on the electric torch which always lay, together with my cap and slippers, beside the bed, slipped a skirt over my nightdress and my great-coat atop, and got into the cap and slippers in record time.  But by the time I had crossed the flagged passage and wrestled with the lock of the “grande porte” there was no getting out of the house.  The canteen, directly across the street, lay in utter darkness, lights out, doors locked.  There was no hope of using it as a short cut to the abris, or shelter, on the other side, while to try to go around it was almost certain death.  The sky was ablaze with breaking shells from our seventy-fives; shrapnel was falling like hail in the streets, while the steady “pup-pup” of machine-guns—­both our own and the bombing planes’—­advised all who could to remain under shelter.  The noise of our guns and of the bombs was like a small inferno.

[Sidenote:  Waiting through the raid alone.]

I stayed it out—­about twenty minutes—­alone in that dark flagged hallway, and it was lonesome.  When the shrapnel and machine-gun fire let up sufficiently to make it safe, I crept along under the shelter of the eaves to the door of a courtyard next door where I knew one of our cooks lived.  She had invited me a few days before, to refuge there instead of trying to get over the abris, because, she said, the whole upper lofts were full of hay, and it had been demonstrated that bombs will not penetrate to any depth in hay.  But the door was locked, and though I beat upon it with my electric torch, nobody heard me.  I finally took advantage of a lull in the firing, when the Germans went back to their own lines for more ammunition, to get over the abris.

There one of the women on night duty at the canteen told me that the directrice and everybody else not on night duty, had gone up to the evacuation hospital about ten o’clock, in response to a call for aid from the French authorities.

[Sidenote:  Many wounded in the hospitals.]

In E——­ there were half a dozen large hospitals.  The wounded, chiefly English, were coming in faster than the hospital corps could handle them.  They needed our help, not only in registering the men—­very few of whom understood any French—­but in feeding and giving water.

I got to the hospital the next day and worked steadily till eight thirty.  Then an ambulance driver gave me a lift as far as the canteen, and I managed to get a cold supper at our mess.

[Sidenote:  Dispensing hospitality to worn-out officers.]

I was hardly in my office before I heard a knock at the door, which, as I was alone in the house, I always locked at night as soon as I entered.  In response to my “Who’s there?” a voice, guided by my English, replied, “I am an English officer.”  I threw open the door without a second’s hesitation.  A young officer, weary, white-faced, stood there, beginning to apologize as he saw my uniform and white veil.