BLANCHE'S LETTERS:  WAR GOSSIP

Park Lane.

DEAREST DAPHNE, 

The situation here is unchanged though we leave made some progress in knitting. Forgive me, m'amie, but one does get so much into the dispatch habit! The other day I'd a letter from Babs in which she told me she'd "nothing fresh to report on her right wing" before she pulled herself together.

Norty's at the front as a flying-man. He's finding out all sorts of things, dropping bombs on Zeppelins and covering himself with glory. I had a few lines from him last week. He dated from "A place in Europe" (they have to be enormously cautious) and said he was having the time of his life. He was immensely pleased with the last letter I managed to get through to him, and was particularly struck, he says, with my advice to him: "Find out all you can and above all don't get caught;" he considers it simply invaluable advice and says all airmen ought to have it written up in letters of gold somewhere or other.

Stella Clackmann's had a fortnight's training as a nurse and is off. I ran in to see the dear thing the night before she left. She'd been posing to a photographer in her Red Cross uniform for hours and hours and was almost in a state of collapse, but the heroic darling said she was ready to do even more than that for her country. In one photo she's sitting by a cot with her hands folded looking sad but very sweet. In another she 's standing up; singing "It's a long way to Tipperary;" and in a third she's bandaging someone (she had one of the footmen in for this photo) and a mon avis, it's the least successful of all. She appears to be choking the poor man! However they're immensely charming and will all be seen in the "Aristocratic Angels of Mercy" page of next week's People of Position.

Dear Professor Dimsdale has only just got back to England from his eclipse expedition. I'm not sure now whether it was an eclipse or an occultation, but anyhow the only place where it could be properly seen was a mountain in the Austrian Tyrol. It was due in the middle of August, and the last week in July the Professor set off with his big telescope and his lenses and his assistants and his note-books and everything that was his. He lived a week or two on the mountain to get used to the atmosphere and prepare all his things, so he didn't know what was going on in the world below. And then just as the eclipse or whatever it was began, and the Professor was looking up at the sky for all he was worth, a lot of fearful creatures came rushing up the mountain and said there was a war and that he was an alien enemy and that he was making signals and that his big telescope was a new sort of howitzer; and they pushed him down the mountain and broke his telescope and all his lenses and tore up his notebooks and shook their fists at him and used such language that he said for the first time in his life he was sorry he such such a good linguist!

They finished by shutting him up in a fortress and there he'd been ever since. He hardly knows how it was he got away but he believes the whole garrison was marched off to meet the Russians and that they're all prisoners now which is his only drop of comfort. I've tried to console him for having missed what he went to see. I said, "Perhaps the eclipse or whatever it was will happen again soon, or one like it." He groaned out, "My dear lady that particular conjunction of the heavenly bodies will not occur again for 2,645 years 9 months 3 weeks and 2 days." So there it is, my dearest!

Would it cheer you up to hear a small romance of war and knitting? Here it is, then. Some time ago Monica Jermyn brought round some terrific mitts she'd knitted to go in one of my parcels for the troop . She's easily the worst knitter who ever held needles! "My dear child" I said, "what simply ghastly mitts! They're full of mistakes." "What's it matter?" Monica answered.. "Mistakes will keep them quite as warm as the right stitches. Besides they 're all right. I knit ever so much better now than when I used to make socks for the Deep Sea Fisherman last year." "That's not saying much," I said. "I remember those socks for the Deep Sea Fishermen and I doubt whether even the deepest sea fisherman would know how to put them on! What's this ?" "It's a message to go with the mitts," replied Monica. This was the message: --"The girl who made these mitts hopes they will be a comfort to some dear brave hands fighting for her and her sisters in England." "Oh my dear!" I remonstrated. "It's very young and romantic of you but don't you think it's just a little--" "No I don't!" she cried. " And if it is I don't care. Please, please let it go!" So it went.

Soon after that the Jermyns went down to their place in Sussex and later I heard they'd some convalescent war heroes as guests. Monica wrote me: "All six of them are dear brave darlings, of course, but one of them is darlinger than the others. Tell it not in Gath, dear Blanche, but I think I've met my fate!" Later she wrote: "He's getting on splendidly. He turns out to be a cousin of the Flummerys. He performed prodigies of valour but won't say a word about it . When he leaves us my heart will quite quite break, and I sometimes hope his will too!"

Yesterday came the following: "Claude and I belong to each other. And what, oh what, do you think helped to lead up to the dear delicious finale? But wait. My hero is almost quite well now and this morning, when we took what would have been our last little walk in the grounds it happened! He walks beautifully now though he still needs an arm at about the level of mine to lean on. It was a chilly morning and as l was looking down and trying to think of something to say I gave a sudden shriek for on his dear heroic wrists I recognised My Mitts! And after he heard I'd made them, he was just as confused as I was. 'They were in a bale of comfies sent to my company,' he said, 'and I had the ladling out of them to the men. But when I came to these mitts with the sweet little message pinned to them I simply couldn't part with them! And to think you made them, and wrote the little message! It makes one believe in all those psychic what-d'-you-call-'ems.'

"I felt a crisis was coming and so I said hurriedly 'Oh, I only wish they were worthier of brave hands and wrists. I'm a wretched knitter, they're full of mistakes, I kept forgetting to keep to the pattern-- it ought to have been "knit two together and make one"-- but of course you don't understand knitting.' 'I understand it right enough if that's all there is to it' he said. '"Knit two together and make one." Monica-- no, you mustn't run away--' And that's all you're going to be told, Blanche, except that the powers that be have given their consent and I'm too happy for words!"

Et voila mon petit roman de guerre et de tricotage.

My poor Josiah is still at the uttermost edge of beyond. He began to come home and the boat was chased and ran to an island for shelter and then the island was taken by one of our enemies and he was a prisoner. Then it was retaken by one of the Allies and he was free again. Since then more things have happened and he's been a prisoner again and free again. And now he's lost count and says he doesn't know what he is or who's got the island!

Ever thine,

 BLANCHE.

From:  Punch, October 11, 1914