ements, or crowded together in the one room that was
left of their home--anything, even death, rather than leave the place
where they were born and where they had passed all their quiet, happy
years.

I knew one woman who lived with her little daughter near the Porte de
Menin, and one day, when the next cottage to hers had been blown to
bits, I tried to persuade her to leave. For a long time she shook her
head, and then she took me to show me her bedroom--such a poor little
bedroom, with a crucifix hanging over the bed and a dingy rosebush
growing up outside the window. "It was here that my husband died, five
years ago," she said. "He would not like me to go away and leave the
house to strangers."

"But think of the little one," I pleaded. "She is only a girl of five,
and you cannot endanger her life like this."

For a long time she was silent, and a tear crept down her cheek as she
tried to decide. "I will go, monsieur," she said at last, "for the sake
of the little one."

And that night she set off into the unknown, fearful to look back at her
little home lest her courage should desert her. She was dressed in her
best clothes--for why leave anything of value for the Germans, should
they ever come?--and she wheeled her few household treasures before her
in the perambulator, while her little daughter ran beside her.

But next morning I saw her again coming back up the street to her
cottage. This time she was alone, and she still trundled the
perambulator in front of her.

I went out, and knocked at her door. "So you have come back," I said.
"And where have you left the little one?"

She gazed at me dully for a minute, and a great fear gripped me, for I
saw that her best clothes were torn and dust stained.

"It was near the big hospital on the Poperinghe road," she said in a
horribly even voice. "The little one had lingered behind to pick up some
bits of coloured glass on the roadside when the shell came. It was a big
shell ... and I could find nothing but this," and she held up part of a
little torn dress, bloody and terrible.

I tried to utter a few words of comfort, but my horror was too great.

"It is the will of God," she said, as she began to unpack the treasures
in the perambulator, but, as I closed the door, I heard her burst into
the most awful fit of weeping I have ever known.

* * * * *

And, day by day as the war goes on, the tragedy of Ypres grows greater.
Each s