were in Brussels in January after the Armistice. True, my husband was a Brigadier-General, but Brussels was full of them in those days. Like silver in the time of Solomon, they were of no account. Nevertheless, the Belgian War Office sent us all round the battlefields in a military car. Those battlefields! I do not think many women saw them as early as I did-two months after the Armistice, when they were still untouched by God or man. I cannot describe them. Far abler pens than mine have done so many times already. I saw too much. In my mind it is all a confused jumble of mile after mile of desolation unspeakable. Wire, overturned tanks, broken aeroplanes, duckboard tracks, skeletons of horses, shell-holes, craters, and, pervading all, noisome mud, with unnameable horrors sticking up out of it. Ruins as at Ypres, or again at other places just a heap of stones, or perhaps only a nameboard, marked what had once been a village. Before I left Brussels the owner of the chateau of Langemark had asked me to look at her much-loved home, which she had not seen for four weary years, and to tell her how it looked, and whether it was much damaged by the war. I did see the chateau of Langemark.

At

least I saw two or three battered stones and a huge crater full to the brim with mud and water which I was told was the chateau. I am glad I never saw the owner again.

And everywhere the little wooden crosses. The first little wooden cross I saw is my most vivid and unforgettable impression of the wonderful and yet dreadful two days I spent on the battlefields. It was just outside Courtrai, in a ditch I stopped the car and got out, and knelt beside it. Private the Regiment. As

I knelt I began to understand, as I had never understood during the whole four years of war, what war really meantwhat it had meant to Private what it had meant to me. There are some things too deep for tears or words. Dry-eyed and speechless, I went back to the car. Why had I not brought armfuls of flowers ? Why could I not do something to show the dead the pitiful understanding that filled my heart. heart. The little crosses came thick and fast after that—in the ditches, in the fields, on banks, everywhere. I longed to stop the car at each and every one. I hated motoring past. It seemed as if I did not care. But I did care, and

very still, and most unutterably peaceful, and like this I want to remember it. I seem to have wandered very far from War Offices, but I shall always be very grateful to the Belgian one for those days given to me in spite of British regulations. It was soon after this that visitors to the battlefields were forbidden by the French and Belgian authorities, and later on it was not the same thing.

It is quite amusing to contrast the methods of the various military officials through whose hands one passes. I may be prejudiced, but there is one feature of the British War Office, and all our other officials, which I do appreciate, and which endears them to my heart in spite of rebuffs and stern refusals of my simple requests, and that is, that whatever time one goes, however soon after or even before breakfast, all the officials appear to have shaved. Possibly this might not excite any one else's admiration or astonishment. But fresh from visits to our gallant Allies, this little fact impressed me tremendously, and with my eyes fixed firmly on the various chins I came across, I thought that perhaps, after all, I did like Englishmen best. The Americans possibly are the most impressive. An American General, sitting sternly at the head of a long table, with twenty typists typewriting madly-and extremely noisily -ten on either side, was & truly wonderful sight. Every

detail, large or small, was laid before him personally, from the orders for the move of a brigade, marked with a huge red label RUSH, the American equivalent for our word "urgent," to my own little application to enter the American zone in Germany. In spite of these vast labels, and strong and menacing language, I never heard that things got done any quicker. When an American soldier says 'no' " he means

no." I remember trying to buy a tin of their very excellent chocolate from an American canteen at Coblenz on a Sunday. The canteen was open, the desired tin within sightnay, within my reach; but I was not allowed to touch it. It was then 4.30; chocolate could not be sold on Sundays till 5 o'clock. He was a small soldier, but a mixture of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Stonewall Jackson. I basely suggested that no one would know; but he said that he was accountable to his officer, and could not tell a lie. I could not sit and look at that tin for half an hour, so came sadly away.

The following letter is very typical of another charming nation's methods, and of the distinguished man who wrote it. It was written to a certain Commander-in-Chief who we thought might help me to join my husband in Germany, in spite of the British regulations

or it might even have been because of them, I am not sure which, for even the most high

Of course the most delightful thing must be to have a husband at the War Office to really belong to that sacred edifice, to be one of them, to know everything and everybody, to be able to say with assumed carelessness, "My husband is at the War Office." To feel that Poland may become German or remain Polish, that Ireland may become a republic or merely remain a nuisance, that every railwayman and miner in England, Scotland, and Wales may be out on strike for all you care.

mean a move for you, but through it all your husband would remain would remain as immovable, and I suppose as inscrutable, as the sphinx. For any man must become inscrutable, or at least look so, at the War Office. Think of the secrets they must know and keep. Why, some one must even know whether there will be any passages available for officers' wives to India or Timbuctoo next trooping season, and other similar things of fearful import to me. Some one possibly may even know whether or not there will be any Army at all next year. As to this last point, though, I do feel slightly reassured, since a well-known Labour member of Parliament I met the other day assured me that when they are in power they are not going to do away with the Army. His statement took a load off my mind. I should hate to join all the other demobilised officers and their wives who play barrel-organs in the streets, the only way I can think of at the moment by which we could earn a living. The fish trade and all its branches, from the great Mac Fisheries to watching over the muddy little fishes in the Nile, is the last refuge of the retired naval officer; but the Army has no such trade to fall back on. Fish is the perquisite of the Navy. the Navy. Perhaps meat is indicated for the Army, and its connection with butchers would surely please many of the Army Irish critics.

IT was the middle of one of the hottest of hot weathers at Agra. Coming out of the mess after luncheon I glanced at the thermometer in the verandah. It registered 110°. As I walked across to my bungalow a wave of fierce heat as from a furnace blast seemed to strike up at me; the merciless white glare seemed to draw one's eyes out of one's head; the air danced and vibrated in the scorching sunlight. Thank heaven, I I thought to myself, I have only got two more weeks of this ordeal by fire and then leave -leave for two whole months.

It was too hot to sleep or read or even think. The only thing to be done was to subside under a punkah and get somebody else to think for me. I summoned my familiar in the person of Amir Khan, my Mahommedan servant, to my side. "Talk about cool things," I said. He took the cue at once. There was the pressing question of where the Sahib would spend his leave this year to be decided. Last year we had spent our leave in the jungles of the south. It was true we had had good sport and had escaped escaped malaria, thanks be Allah, but it would not be wise to tempt Fortune in that direction again. The Sahib had spoken of Kashmir and Baltistan, but to achieve

anything great in those far hunting-grounds three months' leave at least were required, whereas we had only got two. Without a doubt the place to go to was Chamba. He had visited this glorious mountain land before with a previous master; he knew of a shikari whose name was a household word throughout the countryside. In ten days from starting we should be in the land of black bear, gural, and scrow; in a fortnight in the haunts of red bear and tahr.

Then he launched forth into a glowing eulogy of this heaven upon earth-a country of rushing mountain streams and smiling sunlit valleys; of majestic snow-clad mountains and cool forests of deodar, oak, and pine; of grassy flower-bedecked upland meadows; of fresh lifegiving air from the eternal snows; of rhododendrons and wild strawberries; of apricot and walnut trees. He wound up his panegyric with the words: "It's God's own country."