I am due back in the French camps in about ten days' time and I am half afraid to go. I can't answer all the questions they will put to me. I don't know enough.
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.
Meanwhile the band is slowly tightening.
We have not had any butter at home for over a week.
XIII
The awful suspense about Himself I was enduring when I wrote last was broken at last by a cable from France. It came from Effie at Camiers and it took me some time to grasp its meaning. "Safe, unhurt; tell your mother," was every word it said.
Florence and I, poring distractedly over it together, could only arrive at the conclusion that there had been a disaster at sea, in which our troopship was involved. We did not even know its name, from what port it had sailed, or whither bound; in fact we did not know he had sailed at all from the French base.
It is the black darkness in which one has to live which makes it so hard to be a soldier's wife in war times. A few more awful days had to be lived through—whole ten of them, then a long, closely written letter from Himself, arrived from a port in France, whose very name was not given.