There were other sights that did one good to see: such as gray-haired Mrs. Richardson, venerable figure of a British nurse, with six wars to her credit and a breastful of decorations from four different governments, who refused to leave her hospital even if it was blown to pieces, so long as there were men to help and wounds to heal. When the St. Antoine closed I took her to the American Consulate to find a house where she could stay. That night and the next loads of English Red Cross busses with their households of pain and ether rumbled over the pontoon bridge across the Scheldt, went past Fort Tete de Flandre, and disappeared in the swampy meadows on the road to Ghent. I never saw her again, but I have always hoped that Mrs. Richardson was among the nurses who went with them. When on Wednesday morning I was turned out of my room, I made my way past a pressing throng of foreign faces to the Queen's Hotel on the water front. There I found Arthur Ruhl and James H. Hare, who had just come over from England. The hotel overlooked the River Scheldt, forming a wide crescent on the city's north, and was within fifty yards of one of the longest pontoon bridges constructed in modern warfare. Here was a sight to come again and rend the memory. The crowds were endeavoring to get away over one of the two avenues of escape still open. I estimated that between five in the afternoon and the following dawn three hundred thousand persons must have passed through the city's gates. They were the people of Antwerp itself, swelled by exiles from Alost, Aerschot, Malines, Termonde, and other cities to the south and west. Intermittently for two days and nights I watched them from my room in the Queen's. From five yards beneath my window ledge came the shuffle, shuffle of unending feet, the creak and groans of heavy cart wheels, the talk and babble of guttural tongues, the yelp of hounds, as the thousands moved and wept and surged and jostled along throughout the night and into the uncertain mist of that October morning. They were so close I could have jumped into their carts or dropped a pebble on their heads. Infinitely more impressive than the retreat of the allied armies or the victorious entry of the Germans a little later, was the pageant of this pitiful army without guns or leaders.