m Dusseldorf and a
school-teacher from Coblenz among them. Catholic and Protestant,
Belgian and French and German, they all labored together, cheerfully and
earnestly doing drudgery of the most exacting, the most unpleasant
sorts.

One of the patronesses of the hospital, who was also its manager ex
officio, had just left with a soldier chauffeur for a guard and a
slightly wounded major for an escort. She was starting on a three-
hundred-mile automobile run through a half subdued and dangerous
country, meaning to visit base hospitals along the German frontier until
she found a supply of anti-tetanus serum. Lockjaw, developing from
seemingly trivial wounds in foot or hand, had already killed six men at
Chimay within a week. Four more were dying of the same disease. So,
since no able-bodied men could be spared from the overworked staffs of
the lazarets, she was going for a stock of the serum which might save
still other victims. She meant to travel day and night, and if a bullet
didn't stop her and if the automobile didn't go through a temporary
bridge she would be back, she thought, within forty-eight hours. She
had already made several trips of the sort upon similar missions. Once
her car had been fired at and once it had been wrecked, but she was
going again. She was from near Cologne, the wife of a rich manufacturer
now serving as a captain of reserves. She hadn't heard from him in four
weeks. She didn't know whether he still lived. She hoped he lived, she
told us with simple fortitude, but of course these times one never knew.

It was just before sundown. The nuns had gone upstairs to their little
chapel for evening services. Through an open window of the chapel just
above my head their voices, as they chanted the responses between the
sonorous Latin phrases of the priest who had come to lead them in their
devotions, floated out in clear sweet snatches, like the songs of vesper
sparrows. Behind me, in a paved courtyard, were perhaps twenty wounded
men lying on cots. They had been brought out of the building and put in
the sunshine. They were on the way to recovery; at least most of them
were. I sat facing a triangular-shaped square, which was flanked on one
of its faces by a row of shuttered private houses and on another by the
principal church of the town, a fifteenth-century structure with outdoor
shrines snuggled up under its eaves. Except for the chanting of the
nuns and the braggadocio booming of