We found ourselves at noon in a large town with four hours' leisure before us. An R.T.O.--we reported to every R.T.O. we could find--recommended an excellent restaurant. M. shaved and washed elaborately in a small basin which the thoughtful proprietor had placed in the passage outside the dining-room door. We had a huge meal and made friends with a French officer who was attached to some of our troops as interpreter. He had spent two years before the war at Cambridge. There perhaps, more probably elsewhere, he had been taught that Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb are the most influential people in England, and that Mr. H. G. Wells, though not from a purely literary point of view a great writer, is the most profound philosopher in the world. He deeply lamented the fact that compulsory military service had just been introduced into England. "The last fortress of individual liberty," he said, "has fallen. The world is now militarised." I reminded him that Ireland still remained a free country; but he did not seem consoled. He took the view that the Irish, though not compelled to fight, are an oppressed people. I found that interpreter an interesting man, though he would not talk about the early fighting at Charleroi where he had been wounded. I should much rather have heard about that. Lyrical eulogies of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb seemed out of place. I had been "militarised" for no more than four days. But I already felt as if the world in which clever people suppose themselves to think were a half-forgotten dream. The only reality for me was that other world in which men, who do not profess to be clever, suppose themselves to be doing things. On the whole the soldiers, though they fuss a good deal, seem to have a better record of actual accomplishment than the thinkers. The last stage of our journey--an affair of some six hours--was unexciting. I think I should have slept through the whole of it if it had not been for a major, plainly a "dug-out" who had not gone soldiering for many years. He had landed from England a day before we did, and had, by his own account, been tossed about northern France like a shuttlecock, the different R.T.O.'s he dealt with being the battledores. He had been put into trains going the wrong way, dragged out of them and put into others which did not stop at his particular station. He was hungry, which he disliked; dirty, which he disliked still more; and was beginning to lose hope of ever reaching his destination. M. slept; but then M. was at the far end of the compartment. The other three people with us were French, and the major could not speak their language. It was to me that he expressed his feelings, so I could not sleep.