We took a little walk in the woods, this afternoon--as the coast was clear and no strangers in the house for the first time in three weeks. We had hardly finished a short promenade when we heard a violent clanging on the gong to call us back, and when we returned in all haste to the house found seven soldiers in the library going through all the drawers and closets in search of firearms. Commencing there, they searched the whole house from top to bottom, even fumbling in the bureaus among the dainty lingerie of Madame X. Some of them took an obvious pleasure in performing their duty, while others looked uncomfortable and bored. It is true that many of the men hate this war, whereby whole families of brothers and cousins have to leave their homes to fight what they call the "Aristocrats' War," who in their arrogance think to be masters of the whole world. Some newspapers, two weeks old, were brought from Brussels in the evening and we pounced upon them as a starved dog makes for a bone. _September 5th, Saturday._ (At the ambulance.) "_Constant, le pauvre Constant!_ What is in your tortured soul, these three long days and nights, that chains it to earth and tosses your poor body from one troubled thought to another?" I did not think to have my question answered. At eleven o'clock this morning a child of twelve years, beautiful as an angel with heavenly blue eyes and a shock of golden hair, dashed breathlessly into the courtyard of the Convent, almost too exhausted to ask if _Soldat_ Constant Martin, by any chance, were there. The gentle _Soeur Cecile_ led him in to the sick man's cot. The boy gazed a moment, bewildered at the wasted form upon it; then with an agonizing cry of "_mon père_" fell on his knees by the bedside. The man's eyelids trembled, half opened an instant to look upon his son, and closed. In ten minutes he was at peace. Since the railroad has been reconstructed the soldiers have been passing in trains instead of on foot. Today we saw hundreds of older men, Bavarians and sailors--it looks as if something had miscarried when the marines have to fight on land. In the opposite direction, thousands of wounded were going back in ambulance cars. These ambulance trains are admirable and are often made up of forty and fifty carriages of the light, swinging, old-fashioned type, of uniform size, the roofs painted white, with a big, red cross on the top and one on each side. The cots are arranged one above the other, showing clean, white linen, while the attendants are spotlessly uniformed in white. In the middle of each train is a car which might be called the "ugly duckling," for it is a decidedly clumsy looking affair, full of steam boilers with safety valves and tubes sticking out at the top, and is, I fancy, a sterilizing plant. _September 6th, Sunday._