to the bridge was soon choked. One went away and
returned an hour later and found the same people waiting almost in the
same spot, and, with that wonderful calm and patience of theirs, feeding
their children or giving a little of their precious hay to the horses,
quietly waiting their turn while the cannon which had driven them from
their homes kept on thundering behind them.

That afternoon I walked up-town through the shuttered, silent streets--
silent but for that incessant rumbling in the southeast and the
occasional honking flight of some military automobile--to two of the
hospitals. In one, a British hospital on the Boulevard Leopold, the
doctor in charge was absent for the moment, and there was no one to
answer my offer of occasional help if an outsider could be of use. As I
sat waiting a tall, brisk Englishwoman, in nurse's uniform, came up and
asked what I wanted. I told her.

"Oh," she said, and in her crisp, English voice, without further ado,
"will you help me with a leg?"

She led the way into her ward, and there we contrived between us to
bandage and slip a board and pillow under a fractured thigh. Between
whispers of "Courage! Courage!" to the Belgian soldier, she said that
she was the wife of a British general and had two sons in the army, and
a third--"Poor boy!" she murmured, more to him than to me--on one of the
ships in the North Sea. I arranged to come back next morning to help
with the lifting, and went on to another hospital in the Rue Nerviens,
to find that little English lady who crossed with me in the Ostend boat
in August on the way to her sister's hospital in Antwerp.

Here in the quiet wards she had been working while the Germans swept
down on Paris and were rolled back again, and while the little nation
which she and her sister loved so well was being clubbed to its knees.

Louvain, Liege, Malines, Namur--chapters in all the long, pitiless story
were lying there in the narrow iron beds. There were men with faces
chewed by shrapnel, men burned in the explosion of the powder magazine
at Fort Waelhem, when the attack on Antwerp began--dragged out from the
underground passage in which the garrison had sought momentary refuge
and where most of them were killed, burned, and blackened. One strong,
good-looking young fellow, able to eat and live apparently, was shot
through the temples and blind in both eyes. It was the hour for
carrying those well enough to stand it out into the cour