I rose in the morning at seven degrees Centigrade and dressed.  At breakfast part of the mystery was cleared up.  The house was being used as a residence by the chief surgeon of the Ambulance Jeanne d’Arc, the Belgian Red Cross hospital in Calais, and by others interested in the Red Cross work.  It was a dormitory also for the English nurses from the ambulance.  This explained, naturally, my being sent there, the somewhat casual nature of the furnishing and the odour of disinfectants.  It does not, however, explain the lady of the wreath or the black iron bed.

After breakfast some of the nurses came in from night duty at the ambulance.  I saw their bedroom, one directly underneath mine, with four single beds and no pretence at comfort.  It was cold, icy cold.

“You are very courageous,” I said.  “Surely this is not very comfortable.  I should think you might at least have a fire.”

“We never think of a fire,” a nurse said simply.  “The best we can do seems so little to what the men are doing, doesn’t it?”

She was not young.  Some one told me she had a son, a boy of nineteen, in the trenches.  She did not speak of him.  But I have wondered since what she must feel during those grisly hours of the night when the ambulances are giving up their wounded at the hospital doors.  No doubt she is a tender nurse, for in every case she is nursing vicariously that nineteen-year-old boy of hers in the trenches.

That morning I visited the various Calais hospitals.  It was a bright morning, sunny and cold.  Lines of refugees with packs and bundles were on their way to the quay.

The frightful congestion of the autumn of 1914 was over, but the hospitals were all full.  They were surgical hospitals, typhoid hospitals, hospitals for injured civilians, hospital boats.  One and all they were preparing as best they could for the mighty conflict of the spring, when each side expected to make its great onward movement.

As it turned out, the terrible fighting of the spring failed to break the deadlock, but the preparations made by the hospitals were none too great for the sad by-products of war.

The Belgian hospital question was particularly grave.  To-day, several months later, it is still a matter for anxious thought.  In case the Germans retire from Belgium the Belgians will find themselves in their own land, it is true, but a land stripped of everything.  It is for this contingency that the Allies are preparing.  In whichever direction the line moves, the arrangements that have served during the impasse of the past year will no longer answer.  Portable field hospital pavilions, with portable equipment, will be required.  The destructive artillery fire, with its great range, will leave no buildings intact near the battle line.

One has only to follow the present line, fringed as it is with destroyed or partially destroyed towns, to realise what the situation will be if a successful offensive movement on the part of the Allies drives the battle line back.  Artillery fire leaves no buildings standing.  Even the roads become impassable,—­masses of broken stone with gaping holes, over which ambulances travel with difficulty.