e that they were well. Then when the wounded
came in, I thought of these wives and mothers. I knew how they felt,
because I felt so. I knew, as the Belgian and French women know, that
the war must be waged without wavering, and yet I always see war as
hideous. There was no glory in those stricken men. I had no fear of
dying, but I had a fear of being mangled.

One evening I walked into the Convent Hospital where the wounded lay so
thickly that I had to step over the stretcher loads. The beds were full,
the floor blocked, only one door open. There was a smell of foul blood,
medicines, the stench of trench clothes. It came on an empty stomach, at
the end of a tired day.

"Sister, will you hold this lamp?" a nurse said to me.

I held it over a man with a yawning hole in his abdomen. He lay
unmurmuring. When the doctor pressed, the muscles twitched. I asked some
one to hold the lamp. I went into the courtyard, and fainted. Hard work
would have saved me.

One other time, there had been a persistent fire all day. A boy of
nineteen was brought in screaming. He wanted water and he wanted his
mother. In our dressing station room were crowded two doctors, three
women, two stretcher bearers, a chauffeur, and ten soldiers. They cut
away his uniform and boots. His legs were jelly, with red mouths of
wounds. His leg gave at the knee, like a piece of limp twine. I went
into the next room, and recovered myself. Then I returned, and stayed
with the wounded. The greatest comfort was a doctor, who said it was a
matter of stomach, not of nerve. A sound woman doesn't faint at the
sight of blood any quicker than a man does. Those two experiences were
the only times when the horror was too much for me. I saw terrible
things and was able to see them. With the dead it seems different. They
are at peace. It is motion in the wounded that transfers suffering to
oneself. A red quiver is worse than a red calm.

Antwerp fell. The retreating Belgian army swarmed around us, passed us.
In the excitement every one lost her kit and before two days of actual
warfare were over we had completely forgotten those little tents that we
had practised pitching so carefully, and that we had meant to sleep in
at night. Little, dirty, unkempt, broken-hearted men came shuffling in
the dust of the road by day, shambling along the road at night.
Thousands of them passed. No sound, save the fall of footsteps. No
contrast, save where a huddle of refugees passed, thei