civilian, giving him far more attention than she had
ever bestowed upon a soldier. She was sentimental, and his little age
appealed to her--her sense of proportion and standard of values were all
awrong. The _Directrice_ appeared in the ward and tried to comfort the
civilian, to still his howls, and then, after an hour of vain effort,
she decided that his mother must be sent for. He was obviously dying,
and it was necessary to send for his mother, whom alone of all the world
he seemed to need. So a French ambulance, which had nothing to do with
Belgian civilians, nor with Ypres, was sent over to Ypres late in the
evening to fetch this mother for whom the Belgian civilian, aged ten,
bawled so persistently.

She arrived finally, and, it appeared, reluctantly. About ten o'clock in
the evening she arrived, and the moment she alighted from the big
ambulance sent to fetch her, she began complaining. She had complained
all the way over, said the chauffeur. She climbed down backward from the
front seat, perched for a moment on the hub, while one heavy leg, with
foot shod in slipping _sabot_, groped wildly for the ground. A soldier
with a lantern watched impassively, watched her solid splash into a mud
puddle that might have been avoided. So she continued her complaints.
She had been dragged away from her husband, from her other children, and
she seemed to have little interest in her son, the Belgian civilian,
said to be dying. However, now that she was here, now that she had come
all this way, she would go in to see him for a moment, since the
_Directrice_ seemed to think it so important. The _Directrice_ of this
French field hospital was an American, by marriage a British subject,
and she had curious, antiquated ideas. She seemed to feel that a
mother's place was with her child, if that child was dying. The
_Directrice_ had three children of her own whom she had left in England
over a year ago, when she came out to Flanders for the life and
adventures of the Front. But she would have returned to England
immediately, without an instant's hesitation, had she received word that
one of these children was dying. Which was a point of view opposed to
that of this Belgian mother, who seemed to feel that her place was back
in Ypres, in her home, with her husband and other children. In fact,
this Belgian mother had been rudely dragged away from her home, from her
family, from certain duties that she seemed to think important. So she
com