They were bad cases, and lay still upon the straw.  I shall never forget the picture of that church with its painted statues huddled together and toppled down.  St. Antony of Padua and St. Sebastian were there in the straw, and crude pictures of saints on the walls stared down upon those bodies lying so quiet on the floor.  It was the house of God, but it was filled with the cruelty of life, and those statues seemed to mock at men’s faith.

In Furnes the news of the danger seemed to have been scented by the people.  They had packed a few things into bundles and made ready to leave their homes.  In the convent where I had helped to wash up and to fill the part of odd-job man when I was not out with the “flying column,” the doctors and nurses were already loading the ambulances with all their cases.  The last of the wounded was sent away to a place of safety.  He was a man with a sabre-cut on his head, who for four days had lain quite still, with a grave Oriental face, which seemed in the tranquillity of death.

A group of nuns pleaded to be taken with the doctors and nurses.  They could help in the wards or in the kitchen—­if only they might go and escape the peril of the German soldiery.

I went across the square to my own room in the Hotel de la Couronne, and put a few things together.  A friend of mine who helped me told the story of a life—­the mistakes that had nearly ruined it, the adventures of a heart.  A queer conversation at a time when the enemy was coming down the road.  The guns were very loud over Wulpen way.  They seemed to be coming closer.  Yet there was no panic.  There was even laughter in the courtyard of the hospital, where the doctors tossed blankets, mattresses, food stores and stoves into the motor ambulances.  They were in no hurry to go.  It was not the first or the second time they had to evacuate a house menaced by the enemy.  They had made a habit of it, and were not to be flurried.  I helped the blue-eyed boy to lift the great stoves.  They were “some” weight, as an American would say, and both the blue-eyed boy and myself were plastered with soot, so that we looked like sweeps calling round for orders.  I lifted packing-cases which would have paralysed me in times of peace and scouted round for some of the thousand and one things which could not be left behind without a tragedy.  But at last the order was given to start, and the procession of motor-cars started out for Poperinghe, twenty-five kilometres to the south.  Little by little the sound of the guns died away, and the cars passed through quiet fields where French troops bivouacked round their camp fires.  I remember that we passed a regiment of Moroccans half-way to Poperinghe, and I looked back from the car to watch them pacing up and down between their fires, which glowed upon their red cloaks and white robes and their grave, bearded Arab faces.  They looked miserably cold as the wind flapped their loose garments, but about these men in the muddy field there was a sombre dignity which took one’s imagination back to the day when the Saracens held European soil.