… I shall not be able to write you a proper letter until I arrive in Bandol. It is so difficult to get calm and I have spent an immense day rushing after my luggage and to Cook's (who wouldn't ‘arrange’ my affair for me) and to the P.L.M. However, it is all done now and I am in a café near the station with my grande malle enregistrée and page 92 my little' uns at the consigne, writing to you before I go to that Duval where we went, to get some dinner before the train goes.

Everything on the whole has gone wonderfully. It's not a nice journey nowadays, and it was immensely complicated this time by the blizzard. We left Southampton at about 9 o'clock and did not arrive at Havre until after 10 next morning. We anchored for hours outside Havre in a snow-storm and lay tossing and pitching and rolling…. You won't believe me when I say that I enjoyed it. I did. For one thing I had a splendid supper when I got on board—a whack of cold, lean beef and pighells, bread, butter ad lib., tea and plenty of good bread. Then I took a nip of brandy and went right to bed, in a little cabin very clean and warm, with an excellent stewardess in attendance. The upper berth was a general's widow (more of her later) and except for her imitations of a cat with a fish-bone in its throat I was divinely comfortable and slept and woke, slept and woke, but did not move unitil we reached Havre. Then I tumbled up on deck to find everything white with snow. I shall tell you nothing in detail now, for I mean to write it all. It was too wonderful to miss.

We had to spend the day in Havre. So I took a bedroom at a hotel, had breakfast and washed and went to sleep until late lunch. The food in France is simply wonderful. Bread that makes one hungry to look at it, butter, sugar, meat, 7 kinds of cheese for lunch and 7 hors d'oeuvres. Then we started for Paris at 5 to arrive at 9.20. The carriage was packed, unheated, with a broken window the snow drifting in. This was very vile. But a Red Cross old party took me in charge and rubbed me and cosseted me and finally made me eat a dinner which cost 6 francs! but saved me, as we did not arrive until 2 a.m. Then a plunge into the pitch dark and snow, as all the entrances to the Terminus were shut, except the one in the street. God! how thankful I was that I had reserved a room. Crowds were turned away. page 93 But I staggered up a palatial staircase, through ballrooms, reception-rooms, hollows glittering with chandeliers, to a yellow and blue brocade bedroom which seemed to be worth £50 to me. I slept like a top and got up early and—L'Heure! Liberté! La Presse!—saw about all my affairs. It is snowing hard. The streets are all ice and water and so slippery qu'on marche' comme un poulet malade.

All the same, I am unreasonably deeply happy. I thought I would be disenchanted with France this time. But for the first time I seem to recognise my love for it and to understand why. It is because, whatever happens, I never feel indifferent. I feel that indifference is really foreign to my nature and that to live in a state of it is to live in the only Hell I really appreciate. There is, too, dispassionately speaking, a wonderful spirit here—so much humour, life, gaiety, sorrow. One cannot see it all and not think with amazement of the strange cement-like state of England. Yes, they do feel the war, but with a difference. But this, too, I must write about seriously….