to the right along the Malines road, we drew up in front of
the hospital on our right-hand side. The shell had fallen almost
vertically on to a large wing, and as we walked across the garden we
could see that all the windows had been broken, and that most of the
roof had been blown off. The nuns met us, and took us down into the
cellars to see the patients. It was an infirmary, and crowded together
in those cellars lay a strange medley of people. There were bedridden
old women huddled up on mattresses, almost dead with terror.
Wounded soldiers lay propped up against the walls; and women and
little children, wounded in the fighting around, lay on straw and
sacking. Apparently it is not enough to wound women and children; it
is even necessary to destroy the harbour of refuge into which they
have crept. The nuns were doing for them everything that was
possible, under conditions of indescribable difficulty. They may not be
trained nurses, but in the records of this war the names of the nuns of
Belgium ought to be written in gold. Utterly careless of their own lives,
absolutely without fear, they have cared for the sick, the wounded,
and the dying, and they have faced any hardship and any danger
rather than abandon those who turned to them for help.

The nuns led us upstairs to the wards where the shell had burst. The
dead had been removed, but the scene that morning must have been
horrible beyond description. In the upper ward six wounded soldiers
had been killed, and in the lower two old women. As we stood in the
upper ward, it was difficult to believe that so much damage could
have been caused by a single shell. It had struck almost vertically on
the tiled roof, and, exploding in the attic, had blown in the ceiling into
the upper ward. I had not realized before the explosion of a large
shell is not absolutely instantaneous, but, in consequence of the
speed of the shell, is spread over a certain distance. Here the shell
had continued to explode as it passed down through the building,
blowing the floor of the upper ward down into the ward below. A great
oak beam, a foot square, was cut clean in two, the walls of both wards
were pitted and pierced by fragments, and the tiled floor of the lower
ward was broken up. The beds lay as they were when the dead were
taken from them, the mattresses riddled with fragments and soaked
with blood. Obviously no living thing could have survived in that awful
hail. When the shell came the s