Any hope that conditions would be improved by a general spring movement into uncontaminated territory has been dispelled. The war has become a gigantic siege, varied only by sorties and assaults. As long ago as November, 1914, the situation as to drinking water was intolerable. I quote again from the diary taken from the body of a German officer after the battle of the Yser--a diary published in full in an earlier chapter. "The water is bad, quite green, indeed; but all the same we drink it--we can get nothing else. Man is brought down to the level of the brute beast." There is little or no typhoid among the British troops. They, too, no doubt, have realised the value of conservation, and to inoculation have added careful supervision of wells and of watercourses. But when I was at the front the Belgian Army of fifty thousand trained soldiers and two hundred thousand recruits was dependent on springs oozing from fields that were vast graveyards; on sluggish canals in which lay the bodies of men and horses; and on a few tank wagons that carried fresh water daily to the front. A quarter of a million dollars would be needed to install a water supply for the Belgian Army and for the civilians--residents and refugees--gathered behind the lines. To ask the American people to shoulder this additional burden is out of the question. But perhaps, somewhere among the people who will read this, there is one great-hearted and wealthy American who would sleep better of nights for having lifted to the lips of a wounded soldier the cup of pure water that he craves; for having furnished to ten thousand wounds a sterile and soothing wet compress. Dunkirk was full of hospitals when I was there. Probably the subsequent shelling of the town destroyed some of them. I do not know. A letter from Calais, dated May 21st, 1915, says: "I went through Dunkirk again. Last time I was there it was a flourishing and busy market day. This time the only two living souls I saw were the soldiers who let us in at one gate and out at the other. In the interval, as you know, the town had been shelled by fifteen-inch guns from a distance of twenty-three miles. Many buildings in the main streets had been reduced to ruins, and nearly all the windows in the town had been smashed." There is, or was, a converted Channel steamer at Dunkirk that is now a hospital. Men in all stages of mutilation are there. The salt winds of the Channel blow in through the open ports. The boat rises and falls to the swell of the sea. The deck cabins are occupied by wounded officers, and below, in the long saloon, are rows of cots. I went there on a bright day in February. There was a young officer on the deck. He had lost a leg at the hip, and he was standing supported by a crutch and looking out to sea. He did not even turn his head when we approached. General M----, the head of the Belgian Army medical service, who had escorted me, touched him on the arm, and he looked round without interest.