Chapter M: C---- is now glad that we went on to Melle (3)

And I went away. Somebody took me into the right ward, where I found Fisher and Williams and the other man. Fisher was none the worse for his journey, and Williams and the other man were very cheerful. Another English nurse, who must have had the tact of a heavenly angel, brought up a bowl of chicken broth and said I might feed Fisher if I liked. So I sat a little while there, feeding Fisher, and regretting for the hundredth time that I had not had the foresight to be trained as a nurse when I was young. Unfortunately, though I foresaw this war ten years ago, I had not foreseen it when I was young. I told the men I would come and see them early in the morning, and bring them some money, as I had promised Miss Ashley-Smith. I never saw them again.

Nothing happened quite as I had planned it.

To begin with, we had discovered as we lunched at Bruges that the funds remaining in the leather purse-belt were hardly enough to keep the Ambulance going for another week. And our hotel expenses at Ostend were reducing its term to a problematic three days. So it was more or less settled amongst us that somebody would have to go over to England the next day and return with funds, and that the supernumerary Secretary was, on the whole, the fittest person for the job.

I slept peaceably on this prospect of a usefulness that seemed to justify my existence at a moment when it most needed vindication.

[_Tuesday, 13th._]

I got up at six. Last thing at night I had said to myself that I must wake early and go round to the Hospital with the money.

With my first sleep the obsession of Ghent had slackened its hold. And though it came back again after I had got up, dressed and had realized my surroundings, its returns were at longer and longer intervals.

The first thing I did was to go round to the _Kursaal_. The Hospital was being evacuated, the wounded were lying about everywhere on the terraces and galleries, waiting for the ambulances. Williams and Fisher and the other man were nowhere to be seen. I was told that their ward had been cleared out first, and that the three were now safe on their way to England.

I went away very grieved that they had not got their money.

At the Hotel I find the Commandant very cheerful. He has made Miss ---- his Secretary and Reporter till my return.[37]

He goes down to the quay to make arrangements for my transport and returns after some considerable time. There have been difficulties about this detail. And the Commandant has an abhorrence of details, even of easy ones.

He comes back. He looks abstracted. I inquire, a little too anxiously, perhaps, about my transport. It is all right, all perfectly right. He has arranged with Dr. Beavis of the British Field Hospital to take me on his ship.

He looks a little spent with his exertions, and as he has again become abstracted I forbear to press for more information at the moment.

We breakfasted. Presently I ask him the name of Dr. Beavis's ship.

Oh, the _name_ of the ship is the _Dresden_.

Time passes. And presently, just as he is going, I suggest that it would be as well for me to know what time the _Dresden_ sails.

This detail either he never knew or has forgotten. And there is something about it, about the nature of stated times, as about all things conventional and mechanical and precise, that peculiarly exasperates him.

He waves both hands in a fury of nescience and cries, "Ask me another!"

By a sort of mutual consent we assume that the _Dresden_ will sail with Dr. Beavis at ten o'clock. After all, it is a very likely hour.

More time passes. Finally we go into the street that runs along the Digue. And there we find Dr. Beavis sitting in a motor-car. We approach him. I thank him for his kindness in giving me transport. I say I'm sure his ship will be crowded with his own people, but that I don't in the least mind standing in the stoke-hole, if _he_ doesn't mind taking me over.

He looks at me with a dreamy benevolence mixed with amazement. He would take me over with pleasure if he knew how he was to get away himself.

"But," I say to the Commandant, "I thought you had arranged with Dr. Beavis to take me on the _Dresden_."

The Commandant says nothing. And Dr. Beavis smiles again. A smile of melancholy knowledge.

"The _Dresden_," he says, "sailed two hours ago."

So it is decided that I am to proceed with the Ambulance to Dunkirk, thence by train to Boulogne, thence to Folkestone. It sounds so simple that I wonder why we didn't think of it before.

But it was not by any means so simple as it sounded.

First of all we had to collect ourselves. Then we had to collect Dr. Hanson's luggage. Dr. Hanson was one of Mrs. St. Clair Stobart's women surgeons, and she had left her luggage for Miss ---- to carry from Ostend to England. There was a yellow tin box and a suit-case. Dr. Hanson's best clothes and her cases of surgical instruments were in the suit-case and all the things she didn't particularly care about in the tin box. Or else the best clothes and the surgical instruments were in the tin box, and the things she didn't particularly care about in the suit-case. As we were certainly going to take both boxes, it didn't seem to matter much which way round it was.

Then there was Mr. Foster's green canvas kit-bag to be taken to Folkestone and sent to him at the Victoria Hospital there.

And there was a British Red Cross lady and her luggage--but we didn't know anything about the lady and her luggage yet.

We found them at the _Kursaal_ Hospital, where some of our ambulances were waiting.

By this time the courtyard, the steps and terraces of the Hospital were a scene of the most ghastly confusion. The wounded were still being carried out and still lay, wrapped in blankets, on the terraces; those who could sit or stand sat or stood. Ambulance cars jostled each other in the courtyard. Red Cross nurses dressed for departure were grouped despairingly about their luggage. Other nurses, who were not dressed for departure, who still remained superintending the removal of their wounded, paid no attention to these groups and their movements and their cries. The Hospital had cast off all care for any but its wounded.

Women seized hold of other women for guidance and instruction, and received none. Nobody was rudely shaken off--they were all, in fact, very kind to each other--but nobody had time or ability to attend to anybody else.

Somebody seized hold of the Commandant and sent us both off to look for the kitchen and for a sack of loaves which we would find in it. We were to bring the sack of loaves out as quickly as we could. We went off and found the kitchen, we found several kitchens; but we couldn't find the sack of loaves, and had to go back without it. When we got back the lady who had commandeered the sack of loaves was no more to be seen on the terrace.

While we waited on the steps somebody remarked that there was a German aeroplane in the sky and that it was going to drop a bomb. There was. It was sailing high over the houses on the other side of the street. And it dropped its bomb right in front of us, above an enormous building not fifty yards away.

We looked, fascinated. We expected to see the building knocked to bits and flying in all directions. The bomb fell. And nothing happened. Nothing at all.

It was soon after the bomb that my attention was directed to the lady. She was a British Red Cross nurse, stranded with a hold-all and a green canvas trunk, and most particularly forlorn. She had lost her friends, she had lost her equanimity, she had lost everything except her luggage. How she attached herself to us I do not know. The Commandant says it was I who made myself responsible for her safety. We couldn't leave her to the Germans with her green canvas trunk and her hold-all.

So I heaved up one end of the canvas trunk, and the Commandant tore it from me and flung it to the chauffeurs, who got it and the hold-all into Bert's ambulance. I grasped the British Red Cross lady firmly by the arm, lest she should get adrift again, and hustled her along to the Hotel, where the yellow tin box and the suit-case and the kit-bag waited. Somebody got them into the ambulance somehow.

It was at this point that Ursula Dearmer appeared. (She had put up at some other hotel with Mrs. Lambert.)

My British Red Cross lady was explaining to me that she had by no means abandoned her post, but that she was doing the right thing in leaving Ostend, seeing that she meant to apply for another post on a hospital ship. She was sure, she said, she was doing the right thing. I said, as I towed her securely along by one hand through a gathering crowd of refugees (we were now making for the ambulance cars that were drawn up along the street by the Digue), I said I was equally sure she was doing the right thing and that nobody could possibly think otherwise.

And, as I say, Ursula Dearmer appeared.

The youngest but one was seated with Mr. Riley in the military scouting-car that was to be our convoy to Dunkirk. I do not know how it had happened, but in this hour, at any rate, she had taken over the entire control and command of the Ambulance; and this with a coolness and competence that suggested that it was no new thing. It suggested, also, that without her we should not have got away from Ostend before the Germans marched into it. In fact, it is hardly fair to say that she had taken everything over. Everything had lapsed into her hands at the supreme crisis by a sort of natural fitness.

We were all ready to go. The only one we yet waited for was the Commandant, who presently emerged from the Hotel. In his still dreamy and abstracted movements he was pursued by an excited waiter flourishing a bill. I forgot whose bill it was (it may have been mine), but anyhow it wasn't _his_ bill.

We may have thought we were following the retreat of the Belgian Army when we went from Ghent to Bruges. We were, in fact, miles behind it, and the regiments we overtook were stragglers. The whole of the Belgian Army seemed to be poured out on to that road between Ostend and Dunkirk. Sometimes it was going before us, sometimes it was mysteriously coming towards us, sometimes it was stationary, but always it was there. It covered the roads; we had to cut our way through it. It was retreating slowly, as if in leisure, with a firm, unhasting dignity.

Every now and then, as we looked at the men, they smiled at us, with a curious still and tragic smile.

And it is by that smile that I shall always remember the look of the Belgian Army in the great retreat.

Our own retreat--the Ostend-Dunkirk bit of it--is memorable chiefly by Miss ----'s account of the siege of Antwerp and the splendid courage of Mrs. St. Clair Stobart and her women.

But that is her story, not mine, and it should be left to her to tell.

[_Dunkirk._]

At Dunkirk the question of the Secretary's transport again arose. It contended feebly with the larger problem of where and when and how the Corps was to lunch, things being further complicated by the Commandant's impending interview with Baron de Broqueville, the Belgian Minister of War. I began to feel like a large and useless parcel which the Commandant had brought with him in sheer absence of mind, and was now anxious to lose or otherwise get rid of. At the same time the Ambulance could not go on for more than three days without further funds, and, as the courier to be despatched to fetch them, I was, for the moment, the most important person in the Corps; and my transport was not a question to be lightly set aside.

I was about to solve the problem for myself by lugging my lady to the railway station, when Ursula Dearmer took us over too, in her stride, as inconsiderable items of the business before her. I have nothing but admiration for her handling of it.

We halted in the main street of Dunkirk while Mr. Riley and the chauffeurs unearthed from the baggage-car my hold-all and suit-case and the British Red Cross lady's hold-all and trunk and Mr. Foster's kit-bag and Dr. Hanson's suit-case with her best clothes and her surgical instruments and the tin--No, not the tin box, for the Commandant, now possessed by a violent demon of hurry, resisted our efforts to drag it from its lair.[38]

All these things were piled on Ursula Dearmer's military scouting-car. The British Red Cross lady (almost incredulous of her good luck) and I got inside it, and Ursula Dearmer and Mr. Riley drove us to the railway station.

By the mercy of Heaven a train was to leave for Boulogne either a little before or a little after one, and we had time to catch it.

There was a long line of refugee _bourgeois_ drawn up before the station doors, and I noticed that every one of them carried in his hand a slip of paper.

Ursula Dearmer hailed a porter, who, she said, would look after us like a father. With a matchless celerity he and Mr. Riley tore down the pile of luggage. The porter put them on a barrow and disappeared with them very swiftly through the station doors.

At least I suppose it was through the doors. All we knew was that he disappeared.

Then Ursula Dearmer handed over to me three cables to be sent from Dunkirk. I said good-bye to her and Mr. Riley. They got back into the motor-car, and they, too, very swiftly disappeared.

Mr. Riley went away bearing with him the baffling mystery of his personality. After nearly three weeks' association with him I know that Mr. Riley's whole heart is in his job of carrying the wounded. Beyond that I know no more of him than on the day when he first turned up before our Committee.

But with Ursula Dearmer it is different. Before the Committee she appeared as a very young girl, docile, diffident, only half-awake, and of dubious efficiency. I remember my solemn pledges to her mother that Ursula Dearmer should not be allowed to go into danger, and how, if danger insisted on coming to her, she should be violently packed up and sent home. I remember thinking what a nuisance Ursula Dearmer will be, and how, when things are just beginning to get interesting, I shall be told off to see her home.

And Ursula Dearmer, the youngest but one, has gone, not at all docilely and diffidently, into the greatest possible danger, and come out of it. And here she is, wide awake and in full command of the Ostend-Dunkirk expedition. And instead of my seeing her off and all the way home, she is very thoroughly and competently seeing _me_ off.

At least this was her beautiful intention.

But getting out of France in war-time is not a simple matter.

When we tried to follow the flight of our luggage through the station door we were stopped by a sentry with a rifle. We produced our passports. They were not enough.

At the sight of us brought to halt there, all the refugees began to agitate their slips of paper. And on the slips we read the words "_Laissez-passer_."

My British Red Cross lady had no "_laissez-passer_." I had only my sixteenth part in the "_laissez-passer_" of the Corps, and that, hidden away in the Commandant's breast-pocket, was a part either of the luncheon-party or of the interview with the Belgian Minister of War.

We couldn't get military passes, for military passes take time; and the train was due in about fifteen minutes.

And the fatherly porter had vanished, taking with him the secret of our luggage.

It was a fatherly old French gentleman who advised us to go to the British _Consulat_. And it was a fatherly old French _cocher_ who drove us there, or rather who drove us through interminable twisted streets and into blind alleys and out of them till we got there.

As for our luggage, we renounced it and Mr. Foster's and Dr. Hanson's luggage in the interests of our own safety.

At last we got to the British _Consulat_. Only I think the _cocher_ took us to the Town Hall and the Hospital and the British Embassy and the Admiralty offices first.

At intervals during this transit the British Red Cross lady explained again that she was doing the right thing in leaving Ostend. It wasn't as if she was leaving her post, she was going on a hospital ship. She was sure she had done the right thing.

It was not for me to be unsympathetic to an obsession produced by a retreat, so I assured her again and again that if there ever was a right thing she had done it. My heart bled for this poor lady, abandoned by the organization that had brought her out.

In the courtyard of the _Consulat_ we met a stalwart man in khaki, who smiled as a god might smile at our trouble, and asked us why on earth we hadn't got a passage on the naval transport _Victoria_, sailing at three o'clock. We said nothing would have pleased us better, only we had never heard of the _Victoria_ and her sailing. And he took us to the Consul, and the Consul--who must have been buried alive in detail--gave us a letter to Captain King of the _Victoria_, and the _cocher_ drove us to the dock.

Captain King was an angel. He was the head of a whole hierarchy of angels who called themselves ship's officers.

There is no difficulty about our transport. But we must be at the docks by half-past two.

We have an hour before us; so we drive back to the station to see if, after all, we can find that luggage. Not that we in the least expected to find it, for we had been told that it had gone on by the train to Boulogne.

Now the British Red Cross lady declared many times that but for me and my mastery of the French language she would never have got out of Dunkirk. And it was true that I looked on her more as a sacred charge than as a valuable ally in the struggle with French sentries, porters and officials. As for the _cocher_, I didn't consider him valuable at all, even as the driver of an ancient _fiacre_. And yet it was the lady and the _cocher_ who found the luggage. It seems that the station hall is open between trains, and they had simply gone into the hall and seen it there, withdrawn bashfully into a corner. The _cocher's_ face as he announces his discovery makes the War seem a monstrous illusion. It is incredible that anything so joyous should exist in a country under German invasion.

We drive again to the _Victoria_ in her dock. The stewards run about and do things for us. They give us lunch. They give us tea. And the other officers come in and make large, simple jokes about bombs and mines and submarines. We have the ship all to ourselves except for a few British soldiers, recruits sent out to Antwerp too soon and sent back again for more training.

They looked, poor boys, far sadder than the Belgian Army.

And I walk the decks; I walk the decks till we get to Dover. My sacred charge appears and disappears. Every now and then I see her engaged in earnest conversation with the ship's officers; and I wonder whether she is telling them that she has not really left her post and that she is sure she has done right. I am no longer concerned about my own post, for I feel so sure that I am going back to it.

To-morrow I shall get the money from our Committee; and on Thursday I shall go back.

And yet--and yet--I must have had a premonition. We are approaching England. I can see the white cliffs.

And I hate the white cliffs. I hate them with a sudden and mysterious hatred.

More especially I hate the cliffs of Dover. For it is there that we must land. I should not have thought it possible to hate the white coast of my own country when she is at war.

And now I know that I hate it because it is not the coast of Flanders. Which would be absurd if I were really going back again.

Yes, I must have had a premonition.

[_Dover._]

We have landed now. I have said good-bye to Captain King and all the ship's officers and thanked them for their kindness. I have said good-bye to the British Red Cross lady, who is not going to London.

And I go to the station telegraph-office to send off five wires.

I am sending off the five wires when I hear feet returning through the station hall. The Red Cross lady is back again. She is saying this time that she is _really_ sure she has done the right thing.

And again I assure her that she has.

Well--there are obsessions and obsessions. I do not know whether I have done the right thing or not in leaving Flanders (or, for that matter, in leaving Ghent). All that I know is that I love it and that I have left it. And that I want to go back.

POSTSCRIPT

There have been changes in that Motor Field Ambulance Corps that set out for Flanders on the 25th of September, 1914.

Its Commandant has gone from it to join the Royal Army Medical Corps. A few of the original volunteers have dropped out and others have taken their places, and it is larger now than it was, and better organized.

But whoever went and whoever stayed, its four field-women have remained at the Front. Two of them are attached to the Third Division of the Belgian Army; all four have distinguished themselves by their devotion to that Army and by their valour, and they have all received the Order of Leopold II., the highest Belgian honour ever given to women.

The Commandant, being a man, has the Order of Leopold I. Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett and Mr. Philip Gibbs and Dr. Souttar have described his heroic action at the Battle of Dixmude on the 22nd of October, 1914, when he went into the cellars of the burning and toppling Town Hall to rescue the wounded. And from that day to this the whole Corps--old volunteers and new--has covered itself with glory.

On our two chauffeurs, Tom and Bert, the glory lies quite thick. "Tom" (if I may quote from my own story of the chauffeurs) "Tom was in the battle of Dixmude. At the order of his commandant he drove his car straight into the thick of it, over the ruins of a shattered house that blocked the way. He waited with his car while all the bombs that he had ever dreamed of crashed around him, and houses flamed, and tottered and fell. 'Pretty warm, ain't it?' was Tom's comment.

"Four days later he was waiting at Oudekappele with his car when he heard that the Hospital of Saint-Jean at Dixmude was being shelled and that the Belgian military man who had been sent with a motor-car to carry off the wounded had been turned back by the fragment of a shell that dropped in front of him. Tom thereupon drove into Dixmude to the Hospital of Saint-Jean and removed from it two wounded soldiers and two aged and paralysed civilians who had sheltered there, and brought them to Furnes. The military ambulance men then followed his lead, and the Hospital was emptied. That evening it was destroyed by a shell.

"And Bert--it was Bert who drove his ambulance into Kams-Kappele to the barricade by the railway. It was Bert who searched in a shell-hole to pick out three wounded from among thirteen dead; who with the help of a Belgian priest, carried the three several yards to his car, under fire, and who brought them in safety to Furnes."

And the others, the brave "Chaplain," and "Mr. Riley," and "Mr. Lambert," have also proved themselves.

But when I think of the Corps it is chiefly of the four field-women that I think--the two "women of Pervyse," and the other two who joined them at their dangerous _poste_.

Both at Furnes and Pervyse they worked all night, looking after their wounded; sometimes sleeping on straw in a room shared by the Belgian troops, when there was no other shelter for them in the bombarded town. One of them has driven a heavy ambulance car--in a pitch-black night, along a road raked by shell-fire, and broken here and there into great pits--to fetch a load of wounded, a performance that would have racked the nerves of any male chauffeur ever born. She has driven the same car, _alone_, with five German prisoners for her passengers. The four women served at Pervyse (the town nearest to the firing-line) in "Mrs. Torrence's" dressing-station--a cellar only twenty yards behind the Belgian trenches. In that cellar, eight feet square and lighted and ventilated only by a slit in the wall, two lived for three weeks, sleeping on straw, eating what they could get, drinking water that had passed through a cemetery where nine hundred Germans are buried. They had to burn candles night and day. Here the wounded were brought as they fell in the trenches, and were tended until the ambulance came to take them to the base hospital at Furnes.

Day in, day out, and all night long, with barely an interval for a wash or a change of clothing, the women stayed on, the two always, and the four often, till the engineers built them a little hut for a dressing-station; they stayed till the Germans shelled them out of their little hut.

This is only a part of what they have done. The finest part will never be known, for it was done in solitary places and in the dark, when special correspondents are asleep in their hotels. There was no limelight on the road between Dixmude and Furnes, or among the blood and straw in the cellar at Pervyse.

And Miss Ashley-Smith (who is now Mrs. McDougall)--her escape from Ghent (when she had no more to do there) was as heroic as her return.

Since then she has gone back to the Front and done splendid service in her own Corps, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.

M. S.

July 15th, 1915.

THE END

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: It would be truer to say she was in love with duty which was often dangerous.]

[Footnote 2: She very soon let us know why. "Followed" is the wrong word.]

[Footnote 3: He didn't. People never do mean these things.]

[Footnote 4: This only means that, whether you attended to it or not (you generally didn't), as long as you were in Belgium, your sub-consciousness was never entirely free from the fear of Uhlans--of Uhlans in the flesh. The illusion of valour is the natural, healthy reaction of your psyche against its fear and your indifference to its fear.]

[Footnote 5: Nobody need have been surprised. She had distinguished herself in other wars.]

[Footnote 6: One is a church and not a cathedral.]

[Footnote 7: I am puzzled about this date. It stands in my ambulance Day-Book as Saturday, 3rd, with a note that the British came into Ghent on their way to Antwerp on the evening of that day. Now I believe there were no British in Antwerp before the evening of Sunday, the 4th, yet "Dr. Wilson" and Mr. Davidson, going into Saint Nicolas before us, saw the British there, and "Mrs. Torrence" and "Janet McNeil" saw more British come into Ghent in the evening. I was ill with fever the day after the run into Antwerp, and got behindhand with my Day-Book. So it seems safest to assume that I made a wrong entry and that we went into Antwerp on Sunday, and to record Saturday's events as spreading over the whole day. Similarly the events that the Day-Book attributes to Monday must have belonged to Tuesday. And if Tuesday's events were really Wednesday's, that clears up a painful doubt I had as to Wednesday, which came into my Day-Book as an empty extra which I couldn't account for in any way. There I was with a day left over and nothing to put into it. And yet Wednesday, the 7th, was the first day of the real siege of Antwerp. On Thursday, the 8th, I started clear.]

[Footnote 8: It wasn't. This was only the first slender trickling. The flood came three days later with the bombardment of the city.]

[Footnote 9: Of all the thousands and thousands of refugees whom I have seen I have only seen three weep, and they were three out of six hundred who had just disembarked at the Prince of Wales's Pier at Dover. But in Belgium not one tear.]

[Footnote 10: This is all wrong. The main stream went as straight as it could for the sea-coast--Holland or Ostend.]

[Footnote 11: The outer forts were twelve miles away.]

[Footnote 12: At the time of writing--February 19th, 1915. My Day-Book gives no record of anything but the hospitals we visited.]

[Footnote 13: There must be something wrong here, for the place was, I believe, a convent.]

[Footnote 14: Every woman did.]

[Footnote 15: This was made up to her afterwards! Her cup fairly ran over.]

[Footnote 16: I have heard a distinguished alienist say that this reminiscent sensation is a symptom of approaching insanity. As it is not at all uncommon, there must be a great many lunatics going about.]

[Footnote 17: Except that nobody had any time to attend to us, I can't think why we weren't all four of us arrested for spies. We hadn't any business to be looking for the position of the Belgian batteries.]

[Footnote 18: More than likely our appearance there stopped the firing.]

[Footnote 19: I have since been told that he was not. And I think in any case I am wrong about his "matchboard" car. It must have been somebody else's. In fact, I'm very much afraid that "he" was somebody else--that I hadn't the luck really to meet him.]

[Footnote 20: He did. She was not a lady whom it was possible to leave behind on such an expedition.]

[Footnote 21: I'm inclined to think it may have been the dogs of Belgium, after all. I can't think where the guns could have been. Antwerp had fallen. It might have been the bombardment of Melle, though.]

[Footnote 22: The fate of "Mr. Lambert" and the scouting-car was one of those things that ought never to have happened. It turned out that the car was not the property of his paper, but his own car, hired and maintained by him at great expense; that this brave and devoted young American had joined our Corps before it left England and gone out to the front to wait for us. And he was kept waiting long after we got there.

But if he didn't see as much service at Ghent as he undertook to see (though he did some fine things on his own even there), it was made up to him in Flanders afterwards, when, with the Commandant and other members of the Corps, he distinguished himself by his gallantry at Furnes and in the Battle of Dixmude.

(For an account of his wife's services see Postscript.)]

[Footnote 23: I record these details (March 11th, 1915) because the Commandant accused me subsequently of a total lack of "balance" upon this occasion.]

[Footnote 24: This is no reflection on Tom's courage. His chief objection was to driving three women so near the German lines. The same consideration probably weighed with the Commandant and M. ----.]

[Footnote 25: The whole thing was a piece of rank insubordination. The Commandant was entirely right to forbid the expedition, and we were entirely wrong in disobeying him. But it was one of those wrong things that I would do again to-morrow.]

[Footnote 26: Antwerp had surrendered on Friday, the 9th.]

[Footnote 27: All the same it was splendidly equipped and managed.]

[Footnote 28: Even now, when I am asked if I did any nursing when I was in Belgium I have to think before I answer: "Only for one morning and one night"--it would still be much truer to say, "I was nursing all the time."]

[Footnote 29: My Day-Book ends abruptly here; and I have no note of the events that followed.]

[Footnote 30: Incorrect. It was, I believe, the uniform of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps.]

[Footnote 31: It was so bad that it made me forget to pack the Commandant's Burberry and his Gillette razors and his pipe.]

[Footnote 32: The Commandant had had an adventure. The Belgian guide mistook the road and brought the car straight into the German lines instead of the British lines where it had been sent. If the Germans hadn't been preoccupied with firing at that moment, the Commandant and Ascot and the Belgian would all have been taken prisoner.]

[Footnote 33: Even now, five months after, I cannot tell whether it was or was not insanity.]

[Footnote 34: It is really dreadful to think of the nuisance we must have been to these dear people on the eve of their own flight.]

[Footnote 35: The Commandant had his own scheme for going back to Ghent, which fortunately he did not carry out.]

[Footnote 36: This girl's courage and self-devotion were enough to establish our innocence--they needed no persuasion. But I still hold myself responsible for her going, since it was my failure to control my obsession that first of all put the idea in her head.]

[Footnote 37: I saw nothing sinister about this arrangement at the time. It seemed incredible to me that I should not return.]

[Footnote 38: Having saved the suit-case, I guarded it as a sacred thing. But Dr. Hanson's best clothes and her surgical instruments were in the tin box after all.]

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"The stories are touched with a peculiar delicacy and whimsicality."--_Los Angeles Times._

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64-66 Fifth Avenue, New York

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Three Sisters

By MAY SINCLAIR

Author of "The Divine Fire," "The Return of the Prodigal," etc.

_Cloth, 12mo, $1.35_

Every reader of "The Divine Fire," in fact every reader of any of Miss Sinclair's books, will at once accord her unlimited praise for her character work. "The Three Sisters" reveals her at her best. It is a story of temperament, made evident not through tiresome analyses but by means of a series of dramatic incidents. The sisters of the title represent three distinct types of womankind. In their reaction under certain conditions Miss Sinclair is not only telling a story of tremendous interest but she is really showing a cross section of life.

"Once again Miss Sinclair has shown us that among the women writers to-day she can be acclaimed as without rival in the ability to draw a character and to suggest atmosphere.... In "The Three Sisters" she gives full measure of her qualities. It is in every way a characteristic novel."--_London Standard._

"Miss Sinclair's singular power as an artist lies in her identification with nature.... She has seldom written a more moving story."--_Metropolitan._

"It is a book powerful alike in its description of the background and in its analysis of character.... This story confirms the impression of her unusual ability."--_Outlook._

"Miss Sinclair's most important book."--_Reedy's Mirror._

"'The Three Sisters' is a powerful novel, written with both vigor and delicacy, dramatic, absorbingly interesting."--_New York Times._

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

The Pentecost of Calamity

By OWEN WISTER

Author of "The Virginian," etc.

_Boards, 16mo, 50 cents_

The author of "The Virginian" has written a new book which describes, more forcibly and clearly than any other account so far published, the meaning, to America, of the tragic changes which are taking place in the hearts and minds of the German people.

Written with ease and charm of style, it is prose that holds the reader for its very beauty, even as it impresses him with its force. It is doubtful whether there will come out of the entire mass of war literature a more understanding or suggestive survey.

"Owen Wister has depicted the tragedy of Germany and has hinted at the possible tragedy of the United States.... We wish it could be read in full by every American."--_The Outlook._

The Military Unpreparedness of the United States

By FREDERIC L. HUIDEKOPER

_Cloth, 8vo_

By many army officers the author of this work is regarded as the foremost military expert in the United States. For nine years he has been striving to awaken the American people to a knowledge of the weaknesses of their land forces and the defencelessness of the country. Out of his extensive study and research he has compiled the present volume, which represents the last word on this subject. It comes at a time when its importance cannot be overestimated, and in the eight hundred odd pages given over to the discussion there are presented facts and arguments with which every citizen should be familiar. Mr. Huidekoper's writings in this field are already well known. These hitherto, however, have been largely confined to magazines and pamphlets, but his book deals with the matters under consideration with that frankness and authority evidenced in these previous contributions and much more comprehensively.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

AN IMPORTANT NEW WORK

With the Russian Army

By Col. ROBERT McCORMICK

_Illustrated, 8vo_

This book deals with the author's experiences in the war area. The work traces the cause of the war from the treaty of 1878 through the Balkan situation. It contains many facts drawn from personal observation, for Col. McCormick has had opportunities such as have been given to no other man during the present engagements. He has been at the various headquarters and actually in the trenches. One of the most interesting chapters of the volume is the concluding one dealing with great personalities of the war from first-hand acquaintance.

The work contains a considerable amount of material calculated to upset generally accepted ideas, comparisons of the fighting forces, and much else that is fresh and original.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

The World War:

How it Looks to the Nations Involved and What it Means to Us

By ELBERT FRANCIS BALDWIN

_Decorated cloth, 12mo, $1.25_

The present war in Europe has called forth a great many books bearing on its different phases, but in the majority of instances these have been written from the standpoint of some one of the nations. Elbert Francis Baldwin has here, however, brought together within the compass of a single volume a survey of the entire field.

Mr. Baldwin was in Europe at the outbreak of hostilities. He mingled with the people, observing their spirit and temper more intimately than it has been permitted most writers to do, and in consequence the descriptions which he gives of the German, or French, or English, or Russian attitude are truer and more complete than those found in previous studies of the war. Mr. Baldwin's statements are calm and just in conclusion. When discussing the German side he has included all of the factors which the Germans think important, and assimilated wholly the German feeling, as he has done in his considerations of the other countries.

"The one indispensable volume so far published for those who desire a comprehensive survey of the situation.... One of the most valuable contributions to the literature of the World War."--_Portland Express._

"The dramatic story ... is unusually calm and dispassionate, after the modern historical manner, with a great deal of fresh information."--_Philadelphia North American._

"Sets down without bias the real causes of the Great War."--_New York Times._

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

Russia and the World

By STEPHEN GRAHAM

Author of "With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem," "With Poor Immigrants to America," etc.

_Illustrated, cloth, 8vo, $2.00_

At the outbreak of the present European war Mr. Graham was in Russia, and his book opens, therefore, with a description of the way the news of war was received on the Chinese frontier, one thousand miles from a railway station, where he happened to be when the Tsar's summons came. Following this come other chapters on Russia and the War, considering such questions as, Is It a Last War?, Why Russia Is Fighting, The Economic Isolation of Russia, An Aeroplane Hunt at Warsaw, Suffering Poland: A Belgium of the East, and The Soldier and the Cross.

But "Russia and the World" is not by any means wholly a war book. It is a comprehensive survey of Russian problems. Inasmuch as the War is at present one of her problems, it receives its due consideration. It has been, however, Mr. Graham's intention to supply the very definite need that there is for enlightenment in English and American circles as to the Russian nation, what its people think and feel on great world matters. On almost every country there are more books and more concrete information than on his chosen land. In fact, "Russia and the World" may be regarded as one of the very first to deal with it in any adequate fashion.

"It shows the author creeping as near as he was allowed to the firing line. It gives broad views of difficult questions, like the future of the Poles and the Jews. It rises into high politics, forecasts the terms of peace and the rearrangement of the world, east and west, that may follow. But the salient thing in it is its interpretation for Western minds of the spirit of Russia."--_London Times._

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Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

German World Policies

(Der Deutsche Gedanke in der Welt)

By PAUL ROHRBACH

Translated by DR. EDMUND VON MACH

_Cloth, 12mo, $1.25_

Paul Rohrbach has been for several years the most popular author of books on politics and economics in Germany. He is described by his translator as a "constructive optimist," one who, at the same time, is an incisive critic of those shortcomings which have kept Germany, as he thinks, from playing the great part to which she is called. In this volume Dr. Rohrbach gives a true insight into the character of the German people, their aims, fears and aspirations.

Though it was written before the war started and has not been hastily put together, it still possesses peculiar significance now, for in its analysis of the German idea of culture and its dissemination, in its consideration of German foreign policies and moral conquests, it is an important contribution to the widespread speculation now current on these matters.

"Dr. von Mach renders an extraordinary service to his country in making known to English readers at this time a book like Rohrbach's."--_New York Globe._

"A clear insight into Prussian ideals."--_Boston Transcript._

"A valuable, significant, and most informing book."--_New York Tribune._

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Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York