thinkable horrors of
operations go on all day and far into the night. The Hall of the Holy
Rosary is a convalescent room, where soldiers smoke and play at cards.
The Room of the Holy Angels contains a steriliser. Through the
corridors that once re-echoed to the soft padding of their felt shoes
brisk English nurses pass with a rustle of skirts.

Even the cross by which they lived has turned red, the colour of
blood.

CHAPTER XXXV

THE LOSING GAME

I saw a typhoid hospital in charge of two women doctors. It was
undermanned. There were not enough nurses, not enough orderlies.

One of the women physicians had served through the Balkan war.

"There was typhoid there," she said, "but nothing to compare with this
in malignancy. Nearly all the cases have come from one part of
Belgium."

Some of the men were wounded, in addition to the fever. She told me
that it was impossible to keep things in proper order with the help
they had.

"And food!" she said. "We cannot have eggs. They are prohibitive at
twenty-five centimes--five cents--each; nor many broths. Meat is dear
and scarce, and there are no chickens. We give them stewed macaroni
and farinaceous things. It's a terrible problem."

The charts bore out what she had said about the type of the disease.
They showed incredible temperatures, with the sudden drop that is
perforation or hemorrhage.

The odour was heavy. Men lay there, far from home, babbling in
delirium or, with fixed eyes, picking at the bed clothes. One was
going to die that day. Others would last hardly longer.

"They are all Belgians here," she said. "The British and French troops
have been inoculated against typhoid."

So here again the Belgians were playing a losing game. Perhaps they
are being inoculated now. I do not know. To inoculate an army means
much money, and where is the Belgian Government to get it? ft seems
the tragic irony of fate that that heroic little army should have been
stationed in the infested territory. Are there any blows left to rain
on Belgium?

In a letter from the Belgian lines the writer says:

"This is just a race for life. The point is, which will get there
first, disease and sickness caused by drinking water unspeakably
contaminated, or sterilising plants to avoid such a disaster."

Another letter from a different writer, also in Belgium at the front,
says:

"A friend of mine has just been invalided home with enteritis. He had
been drinking from a well