It was evident that Antwerp could not withstand much longer the pressure of the enemy’s guns, and we were not surprised when on Friday we received an official notice from the British Consul-General, Sir Cecil Herstlet, that the Government were about to leave for Ostend, and advising all British subjects to leave by a boat which had been provided for them on Saturday.  On Saturday morning came an order from the Belgian Army Medical Service instructing us to place on tramcars all our wounded, and to send them to the railway station.  It appeared evident that Antwerp was to be evacuated, and we took the order to clear out our wounded as an intimation that our services would be no longer required.  We got all our men ready for transport, and proceeded to pack up the hospital.  The tramcars arrived, and we bade good-bye to our patients, and saw them off, some in ordinary trams and some in specially equipped stretcher-cars.  It was a dismal scene.

The hall of the hospital was still covered with stretchers on which lay patients waiting their turn for the cars to take them, and the whole hospital was in process of being dismantled, when tramcars began to arrive back from the station with the patients we had just packed off.  They told us that the whole of Antwerp was covered with tramloads of wounded soldiers, that there were five thousand in the square in front of the railway station, and that two trains had been provided to take them away!  It was evident that some extraordinary blunder had been made; and while we were in doubt as to what to do, a second order came to us cancelling entirely the evacuation order which we and all the other hospitals in Antwerp had received a few hours before.  It was all so perplexing that we felt that the only satisfactory plan was to go round to the British Consul and find out what it all meant.  We came back with the great news that British Marines were coming to hold Antwerp.  That was good enough for us.  In less than an hour the hospital was in working order again, and the patients were back in their beds, and a more jubilant set of patients I have never seen.  It was the most joyful day in the history of the hospital, and if we had had a case of champagne, it should have been opened.  As it was, we had to be content with salt coffee.

But there was one dreadful tragedy.  Some of our patients had not returned.  In the confusion at the station one tramcar loaded with our patients had been sent off to another hospital by mistake.  And the worst of it was that some of these were our favourite patients.  There was nothing for it but to start next morning and make a tour of the hospitals in search of them.  We were not long in finding them, for most of them were in a large hospital close by.  I do not think we shall ever forget the reception we got when we found them.  They had left us on stretchers, but they tried to get out of bed to come away with us, and one of them was a septic factured thigh with a hole in his leg into which you could put your fist, and another had recently had a serious abdominal operation.