This is the base hospital for the Belgian lines.  The men come here with the most frightful injuries.  As I entered the building to-night the long tiled corridor was filled with the patient and quiet figures that are the first fruits of war.  They lay on portable cots, waiting their turn in the operating rooms, the white coverings and bandages not whiter than their faces.

11 P.M.  The Night Superintendent has just been in to see me.  She says there is a baby here from Furnes with both legs off, and a nun who lost an arm as she was praying in the garden of her convent.  The baby will live, but the nun is dying.

She brought me a hot-water bottle, for I am still chilled from my long ride, and sat down for a moment’s talk.  She is English, as are most of the nurses.  She told me with tears in her eyes of a Dutch Red Cross nurse who was struck by a shell in Furnes, two days ago, as she crossed the street to her hospital, which was being evacuated.  She was brought here.

“Her leg was shattered,” she said.  “So young and so pretty she was, too!  One of the surgeons was in love with her.  It seemed as if he could not let her die.”

How terrible!  For she died.

“But she had a casket,” the Night Superintendent hastened to assure me.  “The others, of course, do not.  And two of the nurses were relieved to-day to go with her to the grave.”

I wonder if the young surgeon went.  I wonder—­

The baby is near me.  I can hear it whimpering.

Midnight.  A man in the next room has started to moan.  Good God, what a place!  He has shell in both lungs, and because of weakness had to be operated on without an anaesthetic.

2 A.M.  I cannot sleep.  He is trying to sing “Tipperary.”

English battleships are bombarding the German batteries at Nieuport from the sea.  The windows rattle all the time.

6 A.M.  A new day now.  A grey and forbidding dawn.  Sentries every hundred yards along the beach under my window.  The gunboats are moving out to sea.  A number of French aeroplanes are scouting overhead.

The man in the next room is quiet.

* * * * *

Imagine one of our great seaside hotels stripped of its bands, its gay crowds, its laughter.  Paint its many windows white, with a red cross in the centre of each one.  Imagine its corridors filled with wounded men, its courtyard crowded with ambulances, its parlours occupied by convalescents who are blind or hopelessly maimed, its card room a chapel trimmed with the panoply of death.  For bathchairs and bathers on the sands substitute long lines of weary soldiers drilling in the rain and cold.  And over all imagine the unceasing roar of great guns.  Then, but feebly, you will have visualised the Ambulance Ocean at La Panne as I saw it that first winter of the war.

The town is built on the sand dunes, and is not unlike Ostend in general situation; but it is hardly more than a village.  Such trees as there are grow out of the sand, and are twisted by the winds from the sea.  Their trunks are green with smooth moss.  And over the dunes is long grass, then grey and dry with winter, grass that was beaten under the wind into waves that surge and hiss.