he next room has started to moan. Good God, what a
place! He has shell in both lungs, and because of weakness had to be
operated on without an anaesthetic.

2 A.M. I cannot sleep. He is trying to sing "Tipperary."

English battleships are bombarding the German batteries at Nieuport
from the sea. The windows rattle all the time.

6 A.M. A new day now. A grey and forbidding dawn. Sentries every
hundred yards along the beach under my window. The gunboats are moving
out to sea. A number of French aeroplanes are scouting overhead.

The man in the next room is quiet.

* * * * *

Imagine one of our great seaside hotels stripped of its bands, its gay
crowds, its laughter. Paint its many windows white, with a red cross
in the centre of each one. Imagine its corridors filled with wounded
men, its courtyard crowded with ambulances, its parlours occupied by
convalescents who are blind or hopelessly maimed, its card room a
chapel trimmed with the panoply of death. For bathchairs and bathers
on the sands substitute long lines of weary soldiers drilling in the
rain and cold. And over all imagine the unceasing roar of great guns.
Then, but feebly, you will have visualised the Ambulance Ocean at La
Panne as I saw it that first winter of the war.

The town is built on the sand dunes, and is not unlike Ostend in
general situation; but it is hardly more than a village. Such trees as
there are grow out of the sand, and are twisted by the winds from the
sea. Their trunks are green with smooth moss. And over the dunes is
long grass, then grey and dry with winter, grass that was beaten under
the wind into waves that surge and hiss.

The beach is wide and level. There is no surf. The sea comes in in
long, flat lines of white that wash unheralded about the feet of the
cavalry horses drilling there. Here and there a fisherman's boat close
to the line of villas marks the limit of high tide; marks more than
that; marks the fisherman who has become a soldier; marks the end of
the peaceful occupations of the little town; marks the change from a
sea that was a livelihood to a sea that has become a menace and a
hidden death.

The beach at La Panne has its story. There are guns there now,
waiting. The men in charge of them wait, and, waiting, shiver in the
cold. And just a few minutes away along the sands there was a house
built by a German, a house whose foundation was a cemented site for a
gun. The house is de