The three women ran over to a little house two hundred yards down the road. One wall of it was bullet-chipped, one room of it a wreck from a spent obus. But, for the rest, it was a livable little place, and here was gathered a Flemish family. The event was half over, as Mrs. Bracher, closely followed by Scotch and Hilda, rushed in. The mother, fully dressed, was lying on a wooden bed that fitted into an alcove. She was typically Flemish, of high cheek-bones and very red cheeks. The entire family was grouped about the bed--a boy of twelve years, a girl of nineteen, and a girl of three. Attending the case, was a little old woman, the grandmother, wearing a knitted knobby bonnet, sitting high on the top of her head and tied under her chin--a conical frame for her pert, dark eyes and firm mouth. She was a tiny woman, every detail of her in miniature, clearly defined, except the heavy, noisy wooden shoes. She carried in her personality an air of important indignation. With the confidence of a lifetime of obstetrical experience, she drew from her pocket a brown string, coarse and dirty, and tied up the newcomer's navel. It was little the nurses were allowed to help. Though a trained and certificated midwife, Mrs. Bracher was edged out of the ministration by the small, determined grandmother, who looked anger and scorn out of her little black eyes upon the three. She resented their coming. Antiseptic gauze and hot-water bottles were as alien as the Germans to her. So "Pervyse" entered this world. Nothing could hold him back, neither shell nor bayonets. He had slipped through the net of death which men were so busily weaving. There he was, a matter of fact--a vital, lusty, shapeless fact. To that little creature was given the future, and he was stronger than the artillery. By all the laws, vibrations of fear ought to have passed into the tiny body. His consciousness, it would seem, must be a nest of horrors. Instead of that, his cry had the insistence of health. His solemnity was as abysmal as that of a child of peace. When the girls visited "Pervyse" next morning, the grandmother was nursing him with sugar and water from a quart bottle. She had him dressed in dark blue calico. Thereafter twice a day they called upon him, and each time Hilda carried snowy linen, hoping to win the grandmother. But the old lady was firm, and "Pervyse" was to thrive, looking all the redder, inside blue calico. The mother was a good mother, sweet and constant. Very slowly, the nurses won her confidence and the grandmother's respect. "Do come away," urged Hilda. "Let me take you all back to La Panne, where it is safer. Give 'Pervyse' his chance. It is senseless to live here in this shed under shell fire. Some day, the guns will get you, and then it will be too late." But always they refused, mother, and brother, and big and little sister, and grandmother. The village was their place. The shed was their home.