s. When darkness fell
he made his way back to the village of Waelhem, where he found a
regiment of Belgian infantry. In one of the soldiers Thompson
recognized a man who, before the war, had been a waiter in the St.
Regis Hotel in New York and who had been detailed to act as his
guide and interpreter during the fighting before Termonde. This man
took Thompson into a wine-shop where a detachment of soldiers
was quartered, gave him food, and spread straw upon the floor for
him to sleep on. Shortly after midnight a forty-two centimetre shell
struck the building. Of the soldiers who were sleeping in the same
room as Thompson nine were killed and fifteen more who were
sleeping upstairs, the ex-waiter among them. Thompson told me
that when the ceiling gave way and the mangled corpses came
tumbling down upon him, he ran up the street with his hands above
his head, screaming like a madman. He met an officer whom he
knew and they ran down the street together, hoping to get out of the
doomed town. Just then a projectile from one of the German siege-
guns tore down the long, straight street, a few yards above their
heads. The blast of air which it created was so terrific that it threw
them down. Thompson said that it was like standing close to the
edge of the platform at a wayside station when the Empire State
Express goes by. When his nerve came back to him he pulled a
couple of cigars out of his pocket and offered one to the officer.
Their hands trembled so, he said afterwards, that they used up half
a box of matches before they could get their cigars lighted.

I am inclined to think that the most bizarre incident I saw during the
bombardment of the outer forts was the flight of the women inmates
of a madhouse at Duffel. There were three hundred women in the
institution, many of them violently insane, and the nuns in charge,
assisted by soldiers, had to take them across a mile of open
country, under a rain of shells, to a waiting train. I shall not soon
forget the picture of that straggling procession winding its slow way
across the stubble-covered fields. Every few seconds a shell would
burst above it or in front of it or behind it with a deafening explosion.
Yet, despite the frantic efforts of the nuns and soldiers, the women
would not be hurried. When a shell burst some of them would
scream and cower or start to run, but more of them would stop in
their tracks and gibber and laugh and clap their hands like excited
children.