Out there two old Belgians are talking. "_Ce sont les Anglais qui ne veulent pas rendre les forts!_" says one. They are discussing the fighting which still goes on fiercely in the forts around the city. My head aches! I am hungry; and those big guns are making what the Kaiser would call World Noises. Strange thoughts come over me, attacking me, like Samson Agonistes' "deadly swarm of hornets armed." In a terrific conflict it doesn't seem to matter much which side is victorious, all hatred of the conquerors dies away; in fact the conquerors themselves may seem like deliverers since peace comes in with their entrance. And I am weak and weary enough at this moment to wish _les Anglais_ would give it up, let the forts be rendered, and let the cannons cease. Anything for peace, for an end of slaughter, an end of terror, an end of this cruel soul-racking thunder. Terrible thoughts ... deadly thoughts. Do they come to the soldiers, thoughts like these? Heaven help the poor fellows if they do! They are more deadly than Death, for they attack only the immortal part of one, leaving the mortal to save itself while they blight and corrode the spirit. * * * * * I am weary. I have not slept for five nights, and I feel as if I shall never sleep again. I daresay that's partly why I have been weak enough to wish for an end of noise. It's five o'clock and darkness has set in. Nobody has been near me, I'm still here, locked up in this little room. I roam about like a caged animal. I look from the window. The blank back wall of the Antwerp Theatre meets my eye, but a corner of the hotel looks in also, and I can see three tiers of windows, so I hastily move away. In all those rooms there are Germans quartered now. What if they glanced down here and discovered _me_? I pull the curtains over the window, and move back into the room. This is Saturday afternoon, October 10th, and all of a sudden a queer thought comes over me. October 10th is my birthday. I lie down on the mattress again, and my thoughts begin dreamily to revolve round an extraordinary psychic mystery that I became conscious of when I was little more than a baby in far-away Australia. I became conscious at the age of four that I heard in my imagination the sounds of cannon, and I became certain too that those cannon were going to be real cannon some day. Yes! All my life, ever since I could think, I have heard heavy firing in my ears, and have known I was going to be very close to battle, some far-off day or other. Have other people been born with the same belief, I wonder? I should like so much to know.