One plate I saw had a story attached to it.

I was stopping in a private house where a tall Belgian surgeon lived.  In the morning, after breakfast, I saw him carefully preparing a tray and carrying it upstairs.  There was a sick boy, still in his teens, up there.  As I passed the door I had seen him lying there, gaunt and pale, but plainly convalescent.

Happening to go up shortly after, I saw the tall surgeon by the side of the bed, the tray on his knees.  And later I heard the story: 

The boy was his son.  During the winter he had been injured and taken prisoner.  The father, in Calais, got word that his boy was badly injured and lying in a German hospital in Belgium.  He was an only son.

I do not know how the frenzied father got into Belgium.  Perhaps he crept through the German lines.  He may have gone to sea and landed on the sand dunes near Zeebrugge.  It does not matter how, for he found his boy.  He went to the German authorities and got permission to move him to a private house.  The boy was badly hurt.  He had a bullet in the wall of the carotid artery, for one thing, and a fractured thigh.  The father saw that his recovery, if it occurred at all, would be a matter of skillful surgery and unremitting care, but the father had a post at Calais and was badly needed.

He took a wagon to the hospital and got his boy.  Then he drove, disguised I believe as a farmer, over the frontier into Holland.  The boy was covered in the bottom of the wagon.  In Holland they got a boat and went to Calais.  All this, with that sharp-pointed German bullet in the carotid artery!  And at Calais they took the plate I have mentioned and got out the bullet.

The last time I saw that brave father he was sitting beside his son, and the boy’s hand was between both of his.

Nearly all the hospitals I saw had been schools.  In one that I recall, the gentle-faced nuns, who by edict no longer exist in France, were still living in a wing of the school building.  They had abandoned their quaint and beautiful habit for the ugly dress of the French provinces—­odd little bonnets that sat grotesquely on the tops of their heads, stuffy black dresses, black cotton gloves.  They would like to be useful, but they belonged to the old regime.

Under their bonnets their faces were placid, but their eyes were sad.  Their schoolrooms are hospital wards, the tiny chapel is piled high with supplies; in the refectory, where decorous rows of small girls were wont to file in to the convent meals, unthinkable horrors of operations go on all day and far into the night.  The Hall of the Holy Rosary is a convalescent room, where soldiers smoke and play at cards.  The Room of the Holy Angels contains a steriliser.  Through the corridors that once re-echoed to the soft padding of their felt shoes brisk English nurses pass with a rustle of skirts.

Even the cross by which they lived has turned red, the colour of blood.