The room in the château was the lace office not only for Herzele, but for eleven additional villages, where between 2,500 and 3,000 girls and women, encouraged by the Committee support—its designs and thread and money—were busy with their needles and bobbins; for while this is chiefly a needle-work district, large quantities of bobbin laces are also made. To be sure, none of these laces is superior, but they are good, and marketable. They include Cluny, Duchesse de Bruxelles, a kind of coarse Flanders (where the flowers are made with bobbins and the mesh with the needle), Venise, and Rosaline; and of these the Flanders and Venise are most important. At times it was not difficult for the dentellières to take or send their finished lace to the château, at others they were threatened with fines and imprisonment if they were discovered trying to get it there. To refer to but one instance, the facteur of the village three miles distant was fined seventy-five francs when caught on the way with his pieces. The Germans were doing their utmost always, to attach lace-makers to their _Spitzen Centrale_, and despite the international agreement which engaged their protection of the work of the Brussels Lace Committee, they interfered with and obstructed its work again and again. At one point they insisted that all deliveries to the Committee should be made through them, and that they be paid 1 per cent. on the value, in gold, for transmission, where transmission, unfortunately, only too often spelled for them retention. In the village Madame and her daughters went from house to house, instructing and comforting. The days of the deportations were more terrible than any others. In remembering that first hideous deportation night in Herzele, one remembers, too, that early in the war Cardinal Mercier said that while there was once a time, when to make people believe, we felt we must heighten, or embellish the cold facts, that now in order that they should believe, we must withhold part of the truth. That first night, men and boys were torn from their beds and herded into the school, from there to be carried off in cattle-cars to Germany. There was neither light nor heat, and in the cold and the darkness, the tortured little village broke into a great cry of lamentation, while the château was filled with wives and mothers seeking comfort. Later, when the activist troubles became acute, the two daughters held meetings even in the cabarets to urge loyalty to a united Belgium. They believe that not one person in their entire village can be said to have worked for the enemy, except when deported bodily, or otherwise coerced.