Only I seem changed, and all the things we once accepted as necessities of life are become luxuries, from books and baths to the once despised draught of clear cold water!
Yes, as to the sound of the soft-toned grand we sat by the fire enjoying the ever sweet smell of burning logs, whilst, with the inscrutable smile of one to whom the mysteries of Life and Death are revealed, the death mask of the woman who was found in the Seine looked down from her oak beam, and the hour-glass speeded its atoms along the road to eternity, for the first time France and work seemed anything but attractive.
June 29th. It is worth the journey to be amongst our men again, to be welcomed as they alone welcome one, with hearty handshakes and hopes that one has "come back to stay."
Things have progressed a good deal, too, in our small world. In the beginning, were one only rich enough, or endowed with a title sufficiently illustrious or notorious (it mattered not which), one might rent an hotel or a château, turn it into a French or Belgian Red Cross Hospital, and resort to a little harmless hospital work in France whenever London became boring.
True, the authorities never encouraged these little pleasure trips, but now that Boulogne has been definitely declared within the War Zone, entrance and egress are a very different matter, and it requires quite an amount of strategy for anyone not affiliated to some recognised society, and armed to the teeth with permits, to get here at all.
There seems also to have been a systematic "rounding up" of undesirables, and one by one the so-called "officers," who, in the beginning, had made the nights hideous with their champagne suppers, have disappeared.
Naturally, we too have progressed.
In place of skeleton buildings, well-planned camps lie along the shore, complete even to their Imperial red letter-boxes. Once swampy convalescent camps display smart flower gardens, whilst Thomas Atkins moves about less molested by demands for souvenirs, and somewhat solaced for his enforced absence from home by the welcome accorded to him by his Allies. If the average man's vocabulary does not run much beyond the five phrases, "Bong jour!" "Compris?" "No bon!" "Nar poo!" ("Je ne peux pas!") "Promenade ce soir?" the few exceptions have made remarkable progress.
One wonders what the residents of Brighton would say if a number of friendly French workmen erected all along the Downs a miniature village of asbestos and corrugated iron huts, interspersed with tents and planted with trim little gardens of bright flowers and evergreens; installed pillar-boxes bearing French arms, their electric power-station, their orderly-and mess-rooms, surrounded the whole by a mass of barbed wire, and having notified everywhere that this was Hospital No. ——, to which there is "No Admittance," proceeded to explain smilingly to the bewildered Brightonians that the huts are stable enough to last for seven years.
If one could fathom the conflicting feelings of Brighton under these conditions, one might have some small understanding of the astonishment with which our Allies, already hard stricken by war, contemplate the problem of this little Britain in France.