This morning there was excitement at the Convent; someone was reading a three weeks' old journal to the soldiers and for a moment everybody forgot his particular aches and black heads lifted themselves from their pillows and gaunt forms swayed to and fro on shaky elbows. The lust of battle lit up wooden countenances, fire sprang from eyes yet heavily veiled by crusted lids and a fervent "_bien fait_" or "_vivent les Belges_," trembled from heretofore silent corners. Madame André, who comes to see her boy every day, remarked my looking at her dress which was all darned and mended in the most unaccountable places, "O, Mademoiselle," she said. "I suppose you are wondering about my waist? But wasn't it lucky I was here with André when the troops passed through our village? The soldiers fired haphazard in the windows and the wardrobe in which my clothes were hanging caught seven bullets and the headboard of my bed, four." All the afternoon troops were coming back from Namur in evident haste and apparent rout, for they had such a tired, bedraggled look. About five o'clock a company with ammunition wagons, Red Cross ambulances and baggage trucks dashed madly into the orchard among the apple trees, nearly wrecking themselves and everything else. Immediately after, three officers came to the house to beg lodging for the night. They were frightful-looking individuals covered with mud and dirt, with half-grown beards and one could not tell what uniforms. They asked the most humble apartment--a corner, the floor--anything, "and, Madame, a little hot water, _s'il vous plait_." We were sitting on the terrace tonight just before dinner when down came the three new arrivals, beautiful as the morning, shaven and shining in their gray-green uniforms, polished boots and bracelets set with precious stones--officers of the "Emperor's Own," though these men did not seem like Germans, but were much more the lighter build and elegant type of the Austrians.