She shrugged her shoulders.

"It is all I have," she said philosophically. "And I have no
money--none. None of us has."

A titled Belgian woman with her daughter had just escaped from
Brussels. She was very sad, for she had lost her only boy. But she
smiled a little as she told me of their having nothing but what they
wore, and that the night before they had built a fire in their room,
washed their linen, and gone to bed, leaving it until morning to dry.

Across the full width of the hospital stretched the great drawing-room
of the hotel, now a recreation place for convalescent soldiers. Here
all day the phonograph played, the nurses off duty came in to write
letters, the surgeons stopped on their busy rounds to speak to the men
or to watch for a few minutes the ever-changing panorama of the beach,
with its background of patrolling gunboats, its engineers on rest
playing football, its occasional aëroplanes, carrying each two men--a
pilot and an observer.

The men sat about. There were boys with the stringy beards of their
twenty years. There were empty sleeves, many crutches, and some who
must be led past the chairs and tables--who will always have to be
led.

They were all cheerful. But now and then, when the bombardment became
more insistent, some of them would raise their heads and listen, with
the strained faces of those who see a hideous picture.