countryside are sitting on War Committees, or working for the Red Cross.
Our lives are penetrated by the war; our thoughts are never free from it.

But in trying to answer your questions I have gone far beyond my own
normal experience. I asked the English Government to give me some special
opportunities of seeing what Great Britain is doing in the war, and in
matters connected with the war, and they have given them ungrudgingly. I
have been allowed to go, through the snow-storms of this bitter winter,
to the far north and visit the Fleet, in those distant waters where it
keeps guard night and day over England. I have spent some weeks in the
Midlands and the north watching the vast new activity of the Ministry of
Munitions throughout the country; and finally in a motor tour of some five
hundred miles through the zone of the English armies in France, I have
been a spectator not only of that marvellous organisation in northwestern
France, of supplies, reinforcements, training camps and hospitals, which
England has built up in the course of eighteen months behind her fighting
line, but I have been--on the first of two days--within less than a mile
of the fighting line itself, and on a second day, from a Flemish
hill--with a gas helmet close at hand! I have been able to watch a German
counter attack, after a successful English advance, and have seen the guns
flashing from the English lines, and the shell-bursts on the German
trenches along the Messines ridge; while in the far distance, a black and
jagged ghost, the tower of the Cloth Hall of Ypres broke fitfully through
the mists--bearing mute witness before God and man.

For a woman--a marvellous experience! I hope later on in these letters to
describe some of its details, and some of the thoughts awakened by them in
a woman's mind. But let me here keep to the main point raised by your
question--_the effort of England_. During these two months of strenuous
looking and thinking, of conversation with soldiers and sailors and