and remembered that the Field
Ambulance was still out, God knows where.

The mess-room windows look south over the railway lines towards the
country where the fighting is. From the balcony you can see the lines
where the troop trains run, going north-west and south-east. The
Station, the Post Office, the Telegraph and Telephone Offices are here,
all in one long red-brick building that bounds one side of the _Place_.
It stands at right angles to the Flandria and stretches along opposite
its flank. It has a flat roof with a crenelated parapet. Grass grows on
the roof. No guns are mounted there, for Ghent is an open city. But in
German tactics bombardment by aeroplane doesn't seem to count, and our
situation is more provocative now than the Terminus Hotel at Ostend.

Beyond the straight black railway lines are miles upon miles of flat
open country, green fields and rows of poplars, and little woods, and
here and there a low rise dark with trees. Under our windows the white
street runs south-eastward, and along it scouting cars and cycling corps
rush to the fighting lines, and military motor-cars hurry impatiently,
carrying Belgian staff officers; the ammunition wagons lumber along, and
the troops march in a long file, to disappear round the turn of the
road. That is where the others have gone, and I'd give everything I
possess to go with them.

They have come back, incredibly safe, and have brought in four wounded.

There was a large crowd gathered in the _Place_ to see them come, a
crowd that has nothing to do and that lives from hour to hour on this
spectacle of the wounded. Intense excitement this time, for one of the
four wounded is a German. He was lying on a stretcher. No sooner had
they drawn him out of the ambulance than they put him back again. (No
Germans are taken in at our Hospital; they are all sent to the old
_Hopital Militaire_ No. I.) He thrust up his poor hand and grabbed the
hanging strap to raise himself a little in his stretcher, and I saw him.
He was ruddy and handsome. His thick blond hair stood up stiff from his
forehead. His little blond moustache was turned up and twisted fiercely
like the Kaiser's. The crowd booed at him as he lay there. His was a
terrible pathos, unlike any other. He was so defiant and so helpless.
And there's another emotion gone by the board. You simply could not hate
him.

Later in the evening both cars were sent out, Car No. 1 with the
Commandant and, if you will believ