; I mean the motor-car which is the
property of his paper.

In the afternoon Mademoiselle F. called to take me to the Palais des
Fetes. We stopped at a shop on the way to buy the Belgian Red Cross
uniform--the white linen overall and veil--which you must wear if you
work among the refugees there.

Madame F. is very kind and very tired. She has been working here since
early morning for weeks on end. They are short of volunteers for the
service of the evening meals, and I am to work at the tables for three
hours, from six to nine P.M. This is settled, and a young Red Cross
volunteer takes me over the Palais. It is an immense building, rather
like Olympia. It stands away from the town in open grounds like the
Botanical Gardens, Regent's Park. It is where the great Annual Shows
were held and the vast civic entertainments given. Miles of country
round Ghent are given up to market-gardening. There are whole fields of
begonias out here, brilliant and vivid in the sun. They will never be
sold, never gathered, never shown in the Palais des Fetes. It is the
peasants, the men and women who tilled these fields, and their children
that are being shown here, in the splendid and wonderful place where
they never set foot before.

There are four thousand of them lying on straw in the outer hall, in a
space larger than Olympia. They are laid out in rows all round the four
walls, and on every foot of ground between; men, women and children
together, packed so tight that there is barely standing-room between any
two of them. Here and there a family huddles up close, trying to put a
few inches between it and the rest; some have hollowed out a place in
the straw or piled a barrier of straw between themselves and their
neighbours, in a piteous attempt at privacy; some have dragged their own
bedding with them and are lodged in comparative comfort. But these are
the very few. The most part are utterly destitute, and utterly
abandoned to their destitution. They are broken with fatigue. They have
stumbled and dropped no matter where, no matter beside whom. None turns
from his neighbour; none scorns or hates or loathes his fellow. The
rigidly righteous _bourgeoise_ lies in the straw breast to breast with
the harlot of the village slum, and her innocent daughter back to back
with the parish drunkard. Nothing matters. Nothing will ever matter any
more.

They tell you that when darkness comes down on all this there is hell.
But you do not believ