It will take us all our time to derive any amusement from these bomb-dropping fiends.... A brain-wave has passed over the village. The word “red-cross” is mentioned. M. le Directeur suggests with admirable sense that the inn should be turned into a hospital for the wounded soldiers. Wonderful the enthusiasm this idea has evoked. Extraordinary the unanimity with which it is received by the peasants. M. le Précepteur wishes to hang a flag out of his window too. His step becomes more elastic, his expression brighter at the mere idea. This seems to him an opportune way of staving off the awful, possible hour of arrest. He is actuated, too, by that beautiful sense of compassion which makes the Belgian nature so attractive. The burnt-out old lady is quite vociferous with joy at the prospect of nursing the enemy. It never occurs to her that she will thereby heap coals of fire on the miscreants who so basely tried to destroy her little home. At this moment she is sitting out in the potato-patch industriously picking over the flock in her mattress. The adjacent hedge is hung with odds and ends of half-burnt coverlets and clothes. I know she is scheming in her generous Walloon brain how much of her slender household stock can be spared for the use of the wounded soldiers. These flags—the great red cross on the white ground—are produced in the shortest space of time. We breathe more freely when they float out majestically from the hotel windows. We are as afire with first-aid enthusiasm as any ignorant sixteen-year-old Miss who has volunteered for the front. Every woman in the village has offered her help. She will insist on giving it too. I pity the first victim who arrives. He is likely to be pulled into a thousand pieces! Scarcely any Uhlans have passed through to-day. Those who did were well behaved. This fact and the Red Cross flag have combined to make us quite jovial. The skittle alley is in use again. A group of villagers is gathered on the _terrasse_ telling war-tales which would make our English fishermen green with envy. One tale no one tells, however, out of respect to Madame Job. That is the tale of the Liège forts. We are all under a solemn pledge to believe that they are still intact. We know better. Anyone would know better after the awful cannonade of the last few days. But in our common humanity we cannot bear that Madame Job should know before she must, that her Albert “in-the-forts-there-below” is dead, safe though she thought him in those forts, “the-forts-which-are-so-strong.”... ON THE ROAD