One by one the hospitals run by well-meaning but little experienced women are vanishing or coming under War Office control. One by one free-lance workers brought to the scene of action by motives of patriotism or curiosity are being banished to their proper sphere or sent home.
It is very hard on them, one realises, after they have given so much, yet, hard though it may be, it is but one of the lesser evils of war.
The position of those members of the Voluntary Aid Detachments still here is precarious to the last degree.
They have been relegated to rest station and canteen work where, in the disused railway trucks they have rigged out so well as kitchens and emergency dressing-rooms, they administer to the wounded on the trains by day and night, veritable angels of mercy, as the men say. Yet none of them is allowed to do hospital work. One cannot help wondering that the authorities do not utilise them as probationers under trained nurses instead of using up the strength of the qualified workers in menial jobs. But apparently the law out here is "scrap and discard," which may be a good motto for Ford cars, but seems somewhat hard on human beings.
December 17th. The news of the bombardment of Scarborough, the wholesale slaughter of women and children, which has just come through, must be greatly gratifying to the Germans!
We wonder if it will bring the reality of war home to the people of England.
December 18th. The craving for music, for something to relieve the tension, is almost unbearable. Fortunately, the French attitude towards piano playing has slightly relaxed lately; they no longer stand agape at the idea of overwrought nurses enjoying a few simple songs, and we have been able to hire some well-worn copies of popular tunes to strum on the exceedingly out-of-tune piano. What we lack in music we are repaid for by the picturesqueness of Boulogne. Here stand a batch of khaki Tommies surrounded by an admiring group of French children. "Eengleesh soldyer," they cry gleefully, clinging to the men's arms and not to be moved until some souvenir has been obtained, a button, a hat badge, a cigarette-end. Along the front, the incessant tramp of feet by day and night, recruits, young conscripts full of life and enthusiasm, squads of more sombre men who have already received their baptism of fire, trams laden with Army and Red Cross nurses, the former in their ugly red capes so successfully devised by Florence Nightingale to hide the human form divine.
The stormy nights, too, are very beautiful, when one may watch the searchlights catching the crested waves, until the sea seems alight with a myriad lightships.
The papers tell us of the appointment of Prince Hussein Kamel Pasha as Sultan of Egypt. It seems such a wonderfully clever diplomatic coup that it drives all thoughts of our surroundings from our minds.