What you tell me about the present state of your war activities takes me back about three years to the time when we were at the same stage. Have you noticed that one woman’s matrimonial experience is not of the slightest use to another? It doesn’t even help her to avoid quite obvious pitfalls. War seems to me to be a little like that. Every country has to "dree her own weird" in it—grope for her soul in her own particular way. One of Lloyd George’s speeches put the matter in a nut shell: "To peace-loving peoples war is a trackless waste—an undiscovered country through which a pathway has to be made." That being so, there must of necessity be side tracking. I see your George stamping about in righteous indignation because things are not being "put over" with the rapidity and despatch which seem to him essential. Tell him he’ll just have to possess his soul in patience, and don’t let him do anything foolish. He’ll only hinder thereby. I do hope and pray most fervently, however, that you are exaggerating the state of affairs. I wonder why it is that the war machine has such a tendency to become unwieldy. It needs not any vivid imagination, nor a particularly brilliant intelligence to grasp the magnitude of your war task. You have almost everything the old world now lacks, your trouble is to co-ordinate your forces from sea to sea, and get them into line. Colossus can’t move with the agility of his lesser brethren, we must comfort ourselves and stay our impatience with that reflection. I am sure you will hate leaving your lovely home, but Washington will have compensations. I could not, somehow, imagine or contemplate existence for myself very far from London, in wartime, at least for any length of time. I don’t agree with all you say about the mobilisation of your women for war. There is no other way of doing it; and the things you tell me are only the excrescences of a great forward movement, the shock of which will soon make itself felt throughout the entire country. We, too, had the kind of women you criticise so severely. I knew one whose first act of war service for her country was the purchase of a red cross of rubies to wear with her uniform. She went to France with it, but abandoned it before very long. The real cross, when she came up with it, red with the blood of brave men, put her to shame. She has won the saint’s crown out there, and her name has been on a hundred dying lips. So don’t worry about these little things, Cornelia, they will pass as a tale that is told. The best will remain—the things that cannot be shaken, and which are the same in all countries, and of all peoples. God, how I cling to that text. I have to say it over and over a hundred times a day. We are getting so badly shaken here that sometimes we feel as if we had no foundation whatsoever. I don’t know whether I have made you understand that a big section of England now is as truly the war zone as that across the Channel.