king--how to get
all the things he had brought with him into one small Gladstone bag and
a sleeping-sack. There was a blue serge suit, two sleeping-suits, a
large Burberry, a great many pocket-handkerchiefs, socks and stockings,
an assortment of neckties, a quantity of small miscellaneous objects
whose fugitive tendencies he proposed to frustrate by confinement in a
large tin biscuit-box; there was the biscuit-box itself, a tobacco tin,
a packet of Gillette razors, a pipe, a leather case containing some
electric apparatus, and a fat scarlet volume: Freud's "Psychopathology
of Everyday Life." All these things he had pointed out to me as they lay
flung on the bed or strewn about the room. He had impressed on me the
absolute necessity of packing every one of them, and by the pathetic
grouping around the Gladstone bag of the biscuit-box, the tobacco-tin,
the case of instruments and Freud, I gathered that he believed that they
would all enter the bag placably and be contained in it with ease.

The night is still young.

I pack the Gladstone bag. By alternate coaxing and coercion Freud and
the tobacco-tin and the biscuit-box occupy it amicably enough; but the
case of instruments offers an unconquerable resistance.

The night is not quite so young as it has been, and I think I must have
left off packing to run over to the Hotel Cecil and pay my bill; for I
remember going out into the _Place_ and seeing a crowd drawn up in the
middle of it before the "Flandria." An official was addressing this
crowd, ordering them to give up their revolvers and any arms they had on
them.

The fate of Ghent depends on absolute obedience to this order.

When I get back I find Mrs. Torrence downstairs in the hall of the
"Flandria." I ask her what we had better do about our refugee children.
She says we can do nothing. There must be no refugee children. How _can_
there be in an ambulance packed with wounded men? When I tell her that
the children will certainly be there if somebody doesn't do something to
stop them, she goes off to do it. I do not envy her her job. She is not
enjoying it herself. First of all she has got to break it to Janet. And
Janet will have to break it to the mother.

As to poor Marie, she is out of the question. _I_ shall have to break it
to Marie.

The night goes on. I sit with Mr. ---- for a little while. I have still
to finish the Commandant's packing; I have not yet begun my own, and it
is time that I should go rou