At 5 o’clock I went to bed and slept till 8.  Mrs. Stobart never rests.  I think she must be made of some substance that the rest of us have not discovered.  At 5 a.m.  I discovered her curled up on a bench in her office, the doors wide open and the dawn breaking.

2 October.—­Here is a short account of one whole day.  Firing went on all night, sometimes it came so near that the vibration of it was rather startling.  In the early morning we heard that the forts had been heavily fired on.  One of them remained silent for a long time, and then the garrison lighted cart-loads of straw in order to deceive the Germans, who fell into the trap, thinking the fort was disabled and on fire, and rushed in to take it.  They were met with a furious cannonade.  But one of the other forts has fallen.

At 7 a.m. the men’s bread had not arrived for their 6 o’clock breakfast, so I went into the town to get it.  The difficulty was to convey home twenty-eight large loaves, so I went to the barracks and begged a motor-car from the Belgian officer and came back triumphant.  The military cars simply rip through the streets, blowing their horns all the time.  Antwerp was thronged with these cars, and each one contained soldiers.  Sometimes one saw wounded in them lying on sacks stuffed with straw.

I came down to breakfast half-an-hour late (8 o’clock) and we had our usual fare—­porridge, bread and margarine, and tea with tinned milk—­amazingly nasty, but quite wholesome and filling at the price.  We have reduced our housekeeping to ninepence per head per day.  After breakfast I cleaned the two houses, as I do every morning, made nine beds, swept floors and dusted stairs, etc.  When my rooms were done and jugs filled, our nice little cook gave me a cup of soup in the kitchen, as she generally does, and I went over to the hospital to help prepare the men’s dinner, my task to-day being to open bottles and pour out beer for a hundred and twenty men; then, when the meat was served, to procure from the kitchen and serve out gravy.  Our own dinner is at 12.30.

Afterwards I went across to the hospital again and arranged a few things with Mrs. Stobart.  I began to correct the men’s diagnosis sheets, but was called off to help with wounded arriving, and to label and sort their clothes.  Just then the British Minister, Sir Francis Villiers, and the Surgeon-General, Sir Cecil Herslet, came in to see the hospital, and we proceeded to show them round, when the sound of firing began quite close to us and we rushed out into the garden.

[Page Heading:  A Taube overhead]