I was coming home. Until the boat lay against the quay I had not let myself believe that I was coming home. It was after sunset. The heaped-up town at the edge of the sea, with its old roofs and chimneys, was black, in a livid, cold, desolate sky, that made one think of the dead. The fields of France were dark as we came through them. The towns had few lights, one felt them to be in grief, and lonely. In each town there was the same pleading at the windows of the train, "Pour nos blessés, pour nos refugiés." We came in the small hours to Paris. The broken-down fiacre dragged through scarcely lit streets that were all empty, and across the great Place, where nothing stirred, and over the bridge of the river, that was as lonely as a river of the wilderness. And then there was my home, where I must dream, all the nights, of homeless people, thousands and thousands of homeless people. London, November I go to the little Soho church of Our Lady of France, to just stay there, not praying or anything. I go just to be with a people who are far from their country in her great need. Most of them are very humble people. There is a smell of poverty always in the little dark church. They are people to whom "home" can mean only some small poor place and things, a thatched cabin, a vineyard, a mansarde over a cobbled street. They kneel in the little dark church and sing-- Sauvez, sauvez la France Au nom du Sacré Coeur-- while alien feet tread hearts down into the stains and bruises of the roads between shattered poplar trees and thatched roofs burning. Paris, just before Christmas I try not to write. The only things worth saying are the things I do not know how to say. Every morning people take up the day like a burden. They carry its weight of dread along the hours, down the length of them to the end. Night comes at last, and they can lay the burden down, perhaps, for a little. When it is over they will look back and know how beautiful this winter was, and what high places they had sight of from the strange far journeyings of the days. When it is over they will know that it was good to work so hard, to give all, to be tired when night came. PART II Small Town Far Off Small Town Far Off Monday, August 2nd, 1915 We thought we had to get away. But there is no getting away. One feels it almost more in the country and in the little towns than in Paris, where life, somehow or other, keeps on. The country stands so empty. The men are gone. They are gone from the cornfields and vineyards and pastures. They are gone from thatched roofs and tiled roofs. From wide white poplar-bordered roads, and steep cobbled streets, and hill paths that are like the beds of mountain torrents, from the wide way of the river, and from all the little ways of the streams. The women are left, and the old people, and the children. The oxen are left. The war has taken the horses and the mules.