Presently I found myself under the trees of the Boulevard Leopold, not far from the British hospital, and recalled that it was about time that promise was made good.  It was time indeed, and help with lifting they needed very literally.  The order had just come to leave the building, bringing the wounded and such equipment as they could pack into half a dozen motor-buses and retire—­just where, I did not hear—­in the direction of Ghent.  As I entered the porte-cochere two poor wrecks of war were being led out by their nurses—­more men burned in the powder explosion at Waelhem, their seared faces and hands covered with oil and cotton just as they had been lifted from bed.

The phrase “whistle of shells” had taken on a new reality since midnight.  Now one was to learn something of the meaning of those equally familiar words, “they succeeded in saving their wounded, although under heavy fire.”

None of the wounded could walk, none dress himself; most of them in ordinary times would have lain where they were for weeks.  There were fractured legs not yet set, men with faces half shot away, men half out of their heads, and all these had to be dressed somehow, covered up, crowded into or on top of the buses, and started off through a city under bombardment toward open country which might already be occupied by the enemy.

Bundles of uniforms, mud-stained, blood-stained, just as they had come from the trenches, were dumped out of the storeroom and distributed, hit or miss.

British “Tommies” went out as Belgians, Belgians in British khaki; the man whose broken leg I had lifted the day before we simply bundled in his bed blankets and set up in the corner of a bus.  One healthy-looking Belgian boy, on whom I was trying to pull a pair of British trousers, seemed to have nothing at all the matter with him, until it presently appeared that he was speechless and paralyzed in both left arm and left leg.  And while we were working, an English soldier, shot through the jaw and throat, sat on the edge of his bed, shaking with a hideous, rattling cough.

The hospital was in a handsome stone building, in ordinary times a club, perhaps, or a school; a wide, stone stairway led up the centre, and above it was a glass skylight.  This central well would have been a charming place for a shell to drop into, and one did drop not more than fifty feet or so away, in or close to the rear court.  A few yards down the avenue another shell hit a cornice and sent a ton or so of masonry crashing down on the sidewalk.  Under conditions like these the nurses kept running up and down that staircase during the endless hour or two in which the wounded were being dressed and carried on stretchers to the street.  They stood by the buses making their men comfortable, and when the first buses were filled they sat in the open street on top of them, patiently waiting, as calm and smiling as circus queens on their gilt chariots.  The