It was an evening of ineffable beauty and the garden looked so lovely in its mantle of roses, the little lake at the foot with its white swans and the wooded mountain rising up almost from its waters--a picture of calm and contentment. We were there taking a long breath after the nightmare of the day, when the young gardener rushed in from the village with the news that thirty of the soldiers in the fort, wounded and burned beyond recognition, were being brought into the Sisters' Convent, which had been turned into a Red Cross Ambulance hospital. The shells from the great field pieces of the enemy falling upon the forts had shattered the cupolas and had caused them to fall in upon the Belgians who were thus imprisoned and barely escaped suffocation from the poisonous gases of the exploding shells. The electric wires were cut immediately so that the poor things who were entrapped three stories underground groped about in the dark some time before they at last found the stairs which led them up through shot and flame and gas to the air. Gathering some old linen together we fairly flew across the field to the convent and stopped short, staggered by what we saw. Never on this earth could one imagine so horrible a sight as those thirty charred bodies with no suggestion of faces--just a flat, swollen, black surface, with no eyes, nose nor mouth. Some of the wounded lay on beds, others in the middle of the floor or wherever there was space, and each was holding up hands burned to the bone. The room was dimly lighted, a hushed quiet reigned except for an occasional stifled groan of pain or a sigh of concern from the villagers or the swish of the black garments of those ministering angels, the nuns, as they fluttered about among the suffering; their white coifs, like a halo, contrasting them with that other Angel, whose black wings, indeed visible, already shadowed his chosen. _August 14th, Friday._ One has hoped against hope, but the worst has happened and the people are despondent. Liége is certainly in the hands of the Prussians. They have been pouring into the city all day and most of the forts have either been destroyed by the German field artillery or been blown up by their defenders rather than surrender. We nursed the soldiers all day--if last night was horrible I could not find the words to describe what the daylight revealed, or the awful odor of burned flesh when the wounds were redressed. It was pitiful to see the courage of the poor men--the Belgians are brave not only on the battle field. With lips too seared to articulate, they would try to speak and one could occasionally catch an indistinct "_de l'eau_," or a half-formed "_Merci, chère Soeur_," but never a moan or a groan.