r children beside
them, their household goods, or their old people, on their backs. We
picked up the wounded. There was no time for the dead. In and out and
among that army of ants, retreating to the edge of Belgium and the sea,
we went. There seemed nothing but to return to England.

The war minister of Belgium saw us. He placed his son, Lieutenant Robert
de Broqueville, in military command of us. We had access to every line,
all the way to the trench and battlefield. We became a part of the
Belgian army. We made our headquarters at Furnes. Luckily, a physician's
house had been deserted, with china and silver on the table, apples,
jellies and wines in the cellar. We commandeered it.

Winter came. The soldiers needed a dressing station somewhere along the
front from Nieuport to Dixmude. Mrs. Knocker established one thirty
yards behind the front line of trenches at Pervyse. Miss Chisholm and I
joined her. In its cellar we found a rough bedstead of two pieces of
unplaned lumber, with clean straw for a mattress, awaiting us. Any
Englishwoman is respected in the Belgian lines. The two soldiers who had
been living in our room had given it up cheerily. They had searched the
village for a clean sheet, and showed it to us with pride. They lumped
the straw for our pillows, and stood outside through the night,
guarding our home with fixed bayonets. It was the most moving courtesy
we had in the twelve months of war. The air in the little room was both
foul and chilly. We took off our boots, and that was the extent of our
undressing.

[Illustration: SLEEPING QUARTERS FOR BELGIAN SOLDIERS.

Disguised as a haystack, this shelter stands out in a field within easy
shell fire of the enemy. A concealed battery, in which these boys are
gunners, is near by. In their spare time they smoke, read, swim, carve
rings out of shrapnel, play cards and forget the strain of war.]

The dreariness of war never came on us till we went out there to live
behind the trenches. To me it was getting up before dawn, and washing in
ice-cold water, no time to comb the hair, always carrying a feeling of
personal mussiness, with an adjustment to dirt. It is hard to sleep in
one's clothes, week after week, to look at hands that have become
permanently filthy. One morning our chauffeur woke up, feeling grumpy.
He had slept with a visiting doctor. He said the doctor's revolver had
poked him all night long in the back. The doctor had worn his entire
equipment fo