The scrapbook opens with a poster ‘Taisez-Vous! Méfiez-Vous! Les Oreilles Enemies Vous Écoutent’ (translated as Shut up! Beware! Enemy Ears Are Listening To You) which Eleanor captions: ‘This notice was put up in all rail way carriages, trams, public buildings of all kinds in France’, as well as a list of battles which began in 1916. Like other scrapbooks in the series, Eleanor combines reflections on her own experiences of the war with military battles which she notes on small pieces of paper on the right-hand side of her volume. She continues to demonstrate a fascination with the presence of animals in the battlefield. Eleanor accompanies many of her typescript entries with postcards, photographs, newspaper clippings of the people and events mentioned, as well as other ephemera.

During this year, Eleanor was invited to Buckingham Palace to receive a Red Cross from the King for her First Aid Training work. She continues recording her and her husband’s social engagements, including meeting with government officials and members of the Royal Family. In March, she moved rooms from the Duke of York’s Headquarters to an office in Sloane Street, supported by her secretary, Miss Watkins. This year also marks the Eshers move to France, where Eleanor continues with her work for the Territorial Relief Fund. More so in this volume, Eleanor gives short sketches of some of the people she dines with, including women working in hospitals, as well as journalists.

Events include: visits from Sylvia [daughter]; travelling from Scotland to London; inspecting Colonel Barron’s Convalescent Camp and his new treatments; visits from Maurice [son]; comments on the street lamps being painted over while in London; visiting headquarters of VAD detachment at Devonshire house ‘where female jealously seemed rampant’; travelling from London to Boulogne [France]; visit to St Cloud to see Canadian Hospital and the Edinburgh and Border Hospital in Bois [France]; lunches with Aga Khan; a visit to hospital in Rue de Trevise, overseen by Germaine Cambefort where medals were awarded to patients; a visit to American Hospital at Neuilly to get her husband’s [Reginald Brett] arm X-rayed; reflections on receiving the news of the death of Lord Kitchener; various comments on other nurses involved in the running of hospitals; attending Lord Kitchener's memorial service; holidaying in Versailles and walking in the woods at Little Trianon [France]; purchasing craft items made by soldiers; attending a Review of the Allied Troops; watching a war film at Gaumont Cinema Palace; tea with Prince Louis of Battenberg; dining in the Ritz in the dark; visits to Reckitt-Johnston Hospital and St Cloud Canadian Hospital with Princess Henry of Battenberg; attending a Red Cross Inspection Tour in Paris; visits to Duchess of Sutherland’s hospital in Calais [France], Women’s Emergency Canteens at Compiegne, and various hospitals in Paris; comments on buying postcards painted by soldiers, which are themselves pasted in the volume.

Items include: a photograph of a dog wearing a gas mask; a French calendar; a postcard of two children kissing underneath the mistletoe; Lord Esher’s Report on the Work of the Territorial Force Association of the County of London; a newspaper article reporting on the Bedford Regiment’s adoption of a girl; newspaper article about learning to trust gas masks; photo of a dog guarding his master’s trench; clippings about a cat being a mascot of the Belgian Field Hospital; photo of how mines explode in the North Sea; pressed flowers from Fontainebleau [France]; a poem on Lord Kitchener; flowers picked from Versailles; a newspaper clipping headlined ‘France in England – The Women Workers in the field’; a piece of anti-British propaganda written and distributed in France; a leaflet carrying the title ‘Regulations for V.A.D. members applying for special service’; a clipping on how life is simplified by war; an allegorical drawing of France’s Red Cross by Herbert Ward; various articles on animals and pets in the trenches; pressed flowers bought back from Reginald from the trenches of the Battle of the Somme; various photos from official visits by the King and military officials to the war front; a photograph of Zena [daughter-in-law] when working in Neuilly as a nurse; photographs of sandbags protecting the columns of the Cathedral at Amiens [France]; a letter of thanks from the Women’s Emergency Canteens for a donation.