f miles from Ghent. They are saying that the Germans may enter
Ghent to-day, in an hour--half an hour! It will be very awkward for us
and for our wounded if they do, as both our ambulance cars are out.

Later news of more fighting at Quatrecht.

[_Afternoon._]

The Commandant has come back. They were at Quatrecht, not Lokeren.

Mr. ---- is awake now. The Commandant has taken me to see him.

He is lying in one of the officers' wards, a small room, with bare walls
and a blond light, looking south. There are two beds in this room, set
side by side. In the one next the door there is a young French officer.
He is very young: a boy with sleek black hair and smooth rose-leaf skin,
shining and fresh as if he had never been near the smoke and dirt of
battle. He is sitting up reading a French magazine. He is wounded in the
leg. His crutches are propped up against the wall.

Stretched on his back in the further bed there is a very tall young
Englishman. The sheet is drawn very tight over his chest; his face is
flushed and he is breathing rapidly, in short jerks. At first you do not
see that he, too, is not more than a boy, for he is so big and tall, and
a little brown feathery beard has begun to curl about his jaw and chin.

When I came to him and the Commandant told him my name, he opened his
eyes wide with a look of startled recognition. He said he knew me; he
had seen me somewhere in England. He was so certain about it that he
persuaded me that I had seen him somewhere. But we can neither of us
remember where or when. They say he is not perfectly conscious all the
time.

We stayed with him for a few minutes till he went off to sleep again.

None of the doctors think that he can live. He was wounded in front with
mitrailleuse; eight bullets in his body. He has been operated on. How he
survived the operation and the journey on the top of it I can't imagine.
And now general peritonitis has set in. It doesn't look as if he had a
chance.

* * * * *

We have heard that all the War Correspondents have been sent out of
Ghent.

Numbers of British troops came in to-day.

Went up to see Mr. Foster, who is in his room, ill. It is hard lines
that he should have had this accident when he has been working so
splendidly. And it wasn't his fault, either. One of the Belgian bearers
slipped with his end of a stretcher when they were carrying a heavy man,
and Mr. Foster got hurt in trying to right th