British "Tommies" went out as Belgians, Belgians in British khaki; the
man whose broken leg I had lifted the day before we simply bundled in
his bed blankets and set up in the corner of a bus. One healthy-looking
Belgian boy, on whom I was trying to pull a pair of British trousers,
seemed to have nothing at all the matter with him, until it presently
appeared that he was speechless and paralyzed in both left arm and left
leg. And while we were working, an English soldier, shot through the
jaw and throat, sat on the edge of his bed, shaking with a hideous,
rattling cough.

The hospital was in a handsome stone building, in ordinary times a club,
perhaps, or a school; a wide, stone stairway led up the centre, and
above it was a glass skylight. This central well would have been a
charming place for a shell to drop into, and one did drop not more than
fifty feet or so away, in or close to the rear court. A few yards down
the avenue another shell hit a cornice and sent a ton or so of masonry
crashing down on the sidewalk. Under conditions like these the nurses
kept running up and down that staircase during the endless hour or two
in which the wounded were being dressed and carried on stretchers to the
street. They stood by the buses making their men comfortable, and when
the first buses were filled they sat in the open street on top of them,
patiently waiting, as calm and smiling as circus queens on their gilt
chariots. The behavior of the men in the trenches was cool enough, but
they at least were fighting men and but taking the chance of war. These
were civilian volunteers, they had not even trenches to shelter them,
and it took a rather unforeseen and difficult sort of courage to leave
that fairly safe masonry building and sit smiling and helpful on top of
a motor-bus during a wait of half an hour or so, any second of which
might be one's last. There was an American nurse there, a tall, radiant