When we came to London we saw, even as we whirled through the grey old streets, surface differences between London and the other capitals of the Allies, so striking that they were marked contrasts.  These differences marked the different reactions of personal loss upon the different nations.  France expresses her loss in mourning; she relieves her emotions in visible grief.  Italy does this also; but her losses have been smaller than the French losses and Italy’s sorrow is less in evidence than is the woe of France.  But England’s master passion in this war is pride.  “In proud and loving memory” is a phrase that one sees a hundred times every day in the obituary notices of those who have died for England.  Ambassador Page tells this:  He was asking a British matron about her family, severally, and when he inquired about the son, she replied, “Haven’t you heard of the new honour that has come to us through him?” And to her friend’s negative she returned:  “He has been called upon to die for England!” Now that seems rather French in its dramatics than British.  Yet it reflects exactly the British attitude.  The women wear no mourning.  They do not go about in bright colours by any means.  Bright colours in the war distinguish the men.  But the women do wear dark blues, lavenders and purples, dark wine colours and neutral tints of various hues.  The shop windows of London are bright.  There is a faint re-echo of the time when Great Britain said, “Business as usual.”  The busy life, the shopping crowds, the street throngs, and the heavy streams of trade that flow through the highways of London, prove that London still is a great city—­the greatest city in the world:  and even the war, black and dread and horrible as it is, cannot overcome London, entirely.  Something of the fact that she is the world’s metropolis, more permanent than the war, somewhat apart from the war, and indeed above it, still lingers in the London consciousness, however remotely.

One must not imagine that London is unchanged.  It is greatly changed, for the men are gone.  One sees fewer men in London out of uniform than in Paris.  And the Londoners one does see, all appear to be hurrying about war work.  But it is the women constantly in evidence who have changed the face of London.  Women keep the shops, conduct the busses, run the street cars, drive the trucks, sit on the seats of the horse-drays, deliver freight, manage railway trains, sweep the streets, wait on the tables, pull elevator ropes, smash baggage at the railway stations, sell tickets, usher at the theaters, superintend factories, make munitions, lift great burdens before forges, plough, reap, and stack grain and grass on farms, herd sheep in waste places, hew wood and draw water, and do all of the world’s work that man has ever done.  Now, of course, women are doing these things elsewhere in the world.  But London and England are man’s domain.  It seems natural to see the French women, and even the Italian women at work.  Man is more or less the leisure class on the continent.  But London is a man’s town if on earth there is one, and to see women everywhere in London is a curious and baffling sight.