"How foolish of them to go to war!" continued the banker. When his mind once gripped an idea, it carried it through to the terminal station. Hilda turned on him vigorously.

"You realize, don't you," she said, "that Belgium didn't bring on this war? You remember that it was some one else that came pouncing down upon her. It seems almost a pity, doesn't it, to smash this beauty and hunt these nice people?"

[179]

[179]

"It's all wrong," he said; "it's all wrong."

Wetteren Hospital—brick walls and stone floors, the clatter of wooden shoes in the outer corridor, where peasants shuffled. In two inner rooms, where eleven cots stood, there was a hush, for there lay the grievously wounded. Eleven peasants they were, men, women, and a child. A priest was ministering cheer to them, bed by bed. Four Sisters were busy and noiseless in service. The priest led Hilda and Hinchcliffe to the cot of one of the men. The peasant's face was pallid, and the cheeks sunken from loss of blood. The priest addressed him in Flemish, telling him these two were friendly visitors, and wished to know what had been done to him. Quietly and sadly the man in the bed spoke. Sentence by sentence the priest translated it for Hilda and the banker. On Sunday morning, the peasant, Leopold [180]de Man, of Number 90 Hovenier Straat, Alost, was hiding in the house of his sister, in the cellar. The Germans made a fire of the table and chairs in the upper room. Then catching sight of Leopold, they struck him with the butt of their guns, and forced him to pass through the fire. Then, taking him outside, they struck him to the ground, and gave him a blow over the head with a gun stock, and a cut of the bayonet which pierced his thigh, all the way through.

[180]

Slowly, carefully, he went on with his statement:

"In spite of my wound they make me pass between their lines, giving me still more blows of the gun-butt in the back, in order to make me march. There are seventeen or eighteen persons with me. They place us in front of their lines and menace us with their revolvers, crying out that they will make us pay for the losses they have suffered at Alost. So, we march in front of the troops.

[181]

[181]

"When the battle begins, we throw ourselves on our faces to the ground, but they force 

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