g
market town. Then through an aperture that had been a window I saw
three women sitting round a candle. And in the next street I found a
man on his knees on the pavement, working with bricks and a trowel.

He explained that he had closed up a small cellar-way. His family had
no place else to go and were coming in from the fields, where they had
sought safety, to sleep in the cellar for the night. He was leaving a
small aperture, to be closed with bags of sand, so that if the house
was destroyed over them in the night they could crawl out and escape.

He knelt on the bricks in front of the house, a patient, resigned
figure, playing no politics, interested not at all in war and
diplomacy, in a way to the sea or to a place in the sun--one of the
millions who must adapt themselves to new and fearsome situations and
do their best.

That night, sitting at dinner in a hotel, I saw two pretty nurses come
in. They had been relieved for a few hours from their hospital and
were on holiday.

One of them had a clear, although musical voice. What she said came to
me with great distinctness, and what she was wishing for was a glass
of American soda water!

Now, long months before I had had any idea of going to the war I had
read an American correspondent's story of the evacuation of Antwerp,
and of a tall young American girl, a nurse, whom the others called
Morning Glory. He never knew the rest of her name. Anyhow, Morning
Glory leaped into my mind and stayed there, through soup, through
rabbit, which was called on the menu something entirely different,
through hard cakes and a withered orange.

So when a young lieutenant asked permission to bring them over to meet
me, I was eager. It was Morning Glory! Her name is really Glory, and
she is a Southern girl Somewhere among my papers I have a snapshot of
her helping to take a wounded soldier out of an ambulance, and if the
correspondent wants it I shall send it to him. Also her name, which he
never knew. And I will verify his opinion that it is better to be a
Morning Glory in Flanders than to be a good many other things that I
can think of.

CHAPTER XXXVI

HOW AMERICANS CAN HELP

With the possible exception of Germany, which seems to have
anticipated everything, no one of the nations engaged appears to have
expected the fearful carnage of this war. The destructive effect of
the modern, high-explosive shell has been well known, but it is the
trench form of warfare wh