[Page Heading:  THE BOMBARDMENT]

We came in for some most severe shelling at first, either because we flew the Red Cross flag or because we were in the line of fire with a powder magazine which the Germans wished to destroy.  We sat in the cellars with one night-light burning in each, and with seventy wounded men to take care of.  Two of them were dying.  There was only one line of bricks between us and the shells.  One shell fell into the garden, making a hole six feet deep; the next crashed through a house on the opposite side of the road and set it on fire.  The danger was two-fold, for we knew our hospital, which was a cardboard sort of thing, would ignite like matchwood, and if it fell we should not be able to get out of the cellars.  Some people on our staff were much against our making use of a cellar at all for this reason.  I myself felt it was the safest place, and as long as we stayed with the wounded they minded nothing.  We sat there all night.

The English sergeant said that at daybreak the firing would probably cease, as the German guns stopped when daylight came in order to conceal the guns.  We just waited for daybreak.  When it came the firing grew worse.  The sergeant said, “It is always worse just before they stop,” but the firing did not stop.  Two hundred guns were turned on Antwerp, and the shells came over at the rate of four a minute.  They have a horrid screaming sound as they come.  We heard each one coming and wondered if it would hit us, and then we heard the crashing somewhere else and knew another shell was coming.

The worst cases among the wounded lay on the floor, and these wanted constant attention.  The others were in their great-coats, and stood about the cellar leaning on crutches and sticks.  We wrapped blankets round the rheumatism cases and sat through the long night.  Sometimes when we heard a crash near by we asked “Is that the convent?” but nothing else was said.  All spoke cheerfully, and there was some laughter in the further cellar.  One little red-haired nurse enjoyed the whole thing.  I saw her carry three wounded men in succession on her back down to the cellar.  I found myself wishing that for me a shot would come and finish the horrible night.  Still we all chatted and smiled and made little jokes.  Once during that long night in the cellar I heard one wounded man say to another as he rolled himself round on his mattress, “Que les anglais sont comme il faut.”

At six o’clock the convent party came over and began to prepare breakfast.  The least wounded of the men began to steal away, and we were left with between thirty and forty of them.  The difficulty was to know how to get away and how to remove the wounded, two of whom were nearly dead.  Miss Benjamin went and stood at the gate, while the shells still flew, and picked up an ambulance.  In this we got away six men, including the two dying ones.  Mrs. Stobart was walking about for three hours trying to find anything on wheels to remove us and the wounded.  At last we got a motor ambulance, and packed in twenty men—­that was all it would hold.  We told them to go as far as the bridge and send it back for us.  It never came.  Nothing seemed to come.