The searchlights flash above the city; the street lights are shaded overhead in foolish fancy as a protection from aeroplanes or dirigibles.  Curtains are closely drawn by police orders, in the houses and railway trains.

Yet one of the airmen who had been over London at night told me that the city was just as conspicuous as though it were wide open in illumination.  Indeed, there is a general call among the Londoners for the police to let up and permit electric signs, lighted windows, and more light in the streets.  But the only answer that came early in December was orders to turn down the lights further!

In Paris they turned on the lights, illuminated the streets, closed up the museums and galleries, buried their art and sent the Venus de Milo on a walk to some storage vault along with the banks’ reserve gold.  London’s museums and picture galleries are wide open, and the endeavor to protect the streets from Germans peering down from above looks childish.  The great strategy of the Germans consists of talking across the Channel about their plans for raiding England.  I suspect that the English military authorities do not object.  It encourages enlistment.  When enlistment gets dull, the Germans stimulate it with some shells thrown on the English coast.

There are only two or three new plays in London this season; the great war-plays and dramas, and indeed the literature of this war, have yet to be written.  Nearly all the new presentations for which London is so famous were set back on the shelf when the business of war started.  Most of the theater programs are revivals of old favorites, and a few of the theaters are still closed.  All that are open begin promptly at 8 P.M.  Five hundred English actors have gone to the front.

You have to make the circuit to find the heart of England at war, but you find it—­horse, foot, and dragoons; men, women, and children.  “Are we downhearted?” answered by a thunderous “No!” Then again silence, and turning down of the lights, and the steady work! work! work!

“Have you a bed here?” said Kitchener when he entered the War Office.  “Never heard of such a thing here,” was the response.

“Get one,” said Kitchener; “I have no time for clubs and hotels.”

Not only Kitchener but the whole staff camped down in the office, working days, nights, and Sundays, until Lady ——­ turned over her house nearby to Kitchener and his staff.

“Where is ——?” I asked of his next-door neighbor.  The response was, “Oh, he is at the War Office, and gets a Sunday home with his family about once in six weeks.”  That family was not fifteen miles from London.

When a citizen has been suddenly notified that where he could formerly get a train for home every fifteen minutes, the railroad has been taken for military service, and he must get his supper in town, there is not the slightest word of complaint.  He only wishes he could contribute more to the Empire.