My business in Brussels was now finished, and I wanted to return to my
hospital at M. The German authorities met my request with a blank
refusal. I was not at all prepared for this. I had only come in for two
days and had left all my luggage behind me. Also one cannot leave one's
hospital in this kind of way without a word of explanation to anyone. I
could not go without permission, and it was more than sixty kilometres,
too far to walk. I kept on asking, and waited and waited, hoping from
day to day to get permission to return.

Instead of that came an order that every private ambulance and hospital
in Brussels was to be closed at once, and that no wounded at all were to
be nursed by the English Sisters. The doctor and several of the Sisters
belonging to the Red Cross unit were imprisoned for twenty-four hours
under suspicion of being spies. Things could not go on like this much
longer. What I wanted to do was to send all my nurses back to England if
it could be arranged, and return myself to my work at M. till it was
finished. We were certainly not wanted in Brussels. The morning that the
edict to close the hospitals had been issued, I saw about 200 German Red
Cross Sisters arriving at the Gare du Nord.

I am a member of the International Council of Nurses, and our last big
congress was held in Germany. I thus became acquainted with a good many
of the German Sisters, and wondered what the etiquette would be if I
should meet some of them now in Brussels. But I never saw any I knew.

After the Red Cross doctor with his Sisters had been released, he went
to the German authorities and asked in the name of us all what they
proposed doing with us. As they would no longer allow us to follow our
profession, we could not remain in Brussels. The answer was rather