utiny
of the map of Calais has deterred me. Age would overtake me, and I
should still be threading the maze of those streets, seeking an old
house in an old garden, both growing older all the time.

A very large house it was, large and cold. I found that I was
expected; but an air of unreality hung over everything. I met three or
four most kindly Belgian people of whom I knew nothing and who knew
nothing of me. I did not know exactly why I was there, and I am sure
the others knew less. I went up to my room in a state of bewilderment.
It was a huge room without a carpet, and the tiny fire refused to
light. There was a funeral wreath over the bed, with the picture of
the deceased woman in the centre. It was bitterly cold, and there was
a curious odor of disinfectants in the air.

By a window was a narrow black iron bed without a mattress. It looked
sinister. Where was the mattress? Had its last occupant died and the
mattress been burned? I sniffed about it; the odour of disinfectant
unmistakably clung to it. I do not yet know the story of that room or
of that bed. Perhaps there is no story. But I think there is. I put on
my fur coat and went to bed, and the lady of the wreath came in the
night and talked French to me.

I rose in the morning at seven degrees Centigrade and dressed. At
breakfast part of the mystery was cleared up. The house was being used
as a residence by the chief surgeon of the Ambulance Jeanne d'Arc, the
Belgian Red Cross hospital in Calais, and by others interested in the
Red Cross work. It was a dormitory also for the English nurses from
the ambulance. This explained, naturally, my being sent there, the
somewhat casual nature of the furnishing and the odour of
disinfectants. It does not, however, explain the lady of the wreath or
the black iron bed.

After breakfast some of the nurses came in from night duty at the
ambulance. I saw their bedroom, one directly underneath mine, with
four single beds and no pretence at comfort. It was cold, icy cold.

"You are very courageous," I said. "Surely this is not very
comfortable. I should think you might at least have a fire."

"We never think of a fire," a nurse said simply. "The best we can do
seems so little to what the men are doing, doesn't it?"

She was not young. Some one told me she had a son, a boy of nineteen,
in the trenches. She did not speak of him. But I have wondered since
what she must feel during those grisly hours of the night when the