What a wonderful people the French are for agriculture.... Hardly a man did I see all the days I motored about and about, but I saw mile after mile of cultivated land, the sombrely-clad women or boys guiding the slow ploughs, the rough-coated horses pulling patiently--white horses that looked pale against the bare earth, but a dark yellow when the snow came to show up the tarnishing that the service of man brings upon beasts. Several times I saw English soldiers ploughing, and rejoiced.
We came into the town that was our bourn in the grey of the evening, passed the grey glimmer of the river between its grey stone quays, passed the grey miracle of the cathedral, and then, in the rapidly deepening dusk, turned in through great wrought iron gates into a grey courtyard.
It may have been gathered that, much as I admire both their practical perfection and their spiritual significance, I am no lover of camps, which seem to me among all things man-created upon God's earth about the most depressing. I had lived and moved and had my being in camps it seemed to me for countless ages, the edges of my soul were frayed with camps. From the moment of walking into the old house at R---- a wonderful sense of rest that brooded over the place enveloped me. The thing had an atmosphere, impossible to exaggerate, though very difficult to convey, but I shall never forget the miracle that house was to me.
It was a Hostel for the Relations of Wounded, and there are in France at present some half-dozen of these houses, supported by the Joint War Committee of the Red Cross and the Order of St. John, and staffed by V.A.D.'s. At all of them the relations of badly wounded are lodged and fed free of charge, while cars meet them and also convey them to and from the hospital. This much I knew as plain facts, what I had not been prepared for was the breath of exquisite pleasure that emanated from this house.
The house was originally a butter market, and the entrance room, set about with little tables where the relations have their meals, has one side entirely of glass; the lounge beyond, which is for the staff, is glass-roofed, while that opening on the right hand of the dining-place, the lounge for the relations, has long windows all down the side; so it will be seen that light and air are abundant on the ground floor of the Hostel in spite of the fact that it looks on to a courtyard.