If you would realize fully what the war, as an event in the procession of events, means you must come to France and visit a military hospital. You must make this visit not as a sightseer, nor yet in the spirit of a philanthropist, but only as a friend. You must come prepared to listen to stories that have no relation to war and the affairs of war--most soldiers, I think, are reluctant to speak of the things they have seen--to stories that concern home ties and the doings, real and conjectured, of children--queer, sentimental stories woven around old ideas like the Christmas idea and the idea of home. They will fill you with wonder at first, those unwarlike tales, because they belong to the truly unexpected, against which it is impossible to be prepared. It would not be an exaggeration to describe the first effect of them as startling. They kill so many illusions and they discredit so many beliefs. War, rendered thus the background of life, assumes a new proportion and a new meaning. Or, rather, it becomes vague and meaningless, like a darkness. A few days ago I sat by the bedside of a wounded sapper--a reservist--and heard the story of life in a signal-box on a branch line in the North of England. The man was dying. I think he knew it. But the zest of his everyday life was still strong in him. He described the manner in which, on leaving the army originally, he had obtained his post on the railway. He told me that there were three trains each way in the day, and mentioned that on Winter nights the last train was frequently very late. This meant a late supper, but his wife saw to it that everything was kept hot. Sometimes his wife came to the box to meet him if it was a dry night. In the next bed there was a young Scotsman from a Highland district which I know very well. We were friends so soon as he learned that I knew his home. He was a roadman, and we talked of his roads and the changes which had been wrought in them of late years by motor traffic. He recalled a great storm, during which the sea wall around a certain harbor was washed away and the highway rendered impassable. Then, rather diffidently, he confessed that he had lost a foot and would be handicapped in his work--"at Ypres." At the far end of the ward there was a German who spoke a little English. He was a married man and came from Saxony. His wife and children, he said, would miss him at Christmas. We spoke a long time on the subject of Christmas. I suppose by all the orthodox canons that this German should have told me that he was glad to be a prisoner or else should have declared his conviction that the German Army would speedily carry everything before it to victory. But somehow he forgot to say these things and I forgot to ask him about them. These things seemed far away in the quiet ward, even--and for this I beg forgiveness--grotesque and uninteresting.