Into this town, without warning of any kind, the Germans one morning dropped two of their largest shells.  One fell near the church, but fortunately did no harm.  One fell in the Hospital of St. Elizabeth.  We heard in Antwerp that several people had been wounded, and in the afternoon two of us went out in one of our cars to see if we could be of any service.  We found the town in the greatest excitement, and the streets crowded with families preparing to leave, for they rightly regarded these shells as the prelude of others.  In the square was drawn up a large body of recruits just called up—­rather late in the day, it seemed to us.  We slowly made our way through the crowds, and, turning to the right along the Malines road, we drew up in front of the hospital on our right-hand side.  The shell had fallen almost vertically on to a large wing, and as we walked across the garden we could see that all the windows had been broken, and that most of the roof had been blown off.  The nuns met us, and took us down into the cellars to see the patients.  It was an infirmary, and crowded together in those cellars lay a strange medley of people.  There were bedridden old women huddled up on mattresses, almost dead with terror.  Wounded soldiers lay propped up against the walls; and women and little children, wounded in the fighting around, lay on straw and sacking.  Apparently it is not enough to wound women and children; it is even necessary to destroy the harbour of refuge into which they have crept.  The nuns were doing for them everything that was possible, under conditions of indescribable difficulty.  They may not be trained nurses, but in the records of this war the names of the nuns of Belgium ought to be written in gold.  Utterly careless of their own lives, absolutely without fear, they have cared for the sick, the wounded, and the dying, and they have faced any hardship and any danger rather than abandon those who turned to them for help.

The nuns led us upstairs to the wards where the shell had burst.  The dead had been removed, but the scene that morning must have been horrible beyond description.  In the upper ward six wounded soldiers had been killed, and in the lower two old women.  As we stood in the upper ward, it was difficult to believe that so much damage could have been caused by a single shell.  It had struck almost vertically on the tiled roof, and, exploding in the attic, had blown in the ceiling into the upper ward.  I had not realized before the explosion of a large shell is not absolutely instantaneous, but, in consequence of the speed of the shell, is spread over a certain distance.  Here the shell had continued to explode as it passed down through the building, blowing the floor of the upper ward down into the ward below.  A great oak beam, a foot square, was cut clean in two, the walls of both wards were pitted and pierced by fragments, and the tiled floor of the lower ward was broken up.  The beds lay as they were when