ause will be a
demand of the people to know what their representatives are doing.
Diplomacy, instead of secret whispering, a finger to its lips, must
shout from the housetops. Great nations cannot be governed from
cellars. Diplomats are not necessarily conspirators. There is such a
thing as walking in the sunlight.

There is no such thing in civilisation as a warlike people. There are
peaceful people, or aggressive people, or military people. But there
are none that do not prefer peace to war, until, inflamed and roused
by those above them who play this game of empires, they must don the
panoply of battle and go forth.

CHAPTER VII

THE STORY WITH AN END

In its way that hospital at La Panne epitomised the whole tragedy of
the great war. Here were women and children, innocent victims when the
peaceful nearby market town of Furnes was being shelled; here was a
telegraph operator who had stuck to his post under furious bombardment
until both his legs were crushed. He had been decorated by the king
for his bravery. Here were Belgian aristocrats without extra clothing
or any money whatever, and women whose whole lives had been shielded
from pain or discomfort. One of them, a young woman whose father is
among the largest landowners in Belgium, is in charge of the villa
where the uniforms of wounded soldiers are cleaned and made fit for
use again. Over her white uniform she wore, in the bitter wind, a thin
tan raincoat. We walked together along the beach. I protested.

"You are so thinly clad," I said. "Surely you do not go about like
that always!"

She shrugged her shoulders.

"It is all I have," she said philosophically. "And I have no
money--none. None of us has."

A titled Belgian woman with her daughter had just escaped from
Brussels. She was very sad, for she had lost her only boy. But she
smiled a little as she told me of their having nothing but what they
wore, and that the night before they had built a fire in their room,
washed their linen, and gone to bed, leaving it until morning to dry.

Across the full width of the hospital stretched the great drawing-room
of the hotel, now a recreation place for convalescent soldiers. Here
all day the phonograph played, the nurses off duty came in to write
letters, the surgeons stopped on their busy rounds to speak to the men
or to watch for a few minutes the ever-changing panorama of the beach,
with its background of patrolling gunboats, its engineers on re