My note from Paris has mocked me ever since I threw it so gaily into the letter box by the Gare de Lyon. That action was indeed the end of the movement, the end of the allegro, the end of anything inclining ever so faintly towards the major.

No, no, never come to France while this bloody war is on. It is tolerable as far as Paris but after that it is the most infernal weariness and discomfort and exasperation. Unendurable! The trains are not heated, they are hours upon hours late, one can obtain nothing to eat or what is much more, nothing hot to drink—they are packed to overflowing; the very lavatories refuse to work.

In such a case I crawled to Marseilles, and caught the most plaguey chill, stiff neck, sore throat, streaming cold that I ever had. Staggering out of the train, carrying my luggage, a pimp in white canvas shoes, eager to reserve a place for a super pimp, swung up the steps and dealt me such a blow on the chest that I am still blue with it. This, thought I, is joliment Marseilles. And it was indeed very typical, in a mild way, of the hours I spent there. Finally, when I had thrown myself into the 2 hours late Bandol train there was a fight between the soldiers and the civilians. The soldiers rushed the train, commandeered it and threw the civilians out, bag and baggage on to the platform—not in any high-tiddly-i-ty take me back to Blighty spirit but in a very nasty temper indeed—in fact, as ugly a crowd as I ever wish to see. They crawled into and over the carriages like apes, banged on the windows, page 103 wrenched open the doors—This seemed to me the comble. But I had happily got into a carriage with 8 Serbian officers and their two dogs and they put up a fight against the soldiers. They took off their dogs' leather leads and tied up the doors, barricaded the entrance to the next carriage and generally behaved as though their eight mothers had born and bred them in the most expensive, rare and exclusive cinema de luxe. Finally after complications innumerable, in the midst of which I became for the railway officials a Serbian, too, and the wife of one of them, they gained the day. It only needed that I should arrive here to find I was not expected, that the hotel had changed hands, was far more expedite and was not heated.

No, I lay down my weapons after that.

Since then I have been getting into bed and out of bed and doing very little else, in no gay fashion. As soon as I have recovered from this cursed chill I'll write again. But at present my jaundiced eye would as lief gaze on the Fulham Road as on this lilac sea and budding mimosa. As the night wears on I grow more and more despondent and my thoughts walk by with long black plumes on their heads while I sit up in bed with your pink quilt round my shoulders and think it must be at least 4 o'clock and find it is just a quarter to 2!

My lovely gay shawl lies upon a chair and I gaze at it feeling rather like David Copperfield's Dora, and wondering when I shall wear it again.

But I suppose all this will pass. It's just another little hell that must be gone through….