re the high towers are broken,
And houses crack like the staves of a thin crate filled with fire;
Into the mixing smoke and dust of roof and walls torn asunder
You go;
And only my dream follows you.

That is why I do not speak of you,
Calling you by your names.
Your names are strung with the names of ruined and immortal cities,
Termonde and Antwerp, Dixmude and Ypres and Furnes,
Like jewels on one chain--

Thus,
In the high places of Heaven,
They shall tell all your names.

MAY SINCLAIR.

March 8th, 1915.

INTRODUCTION

This is a "Journal of Impressions," and it is nothing more. It will not
satisfy people who want accurate and substantial information about
Belgium, or about the War, or about Field Ambulances and Hospital Work,
and do not want to see any of these things "across a temperament." For
the Solid Facts and the Great Events they must go to such books as Mr.
E. A. Powell's "Fighting in Flanders," or Mr. Frank Fox's "The Agony of
Belgium," or Dr. H. S. Souttar's "A Surgeon in Belgium," or "A Woman's
Experiences in the Great War," by Louise Mack.

For many of these impressions I can claim only a psychological accuracy;
some were insubstantial to the last degree, and very few were actually
set down there and then, on the spot, as I have set them down here. This
is only a Journal in so far as it is a record of days, as faithful as I
could make it in every detail, and as direct as circumstances allowed.
But circumstances seldom _did_ allow, and I was always behindhand with
my Journal--a week behind with the first day of the seventeen, four
months behind with the last.

This was inevitable. For in the last week of the Siege of Antwerp, when
the wounded were being brought into Ghent by hundreds, and when the
fighting came closer and closer to the city, and at the end, when the
Germans were driving you from Ghent to Bruges, and from Bruges to Ostend
and from Ostend to Dunkirk, you could not sit down to write your
impressions, even if you were cold-blooded enough to want to. It was as
much as you could do to scribble the merest note of what happened in
your Day-Book.

But when you had made fast each day with its note, your impressions were
safe, far safer than if you had tried to record them in their flux as
they came. However far behind I might be with my Journal, it was _kept_.
It is not wri