vercrowded with the wounded. All day long and late into the night
they were brought back by the Belgian ambulances from the zone of
fire, and hardly an hour passed without a bang at the great wooden
gates in the courtyard which were flung open to let in another tide of
human wreckage.

The Belgians were still holding their last remaining ground--it did not
amount to more than a few fields and villages between the French
frontier and Dixmude--with a gallant resistance which belongs without
question to the heroic things of history. During these late days in
October, still fighting almost alone, for there were no British soldiers to
help them and only a few French batteries with two regiments of
French marines, they regained some of their soil and beat back the
enemy from positions to which it had advanced. In spite of the most
formidable attacks made by the German troops along the coastline
between Westende and Ostende, and in a crescent sweeping round
Dixmude for about thirty kilometres, those Belgian soldiers, tired out
by months of fighting with decimated regiments and with but the poor
remnant of a disorganized army, not only stood firm, but inflicted
heavy losses upon the enemy and captured four hundred prisoners.
For a few hours the Germans succeeded in crossing the Yser,
threatening a general advance upon the Belgian line. Before Nieuport
their trenches were only fifty metres away from those of the Belgians,
and on the night of October 22 they charged eight times with the
bayonet in order to force their way through.

Each assault failed against the Belgian infantry, who stayed in their
trenches in spite of the blood that eddied about their feet and the
corpses that lay around them. Living and dead made a rampart which
the Germans could not break. With an incessant rattle of mitrailleuses
and rifle-fire, the Belgians mowed down the German troops as they
advanced in solid ranks, so that on each of those eight times the
enemy's attack was broken and destroyed. They fell like the leaves
which were then being scattered by the autumn wind and their bodies
were strewn between the trenches. Some of them were the bodies of
very young men--poor boys of sixteen and seventeen from German
high schools and universities who were the sons of noble and well-to-
do families, had been accepted as volunteers by Prussian war-lords
ruthless of human life in their desperate gamble with fate. Some of
these lads were brought to the hospi