s,
and the patients made more comfortable. The hospital was a place of
great possibilities in some ways; its position standing almost at the
top of a high hill in its own large garden was ideal, and the air was
gloriously bracing, but little of it reached the poor patients as
unfortunately the Germans had issued a proclamation forbidding any
windows to be open, in case, it was said, anyone should fire from
them--and as we were all prisoners in their hands, we had to do as we
were bid.

At nine o'clock the Belgian doctor and the German commandant appeared,
and I went off with the former to help with an amputation of arm, in one
of the little temporary ambulances in the town of M----, three
kilometres away. The building had been a little dark shop and not very
convenient, and if the patient had not been so desperately ill, he
would have been moved to Charleroi for his operation. He was a French
tirailleur--a lad about twenty, his right arm had been severely injured
by shrapnel several days before, and was gangrenous right up to the
shoulder. He was unconscious and moaning slightly at intervals, but he
stood the operation very well, and we left him fairly comfortable when
we had to return to the hospital.

We got back about twelve, which is the hour usually dedicated to
patients' dinner, but it was impossible to find anything to eat except
potatoes. We sent everywhere to get some meat, but without success,
though in a day or two we got some kind of dark meat which I thought
must be horse. (Now from better acquaintance with ancient charger, I
know it to have been so.) There was just a little milk that was reserved
for the illest patients, no butter or bread. I was beginning to feel
rather in need of food myself by that time. There had been, of course,
up to then no time to bother about my own meals, and I had had nothing
since breakfast the day before, that is about thirty hours ago, except
a cup of coffee which I had begged from the concierge before starting
with the doctor for the amputation case.

Well, there was nothing to eat and only the dirtiest old woman in all
the world to cook it, but at three o'clock we managed to serve the
patients with an elegant dish of underdone lentils for the first course,
and overdone potatoes for the second, and partook ourselves gratefully
thereof, after they had finished. In the afternoon of that day a meeting
of the Red Cross Committee was held at the hospital, and I was sent for
a