This forward detachment of the Red Cross was always keen and united. It worked under fire during a time of retreat, and all its members had the George medal for courage. When I was with them it was a slack time; and the result was that one member of the band after another felt the effects of the previous stress and had to go off to Russia. Now they had struck another period of arduous work, and the absent ones were returning with a few new additions. Work pulls people together, especially out here, and they were making more effort than ever. When I reached their very modest quarters (two rooms: one for the sisters and one for the men), I could not make out where the ambulance rooms ended, because each member's bed in the detachment was occupied by a wounded man or invalid awaiting the evacuation train. Here was an old colonel (they had nursed several here); there was a private, who had won first the George Cross and then a commission. Judging by my own experience, I fully expected the train to be hours late, and thought the detachment would get no sleep till the morning. However, the train drew up, the officers thanked and kissed the gentlemen of the detachment, and the room was clear. I had a warm welcome from my friends, and a bed was found for me. The next day I had an interesting talk with some cordial officers at the staff of a brigade which had taken 7000 prisoners, or almost the number of its own men, from the enemy since December. In all the regiments in the Austrian army the various nationalities were now hopelessly mixed up. They told me of a Serbian, an officer in an Austrian regiment, who had been court-martialled and transferred for not joining, at a banquet, in toasting the extermination of Serbia. All the Austrians, they said, are now for peace, and the military oath, to which, in this non-national state, the greatest significance is attached, is the only deterrent from wholesale surrender. As always elsewhere at the front, I found the greatest enthusiasm for the work of England in the allied cause. I ended this journey in an ambulance train standing at Mezolaborcz, which is already Hungary. The chief of the train, though I did not know him, gave me a clear night's rest, with luxuries of every kind, including English tobacco, of which he insisted on making me up a packet for my journey. But the best of the evening was, as so often, a clever and fascinating conversation on the war and the future of Russia and England. There is matter in this subject for all sorts of interesting suggestion, but one seldom meets any difference of opinion on one point, namely, that after the war the relations of the two countries will assume a far wider importance, political, economic and, above all, social, and that they will be among the chief factors that make for the peace of Europe. _April 19._