Our Roman wanderings included a visit to the Holy Father’s Vatican gardens, which are part of the little temporal kingdom a Pope still possesses, and to his tiny “country house” therein, where he goes for change of air(!) in the summer, about two stonethrows from the Vatican. I note: “There are well-trimmed vineyards there; there are pet birds and beasts in a little ‘zoological gardens’; there is the arbour where he has his meals on hot days; and, finally, we were conducted to his little villa bedroom from whose window one of the finest views of Rome is seen, dominated by the Quirinal, within (let us hope) shaking hands distance.” We heard the “Miserere” at St. Peter’s on Good Friday--very impressive, that twilight service in the apse of the great basilica! The unaccompanied voices of boys sounded in sweetest music--one hardly knew whence it came--and the air seemed to thrill with the thin angelic sound in the waning light as one by one the candles at the altar were put out. At the last Psalm the last light was extinguished, and the vast crowd with its wan faces remained lighted only by the faint glimmer that came down from the pale sky through the high windows. Then good-bye to Rome. We left for Perugia on April 22nd. I certainly ought to be grateful for having had yet another reception by my Umbrian Hills! And such a reception that April afternoon, with the low sun gilding everything into fullest beauty! I did my best to secure that moment in miserably inadequate paint from the hotel window immediately on arrival. Better than nothing. But no more of Perugia, nor of dear old Florence on our way to academic Padua; no more of Verona. I have much yet to record on getting home, and after!
Sir William was asked by Lord Wolseley to take up the Aldershot command in the absence of Sir Redvers Buller, who was struggling very desperately to retrieve our fortunes in the Boer War; so to Aldershot we went from Devonport, where my husband’s command ran concurrently. How intensely England had hoped for the turning of the tide when Buller was given the tremendous task of directing our armies! We forget the horrors the nation went through in those days because the late War has made us pass through the same apprehensions multiplied by millions, but there the fact remains in our history that we nearly suffered a terrible catastrophe at the time of which I am writing. Buller, on leaving for the Cape, had said to my husband how fervently he wished he possessed his gift of imagination, and, indeed, that is a very precious gift to a commander. This truly awful state of things--our terrible losses, and the temporary lowering of our military prestige (thank heaven, so gloriously recovered and enhanced in the World War!)--were the answer to the repeated assertion made, when we were at the Cape, by those who ought to have known, that “the Boers won’t fight.” How this used to enrage my husband, whose “gift of imagination” made him see so clearly the danger ahead. Well, all this is of the long ago, and, as I have already noted, it is better to say little now; but the sense of injustice lives!