This was how the quiet stay-at-home family felt and thought in the days of the titanic conflict; these were the little things that happened in a little country house. No great moral lesson certainly, no revelation of out-of-the-way philosophy; just the way we hoped and feared; the way we still laughed and talked, gardened and worked, the way we were led on from day to day and made to find, after all, what seemed unbearable, bearable, brought to see light where there was apparently no issue.
Being, as we say--so far--singularly unstricken in the midst of so much mourning, we have been able to enjoy the lighter side of existence, the humours, the quaintnesses, which relieve, blessedly for poor humanity, the most complicated and the most desperate situations. Perhaps, therefore, these random jottings, turned, many of them, to the lighter side of life, may, in some stray hour of relaxation, amuse here and there one actively engaged in the stern actions which the time demands. Perhaps the breath of the garden may be grateful to a mind upon which the wind from the trenches has blown so long.
There is a great deal of laughter about our country, even now. The troops go singing down the roads in the early dawn, and come tramping back to camp, with tired feet, but with joking tongues, after the long days. We know there is much laughter in the fighting-line; innocent, childish pleasantries, catchwords that run with grins from lip to lip. There is no laughter so genuine as that which springs from a good conscience. And so there is laughter in the hospitals also, thank God!
We trust our pages may add a little mirth more to the gallant spirit abroad; beguile the fancy of one wounded man, or the oppression of one anxious heart. Then, indeed, they will not have been written in vain.
Would only that through them we could convey an impression of the surroundings in which we write; would we could bring our readers the atmosphere of these Surrey heights; of the rolling moorland, of the winds, sweet with heather, aromatic with the pine-woods, charged with the garden scents that blow about us; then truly would they find refreshment! Would we could show them our terraced borders where now the roses are breaking into wonderful bloom, pink, crimson, cream, fire-carmine, and yellow; where the delphiniums are arrayed, noble phalanxes in every shade of enamel blue and purple--spires marshalled together like some fantastic cathedral town, viewed in impossible moonlight, out of a Doré dream; where the canterbury bells are beginning to shake out their cups, tinted like the colours in a child’s paint-box; and the campanulas, with their tones of mountain wildness--of snow and blue distance--bring coolness into the hotter tints of the border.