ow and then they jerked their
heads up in a frightened way. From a few miles away came the boom
of great guns, and the black sky quivered with tremulous bars of light
as shell after shell burst somewhere over the heads of men waiting
for death. With one of the doctors, two of the nurses, and a man who
led the way, I climbed up to a high room in the convent roof. Through
a dormer window we looked out across the flat country beyond
Furnes and saw, a few miles away, the lines of battle. Some village
was burning there, a steady torch under a heavy cloud of smoke
made rosy and beautiful as a great flower over the scarlet flames.
Shells were bursting with bouquets of light and then scattered stars
into the sky. Short, sharp stabs revealed a Belgian battery, and very
clearly we could hear the roll of field guns, followed by enormous
concussions of heavy artillery.

"There will be work to do to-morrow!" said one of the nurses. Work
came before it was expected in the morning Quite early some Belgian
ambulances came up to the great gate of the convent loaded with
wounded. A few beds were made ready for them and they were
brought in by the stretcher-bearers and dressers. Some of them
could stagger in alone, with the help of a strong arm, but others were
at the point of death as they lay rigid on their stretchers, wet with
blood. For the first time I felt the weight of a man who lies
unconscious, and strained my stomach as I helped to carry these
poor Belgian soldiers. And for the first time I had round my neck the
arm of a man who finds each footstep a torturing effort, and who after
a pace or two halts and groans, and loses the strength of his legs, so
that all his weight hangs upon that clinging arm. Several times I nearly
let these soldiers fall, so great was the burden weighing down my
shoulders. It was only by a kind of prayer that I could hold them up
and guide them to the great room where stretchers were laid out for
lack of beds.

In a little while the great hall where I had helped to sort out packages
was a hospital ward where doctors and nurses worked very quietly
and from which there came faint groans of anguish, horrible in their
significance. Already it was filled with that stench of blood and dirt and
iodoform which afterwards used to sicken me as I helped to carry in
the wounded or carry out the dead.

8

In the courtyard the flying column was getting ready to set out in
search of other wounded men, not ye