foot half off,
but otherwise a survivor of the shell that had fallen and burst inside
his home.

Swiftly Hilda in her car, carried mother and child to La Panne to the
great military hospital. The mother died in two hours on the operating
table, and "Pervyse" was alone in a world at war.

The story and fame of him spread through the last city left to the
Belgians. All the rest of their good land was trampled by the alien and
marred by shell-fire and petrol. Here, alone in Flanders, there was
still music in the streets, even if it was often a dead march. And here
life was still normal and orderly. "Pervyse" found shelter in the
military hospital where his mother had come only to die. He was the
youngest wounded Belgian in all the wards. They put him in a private
room with a famous English Colonel, and they called the two "Big Tom"
and "Little Tom." The blue calico was changed for white things and
"Pervyse" had a deep, soft cradle and more visitors than he cared to
see.

* * * * *

The days of his danger and flight were evil days in Pervyse, for the
guns grew busier and more deadly. There came a last day for the famous
little dressing-station of the women. It began with trouble at the
trenches. Two boys of nineteen years were brought in to the nurses. One
of them was carrying the brains of a dead comrade on his pocket. A shell
had burst in their trench, giving them head wounds. They died in the
hall. They had served two days at the front. The women placed them on
stretchers in the kitchen, and covered their faces, and left them in
peace. A brief peace, for a shell found the kitchen, and the blue fumes
of it puffed into the room where the women were sitting. The orderly and
four soldier friends came running in, holding their eyes. When Hilda
entered the kitchen, she saw that the shell had hit just above those
quiet bodies, bringing the rafters and glass and brick upon them. A
beam, from the rafter, had been driven into the breast of one of the
boys--transfixing him as if by a lance. Shells were breaking in the
road, the garden, the field and the near-by houses, every five seconds.
In her own house, bricks were strewn about, and the windows smashed in.
A large hole, in a shed back of the house, marked the flight of a shell,
and behind it lay a dead man who had taken refuge there.

A Belgian had driven up their car a moment before and it was standing at
the door. One soldier started to the