"But she had a casket," the Night Superintendent hastened to assure
me. "The others, of course, do not. And two of the nurses were
relieved to-day to go with her to the grave."
I wonder if the young surgeon went. I wonder--
The baby is near me. I can hear it whimpering.
Midnight. A man in the next room has started to moan. Good God, what a
place! He has shell in both lungs, and because of weakness had to be
operated on without an anaesthetic.
2 A.M. I cannot sleep. He is trying to sing "Tipperary."
English battleships are bombarding the German batteries at Nieuport
from the sea. The windows rattle all the time.
6 A.M. A new day now. A grey and forbidding dawn. Sentries every
hundred yards along the beach under my window. The gunboats are moving
out to sea. A number of French aeroplanes are scouting overhead.
The man in the next room is quiet.
* * * * *
Imagine one of our great seaside hotels stripped of its bands, its gay
crowds, its laughter. Paint its many windows white, with a red cross
in the centre of each one. Imagine its corridors filled with wounded
men, its courtyard crowded with ambulances, its parlours occupied by
convalescents who are blind or hopelessly maimed, its card room a
chapel trimmed with the panoply of death.
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