... The guns are booming heavily this morning. Nothing seems to
correspond. Are men really falling and dying in agonies quite close to
us? I believe we ought to see less or more--be nearer the front or
further from it. Or is it that nothing really changes us? Only war
pictures and war letters remain as a fixed blazing standard. The
soldiers in the trenches are quite as keen about sugar in their coffee
as we are about tea. No wonder men have decided that one day we must put
off flesh. It is far too obstrusive....

... To comfort myself I try to remember that Wellington took his old
nurse with him on all his campaigns because she was the only person who
washed his stocks properly....

... Surely the expense of the thing will one day put a stop to war. We
are spending two million sterling per day, the French certainly as much,
the Germans probably more, and Austria and Russia much more, in order to
keep men most uncomfortably in unroofed graves, and to send high
explosives into the air, most of which don't hit anything. Surely, if
fighting was (as it is) impossible in this flooded country in winter, we
might have called a truce and gone home for three months, and trained
and drilled like Christians on Salisbury Plain!...

... Health--_i.e._, bad health--obtrudes itself tiresomely. I am ill
again, and, fortunately, few people notice it, so I am able to keep on.
A festered hand makes me awkward; and as I wind a bandage round it and
tie it with my teeth, I once more wish I was a Belgian refugee, as I am
sure I would be interesting, and would get things done for me!

A sick Belgian artist, M. Rotsartz{3}, is doing a drawing of me. I go to