“I think God must want you very badly,” she said, “or He wouldn’t have laid so heavy a cross upon you. You will come?” “God knows I didn’t want it, speaking personally,” said a German prisoner one day, with a laugh. “I had been working at a printing business sixteen hours a day for seven years. It was just beginning to pay me, and now my wife writes me that she has had to shut the place up and sell the machinery to keep them all from starving.”!

Mud! that seemed to be the one word with which to describe modern war. Mud everywhere! Mud ankle-deep upon the roads; mud into which you sank up to your knees the moment you stepped off it; tents and huts to which you waded through the mud, avoiding the slimy gangways on which you slipped and fell; mud-bespattered men, mud-bespattered horses, little donkeys, looking as if they had been sculptured out of mud, struggling up and down the light railways that every now and then would disappear and be lost beneath the mud; guns and wagons groaning through the mud; lorries and ambulances, that in the darkness had swerved from the straight course, overturned and lying abandoned in the mud, motor-cyclists ploughing swift furrows through the mud, rolling it back in liquid streams each side of them; staff cars rushing screaming through the mud, followed by a rushing fountain of mud; serried ranks of muddy men stamping through the mud with steady rhythm, moving through a rain of mud, rising upward from the ground; long lines of motor-buses filled with a mass of muddy humanity packed shoulder to shoulder, rumbling ever through the endless mud. Joan offered to go in and sit with the invalid. But Mary feared the exertion of talking might be too much for him. “He gets so excited,” she explained. She slipped out noiselessly.

“No,” she answered. “I’ve seen all the horror and cruelty I want to for the rest of my life.” “You’ll soon get used to it,” Joan told her. “The great thing is not to be afraid of one’s fate, whatever it is; but just to do one’s best.” It was rather like talking to a child. “It will do him good,” answered Mrs. Phillips; “getting away from them all for an hour or two. I don’t see much of him myself.”