depot of two thousand beds. Every day the
ambulance train comes in, and splendid hospital ships are taking the
brave wounded back to England for home and rest.

And now came the day in which they were to motor forty miles to be the
guests of the G.H.Q. Soon they seemed to be in the midst of the battle,
"our own guns were thundering away behind us, and the road was more and
more broken up by shell holes." The British lines are just beyond,
cottages close by, and the German lines just in front of a wood near them,
three-quarters of a mile away. Already they had been nearer than any
woman, even a nurse, had been in this war, to the actual fighting on the
English line, and the cup of impressions was full. They actually saw the
brave boys whom they had passed an hour before, sitting in the fields
waiting for orders, now marching into the trenches to take their turn
there--they knew that they were marching into the jaws of death, but they
walked as quietly and as cheerfully as if they were going to a parade, the
guns crashing close by them all the time. The firing being too hot for the
women, the captain in charge of them was relieved when they elected to
turn back.

The next day, their second as guests of G.H.Q., as they came down from
breakfast, our ladies were surprised to find the motor at the door, a
simple lunch being packed up, and gas-helmets got ready for them to use,
for the captain greeted them in the best of spirits with the news that a
very successful action had been fought that morning, "we had taken back
some trenches on the Ypres-Comines Canal that we lost, a little while ago,
and captured about two hundred prisoners; and if we go off at once we
shall be in time to see the German counter attack." The one impossible
thing for any woman ever to have hoped to see!

Somehow or other they very quickly got to the very post of danger. Soon
they got close to the Tower of Ypres, which Mrs. Ward well describes as
"mute witness of a crime that beyond the reparation of our own day,
history will revenge through years to come." Then the English guns spoke,
and they watched and saw the columns of white smoke rising from the German
lines as the shells burst. The German lines are right in sight, and soon
their shells begin to burst on the English trenches. The German counter
attack is on. All the famous sites of the early part of the war are then
in sight, but all they can fully see is the bursting German shells, as
from mo