little object not easy to find among these heaps of calcined stones and twisted bars of iron.  One old woman shook her head sadly as though to say, “Dear me, I can’t see it anywhere.”  I wondered if they were looking for some family photograph—­or for some child’s cinders.  It might have been one or the other, for many of these Belgian peasants had reached a point of tragedy when death is of no more importance than any trivial loss.  The earth and sky had opened, swallowing up all their little world in a devilish destruction.  They had lost the proportions of everyday life in the madness of things.

In the tavern there was a Belgian doctor with a few soldiers to help him, and a dozen wounded in the straw which had been put down on the tiled floor.  Another wounded man was sitting on a chair, and the doctor was bandaging up a leg which looked like a piece of raw meat at which dogs had been gnawing.  Something in the straw moved and gave a frightful groan.  A boy soldier with his back propped against the wall had his knees up to his chin and his face in his grimy hands through which tears trickled.  There was a soppy bandage about his head.  Two men close to where I stood lay stiff and stark, as though quite dead, but when I bent down to them I heard their hard breathing and the snuffle of their nostrils.  The others more lightly wounded watched us like animals, without curiosity but with a horrible sort of patience in their eyes, which seemed to say, “Nothing matters...  Neither hunger nor thirst nor pain.  We are living but our spirit is dead.”

The doctor did not want us to take away his wounded at once.  The German shells were coming heavily again, on the outskirts of the town through which we had to pass on our way out.  An officer had just come in to say they were firing at the level crossing to prevent the Belgian ambulances from coming through.  It would be better to wait a while before going back again.  It was foolish to take unnecessary risks.

I admit frankly that I was anxious to go as quickly as possible with these wounded A shell burst over the houses on the opposite side of the street.  When I stood outside watching two soldiers who had been sent further down to bring in two other wounded men who lay in a house there, I saw them dodge into a doorway for cover as another hail of shrapnel whipped the stones about them.  Afterwards they made an erratic course down the street like drunken men, and presently I saw them staggering back again with their wounded comrades, who had their arms about the necks of their rescuers.  I went out to aid them, but did not like the psychology of this street, where death was teasing the footsteps of men, yapping at their heels.

I helped to pack up one of the ambulances and went back to Furnes sitting next to the driver, but twisted round so that I could hold one of the stretcher poles which wanted to jolt out of its strap so that the man lying with a dead weight on the canvas would come down with a smash upon the body of the man beneath.