would have wept and prayed over, some extra cartridges and a piece of
leather. Perhaps he meant to try to mend the shoes.

And here again I wish I could finish the story. I wish I could tell
whether he lived or died--whether he carried that knapsack back to
battle, or whether he died and its pitiful contents were divided among
those of his comrades who were even more needy than he had been. But
the veil lifts for a moment and drops again.

Two incidents stand out with distinctness from those first days in La
Panne, when, thrust with amazing rapidity into the midst of war, my
mind was a chaos of interest, bewilderment and despair.

One is of an old abbé, talking earnestly to a young Belgian noblewoman
who had recently escaped from Brussels with only the clothing she
wore.

The abbé was round of face and benevolent. I had met him before, at
Calais, where he had posed me in front of a statue and taken my
picture. His enthusiasm over photography was contagious. He had made a
dark room from a closet in an old convent, and he owned a little
American camera. With this carefully placed on a tripod and covered
with a black cloth, he posed me carefully, making numerous excursions
under the cloth. In that cold courtyard, under the marble figure of
Joan of Arc, he was a warm and human and most alive figure, in his
flat black shoes, his long black soutane with its woollen sash, his
woollen muffler and spectacles, with the eternal cigarette, that is
part and parcel of every Belgian, dangling loosely from his lower lip.

The surgeons and nurses who were watching the operation looked on with