At another camp I found the C.O. most anxious for the women to start a Mending Factory--it would be such a help to the men, who, unlike sailors, are not adept at the repairing of their clothes. Also a laundry, he intimated, would be necessary really to round off the scheme satisfactorily. Both these are thoroughly sound suggestions that may yet, let us hope, come to something, though they would be in a sense breaking new ground, as the idea of the Waacs is that they actually replace men. Each cook releases one man, while among the clerks at present the ratio is four women to three men. And there are already six thousand Waacs in France.... Does not this give the obvious reason why slanders, started by enemy agents, have been busy trying to drive the Women's Army out of France? Every Waac who goes to France is like the pawn who attains the top of the chessboard and is exchanged for a more valuable piece. She sends a fighting man to his job by taking on the jobs that are really a woman's after all. For is it not woman's earliest job to look after man? She looks after him to keep him well and strong, she looks after him when he is ill--and now, in France, she looks after the gallant dead, who are lying in the soil for which they fought. Between the pines and the gleaming river with its sandy shoals are the rows of crosses, sparkling, the ash grey wood of them, in the effulgence of the spring light, making hundreds of points of brightness above the earth still brown and bare, that soon, under the gardeners' care, will blossom like the rose. Not a desert even now--for no place where fighters rest is a desert--but a place expectant, full of the promise of beauty to come, an outward beauty which is what it calls for as its right, because it is holy ground. Not only in the merely technical sense as the consecrated earth of quiet English cemeteries, where lie all, both those who lived well and those who lived basely, but holy as a place can only be when it is held by those who all died perfectly.... Here and there, among the earth-brown graves, stooping above them, are the earth-brown figures of the gardeners. Every grave is freshly raked, moulded between wooden frames to a flat, high surface where the flowers are to overflow, and above every raised daïs of earth the bleached wood of the cross spreads its arms, throwing a shadow soft and blue like a dove's feather, a shadow that curves over the mound and laps down its edge lightly as a benison. On each cross is the little white metal plate giving the name and regiment of the man who lies beneath and the letters R.I.P. Here and there is an ugly stiff wreath of artificial immortelles beneath a glass frame, the pathetic offering of those who came from England to lay it there.