end—for civilians caught in the fires of war. With two other men I went into the heart of Courtrai and found it desolate, and knew the reason why when, at the corner of the Grande Place, a heavy shell came howling and burst inside a house with frightful explosive noise followed by a crash of masonry. The people were wise to keep to their cellars. Two girls not so wise made a dash from one house to another and were caught by chunks of steel and killed close to the church of St. Martin, where they lay all crumpled up in a clotted pool of blood. A man came up to me, utterly careless of such risks, and I hated to stand talking to him with the shells coming every half-minute overhead.
There was a fire of passion in his eyes, and at every sentence he spoke to me his voice rose and thrilled as he denounced the German race for all they had done in Courtrai, for their robberies, their imprisonments, their destruction of machinery, their brutality. The last Commandant of Courtrai was von Richthofen, father of the German aviator, and he was a hard, ruthless man and kept the city under an iron rule.
"All that, thank God, is finished now," said the man. "The English have delivered us from the Beast!" As he spoke another monstrous shell came overhead, but he took no notice of it, and said, "We are safe now from the enemy's evil power!" It seemed to me a comparative kind of safety. I had no confidence in it when I sat in the parlour of an old lady who, like Eileen O'Connor in Lille, had been an Irish governess in Courtrai, and who now, living in miserable poverty, sat in a bed-sitting room whose windows and woodwork had been broken by shell-splinters. "Do you mind shutting the door, my dear?" she said. "I can't bear those nasty bombs." I realised with a large, experienced knowledge that we might be torn to fragments of flesh, at any moment, by
