Under their bonnets their faces were placid, but their eyes were sad. Their schoolrooms are hospital wards, the tiny chapel is piled high with supplies; in the refectory, where decorous rows of small girls were wont to file in to the convent meals, unthinkable horrors of operations go on all day and far into the night. The Hall of the Holy Rosary is a convalescent room, where soldiers smoke and play at cards. The Room of the Holy Angels contains a steriliser. Through the corridors that once re-echoed to the soft padding of their felt shoes brisk English nurses pass with a rustle of skirts. Even the cross by which they lived has turned red, the colour of blood. CHAPTER XXXV THE LOSING GAME I saw a typhoid hospital in charge of two women doctors. It was undermanned. There were not enough nurses, not enough orderlies. One of the women physicians had served through the Balkan war. "There was typhoid there," she said, "but nothing to compare with this in malignancy. Nearly all the cases have come from one part of Belgium." Some of the men were wounded, in addition to the fever. She told me that it was impossible to keep things in proper order with the help they had. "And food!" she said. "We cannot have eggs. They are prohibitive at twenty-five centimes--five cents--each; nor many broths. Meat is dear and scarce, and there are no chickens. We give them stewed macaroni and farinaceous things. It's a terrible problem." The charts bore out what she had said about the type of the disease. They showed incredible temperatures, with the sudden drop that is perforation or hemorrhage. The odour was heavy. Men lay there, far from home, babbling in delirium or, with fixed eyes, picking at the bed clothes. One was going to die that day. Others would last hardly longer. "They are all Belgians here," she said. "The British and French troops have been inoculated against typhoid." So here again the Belgians were playing a losing game. Perhaps they are being inoculated now. I do not know. To inoculate an army means much money, and where is the Belgian Government to get it? ft seems the tragic irony of fate that that heroic little army should have been stationed in the infested territory. Are there any blows left to rain on Belgium? In a letter from the Belgian lines the writer says: "This is just a race for life. The point is, which will get there first, disease and sickness caused by drinking water unspeakably contaminated, or sterilising plants to avoid such a disaster." Another letter from a different writer, also in Belgium at the front, says: "A friend of mine has just been invalided home with enteritis. He had been drinking from a well with a dead Frenchman in it!" The Belgian Soldiers' Fund in the spring of 1915 sent out an appeal, which said: "The full heat of summer will soon be upon the army, and the dust of the battlefield will cause the men to suffer from an intolerable thirst." This is a part of the appeal: