And here again I wish I could finish the story.  I wish I could tell whether he lived or died—­whether he carried that knapsack back to battle, or whether he died and its pitiful contents were divided among those of his comrades who were even more needy than he had been.  But the veil lifts for a moment and drops again.

Two incidents stand out with distinctness from those first days in La Panne, when, thrust with amazing rapidity into the midst of war, my mind was a chaos of interest, bewilderment and despair.

One is of an old abbe, talking earnestly to a young Belgian noblewoman who had recently escaped from Brussels with only the clothing she wore.

The abbe was round of face and benevolent.  I had met him before, at Calais, where he had posed me in front of a statue and taken my picture.  His enthusiasm over photography was contagious.  He had made a dark room from a closet in an old convent, and he owned a little American camera.  With this carefully placed on a tripod and covered with a black cloth, he posed me carefully, making numerous excursions under the cloth.  In that cold courtyard, under the marble figure of Joan of Arc, he was a warm and human and most alive figure, in his flat black shoes, his long black soutane with its woollen sash, his woollen muffler and spectacles, with the eternal cigarette, that is part and parcel of every Belgian, dangling loosely from his lower lip.

The surgeons and nurses who were watching the operation looked on with affectionate smiles.  They loved him, this old priest, with his boyishness, his enthusiasms, his tiny camera, his cigarette, his beautiful faith.  He has promised me the photograph and what he promises he fulfils.  But perhaps it was a failure.  I hope not.  He would be so disappointed—­and so would I.

So I was glad to meet him again at La Panne—­glad and surprised, for he was fifty miles north of where we had met before.  But the abbe was changed.  He was without the smile, without the cigarette.  And he was speaking beseechingly to the smiling young refugee.  This is what he was saying: 

“I am glad, daughter, to help you in every way that I can.  I have bought for you in Calais everything that you requested.  But I implore you, daughter, do not ask me to purchase any more ladies’ underlinen.  It is most embarrassing.”

“But, father—­”

“No underlinen,” he repeated firmly.  But it hurt him to refuse.  One could see that.  One imagined, too, that in his life of service there were few refusals.  I left them still debating.  The abbe’s eyes were desperate but his posture firm.  One felt that there would be no surrender.

Another picture, and I shall leave La Panne for a time.

I was preparing to go.  A telephone message to General Melis, of the Belgian Army, had brought his car to take me to Dunkirk.  I was about to leave the protection of the Belgian Red Cross and place myself in the care of the ministry of war.  I did not know what the future would bring, and the few days at La Panne and the Ambulance Ocean had made friends for me there.  Things move quickly in war time.  The conventions with which we bind up our souls in ordinary life are cut away.  La Panne was already familiar and friendly territory.