st
playing football, its occasional aeroplanes, carrying each two men--a
pilot and an observer.

The men sat about. There were boys with the stringy beards of their
twenty years. There were empty sleeves, many crutches, and some who
must be led past the chairs and tables--who will always have to be
led.

They were all cheerful. But now and then, when the bombardment became
more insistent, some of them would raise their heads and listen, with
the strained faces of those who see a hideous picture.

The young woman who could not buy a heavy coat showed me the villa
adjoining the hospital, where the clothing of wounded soldiers is
cared for. It is placed first in a fumigating plant in the basement
and thoroughly sterilised. After that it is brushed of its encrusted
mud and blood stains are taken out by soaking in cold water. It is
then dried and thoroughly sunned. Then it is ready for the second
floor.

Here tailors are constantly at work mending garments apparently
unmendable, pressing, steaming, patching, sewing on buttons. The
ragged uniforms come out of that big bare room clean and whole, ready
to be tied up in new burlap bags, tagged, and placed in racks of fresh
white cedar. There is no odour in this room, although innumerable old
garments are stored in it.

In an adjoining room the rifles and swords of the injured men stand in
racks, the old and unserviceable rifles with which Belgium was forced
to equip so many of her soldiers side by side with the new and
scientific German guns. Along the wall are officers' swords, and above
them, on shelves, the haversacks of the common soldiers, laden with
the things that comprise their whole comfort.

I examined one. How few the things were and how worn! And yet the
haversack was heavy. As he started for the trenches, this soldier who
was carried back, he had on his shoulders this haversack of hide
tanned with the hair on. In it he had two pairs of extra socks, worn
and ragged, a tattered and dirty undershirt, a photograph of his wife,
rags for cleaning his gun, a part of a loaf of dry bread, the remnant
of what had been a pair of gloves, now fingerless and stiff with rain
and mud, a rosary, a pair of shoes that the woman of the photograph
would have wept and prayed over, some extra cartridges and a piece of
leather. Perhaps he meant to try to mend the shoes.

And here again I wish I could finish the story. I wish I could tell
whether he lived or died--whether he carri