It is not an easy task to settle down into a new hospital, especially in time of war not far from the enemy’s lines, and as a volunteer in the work I was able to make myself useful by lending a hand with mattresses and beds and heavy cases of medical material.  It was a strange experience, as far as I was concerned, and sometimes seemed a little unreal as, with a bed on my head, I staggered across dark courtyards, or with my arms full of lint and dressings.  I groped my way down the long, unlighted corridors of a Flemish convent.  Nurses chivvied about with little squeals of laughter as they bumped into each other out of the shadow world, but not losing their heads or their hands, with so much work to do.  Framed in one or other of the innumerable doorways stood a Belgian nun, with a white face, staring out upon those flitting shadows.  The young doctors had flung their coats off and were handling the heaviest stuff like dock labourers at trade union rates, though with more agility.  I made friends with them on the other side of cases too heavy for one man to handle—­with a golden-haired, blue-eyed boy from Bart’s (I think), who made the most preposterous jokes in the darkness, so that I laughed and nearly dropped my end of the box (I saw him in the days to come doing heroic and untiring work in the operating theatre), and with another young surgeon whose keen, grave face lighted up marvellously when an ironical smile caught fire in his brooding eyes, and with other men in this hospital and ambulance column who will be remembered in Belgium as fine and fearless men.  With the superintendent of the commissariat department—­an Italian lady with a pretty sense of humour and a devil-may-care courage which she inherited from Stuart ancestors—­I went on a shopping expedition into the black gulfs of Fumes, stumbling into holes and jerking up against invisible gun-wagons, but bringing back triumphantly some fat bacon and, more precious still, some boxes of tallow candles, of great worth in a town which had lost its gas.

I lighted dozens of these candles, like an acolyte in a Catholic church, setting them in their own grease on window-sills and ledges of the long corridors, so that the work of moving might go on more steadily.  But there was a wind blowing, and at the bang of distant doors out went one candle after another, and nurses carrying other candles and shielding the little flames with careful hands cried in laughing dismay as they were puffed out by malicious draughts.

There was chaos in the kitchen, but out of it came order and a good meal, served in the convent refectory, where the flickering light of candles in beer-bottles sheltered from the wind, gleamed upon holy pictures of the Sacred Heart and the Madonna and Child and glinted upon a silver crucifix where the Man of Sorrows looked down upon a supper party of men and women who, whatever their creed or faith or unbelief, had dedicated themselves to relieve a suffering humanity with a Christian chivalry—­which did not prevent the blue-eyed boy from making most pagan puns, or the company in general from laughing as though war were all a jest.