t. The effect of it on this
absurd greenhouse must have been terrific. Every day they are expecting
the bombardment of the town.

No, none of them are leaving except two. Every woman will stick to her
post[14] till the order comes to evacuate the hospital, and then not one
will quit till the last wounded man is carried to the transport.

It seems that Miss ---- is a hospital orderly, and that her duty is to
stand at the gate of the garden with a lantern as the ambulances come in
and to light them to the door of the hospital, and then to see that each
man has the number of his cot pinned to the breast of his
sleeping-jacket.

Mrs. Stobart, very properly, will have none but trained women in her
hospital. But even an untrained woman is equal to holding a lantern and
pinning on tickets, so I implored Miss ---- to let me take her place
while she went back to rest in my room at Ghent, if it was only for one
night. I used every argument I could think of, and for one second I
thought the best argument had prevailed. But it was only for a second.
Probably not even for a second. Miss ---- may drop to pieces at her
post, but it is there that she will drop.

Outside on the verandah the Commandant was fairly ramping to be off.
No--I can't see the Hospital. There isn't any time to see the Hospital.
But Miss ---- could not bear me not to see it, and together we made a
surreptitious bolt for it, and I did see the Hospital.

It was not like any hospital you had ever seen before. Except that the
wounded were all comfortably bedded, it was more like the sleeping-hall
of the Palais des Fetes. The floor of the great concert-hall was covered
with mattresses and beds, where the wounded lay about in every attitude
of suffering. No doubt everything was in the most perfect order, and the
nurses and doctors knew how to thread their way through it all, but to
the hurried spectator in the doorway the effect was one of the most
_macabre_ confusion. Only one object stood out--the large naked back of
a Belgian soldier, who sat on the edge of his bed waiting to be washed.
He must have been really the most cheerful and (comparatively) uninjured
figure in the whole crowd, but he seemed the most pitiful, because of
the sheer human insistence of his pathetic back.

Over this back and over all that prostrate agony the enormous floriated
bronze rings that carried the lights of the concert-hall hung from the
ceiling in frightful, festive decoration.