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210 WITH THE GERMAN ARMIES IN THE WEST
After some considerable hesitation I was at last allowed to
photograph a few of the charming and hospitable nuns in the
convent garden.
We thereupon looked in for a while at the really magnificent
Hopital Militaire with its one hundred and fifty wards and
rooms, its seven hundred wounded, its twenty-three doctors
and one hundred and forty male and female ’
sick ’
attendants.
Right from the beginning there have only been eighteen cases
of tetanus, most of them attended with fatal results. All
possible nationalities were represented amongst the patients.
But from England there was only one patient, a handsome
youth, badly wounded by several bullets. He seemed to be
in a deep sleep and his face was pale and drawn with suffering.
A couple of days before he had lost a chum, and one of the
nurses told us that he had felt dreadfully lonely after his
friend’s bed had stood empty. He seemed indeed terribly
alone amongst all these strangers. I could not take my eyes
off him, and it was touching to see how he lay there waiting
—
for what, I wonder ? He seemed to lie there as the innocent
incarnation of a policy which is doomed to die, and for which
he himself had laid down his life.
A band was beating an old Hessian tattoo in the square
between the cathedral and the Government building when at
half-past two, after dining with the Governor, I stepped into
the car which he had kindly placed at my disposal. I was
going to Brussels via Waterloo, and was to arrive before dusk.
Of Major Friederich I obtained an excellent map of Belgium,
and after saying good-bye to the venerable but still youthful
Professor Lepsius and my other new friends, I soon left the
town behind me. I had with me a chauffeur and an orderly,
both armed with carbines. The car was a little grey monster
with flag and streamer. As regards speed, there seemed to
be no limits to its powers. We drove, nay, we flew, at over
fifty English miles an hour when travelling at our fastest.
I wondered whether the object was to make the aim oifranc-
iireurs more difficult by presenting them with a more swiftly
moving target.
Villages, gardens and fields tore past, and the pace was too
great for careful observations and notes. But it is a delightful
and exhilarating sensation ; one becomes intoxicated with the
sensation of speed, and any feeling of danger vanishes with
the desire to drive on faster, and still faster !
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