During that slack week we took the opportunity to see a certain amount of Antwerp, and to call on many officials and the many friends who did so much to make our work there a success and our stay a pleasure.  To one lady we can never be sufficiently grateful.  She placed at our disposal her magnificent house, a perfect palace in the finest quarter of the city.  Several of our nurses lived there, we had a standing invitation to dinner, and, what we valued still more, there were five bathrooms ready for our use at any hour of the day.  Their drawing-room had been converted into a ward for wounded officers, and held about twenty beds.  One of the daughters had trained as a nurse, and under her charge it was being run in thoroughly up-to-date style.  The superb tapestries with which the walls were decorated had been covered with linen, and but for the gilded panelling it might have been a ward in a particularly finished hospital.  I often wonder what has happened to that house.  The family had to fly to England, and unless it was destroyed by the shells, it is occupied by the Germans.

Calling in Antwerp on our professional brethren was very delightful for one’s mind, but not a little trying for one’s body.  Their ideas of entertainment were so lavish, and it was so difficult to refuse their generosity, that it was a decided mistake to attempt two calls in the same afternoon.  To be greeted at one house with claret of a rare vintage, and at the next with sweet champagne, especially when it is plain that your host will be deeply pained if a drop is left, is rather trying to a tea-drinking Briton.  They were very good to us, and we owed a great deal to their help.  Most of all we owed to Dr. Morlet, for he had taken radiographs of all our fractures, and of many others of our cases.  We went to see him one Sunday afternoon at his beautiful house in the Avenue Plantin.  He also had partly converted his house into a hospital for the wounded, and we saw twenty or thirty of them in a large drawing-room.  The rest of the house was given up to the most magnificent electro-therapeutical equipment I have ever seen or heard of.  We wandered through room after room filled with superb apparatus for X-ray examinations, X-ray treatment, diathermy, and electrical treatment of every known kind.  It was not merely that apparatus for all these methods was there.  Whole rooms full of apparatus were given up to each subject.  It was the home of a genius and an enthusiast, who thought no sum too great if it were to advance his science.  Little did we think that ten days later we should pick its owner up upon the road from Antwerp, a homeless wanderer, struggling along with his wife and his family, leaving behind everything he possessed in the world, in the hope that he might save them from the Germans.  We heard from him not long ago that they had carried off to Germany all the wonderful machinery on which he had spent his life.