THE DRAMA OF 365 DAYS
"BUT LIBERTY MUST GO ON, AND . . . ENGLAND"
What startling surprises! We of the lower,
the middle, or the upper-middle classes had
come to believe that too many of the young men
of our nobility had grown effeminate in idleness
and selfish pleasure indulged in on the borderland
of a kind of aristocratic Bohemia, but,
behold! they were fighting and dying with the
bravest. We had thought too many of their
young women (as thoughtless and capricious
creatures of fashion) had sacrificed the finest
bloom of modest and courageous womanhood
in luxury and self-indulgence; but, lo! they
were hurrying to the battlefields as nurses,
and there facing without flinching the scenes
of blood and horror, of foul sights and stenches,
which make the bravest man's heart turn
sick.
Some of the scenes at home in those last days of August and early days of September were yet more affecting. The first of our casualty lists had been published, and they were terrible. They hit the old people hardest, the old fathers and old mothers who had given all, and had nothing left—not even a little child to live for. At the railway stations, when fresh troops were leaving for the front, you saw sights which searched the heart so much that you felt ashamed
