Meanwhile I find it a real uplifting privilege to live in an air so unterrorized as that of this country, and to feel what confidence we insuperably feel in the big _sea-genius_, let alone the huge sea-resources, of this people. It is a great experience. I mean the whole process of life here is now--even if it does so abound in tragedy and pity, such as one can often scarcely face. But there is too much of all that to say--and all I intended was to remark that while Germany roars and runs amuck the new armies now at last ready are being oh so quietly transported across the diabolised Channel. The quiet and the steady going here, amid the German vociferation, is of itself an enormous--I was going to say pleasure. We have just heard from Burgess of the arrival of his regiment at Havre--they left the Tower of London but a few days ago.... I go to-morrow to the Protheros to help them with tea-ing a party of convalescent soldiers from hospital--Mrs. J. G. Butcher, like thousands, or at least hundreds, of other people, sends her car on certain afternoons of the week to different hospitals for four of the bettering patients--or as many as will go into it--and they are conveyed either to her house or to some other arranged with. I have "met" sets of them thus several times--the "right people" are wanted for them, and nothing can be more interesting and admirable and verily charming than I mostly find them. The last time the Protheros had, by Mrs. Butcher's car, wounded Belgians--but to-morrow it is to be British, whom I on the whole prefer, though the Belgians are more _gravely_ pathetic. The difficulty about them is that they are so apt to know only Flemish and understand almost no French--save as one of them, always included for the purpose, can interpret. I had to-day to luncheon a most decent and appreciative little sapper in the Engineers, whom I originally found in hospital and whose teeth I have been having done up for him--at very reduced military rates! There is nothing one isn't eager to do for them, and their gratitude for small mercies, excellent stuff as they are, almost wrings the heart. _This_ obscure hero (a great athlete in the _running_ line) is completely well again and goes in a day or two back to the Front; but oh how they don't like the hellishness of it (_that_ is beyond all conception,) and oh how they don't let this make any difference! Tremendously will the "people" by this war--I mean by their patience of it and in it--have made good their place in the sun; though even as one says that one recognizes still more how the "upper classes" in this country and the others have poured themselves unstintedly out. The way "society" at large, in England, has magnificently played up, will have given it, I think it will be found, a new lease of life. However, society, in wars, always does play up--and it is by them, and for them, that the same are mostly made....