We drove along the Avenue de Commerce, down the Avenue de Kaiser, towards the hospital. The town was dead. Not a soul was to be seen. The Marché aux Souliers was all ablaze; I saw the Taverne Royale lying on the ground. Next to it was the Hotel de l'Europe, bomb-shattered and terrific in its ruins. I thought of Mr. Jeffries of the _Daily Mail_ and shivered; that had been his hotel. The air reeked with petroleum and smoke. At last we got to the hospital. The door-step was covered with blood, and red, wet blood was in drops and patches along the entrance. As I went in, an unforgettable sight met my eyes. I found myself in a great, dim ward, with the yellow, lurid skies looking in through its enormous windows, and its beds full of wounded and dying soldiers; and just as I entered, a white-robed Sister of Mercy was bending over a bed, giving the last unction to a dying man. Some brave _petit Belge_, who had shed his life-blood for his city, alas, in vain! All the ordinary nurses had gone. The Sisters of Mercy alone remained. And suddenly it came to me like a strain of heavenly music that death held no terrors for these women; life had no fears. Softly they moved about in their white robes, their benign faces shining with the look of the Cross. In that supreme moment, after the hell of shot and shell, after the thousands of wounded and dead, after the endless agonies of attack and repulse and attack and defeat and surrender, something quite unexpected was here emerging, the essence of the Eternal Feminine, the woman supreme in her sheer womanhood; and like a bright bird rising from the ashes, the spirit of it went fluttering about that appalling ward. The trained and untrained hospital nurses, devoted as they were, and splendid and useful beyond all words, had perforce fled from the city, either to accompany their escaping hospitals, or beset by quite natural fears of the Huns' brutality to their kind. But the Sisters of Mercy had no fears. The Cross stood between them and anything that might come to them. And that was written in their faces, their shining gentle faces.... Ah yes, the Priests and the half-forgotten Sisters of Mercy have indeed come back to their own in this greatest of all Wars! Moving between the long lines of soldiers' beds I paused at the side of a little bomb-broken Belgian boy whose dark eyes opened suddenly to meet mine. I think he must have been wandering, poor little child, and had come back with a start to life. And seeing a face at his bedside he thought, perhaps, that I was German. In a hoarse voice he gasped out, raising himself in terror: "_Je suis civil!_" Poor child, poor child! The fright in his voice was heart-breaking. It said that if the "_Alboches_" took him for a _soldat_, they would shoot him, or carry him away into Germany.... I bent and kissed him. "_Je suis civil!_" He was not more than six years old. * * * * *