that morning, the three
or four sisters in charge had had to do all the cooking and housework as
well as look after their patients, and now they were keeping calm and
smiling, to subdue as best they could the fears of the Belgian wounded,
who were ready to jump out of bed, whatever their condition, rather than
fall into the hands of the enemy. Each had no doubt that if he were not
murdered outright he would be taken to Germany and forced to fight in
the east against the Russians. Several, who knew very well what was
going on outside, had been found by the nurses that morning out of bed
and all ready to take to the street.

Lest they should hear that their comrades in the Boulevard Leopold had
been moved, the lay sister--the English lady--and I withdrew to the
operating-room, closed the door, and in that curious retreat talked over
the situation. No orders had come to leave; in fact, they had been told
to stay. They did have a man now in the shape of the Belgian gentleman,
and from the same source an able-bodied servant, but how long these
would stay, where food was to be found in that desolate city, when the
bombardment would cease, and what the Germans would do with them--well,
it was not a pleasant situation for a handful of women. But it was not
of themselves she was thinking, but of their wounded and of Belgium, and
of what both had suffered already and of what might yet be in store. It
was of that this frail little sister talked that hopeless afternoon,
while the smoke in the west spread farther up the sky, and she would now
and then pause in the middle of a syllable while a shell sang overhead,
then take it up again.

Meanwhile the light was going, and before it became quite dark and my
hotel deserted, perhaps, as the rest of Antwerp, it seemed best to be
getting across town. I could not believe that the Germans could treat
such a place and people with anything but consideration and told the
little nurse so. She came to the edge of the glass-covered court,
laughingly saying I had best run across it, and wondering where we, who
had met twice now under such curious circumstances, would meet again.
Then she turned back to the ward--to wait with that roomful of more or
less panicky men for the tramp of German soldiers and the knock on the
door which meant that they were prisoners.

Hurrying across town, I passed, not far from the Hotel St. Antoine, a
blazing four-story building. The cathedral was not touched