Immediately after the armistice they returned, and installed themselves comfortably once more on the first floor of their almost roofless house. When I arrived they had not yet come in from their first inspection trip of the communes just behind the lines, and I was welcomed by pretty, brown-haired Flavia and her six-year-old Albert. Flavia’s husband had been killed at the front during the first months of the war, and she had served in this household throughout all its terrible duration. As I looked from the windows of the drawing-room, still intact, across the rear garden, to the mass of wreckage that was once the neighboring house, I understood the feeling of the impotence of all effort produced by the casualness of these bombs, that spare here to strike there, and why in the war one inevitably becomes a fatalist. And as I looked across the garden, Flavia told me something of her experience with the thirteen Germans who took over the house when they drove her master out and of how whenever the shelling was severe they ran to the cellars, and several times tried to persuade her to go with them but she always refused. “I preferred,” she said, “to die alone with my little boy in the open, to risking being killed with them in the cellar.” On Sunday, October 13, between 11 and 2 o’clock, sixty shells fell on Thielt, and all day Monday and the following days they continued to fall, until on Saturday the 19th, the French marched into the town. To add to the horror of this period, people were dying in large numbers of influenza. Flavia told me of the street-sweeper who died at the corner with her broom in her hand. By some miracle she and her little boy escaped both shell and pestilence, and when Monsieur and his daughter returned they found her scrubbing and restoring as best she could after the flight of the enemy. This was one of the centers where during the four terror-years a bright beacon burned for all the surrounding territory, for it was here that the people of the villages and the convents could bring their laces for the committee, knowing they would be accepted and paid for. In 1916, the Baron van der Graeht was encouraging the work in no less than seventeen communes and of as many as 3,500 lace-workers. Flavia smiled as she remembered something—“What good luck, there will be a sister coming this very day about 2 o’clock, with her laces.” As she said this, the door opened—father and daughter were back from their pony-cart expedition to the front-lines. Monsieur was still visibly moved by what he had seen, even after his own four years’ experience. “Madame,” he said, “I can not describe my emotion on going about in those little shattered villages just behind the lines, where the women have insisted on remaining, and where day by day, and year after year, they have sat calmly before their cushions making lace, while the shells burst before and behind them. After such a victory as theirs, the lace industry of Belgium must live.”