While the King in France was visiting battlefields and passing most of his time with his soldiers, the Queen devoted herself to inspecting hospitals and similar beneficent institutions. At each hospital her Majesty went through the wards saying a few words to patient after patient. The first hospital was an Irish one. “Well,” said one Irishman, “you never know your luck. I’d never have been talked to by the Queen if I hadn’t got this wound.” On one journey the Queen by chance came upon three battalions drawn up at a railway station waiting to be entrained. She spent some time speaking with the men. It was all spontaneous, and 3,000 men seldom make more noise than those men did cheering when the Queen entered her motor-car to drive away. There was a pretty scene when the Queen went down the ranks of the drivers of the Women’s Ambulance Convoy of the VAD. In their blue uniforms they were drawn up almost as smartly as any veteran troops, and the officers saluted with a curtsey as the Queen approached.
During her tour the Queen saw a display of flame-projectors, burning oil throwers, gas shells, and smoke barrage, which gave her Majesty some idea of what the horrors of this conflict really are to the men who do the fighting. It was characteristic that what impressed her most was not the ingenuity of the devices, nor even the terror of the spectacle, but the suffering which they must cause to their victims. With the Prince of Wales she drove to the battlefield of Crecy. Here the Prince stood on the exact spot, as tradition gives it, where the Black Prince stood nearly 600 years ago when he assumed the now familiar Prince of Wales’s feathered crest and motto, which had belonged to the slain King John of Bohemia. Her Majesty also visited the Somme battlefield, motoring through Albert, where the great gilded figure of the Virgin Mother still hangs head downwards from the church steeple, out along the Bapaume road, by the great craters of La Boisselle, to the top of the Pozieres Ridge. It is a peaceful scene now that summer has covered the scars of last year’s fighting with grass and flowers, but the ridge is still not far behind the battle front so that the guns were loudly audible, and the Queen saw shrapnel fired at an aeroplane bursting in the sky.
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