the town at the German trenches beyond.  We even saw a British gunboat lying in the Scheldt, and unlimited reinforcements pouring up the river.  Alas! it was only a couple of big German guns shelling the harbour and the arsenal; at least, that is the conclusion at which we have since arrived.  But for some hours those shells were a source of great satisfaction and comfort.  One can lie in bed with great contentment, I find, when it is the other people who are being shelled.

XIII.  The Bombardment—­Day

We were up early in the morning, and our first business was to go round to the British Headquarters to find out what they intended to do, and what they expected of us as a British base hospital.  If they intended to stay, and wished us to do likewise, we were quite prepared to do so, but we did not feel equal to the responsibility of keeping more than a hundred wounded in a position so obviously perilous.  From shrapnel they were fairly safe in the basement, but from large shells or from incendiary bombs there is no protection.  It is not much use being in a cellar if the house is burnt down over your head.  So two of us started off in our motor to get news.

The Headquarters were in the Hotel St. Antoine, at the corner of the Place Verte opposite to the Cathedral, so we had to go right across the town.  We went by the Rue d’Argile and the Rue Leopold, and we had a fair opportunity of estimating the results of the night’s bombardment.  In the streets through which we passed it was really astonishingly small.  Cornices had been knocked off, and the fragments lay in the streets; a good many windows were broken, and in a few cases a shell had entered an attic and blown up the roof.  Plainly only small shells had been used.  We did not realize that many of the houses we passed were just beginning to get comfortably alight, and that there was no one to put out the fires that had only begun so far to smoulder.  A few people were about, evidently on their way out of Antwerp, but the vast bulk of the population had already gone.  It is said that the population of half a million numbered by the evening only a few hundreds.  We passed a small fox terrier lying on the pavement dead, and somehow it has remained in my mind as a most pathetic sight.  He had evidently been killed by a piece of shrapnel, and it seemed very unfair.  But probably his people had left him, and he was better out of it.

We turned into the Marche aux Souliers, and drew up at the Hotel St. Antoine, and as we stepped down from the car a shell passed close to us with a shriek, and exploded with a terrific crash in the house opposite across the narrow street.  We dived into the door of the hotel to escape the falling debris.  So far the shells had been whistling comfortably over our heads, but it was evident that the Germans were aiming at the British Headquarters, and that we had put our heads into the thick of it, for it was now