t and giving
them their afternoon's airing and smoke. One had lost an arm, another,
a whimsical young Belgian, had only the stump of a left leg. When we
started to lift him back into his bed, he said he had a better way than
that. So he put his arms round my neck and showed me how to take him by
the back and the well leg.

"Bon!" he said, and again "Bon!" when I let him down, and then, reaching
out and patting me on the back, "Bon!" he smiled again.

That night, behind drawn curtains which admitted no light to the street,
we dined peacefully and well, and, except for this unwonted seclusion,
just outside which were the black streets and still the endless
procession of carts and wagons and shivering people, one might have
forgotten, in that cheerfully lighted room, that we were not in times of
peace. We even loitered over a grate fire before going to bed, and
talked in drowsy and almost indifferent fashion of whether it was
absolutely sure that the Germans were trying to take the town.

It was almost exactly midnight that I found myself listening, half
awake, to the familiar sound of distant cannon. One had come to think
of it, almost, as nothing but a sound; and to listen with a detached and
not unpleasant interest as a man tucked comfortably in bed follows a
roll of thunder to its end or listens to the fall of rain.

It struck me suddenly that there was something new about this sound; I
sat up in bed to listen, and at that instant a far-off, sullen "Boom !"
was followed by a crash as if lightning had struck a house a little way
down the street. As I hurried to the window there came another far-off
detonation, a curious wailing whistle swept across the sky, and over
behind the roofs to the left there was another crash.

One after another they came, at intervals of half a minute, or screaming
on each other's heels as if racing to their goal. And then the crash
or, if farther away, muffled explosion as another roof toppled in or
cornice dropped off, as a house made of canvas drops to pieces in a
play.

The effect of those unearthly wails, suddenly singing in across country
in the dead of night from six--eight--ten miles away--Heaven knows
where--was, as the Germans intended it to be, tremendous. It is not
easy to describe nor to be imagined by those who had not lived in that
threatened city--the last Belgian stronghold--and felt that vast, unseen
power rolling nearer and nearer. And now, all at once, it was