It might have been!
For sometimes the city seemed to shake all over, and as I lay in bed I wondered who was firing: Germans, Belgians, English, which?
About three o'clock, between dozing and listening to the cannon, I heard a new sound, a strange sound, something so awful that I almost felt my hair creep with horror.
It was a man crying in the room under mine.
Through the blackness of the hour before dawn a cry came stealing:
"Mon fils! Mon fils!"
Out of the night it came, that sudden terrific revelation of what is going on everywhere beneath the outward calm of this nation of heroes.
And one had not realised it because one had seen so few tears.
One had almost failed to understand, in the outer calm of the Belgians, what agony went on beneath.
And now, in the midnight, the veil is torn aside, and I see a human heart in extremis, writhing with agony, groaning as the wounded never groan, stricken, bleeding, prostrate, overwhelmed with the enormity of its sorrow.