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[Page 49]

About fourteen of the Nurses are Catholics. Perhaps fifty of the men are the same. To night we shall say the rosary & a litany. The doing of these shows the other sections of the ships company that we are as mindful as they of our duties as Christians.

Major Barrett this morning played the piano during half an hour for me. He plays music. The extracts were for the most part from Wagners operas, the Valkyrie chiefly. I enjoyed it. Reminded me of Melba's company, and the one whereof the old German from Dresden was the conductor for the legendary works taken mainly from Norweigan and Saxon folk lore. One of the effects of the present war will be to throw back for half a century studies of the higher intellectual order. The German mind was well suited to this class of work, but the Prussian Junkers have given the minds and bodies of the Empires people other tasks to perform, and even if they win in the war, which is not thinkable to us, the cost in brains and treasure will have been so great that long years must elapse before the tangled skein of industry and learning can be straightened and set running in its proper spools. The history of the world and of man upon it, has been of such kind that just at the moment when all appears brightest, when the acts of ruling chiefs tend most to peace, a bolt from the blue rushes forth & all is chaos. The Lord appears to so ordain. Hence is it so?

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