That afternoon I walked up-town through the shuttered, silent streets—­ silent but for that incessant rumbling in the southeast and the occasional honking flight of some military automobile—­to two of the hospitals.  In one, a British hospital on the Boulevard Leopold, the doctor in charge was absent for the moment, and there was no one to answer my offer of occasional help if an outsider could be of use.  As I sat waiting a tall, brisk Englishwoman, in nurse’s uniform, came up and asked what I wanted.  I told her.

“Oh,” she said, and in her crisp, English voice, without further ado, “will you help me with a leg?”

She led the way into her ward, and there we contrived between us to bandage and slip a board and pillow under a fractured thigh.  Between whispers of “Courage!  Courage!” to the Belgian soldier, she said that she was the wife of a British general and had two sons in the army, and a third—­“Poor boy!” she murmured, more to him than to me—­on one of the ships in the North Sea.  I arranged to come back next morning to help with the lifting, and went on to another hospital in the Rue Nerviens, to find that little English lady who crossed with me in the Ostend boat in August on the way to her sister’s hospital in Antwerp.

Here in the quiet wards she had been working while the Germans swept down on Paris and were rolled back again, and while the little nation which she and her sister loved so well was being clubbed to its knees.

Louvain, Liege, Malines, Namur—­chapters in all the long, pitiless story were lying there in the narrow iron beds.  There were men with faces chewed by shrapnel, men burned in the explosion of the powder magazine at Fort Waelhem, when the attack on Antwerp began—­dragged out from the underground passage in which the garrison had sought momentary refuge and where most of them were killed, burned, and blackened.  One strong, good-looking young fellow, able to eat and live apparently, was shot through the temples and blind in both eyes.  It was the hour for carrying those well enough to stand it out into the court and giving them their afternoon’s airing and smoke.  One had lost an arm, another, a whimsical young Belgian, had only the stump of a left leg.  When we started to lift him back into his bed, he said he had a better way than that.  So he put his arms round my neck and showed me how to take him by the back and the well leg.

“Bon!” he said, and again “Bon!” when I let him down, and then, reaching out and patting me on the back, “Bon!” he smiled again.

That night, behind drawn curtains which admitted no light to the street, we dined peacefully and well, and, except for this unwonted seclusion, just outside which were the black streets and still the endless procession of carts and wagons and shivering people, one might have forgotten, in that cheerfully lighted room, that we were not in times of peace.  We even loitered over a grate fire before going to bed, and talked in drowsy and almost indifferent fashion of whether it was absolutely sure that the Germans were trying to take the town.