how can we rest in a world where there is no rest, and with the thunder of the guns in our ears night and day. It is the Somme fighting now, in which we have lost so many of those we love. ”