"Bill, please, porter. How much? We must be off now to the forts!"
"Don't know the bill," says the porter. "I'm new, the other man ran away. He didn't like shells. You can pay some other time, Messieurs!"
"Bien!" says the officers.
They swing their dark cloaks across their shoulders and pass out.
They come back no more, no, never any more.
Then an old, old man limps in on the arm of a young, ever-young Sister of Mercy.
"He is deaf and dumb," she says, "I found him and brought him here. He will be killed in the streets."
Her smile makes sunshine all over the blackness of that haunted hall; the mercy of it, the sweetness of it, the holiness are something one can never forget as, guiding the old man, she leads him into the dark restaurant and tends him through the night.
Then again the door swings open.
"The petroleum tanks have been set on fire by the Belgians themselves!" says a big man with a big moustache. "This is the end."