scene, drenched in darkness, is unearthly and unintelligible. You cannot
account for it in saying to yourself that these are the refugees, and
everybody knows what a refugee is; that there is War--and everybody
knows what war is--in Belgium; and that these people have been shelled
out of their homes and are here at the Palais des Fetes, because there
is no other place for them, and the kind citizens of Ghent have
undertaken to house and feed them here. That doesn't make it one bit
more credible or bring you nearer to the secret of these forms. You who
are compelled to move with them in the sinister darkness are more than
ever under the spell that forbids you and them to feel. You are deadened
now to the touch of the incarnate.

On the edge of the lawn, near the door of the Palais, some ghostly roses
are growing on a ghostly tree. Your guide, M. P----, pauses to tell you
their names and kind. It seems that they are rare.

Several hundred more refugees have come into the Palais since the
afternoon. They have had to pack them a little closer in the straw.
Eight thousand were fed this evening in the inner hall.

In the crush I get separated from M. P---- and from the Corps. I see
some of them in the distance, the Commandant and Ursula Dearmer and Mrs.
Lambert and M. P----. I do not feel as if I belonged to them any more. I
belong so much to the stunned sleepers in the straw who cannot feel.

Nice Dr. Wilson comes across to me and we go round together, looking at
the sleepers. He says that nothing he has seen of the War has moved him
so much as this sight. He wishes that the Kaiser could be brought here
to see what he has done. And I find myself clenching my hands tight till
it hurts, not to suppress my feelings--for I feel nothing--but because I
am afraid that kind Dr. Wilson is going to talk. At the same time, I
would rather he didn't leave me just yet. There is a sort of comfort and
protection in being with somebody who isn't callous, who can really
feel.

But Dr. Wilson isn't very fluent, and presently he leaves off talking,
too.

Near the door we pass the family with the little yellow-brown dog. All
day the little dog slept in their place. And now that they are trying to
sleep he will not let them. The little dog is wide awake and walking
all over them. And when you think what it must have cost to bring him--

_C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?_

As we left the gardens M. P---- gathered two ghostly roses, the last