She demurred (a most unusual thing for her), but men do not protect women in this war, and they said she had to take them.  She asked one of the least wounded of the men to get down and see what was in front of her, and he disappeared altogether.  The dark mass she had seen in the road was a huge hole made by a shell!  After steering into dead horses and going over awful roads Mrs. Knocker came bumping into the yard, steering so badly that they ran to see what was wrong, and they found her fainting, and she was carried into the house.  At Dunkirk she got a good dinner and a night’s rest.

Furnes. 5 November.—­The hospital is beginning to fill up again, and the nurses are depressed because only those cases which are nearly hopeless are allowed to stay, so it is death on all sides and just a hell of suffering.  One man yelled to me to-night to kill him.  I wish I might have done so.  The tragedy of war presses with a fearful weight after being in a hospital, and wherever one is one hears the infernal sound of the guns.  On Sunday about forty shells came into Furnes, but I was at Dunkirk.  This morning about five dropped on to the station.

[Page Heading:  NIEUPORT]

To-day I went out to Nieuport.  It is like some town one sees in a horrible nightmare.  Hardly a house is left standing, but that does not describe the scene.  Nothing can fitly describe it except perhaps such a pen as Victor Hugo’s.  The cathedral at Nieuport has two outer walls left standing.  The front leans forward helplessly, the aisles are gone.  The trees round about are burnt up and shot away.  In the roadway are great holes which shells have made.  The very cobbles of the street are scattered by them.  Not a window remains in the place; all are shattered and many hang from their frames.  The fronts of the houses have fallen out, and one sees glimpses of wretched domestic life:  a baby’s cradle hangs in mid-air, some tin boxes have fallen through from the box-room in the attic to the ground floor.  Shops are shivered and their contents strewn on all sides; the interiors of other houses have been hollowed out by fire.  There is a toy-shop with dolls grinning vacantly at the ruins or bobbing brightly on elastic strings.

In a wretched cottage some soldiers are having breakfast at a fine-carved table.  In one house, surrounded by a very devastation of wreckage, some cheap ornaments stand intact on a mantelpiece.  From another a little ginger-coloured cat strolls out unconcernedly!  The bedsteads hanging midway between floors look twisted and thrawn—­nothing stands up straight.  Like the wounded, the town has been rendered inefficient by war.