Nearly all the moving to the cellars had already been done--only three
stretchers remained to be moved. One wounded English sergeant helped us.
Otherwise everything was done by women. We laid the men on mattresses
which we fetched from the hospital overhead, and then Mrs. Stobart's
mild, quiet voice said, "Everything is to go on as usual. The night
nurses and orderlies will take their places. Breakfast will be at the
usual hour." She and the other ladies whose night it was to sleep at the
convent then returned to sleep in the basement with a Sister.

[Page Heading: THE BOMBARDMENT]

We came in for some most severe shelling at first, either because we
flew the Red Cross flag or because we were in the line of fire with a
powder magazine which the Germans wished to destroy. We sat in the
cellars with one night-light burning in each, and with seventy wounded
men to take care of. Two of them were dying. There was only one line of
bricks between us and the shells. One shell fell into the garden, making
a hole six feet deep; the next crashed through a house on the opposite
side of the road and set it on fire. The danger was two-fold, for we
knew our hospital, which was a cardboard sort of thing, would ignite
like matchwood, and if it fell we should not be able to get out of the
cellars. Some people on our staff were much against our making use of a
cellar at all for this reason. I myself felt it was the safest place,
and as long as we stayed with the wounded they minded nothing. We sat
there all night.

The English sergeant said that at daybreak the firing would probably
cease, as the German guns stopped when daylight came in order to conceal
the guns. We just waited for daybreak. When it came the firing grew
worse. The sergeant said, "It is always worse just before they stop,"