She shrugged her shoulders.

“It is all I have,” she said philosophically.  “And I have no money—­none.  None of us has.”

A titled Belgian woman with her daughter had just escaped from Brussels.  She was very sad, for she had lost her only boy.  But she smiled a little as she told me of their having nothing but what they wore, and that the night before they had built a fire in their room, washed their linen, and gone to bed, leaving it until morning to dry.

Across the full width of the hospital stretched the great drawing-room of the hotel, now a recreation place for convalescent soldiers.  Here all day the phonograph played, the nurses off duty came in to write letters, the surgeons stopped on their busy rounds to speak to the men or to watch for a few minutes the ever-changing panorama of the beach, with its background of patrolling gunboats, its engineers on rest playing football, its occasional aeroplanes, carrying each two men—­a pilot and an observer.

The men sat about.  There were boys with the stringy beards of their twenty years.  There were empty sleeves, many crutches, and some who must be led past the chairs and tables—­who will always have to be led.

They were all cheerful.  But now and then, when the bombardment became more insistent, some of them would raise their heads and listen, with the strained faces of those who see a hideous picture.

The young woman who could not buy a heavy coat showed me the villa adjoining the hospital, where the clothing of wounded soldiers is cared for.  It is placed first in a fumigating plant in the basement and thoroughly sterilised.  After that it is brushed of its encrusted mud and blood stains are taken out by soaking in cold water.  It is then dried and thoroughly sunned.  Then it is ready for the second floor.

Here tailors are constantly at work mending garments apparently unmendable, pressing, steaming, patching, sewing on buttons.  The ragged uniforms come out of that big bare room clean and whole, ready to be tied up in new burlap bags, tagged, and placed in racks of fresh white cedar.  There is no odour in this room, although innumerable old garments are stored in it.

In an adjoining room the rifles and swords of the injured men stand in racks, the old and unserviceable rifles with which Belgium was forced to equip so many of her soldiers side by side with the new and scientific German guns.  Along the wall are officers’ swords, and above them, on shelves, the haversacks of the common soldiers, laden with the things that comprise their whole comfort.

I examined one.  How few the things were and how worn!  And yet the haversack was heavy.  As he started for the trenches, this soldier who was carried back, he had on his shoulders this haversack of hide tanned with the hair on.  In it he had two pairs of extra socks, worn and ragged, a tattered and dirty undershirt, a photograph of his wife, rags for cleaning his gun, a part of a loaf of dry bread, the remnant of what had been a pair of gloves, now fingerless and stiff with rain and mud, a rosary, a pair of shoes that the woman of the photograph would have wept and prayed over, some extra cartridges and a piece of leather.  Perhaps he meant to try to mend the shoes.