find a house where she could stay. That night and the next loads of
English Red Cross busses with their households of pain and ether
rumbled over the pontoon bridge across the Scheldt, went past Fort
Tete de Flandre, and disappeared in the swampy meadows on the
road to Ghent. I never saw her again, but I have always hoped that
Mrs. Richardson was among the nurses who went with them.

When on Wednesday morning I was turned out of my room, I made
my way past a pressing throng of foreign faces to the Queen's Hotel
on the water front. There I found Arthur Ruhl and James H. Hare,
who had just come over from England. The hotel overlooked the
River Scheldt, forming a wide crescent on the city's north, and was
within fifty yards of one of the longest pontoon bridges constructed in
modern warfare.

Here was a sight to come again and rend the memory. The crowds
were endeavoring to get away over one of the two avenues of
escape still open. I estimated that between five in the afternoon and
the following dawn three hundred thousand persons must have
passed through the city's gates. They were the people of Antwerp
itself, swelled by exiles from Alost, Aerschot, Malines, Termonde, and
other cities to the south and west. Intermittently for two days and
nights I watched them from my room in the Queen's. From five yards
beneath my window ledge came the shuffle, shuffle of unending feet,
the creak and groans of heavy cart wheels, the talk and babble of
guttural tongues, the yelp of hounds, as the thousands moved and
wept and surged and jostled along throughout the night and into the
uncertain mist of that October morning. They were so close I could
have jumped into their carts or dropped a pebble on their heads.
Infinitely more impressive than the retreat of the allied armies or the