‘The book will be a very prized memento, not only of a gifted writer who did so much to bring home to the ignorant the whole significance of our effort in the war; but also of a great Englishwoman, and of the happy breaks in our work marked by her visits to the First Army in France.
‘What strikes me most in your mother’s book is her marvellous insight into the way of thinking of the soldiers—I mean those who knew most of what was really happening—who were actually engaged in the great struggle. One would say the book was written by one who had played a prominent part in the War in France, and with knowledge of the thoughts of the high directing staffs. This is no compliment; it can only come from the trained expression of a very deep sympathy, and complete understanding of the thoughts and views which were expressed to her by those high in command.
“I can well understand what a strain such intense concentration of thought must have meant, when combined with the fatigues of travel over great distances on the French roads, and the regrets and delays in publication. But the completed book and its predecessors are a very precious legacy, especially to those of us who saw the whole long struggle in France.”
Mrs. Ward’s health improved to a certain extent during the summer of this year (1919), so that she was able to enjoy on Peace Day (July 19) the great procession of Victory, watching it from the enclosure outside Buckingham Palace. “Foch saluting was a sight not to be forgotten,” she wrote. “A paladin on horseback, saluting with a certain melancholy dignity—a figure of romance.” But she was mainly at Stocks during all this summer, basking in the golden weather of that year, delighting in a few Sunday gatherings of friends and in the weekly visits of her grandchildren, who were now domiciled at Berkhamsted, five miles away, and whom nothing could keep away, on Sundays, from Stocks, with its tennis-court, its strawberries—and “Gunny”!
...“I shall always think of her particularly,” wrote Mrs. Robert Crawshay afterwards, “sitting in her garden that last beautiful summer at Stocks, with her wonderful expression of wisdom and the kindness that prevented anyone feeling rebuked by her being on a much higher level than themselves—her interest so generously given, her pain never mentioned, her eyes lighting up with love as the children came across the lawn, an atmosphere of beauty and peace all around her.”
Much talk was heard on the lawn, as the summer passed on, about the peace terms and the prospects of any recovery in Europe, and it is recorded that although Mrs. Ward approved on the whole of the terms she thought it the height of unwisdom to have allowed the Germans no voice in discussing them before the signature. In Russia her heart was passionately with the various rebels who arose to dispute the tyranny of the Soviets, and as each hope faded she felt the horrors of that tragic land more acutely. But most of all did she feel the tragedy of the children of Austria and Central Europe, so that one of her last speeches was devoted to pleading, at Berkhamsted, the cause of the Save the Children Fund.[40] It was noticed that day how white and frail was her look, but all the more for that did her appeal find its way to the hearts of her audience. The children of Germany must be fed as well as the rest, she said; “we have no war with children,” and she recalled the lovely lines of Blake which describe the angels moving through the night:
“If they see any weeping
That should have been sleeping
They pour sleep on their head
And sit down by their bed.”
“There are hundreds of thousands of children at this moment who on these beautiful October nights ‘are weeping that should have been sleeping’—It is for this country, it is for you and me, to play the part of angels of succour to these poor little ones wherever they may be, to feed and clothe and cherish them in the name of our common humanity and our common faith.”
In the meantime the unrelenting pressure of war taxation on her own income had made it imperative, at last, to give up the house in Grosvenor Place which had been her London home for nearly thirty years. Mrs. Ward slept there for the last time on August 29, 1919, and wrote of her parting from it the next day to J. P. T.