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A WOMAN'S DIARY OF
THE WAR
A WOMAN'S DIARY
OF THE WAR
S.' MACNAUGHTAN
AUTHOR OF "THE FORTUNE OF CHRISTINA M'NAB'
"A LAME DOG'S DIARY," ETC.
THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN, AND NEW YORK
TO
THOSE WHO ARE FIGHTING
AND
THOSE WHO HAVE FALLEN
WITH ADMIRATION AND RESPECT
AND TO
MY NEPHEWS
Helier Percival, 9TH Batt. the Welch Regt
Richard Young, qth Batt. the Welch Regt.
Alan Young, ist Batt. the Welch Regt.
Colin Macnaughtan, 2nd Dragoon Guards
CONTENTS.
I. London ,
9
II. Antwerp
, 29
III. Antwerp
. 41
IV. FURNES
• 55
V. FuRNES
. 69
VI. British
. 85
VII. FuRNES
• 97
an. FuRNES
. 116
IX. La Panne
129
X. La Panne ,
► 143
XI. From a Ki
TCHEN
Win
DOW
• 157
A WOMAN'S DIARY OF
THE WAR.
CHAPTER I.
LONDON.
Hardly anyone believed in the possibility of war
until they came back from their August Bank
Holiday visits and found soldiers and .
sailors saying good-bye to their families ^
at the stations. And even then there ^ ^'
was an air of unreality about everything, which
rendered realization difficult. We saw women
waving handkerchiefs to the men who went away,
and holding up their babies to railway carriage
windows to be kissed, and we saw pictures of this
afterwards in next morning's journals ; but that
the thing which we had talked about, and laughed
at, and sung funny songs about, was really going
to happen, and that we were going to war
with Germany, seemed incredible for a time.
We were breathless, not with fear, but with
astonishment.
lo LONDON.
Most of us will remember that a summer of
very fine weather had just passed. The long
light days and the sunshine are already insepa-
rably connected in the minds of some of us with
the thought of last times, which makes the
memory of the summer exceptionally dear to us.
Already the blooming of roses suggests days that
will not come again, and the memory of lives
that were more to us than a thousand Junes.
On a certain radiant morning before the hay
was mown, we learned that a man and woman had
been murdered in a distant country. Murder has
a particularly horrible sound about it on a sum-
mer morning with red roses in bloom. We felt
deeply for a great family who had known many
tragedies, and we said sorrowfully that here was
another awful happening to an ill-fated house.
For a woman done to a violent death also we felt
pity and horror. But the murder was an historic
event and not a personal one, and after a time
it was forgotten or left undiscussed. Events did
not happen quickly after the deaths of the Grand
Duke and Duchess of Austria. To royal houses
such things, with all their tragedy, had hap-
pened before and might happen again. There
was nothing to show that the world was astir
with amazing possibilities, and there was no
whisper sent forward of the news that was to
follow. Sometimes it seems possible that our
LONDON. II
own statesmen knew less of the things that were
to happen in the immediate future than did even
the common man who is called the " man in the
street." The man in the street had often scented
war, and war-scares at this time were regarded
as the special prerogative of harmless lunatics.
Books and pamphlets on Germany and the
German invasion had ceased to be interesting,
in view of the fact that across the narrow strip
of water that divides England from her Celtic
sister there was more than a faint murmur of
tumult to be heard. The fires of battle were
kindling, and the eyes of the world were turned
upon the little green island across the Channel,
and away from a nation who, to speak the truth,
had been for some time relegated to the pages
of our lesser comic magazines.
When Austria sent her ultimatum to Serbia
there was still — except perhaps amongst the few
who knew — only the vaguest interest taken in
the impossible terms dictated by a great Power
to a small one. We had scattered from towns,
where things are discussed, to holiday places,
where journalism is lazily criticized and generally
believed to be untrue. Besides this, everything
that was happening was happening in distant
countries, while Ireland and the Ulster crisis
were near at hand.
When the sound of the tumult actually at-
12 LONDON.
tracted our attention, the hand that loves to hurl
thunderbolts was already on our neighbour's door.
Much ink has been spilt in explaining why
we went to war with Germany. Many learned
treatises have been written on the diplomatic
situation, and on the moral conditions that lie
behind diplomacy. Almost everybody who is
worth hearing has given his or her views, and
those who are worth reading have written them.
Almost it seems as if the last word had been
said and the last criticism uttered. Men and
women of every creed and of every race have
expressed their sentiments about this war and
about all wars since that day in August v/hich
made war inevitable. Probably a schoolboy,
briefly and simply, might be able to put the
matter as concisely as anyone else, and his creed,
for all its simplicity, is a national one : " When
you see a little chap being downed by a big one
you cut in as soon as you can. And if the big
bully says it's your turn next and begins to swing
his arms about, you take him on for all you're
worth."
England has never allowed her friends to be
bullied, and no one who knew her dreamed that
she was going to allow it now. Her children —
unexpectedly for those who did not know her
— began to stop quarrelling with each other, and
buckled on their swords to meet the common foe.
LONDON. 13
We were not ready — we did not pretend to
be ready — but we meant to fight whether we
were ready or not. Also, we meant to go on
fighting till the end. The schoolboy's simple
creed resolved itself into action. War had
been declared ; the thing which we had talked
of for years had happened ; and with the
lifting of the veil of that peace which concealed
the hate behind it, Germany stood revealed as
England's old and implacable enemy. The
revelation that we have been hated is always
rather contemptible than enraging ; and to our
everlasting credit let it be said that England
went to war with no notion of reprisals in her
mind, and that only the subsequent dishonour-
ableness with which she and her allies were
treated even suggested reprisals. The war was
a matter of national honour, and we went out
to fight like gentlemen. We had a small army
and not enough ammunition or rifles, and we
had listened quite lately to politicians who, like
mean folk at bargain counters, had demanded
" still further reductions," and we went into the
business as hopefully as usual, while in our heart of
hearts the person we felt sorry for was the Kaiser.
Certainly he was sweeping through Belgium
in a noisy vulgar way, trampling on everything
that was beautiful, throwing down and hurting,
killing and destroying, wantonly and odiously.
14 LONDON.
But " the little chap " with his back to the wall
and his face set was putting up a fight, was
contesting every inch of the ground that he still
held, and was daily losing it by inches.
It is admitted, I suppose, on all sides, that we
were unprepared. But we meant to " get one
in,*' and with every echoing crash of falling
cathedrals and beautiful buildings that we heard
from the other side our determination and our
indignation increased. It was crudely expressed,
of course ; England is a plain-spoken body with
a very poor power of self-expression. She can
only sing, " It's a long way to Tipperary," when
she goes out to die, and her war poems have
sometimes made one smile.
But the spirit was there all the same, and
a nation of shopkeepers keeps tucked away on
her topmost shelves a good deal of sentiment,
which is only brought down on very rare occa-
sions. When it appears it generally surprises
customers, who up till then had no idea that
such a commodity was kept on the premises.
The shop people and the manufacturers, and
the men who dig coal out of mines, and the men
who stick pins into the lapels of their coats and
measure out ribbons and speak of things being
sweetly pretty, met each other unexpectedly in
the trenches afterwards, and it was good for
them to meet.
LONDON.
15
Meanwhile, older men were informing the world
generally that they had better just wait a little !
Why, " seventeen of our lads " had gone from
the office or the counter, and this was going
to mean trouble for Kaiser Bill. Belgian forts
might be falling, towns sacked, cathedrals
destroyed ; we still pointed to maps with
little flags stuck into them, and explained that
" Bill " was in a tight place, and we thought it
too !
It was foolish because at the moment it was
not true, but it was fine because we meant it
should be true some day; and if "seventeen of
our lads " never came back, and many times
seventeen times seven had still to go, we felt
big enough for the job in front of us, and to
feel big enough for the job in front is practically
everything.
We sent our little army out, and began to
manufacture a big one. We manufactured it
quietly and quickly, and without much ostenta-
tion. The nation of shopkeepers took down
from their topmost shelves the boxes labelled
" Sentiment," which had grown very dusty for
a while, and we realized what we had always
known before, that the contents of the boxes
were not saleable, but were given with both
hands and ungrudgingly. " The lads " began to
learn the art of putting on puttees in spirals
i6 LONDON.
round their legs, and took off the black coatj
with the white pins stuck in the lapels, an<
gave up Saturday afternoon bicycle rides witl
their best girls. Thus a new army began t<
be made.
It was not too soon. There was a soldiei
living at Ascot then, a small soldier eighty yean
of age, an upright and God-fearing man, with^
eyes which had seen many things and saw far —
one who had not unloosed the sandals from his
feet nor untied his shoe-strings when his march-
ing days were over, but had " slogged it," as sol-
diers say, from one place to another in England,
calling for an army, passionately demanding
fighting men. But we were busy over strikes
and appeals for higher wages, and money-getting;
and we were rather smug too, and did not want
to be disturbed. So, while we admired the old
soldier's energy, and gave him a hearing, because
we are always glad to hear good speakers, his
appeal failed every time. We were all right. Some
one had said that we might sleep comfortably
in our beds, and the soothing phrase had caught
on, as the saying goes. It was a much more
agreeable prophecy than the one the soldier was
preaching ; and, grown lazy in our comfortable
security, we took the pleasant advice that was
offered to us, and slept. England had neither
sufficient rifles nor sufficient men when the war
(1.866)
LONDON. 17
broke out, and " Bobs " never once said, " I told
you so."
I like to think that almost the last thing I
did before I left England was to motor down to
have lunch at Ascot with Lord Roberts, and to
bid him good-bye. He was full of news of the
war, and in so far as it was possible he talked
simply and openly about it, without that almost
overdone discretion with which those who are
privileged to have near information about things
often do talk, and I was struck anew by the fact
that a man who had been in the thick of so
many fights was full of tenderness towards the
suffering which war brings. His mind seemed
filled with distress and indignation at the cruelty
of the German method of warfare. He said :
" I have fought in the Indian Mutiny, and
against Afghans, and Zulus, and Kafirs, and Hill
tribes, but none of these have ever committed
such deeds of savagery as the Germans have
done." We were hearing of Louvain then, and
of Liege, and of Lille and Namur, and we were
almost near enough to stricken Belgium to catch
the echo of women's cries and the shrieks of
young girls ; we were near enough to know
all about the unarmed helpless people who
were not spared by the soldiers in the gray coats.
Afterwards, the saddest experience that I had in
the war was to see the undeserved sufi^ering of
(1.866) 2
i8 LONDON.
non-combatants, and I know nothing more
heartrending than to find old women with their
white hair stained with blood, or Uttle toddUng
creatures wounded by shells. Lord Roberts
believed that German barbarism was a byword
amongst civilized people. For myself, I think
we may forget all about it, for our memories
are proverbially short ; but I do not think
Belgium ever will forget, and France will never
forgive.
Lord Roberts told me that he meant to go to
the front even if he could get no farther than
Ostend ; and he seemed to brush aside his years
and his declining health as if no consideration
could have any weight when there was work to
be done. He reached the front, as we know,
and he died there. And so this war became
another of his victories — his last, and perhaps
the greatest of all. . . .
Many people returned to London in the month
of August, for there was an impatient longing
to be near the centre of things. Also, com-
mittees sprang up like mushrooms in a night,
and must be attended. The need for action
made itself felt everywhere and in many different
ways, and energy was expressed by " in-
quiries '* everywhere. My own Red Cross
Corps summoned its members to return to
London. It was called " mobilizing at head-
LONDON. 19
quarters " — for we were all inclined towards
military terms in those days — and I used to
find that by wearing a red cross, one was im-
mediately believed to be a sort of peripatetic
bureau of information. From searching questions
as to how to make a shirt, up to the general and
most pressing needs of the British Army, I was
appealed to for directions, while the British
Red Cross Society at Devonshire House was
beset by persons in search of information of the
same sort.
Women were, I think, exceptionally military
in those days. It sometimes took the form of
wearing a soldier's greatcoat, rather large and
heavy, thrown open, and with a belt at the back
and a good deal of material about it. Uniforms
became a necessity, but more important even
than uniforms were badges. One could hardly
knit a pair of khaki socks without a brassade
on one's left arm, and work became easier if
accompanied by a stamped metal button. Every
one was making "calls to women," and the
women responded by calling at bureaux, and
were frequently snubbed, which left them
wondering why they had been called. It was
in those days that one first heard people
humming the soldiers' song which one now
hears all over Belgium, but which, as a battle
slogan, has always seemed to me a little thin.
20 LONDON.
At music halls and revues^ girls, dressed as
admirals and colonels, saluted with alarming
sharpness all the time.
War " wasn't such a bad thing " then : it
was going to do every one good and brace every
one up, and the man in the street, watching
some regiment march away, began to talk of
armies who would be " wiped out " in three
weeks or so. Meanwhile, the women bought
badges and the men expensive kits. Both
became very shabby before very long, and both
took their proper place in the scheme of things
in le bon Dieus good time. But London stamped
her name on preparations at first, and buttons
and things in leather cases were important.
Alas ! they have strewn many a battlefield since
then ; and the field-glasses which we gave our
boys have been left in muddy trenches or given
to some comrade after poor So-and-so was gone,
and all the smart straps and buckles have got
dim with hard usage. But the buttons and
the badges have helped to keep men's and
women's spirits up, and just as we used to fight
for a rag of bunting, so now we are content
to die for the sake of some brass letters on the
shoulder straps of our coats.
It was when the boys' new uniforms began
to arrive, and they tried on flat caps in front
of the mirror in the drawing-room, and buckled
LONDON. 21
on bright swords which were expensive and
beautiful, that we began to feel, not how dear,
but just how young they were ! We did not
pretend it was not heart-breaking. All the
dearest ones were soldiers and sailors, as they
ought to be, but would this world be much fun
without them, just suppose. . . . Besides, their
mothers were crying.
Mr. Punch, God bless him ! was our best
consoler in those days, just as he has been our
comforter and friend in many distant lands, and
in many rough and lonely places ever since we
knew him. Mr. Punch found the soul of the
war, and acknowledged the bleeding price of
it, and he showed pictures of things as they
were in Belgium and in France, where already
the fields were strewn with dead, and the blood
of their children cried from the ground. And
he showed us a man standing bareheaded beside
his flag, and defying his enemy to make him
or his country lose their souls whatever else
might be lost. He told us not to give men
and boys drink because it made them feel
ashamed the next morning ; and he told them
also, gravely at first, what they were fighting for
and why. And then he began, in his inimitable
way, to have some fun with them, and to tell
the soldiers in the trenches that the man with
the big moustaches was a theatrical humbug, and
22 LONDON.
that Uhlans were heavy swells, and he snapped
his brave old fingers at both ! He did not refer
again to burning villages and murdered women,
because, like the wise old boy he is, he never
rubs things in ; but he gave us some jokes which
men under fire had made, and he laughed at
raw recruits and made funny verses about them,
although half the time his heart was almost break-
ing. He was always on the right note — never
discordant and always a gentleman, not flippant,
but with the same old grin for every one ; and
let it be remembered that Mr. Punch is a hunch-
back, and can still grin, and that, like many
other non-combatants, he is fighting every inch
of the way.
We, for our part, were " military," and
bandaged little messenger boys with the rest.
Wc talked about " rashions '* and " revellies,"
and we " fell in " frequently, because nothing
makes a section leader so happy or so surely a
soldier as saying " Fall in ! *' and we had a drum-
head service, and raarched (rather badly, I am
afraid) through London, but the Sunday crowds
cheered us, and I do believe we all felt like
doing our bit.
Often afterwards, when wounded and dying
men were lying thick on a field-hospital floor,
and the ambulances were bringing in their
ghastly burdens from the field, and when there
LONDON. 23
was hardly time even to remove the dead from
amongst the dying, I used to think of the drill
and the white-capped stretcher-bearers at home,
and the little messenger boys with their innocuous
wounds, which were so neatly and laboriously
dressed.
The messenger boys' wounds were always
conveniently placed, and they never screamed
and writhed or prayed for morphia when they
were being bandaged. And shoulders were not
shot away, nor eyes blinded, nor men's faces —
well, not much good ever came of talking of
the things one has seen, and they are best left
undescribed. " These are not wounds, they are
mush," I heard one surgeon say ; and then I
thought of the little messenger boys and their
convenient fractures.
One day in London, as I walked back after
drill, across the park, I met an old friend of
mine, who told me that Mrs. Stobart was taking
out a women's unit to Belgium, and she suggested
that I should join her. Mrs. Stobart herself
seconded the suggestion, and I went on to the
committee that was then formed, and we began
to have hot little meetings in rather a small
room. It was all somewhat fatiguing, I re-
member, and there were a great many delays
about passports and the like ; and we interviewed
a large number of voluntary workers, who spoke
24 LONDON.
of " Atthefront " as if it was one word, and who
all said they were strong and did not mind what
they did. We chose our staff in what must have
appeared to be rather a haphazard fashion. But
the average of humanity is good, and, on the
average, is seldom disappointing.
Mrs. Stobart left for Brussels to establish her
hospital there ; but Brussels fell, and she was
taken prisoner, and that caused a delay. We
continued to sit in the small room and to talk,
and no doubt, like many others, we justified our
reputation as a women's committee by finding
each other a little lacking in intelligence, and
not always successfully concealing the fact.
We were all, I think, glad to get off on the
20th September. Our many attempts at start-
ing had often resulted in disappointment, and
we had begun to say " red tape " with a snort
of indignation. We all said " red tape '* in those
days whenever things were delayed or did not
go to our liking — it was another name for
opposition. We also talked of the War Office
as being "hidebound." It did us good, and it
did no one else much harm.
At last we got off.
It was Sunday when we started, and one was
struck by the fact that the whole of the months
of August and September had been very like a
Sunday in Lon.don. I have never seen so little
LONDON. 25
traffic in the streets, and except for the marching
regiments one saw but little stir. England, we
learned, " had not quite realized the war yet."
One forgave the expression then, because it takes
a little while to get anything into English
people's dear slow heads. But afterwards —
when every man was wanted and some did not
come — the old excuse began to get a little bit
loose in the glue. To lend a hand should be an
instinct surely. And to our credit be it said
that it has been an instinct on which we have
acted throughout the whole of our national life.
One likes the answer of the wee Scottish
recruit, who, when asked if he had enlisted,
replied, " Ay, I thocht it was time : yon
Kaiser is goin* ower far." Or the gentleman,
recorded in the pages of Punchy who, when
he was refused at the recruiting station because
of his age or his size, replied in a rage, "All
right, only don't blame me if you lose this
war."
Each of these men felt the whole responsibility
of England on his own shoulders. It is the only
way in which to join the army.
I remember a long wait at the railway station
when we were leaving London for Tilbury, and
I remember also that I forgot my passport and
sent my maid, who had come to see me off,
flying back for it in a taxi, and I also remember
36 LONDON.
hoping sincerely that no one in the corps would
hear anything about it. My official title was
Head of the Orderlies, and for a head orderly to
forget her passport would doubtless sound rather
bad ! However, a more truly cordial lot of
people it would be difficult to find than our unit
turned out to be. The passport was successfully
retrieved, and we set sail.
It was one of those voyages which produce
the deeply-sworn " never again " of suffering
passengers. One regretted living on an island.
One was willing to vote millions for a Channel
tunnel, and the only comforting verse of Scripture
that suggested itself for one's tombstone was
" There shall be no more sea." One promised
oneself one more voyage only, as long as life
lasted, and that was back to England again.
At Antwerp we were met by carriages sent
for us by the British Consulate, and, feeling
empty, we put on the Patent Patriotic Smile,
which we believed to be suitable for " the Front."
The Patent Patriotic Smile helped afterwards,
and it was just as well to begin to practise it,
even though one was still feeling very seasick.
There was a great deal to do. The medical
stores and part of the luggage were taken out
of the boat, and we drove to the " Harmonic,"
where we found a large summer concert-hall
placed at our disposal as a hospital. It was an
LONDON.
27
ideal building, except, of course, as a protection
against shell-fire. The high ceiling and the
many windows gave plenty of light and ventila-
tion, and the whole place had a bright and
friendly air. The good nuns at the convent
opposite gave us sleeping accommodation and
a dining-room, while a few bedrooms were
available for surgeons and orderlies in the
hospital itself. We began to put up beds, and
to allot to each person her special post. The
girls, of course, and very naturally, were all
keen about ward work. No one had come out
to Antwerp to wait on or cook for an English
staff, for instance. They must serve soldiers !
There was a determined competition for heavy
work, while not many " H.M.S. Helpfuls," as
certain of my young friends have now named
fussy workers, were present. I have always felt
that zeal has a right to expend itself like any
other form of energy, and that it can be ex-
pended wholesomely if it has an outlet, while
assuredly it will not make for peace if that
outlet is denied it. It should, I believe, be given
a wide scope in the matter of work, even if it
takes the curious form of a jealous passion for
sweeping out a ward with a long-handled broom.
In a few days there was not so much
anxiety to claim the whole share of every one's
work on the part of our staff as there was at
28 LONDON.
^
the outset, and they began to settle down into
their stride in a very commendable spirit. The
wounded had begun to arrive almost before our
130 beds were in order, but at first the cases
were not so serious as those which afterwards
came to us. Free from anxiety, and with
patients doing well, the time passed pleasantly.
The authorities gave the hospital unstinted
praise, and we were visited by various personages
of high position. We liked the Belgians, and I
believe they liked us, and in the delightful gar-
den of the " Harmonie " we made many friends.
Of course, we had our favourites amongst the
patients — Alfred, whose bed was always sur-
rounded because he spoke English ; and Sunny
Jim, who had, on some pretext or another,
remained in the hospital until long after he was
quite well ; and a few English soldiers who
wrote post cards, and convalescents in red flannel
jackets, who sat on benches in the sun and
smoked. A not too rigorous routine was estab-
lished, and we found ourselves very well content
with Antwerp, and talked of passing a consider-
able time there.
CHAPTER 11.
ANTWERP.
As every one now knows, the life of the hospital
was very brief, but while it lasted it was very
satisfactory. I believe many wounded ^^ ,
soldiers will remember with pleasure ^
the big airy concert-hall and the pleas- ^ ^*
ant garden which surrounded it. The hall and
the garden always had a certain air of gaiety
about them, in curious contrast to their present
uses ; but this was good for the men who had
looked on far other sights not many miles away.
Under the trees were groups of chairs and marble
tables, reminiscent of "refreshments" and an
open-air social life. The tables formed ward-
tables afterwards ; and in the wide, sunny balcony
of the hospital the rows of chairs were always in
use by convalescents, who used to shiver in the
sunbeams, delicate still, and with horny hands
rolled up dry tobacco in cigarette papers.
We must have been singularly fortunate in
our patients, or else, as I shrewdly suspect, the
30 ANTWERP.
Belgians arc naturally good mannered. Their
gratitude was shown in a thousand ways; but I
believe nothing gave the hospital staff more
pleasure than when it took the form of presenting
Mrs. Stobart with a couple of handsome bronze
medals in a case. She herself was much touched
by this gift, and made a nice speech in return
for it. Our patients seemed to consider that
when they said, "Je suis tres content de restcr
ici," they might remain in the hospital as long
as they liked ; and indeed we should have been
contented ourselves to have had them remain.
We grew fond of the patient, quiet, small
men, who, even when they were in pain, were
always grateful and always polite, and who
seemed to have a genuine enthusiasm for Eng-
land. Their " Thank you verra moch *' was
always spoken in English, out of compliment to
their allies, I believe !
One wishes the pleasant useful time could
have lasted longer. According to the news-
papers, it was going to last indefinitely. And
every day we read in the journals, " pour le reste,
tout est calme " in Antwerp, while if one's own
ears were to be believed, the sound of firing
seemed to get nearer every day. We used to
amuse ourselves at breakfast-time by asking for
newspaper accounts of what was happening, and
contrasting them with what we saw for ourselves,
ANTWERP,
31
until at last even the newspapers admitted that
the forts were " threatened.''
I took a little carriage one afternoon and drove
to the second line of fortifications. In Belgium,
which is the muddiest country in the world, and
where water lies long on the level roads, there is
always a slightly raised track of stones in the
middle of the streets, with a slough of mud on
cither side of it. Subsequently, one knew these
roadways well, and got accustomed to the sudden
dives which motor cars and ambulances took
when passing each other on the narrow ways ;
but at first one was puzzled to find oneself
driving on cobbles right out into the country.
My knowledge of military matters is small
indeed, and my knowledge of fortifications and
constructions is even less; yet I must confess to
a feeling of surprise — for which I offer excuses
to those who know much better than myself —
when I saw the forts. I had always heard that
Antwerp was one of the best-protected towns in
the world, and, indeed, I had often heard it
called impregnable ; but the grass-grown ram-
parts and the old stone-built forts looked to my
ignorant eyes like remnants of mediaevalism : it
was impossible to think of them as being designed
to stand a heavy siege of modern artillery ;
indeed, the impression that was conveyed to the
mind was that of some slumbering old fortifica-
32 ANTWERP.
tion, such as one is often taken to sec because o
its historic interest. I passed fields in which men
were laboriously placing wooden stakes which,
they told me, were put there to lame horses !
And there seemed to linger about Antwerp a
notion of cavalry charges up to the walls of the
city. Even the wire entanglements looked lik
mere playthings, and quite unfit to stop hosts of
marching men. Antwerp was shelled from six
miles away ! The wooden pegs, which looked
as if some gardener was preparing to plant a field
with bulbs, could be avoided by making a detour
of one hundred yards on either side of them ; and
the wire entanglements no doubt were subse-
quently pulled up with one hand, and could
hardly, it seemed to me, have stopped a regi-
ment of schoolgirls armed with bonnet-pins.
I never saw the outer forts, but I enjoyed a
survey of the inner ones, in much the same way
in which one enjoys seeing oubliettes and draw-
bridges and loopholes for arrows, and other
interesting remnants of a bygone system of
defence. Cavalry advancing by road and through
a ploughed field might have found Antwerp an
awkward place to negotiate ; otherwise I could
not discover what the defences were for.
A few lines of trees had been cut down, while
others had been spared, and a great many small
gardens had been trampled out of existence, in
ANTWERP. 33
preparation for an assault by 1 6-inch guns !
The place seemed to my ignorant mind to be
doomed beforehand, and no doubt that doom
was hastened by treachery within the walls. A
large German population is not easily or im-
mediately sorted out at a crisis, and the fall of
Antwerp, which took so many persons by
surprise, could hardly, I think, have been un-
anticipated by those who were in the city.
On the 25th we began to hear the sound of
guns, and one afternoon a Taube flew overhead.
One grew well accustomed to the visit of these
destructive birds in the weeks that followed, but
this was the first one I had seen. They are
singularly graceful in their flight, and it is
difficult to connect their dove-like sailing over-
head with dropped bombs and " silent death "
and destruction.
Our guns fired at the one which sailed over
the hospital, and there was some little com-
motion in the street outside ; while a piece of
shrapnel fell through the roof of our hospital
and considerably startled a wounded man beside
whose bed it landed. The bursting shells looked
like bits of cotton wool in the sky, and amongst
them the Taube sailed away again, having had a
look at us and laid an egg very rudely in our
midst.
The firing could constantly be heard after this,
(1,866) 3
34 ANTWERP.
and the work of the hospital became very heavy.
Two orderlies always took turns in sitting
up at night so as to be able to give a helping
hand to the nurses and doctors, who were kept
busy day and night. The bell at the street gate
used to ring, and we knew that one vehicle,
moving more slowly than the others that tore up-
and down the road, contained wounded men
slung on stretchers behind the canvas tilt of
the ambulance. Our work had developed into
routine very quickly. We used to go down the
long passage to the gateway, where a little
crowd with a taste for horrors always assembled
to see what could be seen, and here we received
the different cases and took their names and
regimental numbers before handing them over to
the surgeons. Later, clothes had to be sorted
and labelled, and sent to be disinfected and
cleaned ; and it became a work of some magni-
tude to empty the men's pockets of their various
treasures, and label and number them and put
them away. The Belgian loves his small pos-
sessions, and carries about with him the most
curious collection of things ; and in his knapsack,
whose principal merit might seem to be that it
should be light, he often carries presents for all
his family ; and I have frequently been called
upon to admire the silk scarves, the baby's shoes,
and the bottles of scent which they contained.
ANTWERP. 35
In their greatcoats we used to find loaded
revolvers side by side with sardine tins and
candle ends and oddments of every description.
They were all very pockety, and many of them
were not of the sort that can be conveniently
baked in a furnace ; but I think we loyally
looked after them all, and each patient got his
queer goods when he was discharged.
We used to serve oxo to the men as soon as
they were brought in, and we had hot water bottles
ready for them. The worst of it all was that
everything had to be done in the dark. Orders
were compulsory about lights being turned out
by eight o'clock, and after that hour a good deal
of groping used to begin, and marble tables
with unsuspected legs were frequently over-
turned with a crash. We used to hold electric
torches for the doctors who were dressing
wounds, and I think I have never seen such
exhaustion as the soldiers showed. They often
went to sleep while the bandages were being
placed upon them, and I have even seen a man
doze heavily while a cut in his forehead was
being stitched.
The darkness and the want of water were the
two baffling things about that time in Antwerp ;
and indeed the groping about, when the short
days closed in, was one of the worst things about
the whole winter. The Germans destroyed the
36 ANTWERP.
reservoir near Antwerp, and all the water for the]
hospital and for our own men had to be fetched]
in buckets from a neighbouring well. We use(
to go out after supper, offering to carry things
for each other as women will, and fill every!
available receptacle and carry them back to the]
two houses before going to bed.
About this time we got orders to evacuate the
wounded ; but later, when all the patients who
could move were dressed, we were begged to
remain and to keep the hospital open. The
authorities told us frankly that the town would
without doubt be bombarded, and that the Govern-
ment, etc., were leaving ; also that any of the
hospital unit who wanted to return home were at
liberty to do so. Only one or two took advan-
tage of the permission, and the rest remained.
There was a certain sense of strain about the
days that followed. The weather was still and
quiet, and the autumn leaves dropped plentifully
in the convent's peaceful garden where we
lodged, while the booming of guns went on all
the time, and every one began to leave the city.
The Government officials and the Consulate
departed for England, and every boat was packed
with crowds of refugees of all classes. There
was no panic, but certainly a very fixed deter-
mination to get away. Meanwhile, we still read
" Tout est calme ; " and I suppose that when a
ANTWERP. 37
town IS nearly emptied of its inhabitants it has
rather a calm appearance. We might ourselves
have imagined that all was calm had it not been
for the frequently arriving ambulances at the
door. Each case seemed more pitiful than the
last, and at night time especially it was heart-
breaking to hear the cries in the wards. From
a distance, I fancy that the actual suffering that
war brings is sometimes not appreciated, or may
even be overlooked. It is not, perhaps, well to
insist upon it, but a hospital at the front leaves
nothing unrealized in this respect. And still the
news from the trenches was bad. Even English
soldiers and sailors said it was bad ; and when
English soldiers and sailors admit that they are
not winning hands down, one may begin to
suspect that the outlook is serious.
I often went to the gate of the garden to see
the ceaseless stream of motor conveyances tearing
up and down between our hospital and the
trenches. The stream never ceased, and the
hooting of horns never ceased, while the sense
of hurry and stress went on all the time.
When the cars were English, the occupants
would often stop to ask the way at the cross-
roads ; and to one's question, "What news.?''
there would come a shake of the head and,
" Not very good."
We all spent most of our days in the wards
38 ANTWERP.
then, and got Belgian women to do the other
work. At night time the concert-hall, with its
platform and gay pillars and the forgotten air
of gaiety about it, always struck me as being
particularly sad. It seemed like a living protest
against the destruction of simple happiness in a
big provincial town, where men and women had
enjoyed music, and tea at little marble tables, and
a concert-hall with singers in it. Now it was
plunged in darkness, and nurses with tiny lights,
going up and down between the straight little
beds, had to listen to cries of " A boire,
mademoiselle,'' all through the night. They
moved about softly with their little torches and
straightened a pillow here and there, while over-
head was a great arch of decorated ceiling, all
gay with painted flowers. Wounded men coming
in out of the dark used to blink oddly at the
concert-hall and at the nurses and doctors ; but
I used to think they did not question anything
or think of anything much except their own
suffering. I had had an idea that I should be
kept busy writing letters for them, or sending
messages to their homes, but a good many of
the poor fellows were too ill for this ; and as
time went on, our hospital being nearest to
the actual fighting, we used to receive cases all
night long.
The guns were now so close that the air used
ANTWERP, 39
to shake with them ; and, alas ! we had to refuse
many patients owing to want of room. On
Sunday, the 3rd, however, we were quite sure
that all would now be well, for some London
omnibuses had arrived, and it was quite impos-
sible to associate a respectable London omnibus
with defeat ! They still had advertisements on
them, redolent of familiar streets, and were filled
with naval men. We admitted that we were
" thrilled,'* and we went to the gate to wish
them " good luck '* as they passed, and to tell
them to come to us to be nursed if they were
wounded. In more emotional days the feeling
of safety which our countrymen gave us might
have excused expressions of sentiment ; as it
was, we were " cheery,'' according to the fashion
of our day, and according to the fashion of
the hospital, where the meals were always of
a lively description. We gave the men the best
" send off" that was possible, and they shook
hands with us and said, " We will take care of
you, sister." In our minds there was a sense of
relief; for there is no doubt about it, omnibuses
and sailors do give a great sense of security !
It is far too early to speak of the diplomatic
side of the war, or to venture on criticism.
The arrival of the Naval Brigade did not pre-
vent the fall of Antwerp. And let us leave it
at that.
40 ANTWERP.
The hurrying motor cars and ammunition vans
began to go more swiftly up and down the road,
and now we noticed that many of them were
damaged. The men who were driving them
showed us great lumps of shell which they had
picked up on the roadway, or would point to
disabled engines and broken wings, and say, in
answer to our exclamation, " It would have been
a lot worse if that piece had fallen on my 'ead.*'
They seemed sorry not to be able to give us a
better account of how things were going ; and
when they got the chance they always ate largely
and stolidly, and wiped their mouths, said " Good
morning,'* and went into the firing-line again.
They would not have parted with an old beloved
pipe in those days for a ransom, and, like most
soldiers and sailors, they could grumble about the
want of sugar in their coffee, and then lay down
their lives without a murmur.
CHAPTER III.
ANTWERP.
The bombardment began on the yth of October
at midnight. One does not wish to include
unnecessary personal narrative in an ^ . /
account of work at the front, but the
first sound of shells is unexpected and a " ^*
little startling. Some people have described the
noise as being a scream, and others have called it
a yell, and we get such expressions as " whizzing "
and " whistling," but I do not think any of these
words quite describe it. It is a curious sound of
rending, increasing in violence as the missile
comes towards one, and giving one plenty of
time to wonder, if one feels so disposed, whether
it intends to hit one or not. This has its useful
side if one is inclined to take cover, but it cer-
tainly adds a little to the mental discomfort
which being under a prolonged bombardment
involves. I slept in a small room — the museum
of the convent school — with a large window in
it. When the first shell arrived in Antwerp it
came past my open window and fell quite close
42 ANTWERP.
to the convent. So then we began to dress
ourselves and, looking rather like a girls* school,
I thought, we walked over in the bright moon-
light to the hospital on the other side of the
road. I suppose it was a matter of honour with
us all not to walk quickly. There is a British
obstinacy, of which one saw a good deal during
the war, which refuses to hurry for a beastly
German shell ! It has cost a good many lives,
but it is good all the same.
We found the hospital staff already very busy.
As soon as the shells began to come over, the
helpless wounded all began to scream, while
some of those who, we imagined, would not
walk again leapt out of bed. The nurses
quieted everybody, and an assurance that we did
not mean to desert them seemed to bring a curious
sense of safety to the men — as if a handful of
women could protect them from bursting shells !
The hospital, as I have said, was a lightly
built structure, mostly made of glass, and under-
neath it was a small coke cellar. I do not fancy
it gave any protection whatever, and there was
always the chance that the building above might
collapse and fall on the top of us, preventing
our getting out, but that was one of the chances
which had to be accepted, and the fact of being
in any sort of cellar had a certain pretension of
safety about it which satisfied the men.
ANTWERP. 43
On the day previous, we had done what we
could in the way of removing iron gratings and
bars which might choke the entrance to the
little cellar ; also we had arranged mattresses in it
and stocked it with some provisions and plenty
of water. Every one had been instructed where
to find it, so there was no confusion. Our staff
consisted solely of women : two girls went out
and turned off the gas at the main, to pre-
vent an explosion if we should be hit, and
the others worked at the stretchers, carrying
men from the hospital above into the small
space below. I saw one little red-haired nurse
carry three men in succession on her back down
the little coal-shoot which formed the cellar's
entrance !
Meanwhile the shells were " coming pretty
thick," as a wounded English sergeant said.
Our orders were that everything was to go on
as usual, and we were asked who was on night
duty. We said good-night to those who were
returning to the convent opposite, and the rest
of us lighted little night-lights and stayed with
the wounded. There were over a hundred of
them in the cellar, but we had mattresses for the
worst cases, and we went to the hospital above
for extra pillows and blankets and to see that
every bed was evacuated.
Most of the men slept, as soldiers seem able
44 ANTWERP.
to do under any circumstances ; but we had
various distressing cases of painful gangrenous
wounds and sickness, and these got no rest all
night. Also, there were some disabled men
who stood upright all the time, because the
position was easier for them ; and still others
who slept on the little piles of coke that re-
mained in che cellar. The small flames of the
night-lightS threw curious shadows on the groups
of soldiers in their greatcoats and with heads or
arms bound up, and on the white faces of those
who lay on the mattresses.
I think the men liked having us with them,
and they seemed to think it was civil of us
women not to leave them, for I heard one man
say to another, as he rolled round on his blanket
on the floor, " Mon Dieu ! que les Anglaises
sont comme il faut ! "
It " bucked one," as schoolboys say, to hear
one's country well spoken of. But indeed I
believe a friendship has been established be-
tween us and Belgium which will not lightly
be broken.
The night in the cellar seemed long ; there
was a constant noise of shivering glass as the
impact of the shells destroyed our poor hospital,
and we were anxious about our friends in the
convent, for one shell certainly, crashing through
masonry, sounded as though it must have seriously
ANTWERP. 45
damaged the building. We looked at each
other and said, " That's the convent gone ! "
But as a matter of fact it was the house next it
which had been struck, and this was soon in
flames. The convent itself had only a bit of its
cornice taken off and some shutters damaged.
We ourselves came in for rather more than our
fair share of attention, I fancy, for we were
(it was explained to me) on a line with the
arsenal, against which fire was being directed.
Be that as it may, the morning showed us much
damage done — trees split up in the garden,
and a hole six feet deep, where some nurses
had laid some washing out to dry in front of
the hospital.
The wounded English sergeant told us that
firing would probably cease about dawn, because
the enemy always liked to keep their guns
concealed. Consequently, dawn was pretty wel-
come that morning. But the shelling was
heavier than ever !
At six o'clock the " girls' school " walked
over from the convent again, and very calmly
began to prepare breakfast. I must confess that
had some of the younger girls shown faintness or
fear I should not, for one, have blamed them ;
but I did not see anyone give way even for a
short time. I remember catching a friend's
eye when a shell came very close to us, and
46 ANTWERP.
so unpleasant was it, that we both began to
laugh.
The nurses were bright and lively all the time,
and chatted all through the night, and the wants
of the sick and wounded kept most of us busy.
We could, I admit, have done with less firing
when the men began to quit the hospital after
breakfast. A military order came that all those
who could walk were to leave ; so they set out,
and that was a pathetic and ghastly business.
For they had not even crutches or sticks ; but
we cut up old boxes for them and, leaning on
little bits of board, doubled up with pain and
holding on to their comrades, they limped
off down the long empty road, with "Jack
Johnsons " still whizzing overhead.
But only a small part of our difficulties was
over when all the men who could limp or crawl
had left us, for not only were we filled with
anxiety as to what would become of them on
their slow and painful journey to places of
shelter, but we still had to determine how the
" intransportables " could best be looked after
and cared for. It was, of course, impossible
that they should remain in the cellar or in the
hospital. Already the latter place was partially
wrecked, and it remained unsafe until (I am
informed) it was hit by a shell and took fire just
after we left it.
ANTWERP.
47
Three of our party started off to the town
to see what they could arrange in the way of
transport, while a young girl, whom we called the
Transport Orderly, went unobserved and stood by
the gate at a time when shells were flying "pretty
thick,'* and remained there for an hour in the
hope of seeing some empty vehicle coming back
from the trenches which would take our poor
wounded away. She informed me afterwards
that she had " minded " for the first five minutes
but not afterwards, and she seemed concerned
that some soldiers had ducked behind a stone
wall instead of " standing up to " the shells.
Either the right people were in Antwerp that
day or else bombardments do not affect English
nerves very much, or else, as I once heard a
soldier say, "We are too well-bred to show
it ! " I have since always seen it stated that
shells were bursting at the rate of four per
minute, and although I cannot vouch for this
statement, I do know that the noise never
stopped for a moment all day and all night, and
it was officially stated that many thousands of
shells fell in the town. In the midst of it a few
straggling soldiers sheltered where they could,
while some of our little party, walking for three
hours in the deserted streets, found an Englishman
who had discovered an entrance into a tuck-shop
and was buying a German sausage, and taking
48 ANTWERP.
great care to cut it into neat slices ! At the
field hospital the patients were having breakfast
in the open air, after two shells had fallen into
the courtyard ; and nurses, questioned after-
wards as to whether they felt frightened or not,
always replied, " Oh no, much too busy ! "
I was interested to discover from the various
remarks I heard on the subject what was the
motive — or perhaps one ought to say the
sustaining power — behind the unfailing pluck
which I saw on all sides. " Much too busy "
was, as I have said, a common answer to the
inquisitive questioner who wanted to know what
were the exact sensations of being under shell-
fire. Others exclaimed, " I wasn't going to be
frightened of Germans — rather not ! " While
there were those who merely remarked with
dignity that they hoped they were ladies ! And
still others of thoughtful minds placed their
confidence somewhat deeper. I was affected
to observe that these latter were always to be
relied on at all times and even under trying
circumstances.
Our transport difficulty was not overcome,
but it was certainly much relieved when our
transport orderly who watched by the gate came
in and said she had found a motor wagon, driven
by a British soldier, who said he would help us
to move our wounded. We filled it up with
ANTWERP. 49
our worst cases and had them conveyed to a
hospital in the town where there were excellent
cellars, and then the transport wagon came back
again and we loaded it once more with every
man that could be packed into it. We sent two
nurses in it also, and a surgeon and the ward
interpreter ; and the sole direction that it was
possible to give them was to get out of the
range of fire as soon as possible, and to send back
some conveyance for us if they could do so.
After that we had a long wait. Nearly all the
wounded had been dispatched, and there was not
much to do. We sat in the convent kitchen
and felt amazingly tired ; also the noise of the
bursting shells began to get rather maddening.
At 5.30 we saw three English omnibuses coming
back with ammunition from the trenches. The
men who drove them offered to give us a lift if
we would get in at once, and we did so. As soon
as we were in the omnibus the spirits of all the
girls rose with a bound. They climbed up on the
roof, in order better to see the houses that were
on fire all round us ; they sang " Tipperary,'*
and they lighted cigarettes in an omnibus filled
with ammunition and petrol !
Most people, I think, believe themselves to
have been the last to leave Antwerp. We our-
selves got away about six o'clock, and the bridge
was blown up a few hours later.
(1,866) 4
50 ANTWERP.
The scene down by the river was very striking.
Some immense oil-tanks were in a blaze and
lighted up the sky and the river and the town
like some gorgeous sunset, while across the red
sky the shells still flew.
Our omnibuses crossed the river in a ferry.
I myself found the transit inconveniently slow,
for the rumour was that fire was now being
directed upon the shipping, and the crawling
movement of the ferry hardly made motion
perceptible ; but I did not ask anyone else if they
also would have preferred a little more speed.
When we reached the other side we set out to
walk, with no fixed intention except to give as
wide a berth as possible to the city of Antwerp.
Before we had gone very far, however, some
Belgian ambulances hove in sight, and these
very kindly took us to the shelter of a convent
at St. Gilles. The drive in the dark — for the
dusk had now fallen — was full of vivid interest,
for an endless stream of mounted soldiers and
wagons lined the road. One heard the cracking
of whips and the sound of horses' hoofs in the
mud even when one could not see anything very
clearly, and here and there were fires lighted
under the trees, and some men cooking supper
or sleeping — wherever they stopped, even for a
few minutes, the men fell rather than lay down
and slept.
ANTWERP. 51
We got into St. Gilles very late, and ate the
small store of provisions we had been able to
carry with us, and then the nuns gave us per-
mission to sleep on the floor of one of their
schoolrooms. We turned in (if that is an allow-
able expression for sleeping on a floor) about
midnight, and at 3 a.m. we had to get up again,
the news being that " things were worse." But
this was a scare, I fancy, and the order merely
meant that we must get up and start immediately
in the outgoing train for Ostend. We came
away with some of the Naval Brigade, in the
longest and slowest train I have ever been in.
I was reminded of the old joke about the notice
in a railway carriage in America, which said,
" Passengers are forbidden to write their names
on the telegraph posts when the train is in
motion." When our train was not crawling
it stopped altogether, and we used to get out
and sit on the railway bank for a time, and
then, as it jerked forward again, we would get
back into carriages which smelt of sardines and
tobacco.
I think I have never felt more strongly than
I did on that long journey that an Englishman
never knows when he is beaten. It seemed to
me that whatever we might do in the future —
and we all m.can to " win in the end " — we were
for the moment in the unhappy and horrible
52 ANTWERP.
position of turning our backs on the enemy.
I do not think the British who were our com-
panions were downhearted or even conscious that
they had had a reverse. Most of them in the
third-class carriage in which I travelled were
offering to bring me the Kaiser's head as a
souvenir. Their minds ran on souvenirs, and
they parted with buttons and bullets all the way
down the line to villagers, who brought them
apples and coffee. I did once meekly suggest
to them that in order to get the Kaiser's head
we ought to be travelling in the other direction ;
but this was a view of the matter which did not
suggest itself to the Britisher. " It's all right,
miss ; if we don't get it for you to-day, you shall
have it to-morrow." The Britisher was born
cheery. Even when they were " gassed " they
called out, " All right, AUemands, put another
penny in the meter ! "
We reached Ostend at midnight, having
travelled since three o'clock in the morning,
and found that every one in the place wanted
to stop us and ask news of Antwerp. " Inter-
views " were demanded almost in the gutters,
and our small party had to hasten on through the
dark (for Ostend also was in a state of eclipse)
to try to find accommodation. This, after many
disappointments, we were able to do, and we
were accorded the privilege of sleeping on the
ANTWERP. 53
marble floor of a restaurant. It was not a
particularly comfortable way of passing our third
night out of bed ; and the house for the moment
could produce only three eggs and some bread
for supper for our large party. I consider that
it was very nearly a flight of genius on the part
of one of us when it occurred to her to ask
the patronne of the hotel whether the house
could still produce some light champagne. It
proved itself able to do so, and I was glad for
the sake of the staffs, who had worked so hard,
that the evening ended in a manner that was
determinedly gay. We were all nearly nodding
with fatigue, but we drank our chief's health,
and made the best we could out of a somewhat
sorry occasion. It did not do to think of
our hospital, with its beds and its comforts
perhaps destroyed ; and I was touched more
than I like to say to hear the regrets of some
of those who had lost all their small possessions
in Antwerp.
During the day I had heard a good deal from
the men in the train about the equipment which
they had been obliged to leave behind them on
the platform of the town we had quitted. They
told me that each man's kit cost ^^6, and that
they would have to be fitted out again when
they went back to Folkestone. They got an
immense reception there, which I, for one, do
54 ANTWERP.
not grudge them ; but women — the nurses and
the orderlies and the staff — were adding up the
value of the things that they had left behind,
and I am sure no one ever knew when or where
they landed in England ! They came back un-
noticed, and began to save up out of their little
salaries money enough to replace their caps
and aprons.
Still, we were able to wire home to our friends
on the following morning that we were all right,
and that was a certain satisfaction.
CHAPTER IV.
FURNES.
At Ostend we found our little party of nurses
and wounded men who had left us during the
bombardment of Antwerp. One man ^.r /
had died, and many others were very
ill. A small house had been given up " ^'
to them, but it was quite evident that we
should not long be able to remain at Ostend.
Our unit went back to England, and I was much
struck to see the evidence of fatigue and strain
on every one. More seasoned warriors than these
women wore the stamp of the siege of Antwerp
on their faces for a long time afterwards, and the
" Antwerp look " passed into a sort of proverb.
Our women had not slept for three nights ; they
had been under heavy shell-fire for eighteen
hours (and they were new to shells in those days) ;
and they were returning home after three weeks
of exhausting work. But no one complained,
and all were ready to stay on with the wounded.
The only sign of strain which anyone showed
was an inability to hear what was said. It took
56 FURNES.
some time for a question to penetrate, and it was
significant to hear how often every one said
" What ? "
I did not return to England, but waited at
Ostend, which I found very interesting for a
few days. There was something a little bit
like a panic in the place, and so crowded were
the boats going to England that people used
to wait at the docks all night for early morning
sailings. The crowds were quiet but anxious,
and every one was on tip-toe to get away.
One heard of people crossing in open boats.
I do not know if this was true or not ; but I
saw the waiting crowds myself, and the wounded,
and the men seemed terribly afraid of being
taken prisoners.
The Germans were not iur off, and it was
a great bore clearing out in front of them again.
At Ostend I met Dr. Munro, retreating like
the rest of us with his ambulances and his staff.
He suggested I should join them, which I did ;
and on Tuesday, the 13th, after a confused break-
fast, served in a hurry, we mounted the ambulances
and went to Dunkirk. The road was lined and
filled with people, walking or in carts or carriages,
all trying to get away. Everywhere we were asked
for " lifts," and every one was carrying something.
It was a stormy day of wind and rain, which added
a great deal to the distressfulness of the scene.
FURNES. 57
At Dunkirk there was no room for any of us
at any of the hotels, so we went out to Malo
les Bains, which is the little seaside suburb of
Dunkirk, approachable by tramway, and we com-
mandeered there a little hotel which had been
shut up for the winter. All the carpets were
up, and Malo at that time suggested nothing
to me but an empty bathing machine, so sug-
gestive was the little place of summer visitors,
all now fled and gone.
As far as I remember, the evening ended
pleasantly on bacon and eggs, served by an
excitable landlady with black hair.
I was interested to find the ladies of our
corps with maps and motor cars. Most of them
were good chauffeurs, and all were well posted
up in war news. I heard a man in a responsible
position say to a girl, " How far are we from
the firing-line ? " and she was able to inform him,
of course. Later, I used to hear the same sort
of appeals made constantly, " Have you been
able to get our passports ? " " Where are we to
get petrol ? " " Can you find us tyres ? " " What
is the password ? "
Perhaps the ladies' superior knowledge of
French gave me the idea that much of the
organization and practical work, both of hos-
pitals and ambulances in Belgium, were due to
them. Later on I was struck by their pluck
58 FURNES.
and their resourcefulness ; but at Malo I firs
learned what good organizers they can be.
News was very scarce at first, but the news
papers, like some dear old hurdy-gurdy with
only one tune to play, loyally drummed out
tales of victories. The sound of firing was
still audible, and I am interested to note that
during nine months in Belgium there were
not many days on which the boom of guns
could not be heard either near or far away.
When the firing was loud and heavy, it was
our invariable custom to remark that those must
be British guns. Of the German artillery we
always spoke as if high explosives and heavy
field-pieces were some happy chance fallen from
heaven on that very undeserving people.
The " preparedness ** of our cousins, who have
declared friendship for us for so many years, and
have had, so to speak, the run of the house, both
here and in India, gave one much to ponder over
and consider. Everywhere there was evidence
that war had been intended for years past. In
Belgium itself pretty, innocent-looking villas,
inhabited by some stout German bourgeois, were
found to be well provided with concrete floors
for mounting guns, and even the carriage drives
had been carefully prepared for the traffic of
heavy ammunition vans. Artillery that had,
perhaps, been sent to some local exhibition had
FURNES.
59
been unaccountably left there, and was con-
veniently discovered when wanted, and no doubt
Germany must often have smiled when some
of our peace-loving politicians advised drastic
economies in our army and navy.
Malo was such a serene little place that it was
almost impossible to associate it with the thought
of war. One saw a level sea and a few fishing
boats going out with the tide. On the long
gray shore shrimpers waded with their nets, and
often the only colour on the beach was the little
wink of white that the breaking waves made on
the sand. The rows of empty bathing-boxes
gave it the air of a theatre seen by daylight
when the audience is no longer there ; but it
was evidently a place of simple amusements
and friendly holiday times.
Damaged ambulances and cars coming in from
the front seemed out of place at Malo. I
remember seeing one that had been brought
to the arsenal to be repaired. It had been a
German one once, painted gray, and with the
Prussian eagle upon it. This had been obliterated
with a few streaks of colour to suggest the French
tricolor^ and mechanics were now repairing it.
Its sides were literally riddled with bullet-holes,
and its engine smashed. The man behind the
wheel must have known something of what
fighting means. He was killed, of course, and
6o FURNES.
one realized that to sit behind a wheel with one*!
car rapidly becoming like a sieve must requin
some nerve.
Speaking of Malo, one cannot do less thai
mention some of the excellent hospitals whicl
were afterwards established there. The on<
which I personally saw most of belonged t<
Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, and I canno
speak too highly of her work. A Frencl
soldier, who was wounded and taken there, told
me afterwards of his experiences. He said the
hospital was almost full when he arrived,
and that it was proposed that the last available
bed should be given to an officer, but " Madame
la Duchesse " said, " No ; a wounded man is
a wounded man, and there is no distinction
between them."
So the wounded soldier got the bed, and I
never heard what became of the officer.
There was plenty of good work done by
various people — sometimes by those of whom
one least expected it. I remember, for instance,
hearing some doubt expressed in the earlier
stages of the war as to whether a barge with
ladies, generally associated in the public mind
with social life, would be of much service in
distributing clothes and necessities to Belgian
refugees. But no one who has seen them visit-
ing in the poorest houses and pinning bundles
FURNES. 6i
of clothes together with their own hands, could
for a moment doubt their usefulness. The work
of these ladies, and of many others during the
war, seemed to produce a favourable and most
grateful expression of feeling on the part of the
Belgians.
On the 22nd of October we moved out to
Furnes. On the road there, one saw what one
was afterwards to get so well accustomed to —
an endless stream of motors and men. The
motors were of every size and description, and
everything on wheels had to carry what it could.
A gray-lined, once sumptuous car would often be
filled to the roof with loaves of bread, while a
lumbering camion^ hooting noisily like everything
else, would show an interior stacked with planks
or petrol tins. One's previous notion of soldiers
" marching as to war " may have been associated
in one's mind with bands playing, and the stirring
sound of marching feet. Here, one saw some
tired men grimly slogging along, their uniforms
covered with mud, and their boots often worn
out. But every inch of Belgium was being
contested by them ! They were flying no
banners, but they stuck to the trenches, and
with one little corner of their country left to
them, they held their own and fought stubbornly
and obstinately.
Nothing was ready for us at Furnes, so we had
62 FURNES.
to motor back to Malo to sleep, and we starte(
again the next morning at 5 a.m. The road
were nearly empty then, and I remember w(
made the journey in a Brooklands racing car, ii
which I was somewhat insecurely perched 01
some petrol tins. Our chauffeur said when w
arrived that he had " knocked sixty miles ar
hour out of her.*' This may or may not have
been true, but I do not ever remember travelling
so fast before, and I could have done with a
more secure seat than the one I was on.
When we reached the hospital we heard that
lighting had been going on all night, and already
the wounded were beginning to come in. We
often spoke afterwards of the time that followed
as the busiest we had ever known. It certainly
was one which emphasized what is glibly spoken
of as the horrors of war.
A large ecclesiastical college had been made
over to the field hospital, and wards were not
only already prepared, but were already filled.
Our ambulances, together with those of the
Belgians, brought in the wounded both by
day and by night. Men and women drove
these ambulances, and they were coming
in ceaselessly all the time. The courtyard of
the college was always filled with cars, and
filled, too, with the sound of throbbing engines
and clutches being jerked, and all the noises
FURNES. 63
which arrival and departure involve. Stores
were being unpacked, and one noticed how many
people said, " Where ? '' and then hastened on
without waiting for a reply. " Where is the
chloroform ? " " Where are the stretchers ? "
" Where are the Germans ? " " Where (even) are
the dead to be put .? "
No one stopped to answer. The wounded
continued to come in, and the guns were firing
all the time. The first of the ambulances that
had been out all night used to arrive about 10 a.m.
carrying battered men on its pitiful shelves.
" Take care ; there are two fearfully bad cases
inside. Step together ! The man on the top
stretcher is dead, lift him down. Steady ! Lift
the others out first. Now, carry them across the
yard to the overcrowded ward, and lay them
on the floor, for all the beds are full. Lay them
down, and go for others. Take the worst cases
to the operating theatre, and cut off^ the shattered
limb. Here is a man in the ward just dead ; lift
him out, and make room for another."
All round the stoves on the floor the stretchers
are lying closely packed. A hurrying nurse
covers a man's face as she passes, and the bran-
car diers carry him out. A doctor enters with
disinfectants, and sprinkles the floor where he
can, for nearly all of it is covered with stretchers.
A half- starved boy with both his hands in
64 FURNES.
bandages is unable to hold a spoon, and wher
he is fed with a bowl of porridge and milk
he stops before it is half finished and says, " Fn
afraid there won't be enough for the others.'
A few cushions in the corner of the room an
all that we can give him, and even these mus
be given up soon, for every man who can trave
must go on to Calais or Dunkirk. The firinj
is pretty near now, and the wounded are comin]
in sometimes at the rate of a hundred a day.
A young friend of mine at home said to me
" I suppose, though, on the whole, you an
having a very good time."
A French boy of sixteen dies very slowly an(
painfully ; and children are brought in, and girll
with their legs smashed, and old women wit!
white hair are horribly wounded. These lattei
cases must go to the civil hospital. Onlj
soldiers can remain in the field hospital. An(
there isn't nearly enough room for them !
It is about five o'clock in the afternoon, whei
the light fails, that the worst hour in the hospita
begins. The dim lamps are lighted, and peopl<
begin to fall over things. Also, this is the hour
it seems to me, when men feel pain most, when
the wounded in beds and on the floor begin to
cry out. How they sufi^er ! Here is a young
boy with his eyes shot out ; and several beds in
a row contain men with head wounds, the result
FURNES. 6s
of bursting shrapnel overhead. And there are
other cases far too pitiful to describe ; and men
who have lost their reason ; and men moaning for
morphia ; and a baby of three years old with
both his legs broken and a little bandaged hand
at which he looks with wonder.
It isn't a good time. War is not a merry
picnic.
Blood -covered mattresses and pillows arc
carried out into the courtyard. There is always
a great pile of rags and bandages being burnt
outside. A curious smell pervades everything.
In the midst of it all doctors and nurses keep
their heads and are never flurried, never less than
careful and attentive. They sit up all night,
and in the noisy daytime get but little sleep ;
they have become inured to seeing death and
suffering without being hardened by it, and their
patience is admirable.
On an afternoon the Queen of the Belgians
came to visit the hospital. It seemed to me
then, as it seems to me now, that few things
could so wring the heart of any woman as
to visit the wounded of an army in the remnant
of a kingdom as she did.
On the day she came, the wards were as full
as usual, and she spoke to each man there. In
the evening an old friend of my own appeared,
coming in out of the darkness, in the unexpected
(l»8t>5)
66 FURNES.
way people do in war time, and we went round
the wards together. Mme. Curie and her daugh-
ter were attached to the hospital for a time, and
looked after the X-Rays, and some journalists
came before the stringent rules were subsequently
enforced that none were to be admitted.
There was heavy fighting at Dixmude at that
time, and one night was especially full of interest
and of excitement. The town was being heavily
shelled, and some of our ambulances went in to
get the wounded. The account that some of
these men gave afterwards of the scene which
they witnessed was dramatic in the extreme.
One friend of mine told me that Dixmude was
like some city which a man might see in a
drunken dream. Houses were falling, and build-
ings were literally reeling as the shells struck
them ; spires had been knocked crooked, and it
hardly seemed possible that anything could
remain alive through that night. As far as I
can remember, eight men of our corps went in
on ambulances when the shelling was at its worst
to fetch the wounded out of the cellars where
they had been laid.
A son of the Belgian War Minister was with
us in those days, and he it was who saw to the
loading up of the ambulances, and who gave
orders for them to start. When all were full,
the chauffeur on the last ambulance believed
FURNES. 67
that the order had been given for him also to
start, and it was not until the three heavily laden
vehicles were a considerable way from the town
that it was discovered that our Belgian ally was
missing. One of our ambulances instantly turned
back, after the two men in charge had transferred
the wounded to another transport and had sent it
on to the hospital. It must have required more
than a little nerve to go back into Dixmude that
night. The bombardment continued, and the
two gentlemen were so long in returning that
it was believed without doubt that some serious
misadventure had overtaken them in their efforts
to find the missing man. Without waiting very
long, a second ambulance with two men went
back into Dixmude to look for the first, and
about midnight both of them returned, but, alas !
without having been able to find our friend.
It was a terribly anxious and trying time for
every one, and the feelings of the little party
can be imagined when they returned to Furnes
without him. Every one remembered the fact
that he had helped to load up the ambulances,
and had called out "All right," but from that
moment no tidings could be obtained of him,
and there was no one to ask for information in
the confused and tormented town.
However, all's well that ends well. When
our spirits were at their lowest, he appeared
68 FURNES.
at the door and explained that he had been
obliged to descend into a cellar a second time
to make sure that no wounded were left in
it, and that when he came up into the air again
there was no trace of the ambulances to be seen.
He got out of the town on his feet, and was
picked up later by a Belgian conveyance, which
brought him to the door of the hospital.
Wherever our ambulances were wanted they
always went, and I have never known a case of
their turning back. Dixmude was a case in
point, and there were many others which I could
quote.
CHAPTER V.
FURNES.
On my birthday — one is a little apt to fix
dates in this egotistic way in war time, because
one's own personality is of so little ^ ,
account, and one is so small in the
vastness of it that one clings to what ^ ^'
there may be left of it as one recalls one's features
in a mirror — I was out with the ambulances.
I remember looking forward to my day in the
open air very much, and feeling very saddened
when I went over to the civil hospital with
a wounded old woman, and found the nuns
washing on the green there, and under a rude
open shed I saw many dead laid. They were
only partially covered with blankets, and I
noticed how tired, even in death, their poor
soiled feet looked. The nuns, with their black
robes tucked up, went on with their washing,
and the dead slept beside them.
It was very early, and dawn always suggests
a forward look. One wanted something good
for these unconsidered soldiers, with a number
70 FURNES.
slung round their necks, who had given even
their names for their country.
We started immediately after breakfast to go
and bring in the wounded. It was a gusty, wild
morning — one of those days when the sky takes
up all the picture, and the world looks small.
The mud was deep on either side of the cobbled
roadway, and I heard the chauffeurs say that the
ambulances steered badly, and that it was heavy
going. When we reached the scene of action, it
was necessary to put out of mind altogether the
tin-soldier notion of battle, which one had learned
upon the nursery floor. Squares and serried
ranks and battalions are not visible — indeed,
nothing was visible except the smoke of burst-
ing shells. There was an air of untidiness, if
one may so express it, which is very different
from the straight lines of soldiers on the nursery
carpet. First, one came to straggling lots of
men covered with mud coming back from the
trenches to rest, or a corps of bicyclists, per-
haps, ploughing through the mud. Every one
seemed bent on but two things — to lie down
somewhere, and to get something to eat.
All the soldiers were squatting in groups be-
hind the guns, trying to cook things. I saw
one man with a couple of loaves spitted on
his bayonet and carried over his shoulder, and
another with half a sheep*s carcass across his
FURNES. 71
back. Still another — with a good deal of faith
— was trying to tempt a fish out of the canal,
with a line held on a piece of stick. After the
straggling soldiers came a line of ammunition
vans, and then the long gray guns, tilted at
various angles, and beyond, the bursting shells
like black and white tufts against the sky.
The shells made noise enough ; but the long
gray guns, when we got beyond them, had a
curious streaky sound.
I got an unexpected touch of humour when
I saw one of our chauffeurs put out his hand to
signal to a gun not to fire down our road, in
exactly the manner of a '' Bobby " regulating
London traffic. And I was reminded of a funny
sight I had seen in the city of Delhi, when one
of the gorgeous elephants of the Durbar was
swinging along in his lordly way in the middle
of the road, and a small clerk in gray clothes and
a topee, seated on a bicycle, came up behind and
pinged his little bell to make the elephant move.
These nationalized characteristics of English
people endear them to one very much, even
as one laughs at them.
When we came back to the road, which we
had quitted for a time, we were directed where
to find the wounded. By the roadside was a
little house where, within, one could see surgeons
in white coats busily dressing wounds, and some
72 FURNES.
of these supplied cases for the stretcher-bearers,
while others were to be found in the churches.
Nearly all the churches in Flanders were used
for the soldiers, and their appearance was piti-
fully desolate. The chairs of the place were
stacked together in the middle of the building,
which was then filled with straw, and on this
the men slept or rested, or ate their dinner,
or nursed their wounds. Frequently there were
great shell holes in the walls and roof. The
altar always had the Host removed from it ;
but Calvaries still hung on the walls, and figures
of saints with meek faces and sightless eyes, and
virgins with gilt gowns, looked down on tired
soldiers resting for a while before going out
again to kill or to be killed.
One day, while the troops rested at Lam-
prinesse, a spy gave notice where they were,
and probably directed the fire too, for the shells
fell with horrible accuracy, killing and wound-
ing on every side. I have often, indeed all the
time, at the station at Furnes, seen men coming
in straight off the battlefield, but I have never
seen any quite like those who came in that morn-
ing from the church at Lamprinesse. They
were men who, no doubt, were accustomed to
sleep heavily, and they had been rudely awakened.
In their faces was a look of complete bewilder-
ment, and they were dazed and unable to answer
FURNES.
73
when one spoke to them, like dreamers who
have seen some horrible vision.
The church which I saw first, with its straw-
covered floor and the piled chairs and the deadly
cold of it, remains in my mind as a scene of
absolute desolation. Outside was a group of
English men and women looking like a shooting
party at home, but now engaged in finding out
where wounded were, and bearing a hand with
stretchers on which to take them away.
When we got back to the hospital there was an
ambulance, as usual, in the yard, and I was sur-
prised as we unbuttoned the canvas tilt to hear
an English voice from inside. We had not before
had English patients, as we were quite away from
the British lines, and it was amazing to hear one's
own tongue from a wounded man. The voice
from within the ambulance went on, "Just give
the poor chap above me a drop of water, will
you ? He is pretty bad."
We drew the curtain back, and discovered a
man with a cigar in his mouth, laughing gaily.
" Best joke in the world," he said — " both
my legs broken, and you'll have to lift me out.
Give the chap above me some water first. I am
all right."
The man was Mr. Reading — " Dick Reading,"
as I always heard him aff^ectionately called. He
was serving with the Belgian army, and, as we
74 FURNES.
subsequently heard, he was standing behind a
gun-carriage when a shell burst close to him,
breaking both his legs. The gun-carriage started
at a gallop, and Mr. Reading caught hold of it
and held on behind, and was dragged in this
fashion for some hundreds of yards, his legs being
useless, but he himself conscious and determined
to hold on and get away from bursting shells.
He was taken to the operating theatre, and I
did not see him again till the afternoon, when,
having been under chloroform, he was concerned
to know whether he had " behaved like a baby,"
We wished we could have kept Mr. Reading
with us, but every patient had to be cleared out
of the hospital, as we were under orders to
evacuate Furnes.
We went the next day to Poperinghe, thirty
miles off, and although, as it turned out, the
move was unnecessary and we came back again
in two days, the drive there was extraordinarily
interesting. On either side of the road troops
from every part of the world seemed to be
assembled. There were Arabs with flowing
robes and fine clothes, and there were Turcos
with baggy trousers, and English Tommies, and
French Chasseurs. They were nearly all cook-
ing things for supper, and the waning sunset
and the ruddy light of the fires made the whole
scene wonderfully picturesque.
FURNES. 75
We found beds ready for us in a convent at
Poperinghe (and remarkably welcome they were),
but there was nothing to eat, and we went and
bought chops, which we cooked in a little cafe,
which smelled of burned fat.
One was glad to renew one's acquaintance
with the British soldiers, whom one met every-
where, and who were invariably cheerful and full
of jokes. To the nurses who passed, they merely
said, " No, miss, not yet ! '' and in rain or in sun
their spirits never failed.
There was not much to do at Poperinghe,
and we were glad to get back to Furnes, although
our welcome there consisted of some shells,
which fell close to the hospital, and were
picked up by souvenir grafters. While there
wasn't much to do, I made one of those ex-
cursions, which were afterwards so stringently
forbidden, to Nieuport. One wishes one had had
more of them. But I happened to be busy most
of the time. Nieuport had been heavily shelled
for some time by both German and Allies' guns,
and in its wretched and ruined condition it
seemed to me like some town that one sees in a
nightmare. Some houses were still left standing
when I was there, and have probably since dis-
appeared ; but there was not a pane of glass in
the place, and few buildings that had not been
touched. Roofs were gone and frontages had
76 FURNES
fallen forward into the streets, leaving s
domestic interiors exposed. The brutality of the
whole thing struck one painfully, and the expo-
sure of humble dwellings and the naked desolation
of it all were piteous in their simple tragedy.
There was something about Nieuport which
seemed to me like the people who had fought for
it — something kindly and domestic and given to
inexpensive little pleasures, and now most cruelly
wronged and yet uncomplaining. The shattered
walls and wrecked windows and the fallen front-
ages at Nieuport gave me many a glimpse into
little insignificant houses, with supper set on the
kitchen table, and little ornaments still left stand-
ing on the chimney-piece above the stove. Here,
where the outer wall was gone, one saw a whole
section of a house, as when one opens the front of
a doirs house and sees the upper and the lower
stories displayed. The servants' rooms in the
upper attics, with their tin boxes and pendent
dresses, had descended to the basement, and a
baby's cradle hung between the floors. The
iron of the bedsteads was twisted into strange
shapes, and pictures waved despondently on the
walls. In the roadway outside were great holes
where shells had fallen, and at an inlaid table of
great beauty that stood in the garden, some
soldiers ate their breakfast and cut their bread
with their clasp knives. Many of the houses
FURNES.
77
were completely hollowed out by fire, but there
was one toy shop at a corner where a counter
and shelves remained, although doors and win-
dows were gone. The little shop was filled with
the dust and debris of fallen roof and wrecked
windows ; there wxre holes made by shells, and
the inner walls lay in one helpless mass on the
floor, while the upper part of the house was
wrecked.
Across the ceiling a line of elastic hung and
remained, where solid things had all been de-
stroyed and had fallen, and on the elastic line
was a row of bobbing, foolishly grinning dolls,
with eyes that still gleamed behind the dust that
covered them, and painted lips that smirked.
When the wind blew through the empty case-
ment the dolls all danced upon their rubber line,
and in the curious quiet of the deserted town
their waxen feet beating together made a little
pattering sound.
The cathedral was roofless, but had an outer
wall and two half-ruined aisles standing when I
was in Nieuport, the trees all round it were
slashed and scorched by shell-fire, and the autumn
leaves which still hung on them were burnt up
and shrivelled. In a furniture-shop, goods were
exposed for sale, and some advertisements had a
futile look about them like trivial things viewed
from some large eternity.
78 FURNES.
Death was almost consciously present in this
little town where so many have fallen, and the
poor small houses in the humbler streets seemed
to hold out piteous protesting hands to one, as.
though, like other non-combatants in this hideous
war, they were asking why they had sustained
these terrible hurts. i
The following Sunday there was an important
meeting at Dunkirk of Lord Kitchener, Mr.
Churchill, General French, General Joffre, and
Monsieur Poincare. I was on my way to Calais
to meet some ladies who were returning from
England, and had the pleasure of seeing some of
these celebrated men. The ladies did not arrive,
and I stayed for a time at Dunkirk and gave what
help I could at the station there. The great
railway shed was known by the ghastly name of
" The Shambles,'' and it merited the sobriquet.
On the first occasion that I visited it, it was in the
company of a naval doctor, who had gone there
with the intention of dressing some of the un-
tended wounds. But so bad was the atmosphere
of the place that he declared it was impossible
to remove a single bandage.
A long platform ran down the middle of the
shed, and the railway lines on either side of it
were covered with straw. On these the wounded
and sick lay in numbers so large that I fear to
give them without corroboration from others
FURNES. 79
who worked there. Two ladies gave the numbers
as something exceeding a thousand a night. The
men had been brought by train from every part
of the country to be put on hospital ships or to
go to England, and they waited transportation in
the sheds, lying on the golden straw in their dark
uniforms, and looking, it seemed to me, like
nothing so much as shot pheasants laid out in
rows after some big shoot in the coverts. The
lights burned very dimly in the huge place,
because lights always must burn dimly in war
time, and there were no stoves. It was winter
weather, and from the train half-frozen men used
to pour into the sheds in their torn uniforms,
whose seams had been for the most part slit up
to give place to bandages. It touched one in-
expressibly to see each one's care of his wound,
for one felt that, however difficult realization
might be of suffering on so large a scale, every
man in this most pitiful band was bearing pain
and bearing it alone. As they alighted from
the train or passed through the doorway of the
shed, their poor hands used to be put out to
prevent an accidental touch from anything, and
all that seemed to keep them alert in the com-
fortless cold was the fear of being hurt afresh.
No one ever complained. It was la guerre.
Upon this scene of desolation — and I have feared
to picture it too vividly — came some ladies,
8o FURNES.
so vigorous and at the same time so careful,
that much was accomplished by them in a
very short space of time. The odious and heavy
smell of the great sheds gave place to sanitation,
and a lean-to kitchen was put up at small cost,
where soup and coffee were made. Dressing-
stations were established at either end of the
sheds, where surgeons and nurses worked all day
and all night. Wounded Germans got attention
with the rest, and stoves were distributed all
down the sheds, while on the long platform, clean
straw mattresses were laid out in rows, and a
band of workers came each night to give soup
and to attend to the sick.
There was one aspect of work in the war
which struck me so often that it seems worth
while mentioning it here. There were difficulties
— there were bound to be difficulties at first —
and with the enormous number of men pouring
through the country, the dislocation to traffic was
often unavoidable, just as it was impossible to raise
hospitals all over the country in a night. One's
astonishment was that things arranged themselves
so quickly ! One's astonishment increased when
one found that hardly a thing which the soldier
has wanted in this war has been denied him.
Money has poured in from all sides. There has
scarcely been, even in those journals which are
famous for exploiting grievances, a single genuine
FURNES. 8i
case of unrelieved distress or of suffering made
worse by want of care or forethought. It seems
to me that never have sacrifices been made more
willingly and never have men and women worked
with more disinterested and splendid endeavour
than during this war.
The aspect of it which I have to consider is
that in many cases — as in the matter of the
station at Dunkirk, for instance — an evil which
had existed and had remained unremedied for a
considerable time, was discovered and overcome
by the tireless work of a few individuals. It was
in affairs of this sort that women excelled. They
seem to have an eye for detail and a capacity for
treating even large numbers individually which
is admirable and I believe uniquely feminine.
Their vigour and their non-acceptance of im-
possibilities are factors also in the success of their
undertakings.
The thing that strikes one unfavourably some-
times is that, when work has been established,
order restored, and that " first step," which
costs so much, has been made, the Voice of
Authority (one is obliged to write the words
with initials) can be heard making rules,
dismissing workers, and abrogating to itself full
command of the work which has been so hardly
wrought. Even where its influence is not so
drastic as this it issues rules and regulations and
(1,866) 6
82 FURNES.
I
frames notices hung on nails. The initiative
which has had the courage to launch schemes
becomes hidebound and even penalized. And
workers, turned away from the doors of their
own workshops or regulated by a ticket of
entrance, are relegated to that humble corner
which is known as "their proper place."
One hardly ventures to specialize instances of
this sort which might only provoke discussion,
and would, as our leading politician alv/ays says,
" serve no useful purpose." But they occurred
often enough to induce the belief that in the
aggregate they might furnish food for thought.
... It was still possible to get permits and
passports to Dunkirk up till the month of Novem-
ber, and one met many friends unexpectedly
arrived from England and elsewhere. A large
number of hospitals was being installed, and
money seemed to be forthcoming for everything.
It has been my lot to see a little of warfare
before this present crisis. I happened to be
present at the bombardment of Rio de Janeiro,
and later, I and some friends rode through the
Balkans — not during the actual war, but when
much fighting and still more massacring were
going on. I was fortunate enough to find work
to do in the South African War, and I believe I
may call this present war my fourth campaign.
And after such experience as I have had (and
FURNES. 83
much more that I have read about) I should
be indined to say that in the matter of care
of the sick and wounded, and abundance of
food and clothing, there has never been a war
which has left one so little to regret, and almost
the only thing forgotten seems to have been
ammunition. The number of workers has been
large and efficient, the organization has been good,
and where mistakes have been made or grievances
discovered, they have been put right as soon as
possible. At first, every one suff^ered from the
unpreparedness which distinguished the outset of
the struggle, but I think there has been nothing
that has wrung one's heart as in the awful tales
of the wounded in the Crimea, nor has there been
unnecessary suff^ering for any great length of
time. This, I believe, must be consoling to all
those who at home are grieving over the
necessary horrors which war brings.
In the matter of transport alone, the diff^er-
ence between fighting in South Africa and
fighting four hours from London can hardly
be exaggerated. A man wounded to-day in
Flanders sits up in his cot at Netley for his
breakfast to-morrow, and rubber-tyred am-
bulances convey their burdens swiftly, and as
much as possible painlessly, to field hospitals or
to the base. As soon as a man is found he can
be sure of attention. The tragedy of suff^ering
84 FURNES.
I
hangs round those who are not found or who
remain undiscovered for days, and of this one
had many and most painful instances at Furnes
station. Still, one was able to feel thankful for
the difference between motor ambulances and
Kafir ox wagons, with their grievous jolting
journeys of perhaps seven days before a hospital
was reached, or the long, slow-moving trains
where one used to see English soldiers lying on
the floors or under the seats with their boots for
pillows !
If war has grown more hideous — as of course
it has done, and it is daily becoming worse — it
has at the same time become more merciful ;
and during the long pause in the winter's
fighting, time and opportunity were found for
arranging and preparing comforts on a generous
scale.
At first, as I have said, nothing was in order.
Our field hospital was sending ofi^ cases every
day which ought never to have left the wards
had space been available ; and they were send-
ing them off, too, in trucks lined with straw
and with neither lights nor attendants nor the
means of getting the men so much as a cup of
water.
I believed that a soup kitchen might be useful
at Furnes station, and I, with three Belgian
Sisters, established one there.
CHAPTER VI.
BRITISH.
While the kitchen was being installed at Furnes
a message reached me that one of my nephews
had been wounded at Ypres, and I was
fortunate enough to get a car return- -^
ing to Boulogne, in which I was able " ^'
to go to him at once.
This first Battle of Ypres has not, I believe,
been fully, or at least, generally understood yet.
One does not like to deal in superlatives, but it is
hardly too much to say that it was one of the
great events of our history, and probably there
are not many battles that can compare with it.
A sergeant returning wounded said to me, " It was
proper 'ell, miss." The battle had, indeed, some-
thing about it which suggests things so infernal
that the sergeant's remark alone seems to describe
it. The weather was thick and heavy during the
prolonged fighting in and around the old town,
and in the stillness one could hear the guns very
tar away. The air was dour with smoke, and
news was pitifully scarce. Men were dying in
86 BRITISH,
i
numbers too large for us to dare to count, an
one never heard who had fallen or who was safe.
Only in years to come shall we hear all about
it. Soldiers themselves will always probably say
very little. Hardly anyone ever talks about hell
when they have been there ! It is only by a
chance word or a chance conversation here and
there that one will learn much.
Here and now, it seems hardly a digression to
speak of the work done by what are called " The
Regulars " in war time. As I have belonged
to two voluntary corps, I am, perhaps, one of
those persons who are privileged to say something
on the matter. For I feel that voluntary work
has had its well-deserved meed of praise, and that
its really splendid work has been handsomely
acknowledged. The real business of war is,
however, in the hands of the regular army, the
Territorials, the Colonial troops, and other trained
military bodies, and the nursing is done by regular
certificated women. These and the soldiers are
not often photographed, except in those blurred
and indistinct groups that one sees in the morning
papers, and they seldom have the chance of appear-
ing individually before the eyes of the world.
At Ypres one learned what plain unsung British
line regiments can do ; while it is noted of one
regiment of Guards that they have never given
up a trench ! Plain soldiers, doing their duty
BRITISH. 87
plainly and unpretentiously, under circumstances
which cannot fitly be described either by the
familiar term of " frightfulness " or " horror,"
won the Battle of Ypres.
Some generals know this. There was a
moment when regiments were falling back, and
two men watching the battle may have despaired
or they may not. At any rate, other men say
their faces were white and the order was given
to retire, when one of them exclaimed, " My
God, the s are sticking it !'*... .
They say the general tried three times to thank
the regiment who had saved the day, and was
unable to do so.
Every man knew that success or failure lay with
himself ! Their manner of meeting death was
always heroic, and worthy of the names which
they bore. The list of names is a good one
and highly esteemed amongst us. In the roll
of honour one is reminded of a calling-over at
Eton, where so many names have an historical
interest ! One need not particularize them ; all
the best of English birth and of English man-
hood were there. The men whose forefathers
fought at Agincourt, or Crecy, or Waterloo,
carried the old names unstained at the Battle
of Ypres.
It is the name that counts ; and one might
write a volume on the subject ! It is the name
88 BRITISH.
that is the real meaning of a "scrap of paper/'
and the honour of a thing lies in the fact that
when a man has put his signature to it he sticks
by it. There were men at Ypres who died for
the sake of a tradition, or for the sake of the
names of their regiments.
We are only getting news of it all now, in the
tales that boys tell in hospital, or that soldiers
write home from the front; and we are getting
the tales told jerkily and inconsequently, as I
got them in the hospital at Boulogne. No
one was up to very much talking, and at one
bed one heard only of a man's wounds, while at
another, bits of news came unexpectedly, or a
chance word would conjure up a recollection of
the fight. One learned then what, perhaps, we
had hardly realized before, that the British
cheerfulness and the amazingly good jokes which
they make are not confined to the pauses of
battle, but are shouted out from the very lines
of firing, and are irrepressible even in the
trenches.
" Don't get downhearted, my dear ! " Thomas
Atkins calls out to his German foe only thirty
yards away from him. " You have started for
home, and you will soon be travelling a little
faster than you want to ! *'
" Fm only firing in order to give my lady-
friends flower vases,'' says an impertinent boy
BRITISH. 89
behind a gun, knowing how fond women
are of brass shell-cases. And two Irishmen
settle a long-standing quarrel between them
by having it out with fists under heavy shell-
fire.
Here is a " home-like " description of a
trench : —
^^ April 23^^, 191 5.
" The trenches here are only about seventy
yards apart, and ours are very good in places, while
one part, called the Keep, has been made into
a sort of rock-garden with various battalions*
badges worked in shrubs, and a certain number
of flowers planted. The paths between are
bricked with the remains of walls, etc. — all very
clean. It apparently was the courtyard of a
farm at one time."
A boy friend scribbles for me the type of
letter a soldier writes — what he says in it, what
he says afterwards : —
Before :
" Dear mum, dad, wife, and child, — I now
take great pleasure in writing you these few
lines, hoping they will find you in good health,
as it leaves me at present. We have had a lot
of fighting lately, and have had a good few
casualties. Poor old Bill has gone, and Alf is
wounded. I thank God, He has preserved me
90 BRITISH.
so far. Give my regards to Nell, and tell her I
would give a lot to be with her now. I hope^
Lizzie is getting the money all right. She ought
to write about it if she ain't. Well, God bles
you all. From your dear boy, Bert.'
Afterwards
►lesa
" Damn, boy, come on now ; there's three'
mucking in that tin of jam. Garn, boy,
I tell you it is so. Ask the
sergeant ! There ! You ! Didn't I
well say so i An' I don't want no
old buck, or I'll knock your face in
The same boy writes
" Scene : A trench. Time : One hour before
dawn. Silence only broken by stentorian snores
(no one in the world snores like the British
soldier). One receives a dig in the ribs like
the kick of a horse, and hears a gruff voice :
' Sir ! Sir ! Beg pardon, sir ; four o'clock,
sir
" One opens one's eyes and recognizes the burly
sergeant of the guard. With an oath one tells
him to wake the men and tell them to get to
their fire positions, and one gets up oneself from
one's covering of straw or overcoat. The in-
junction to ' Stand to arms ! ' and hardly sup^
pressed ' langwidge ' announce to one that the
BRITISH. 91
company is waking up. The voice of the
company wit can be distinguished :
" ' Good morning, gentlemen. And how am
I ? Sausages, eggs and bacon, kippahs, ham,
tea or coffeeh. What ! only bully and biscuit ?
Nevah mind ; very nourishing.'
" Wit hastily suppressed under the livery eye of
the company captain :
" ' Not so much talking there. Put out that
cigarette. Do you want to get a bullet in the
mouth, fool ! Pass the word. No smoking
before dawn. Quartermaster-sergeant!* (Arrival
of same.)
" ' Sir ! '
" ' Is there any tea for the men this morning?'
" ' No, sir ; company cooker couldn't come up,
sir, on account of shell-fire.' (Much stamping
of feet and audible curses.)
" Quartermaster-sergeant : ' There's a hissue of
rum, sir. Shall I give it out, sir ? '
" ' No. Wait till daylight.'
" ' Very good, sir.'
" In this manner one gets through the horrible
hour of standing to arms before dawn.
" We were marching back for a short rest
after rather a hot engagement," the boy says.
" One of our men remarked in a jocose manner,
' Are we downhearted ? ' Instead of the usual
92 BRITISH.
chorus of ' No,' a little man near me said quietly,
'Let every one speak for himself/
" Having lunched one morning on the Aisne,
a sergeant said in broad Scotch, ' Aye, I think I
got some o' them the morn ! They put theiri
heids a wee thing too high aboon the bracken !
However, Fm awa' noo to mak' sure/ He
came back and said, ' Aye, they're lying oot as
dead's mutton ! ' He was a born sniper, and
revelled in it. If there was nothing doing with
his own regiment, he would join another for the
sake of killing a German. And he continued
' daein' his wee bit,' as he called it, until he
himself was killed."
I heard from another soldier that during a
charge he passed a Highlander who appeared to
be badly wounded, and he thought he was dead ;
but on returning he found him sitting up hum-
ming a Scottish ballad, and picking his tartan
hose out of a wound in his leg with his bayonet.
When soldiers win the V.C. they ask, "What
for ? " and are as surprised as when they have won
a " Tit-Bits " competition. " I didn't do much,"
they say ; " there was a poor chap outside and I
brought him in." They laugh at everything
except the death of their comrades, and what
they do not laugh at they grumble at ; and
above all, they must have nicknames for every-
thing. And " Jack Johnsons," and " Beer
BRITISH. 93
barrels," and "Mothers," and "Black Marias"
have an absurd sound about them which must
be maddening for Germans. A nation which
preaches a gospel of hate would doubtless like
something more serious in return for what it
feels ! But Englishmen do not feel hate, although
they very often feel rage. And now even Ger-
mans are trying to write little comic letters
which they drop from Taubes, but none of them
are very witty.
Side by side with the Britishers' little jokes
death stalks grimly. One regiment went into
the campaign i,ioo strong, and now only 73
are left. Another counted its numbers by
1,350 men : they had not quite 300 left after
the Battle of Ypres. One knows of another
regiment who were in the trenches for three
weeks, and buried their dead there, and lived
on amongst the straw and muck. One hears
a boy cry out " Stick it, the Welch ! " with his
last breath, just as he used to call it out at foot-
ball matches and the like, and of another who
had only breath enough left to whisper, " Have
we won ? " A middy of fifteen on board ship,
suspecting uneasiness on the part of his men
under heavy fire, gathers a group of them
round him, and sitting down he giavely consults
with them as to whether thev consider that the
new engineer is shaping well.
94 BRITISH.
When they lie ill in bed we try to keep from
them the newspapers which tell of the colone
fallen or the comrade gone. For our own part
we believe that we shall not very easily find the
like of these good men again. There is one
especially whom we recall. He was a verj
chivalrous person, and a most courteous anc
charming friend. It seems to us as though
when Colonel died something fine anc
good died with him. We remember his loyalty
to his friends, and the courage which faced with
every day, health that was far from good. Wc
heard of him that the wound he had receivec
would not, perhaps, have killed a man of more
robust physique, but that he had had no sleep
for four nights, and that while the bullet hac
done little more than graze him, he was utterly
tired and slept, and so continues to sleep.
There are those who envy him even now
There are old comrades of his who watched the
regiment march away, who have only one feel-
ing of regret, and that is that they were not
with him.
Days in hospital are very long, and for some
men the memory of what they have seen has
gone very deep, and they try to tejl one what it
is like to be eight or fourteen days under shell-
fire, but they are unable to do so, and stop and
say, " It was beastly ! "
BRITISH.
95
A boy with a little table beside him covered
with things which he cannot eat, and a packet
of " goodies," which shows how young he is,
rolls round in his bed, and says it is "beastly"
for the other fellows to hear him groaning when
he is not quite himself o' nights. His companion
says, " You see, what is pretty ghastly is that when
you have taken a trench or lost one, the wounded
are often left out in the open. You can't reach
them " (the boy turns in bed again and puts his
arms out on the sheets). "It is impossible to
get at them," he says ; " sometimes they die of
starvation within sight of us. We see them
raise themselves on an arm for a minute, and
yell to us to come to them, but we can't. Yes,
at Ypres the Germans got our range to an inch,
and began shelling our trenches. A whole com-
pany next me was wiped out. It was beastly ! "
One boy has to take a message to his colonel,
and the communication trench by which he
goes is not quite finished. So the boy climbs
out into the open, and races across to where
the unfinished trench begins again. He is not
aware, of course, that a boy running for his life
should strike one in a pathetic light !
He was badly hit, but he managed just to
tumble into the next bit of trench, where
two men found him. He was bound up and
carried four miles on crossed rifles to the hos-
96 BRITISH.
pital at Ypres, and then the train journey had tc
begin. Fortunately, morphia does its work.
" I got half my men away/' says an infant
with his moustache not grown, " but I lost th(
rest.'' And when he is asked how he spent hi
nineteenth birthday in the trenches, he replies
in a voice hardly audible through weakness, " '.
got up early and killed a German ! "
When they are better the last thing they evet
want to talk about is the bad times they have
had ; and, quite wholesomely, they have an in-
satiable desire for picture papers and revues. It
is a good thing to be alive after all !
Our King's visit to Flanders did every on
good. There was a review held in the Grani
Place at Furnes, and the Belgian soldiers, who are
enthusiasts, turned out well. There were some
pretty black days just then, when the water lay
all round the little town where we lived and th
nights were cold and wet. Oddly enough, war
has a dull side to it, as soldiers know. But there
was a good time coming, and even although the
print at the top of newspaper sheets was not
always very large, we were holding on, and that
was everything. The King knew this ; and w
knew that he knew it.
I
CHAPTER VII.
FURNES.
The first soup kitchen was a very small, dark
little place. It was really only a small space
^ J under an archway, and cut off from
•^ the rest or the station by a door or
^ ^' sacking stretched on a wooden frame.
The actual space within the room measured
eight feet by seven feet, and in this not very
lordly apartment was a small stove which
burned, and a large one which didn't. There
were a few kettles and pots, and a little
coffee grinder, too, with a picture of a blue
windmill on it, for which I conceived an earnest
hatred, such as inanimate things sometimes
inspire in one ! It was so silly and so in-
adequate, and in order to get enough ground
coffee its futile little handle had to be turned
all day, while the blue windmill looked busy
and did nothing, and was perfectly cheerful all
the time.
With these not very useful tools to work with
(and it was very difficult to buy anything at
(1,865) 7
98 FURNES.
Furnes at that time), there came a rush of work,
which is not unusual in war time, and there was
a great deal to do at the kitchen.
The first convoy of wounded men used to
come in about 10.30 a.m. They arrived always
in one of those road trains which are common
in Belgium, and which make circuits and stop
at various small stations. We used to hear a
horn blown, and then the noisy outer door of the
station slammed, and we knew the train-load
of men had arrived. The " sitting cases " were
always brought in first. These were men
damaged for the most part in their feet or
hands, or with superficial scalp wounds, or frost-
bitten. They hobbled in, or were carried on
men's backs, or leaned against some comrade's
shoulder. And across the entrance hall of the
station went, day and night, a long stream of them,
to pass under the archway, and out at the other
side of the hall, and so on to the waiting
train on the platform. It was a little pathetic
to find how many soldiers thought they would
have to pay for what was served to them, and
to find them diving into their poor pockets for
coins ! They used to refuse cigarettes until quite
sure that they were a free-will oflfering.
The brancard (stretcher) cases arrived next.
They were all men who were gravement
blesses — one learned the term too well ! — and
FURNES. 99
they were laid in rows on the floor of the
entrance hall of the station. All were quite
helpless ! — wounded men with a number round
their necks and a label on their coats, pinned
there by the surgeon at the first dressing-station !
I never saw any one of them look about him or
take the smallest interest in his surroundings.
They had been sent into the trenches, and had
had a bullet through them, or a piece of shell,
and they had been put into ambulances and
labelled and sent somewhere. I think many
of them were quite unaware that they were in
a station. A steaming basin of coffee or soup
revived them greatly, and even having to decide
which of these refreshments they would have,
and helping themselves to bread, pulled them
together a little. Otherwise they most often
seemed dazed and with no thought for any-
thing but their wounds. One was struck by
their silence. No one spoke or even, except
on rare occasions, moaned much. There was
that dogged patient Flemish tenacity about
them which seldom expresses itself in words.
They were soldiers dumbly enduring, and the
sight impressed me afresh every day.
There was just one thing which added a good
deal (and unnecessarily, I think) to the suffering
of the wounded men, and it might be avoided,
I believe. It was the difference in the size
100 FURNES.
of the stretchers used for transportation. The
patterns were different and the sizes were
diff^erent. Now stretchers, both in ambulances
and in trains, have to be slung, and must fit
into the sockets provided for them. So that it
is obvious that a uniform size should be main-
tained. But the ambulance stretchers are an
inch and a half too wide for the train ; and the
Belgian, French, and English patterns all diff^er
slightly from each other. (The Belgian one|j
seemed to me to be the best, while the French
had the best ambulances.) The consequence
of this was that the wounded men were con-
stantly being shifted from one stretcher to
another. The men on the ambulances, or on the
road train which brought them in, were unable
to carry them directly to the train and sling
them into the sockets which were fixed there.
But each stretcher had to be placed upon th
floor, and then the unhappy man who lay on it
was lifted on to a train-stretcher laid alongside of
it. If his uniform was fairly sound, or he was
a Turco with baggy trousers, the hrancardiers
could take hold of these and make them serve
as a sort of sling to transfer the patient. But
many of the men who came in were in rags,
or their clothes had been cut by the surgeon,
and the process of shifting them was horribly
painful, and frequently produced cries which they
FURNES. loi
were unable to stifle. When they reached their
destination at the base the same shifting process
had to be gone through. Added to this, there was
always an outcry about lost stretchers and com-
plaints about the different patterns getting mixed.
If it is too late now, or too expensive, to
provide stretchers of the same pattern for three
armies, I do not think it would be at all difficult
to make the sockets in the ambulances expanding
rather than fixed, or there might be an alternative
socket on which the larger stretchers might be
placed.
It used to make one miserable that, for the
sake of one and a half inches of space, men
should be put to such real agony as transferring
them frequently involved. I asked a surgeon
who came to visit the station to write to the
Press about this, for I felt sure that a word from
him would mean much more than many words
from me. But I could never hear of anything
being done.
When the men were in the train we used to
take them hot coffee and soup and bread. I had
a little red hand-cart which was very useful in
this respect, and which, for some unknown
reason, always delighted the soldiers. And
afterwards, through the kindness of the people
of the parish of Coldstream in Scotland, two
very superior soup carriages were sent to me,
I02 FDRNES.
with trays for bread, and a fire to keep
soup hot.
Lately, since the warmer weather has come
in, and since new regulations have been made
about feeding the wounded in the hall of Aden-
kerke station — and not in the train — -these
carriages have been presented to the Belgian
army, who are delighted with them.
There was a good deal of desultory shelling
going on at Furnes in those days, although no
actual bombardment. One morning, when I
was giving out my soup at the train and the
Belgian Sisters their coffee, three shells came
with their unpleasant scream into the station.
The first passed disagreeably close just overhead.
Afterwards, in order to enhance my value in the
eyes of my relatives and friends, I persuaded
a friend of mine to take a photograph of the
big hole which it made in a wall that was
just behind me. Beyond the wall was a huge
hay store, and in the closely packed bales of
hay the shell, no doubt, expended itself. But
we picked up pieces of it cfuite hot, and, alas !
the flying fragments killed two men in the
station, while another man showed me his
watch crumpled up like a piece of paper by a
bit of shell.
Every window and every breakable thing in
the train was shattered by the impact of the
FURNES. 103
explosion, and it was a bad moment for helpless
men lying within, and unable to stir or help
themselves. The train was stationary, and had
no engine attached to it, and had the shelling
continued, it might have been very serious for
them. But there was no more of it that day.
At Cuxide, however, there had been a con-
siderable bombardment, and the refugees were
flying into Furnes, and were being evacuated by
our ambulances. All of them were destitute,
having been obliged to leave everything behind
them, and their large numbers made feeding
them a little difficult. However, we did what
we could, and I was rather pleased with the
exploits of the kitchen that day. Its actual
output of liquid always seemed, I thought, to
be in excess of its size ; but on that day we
had been asked unexpectedly to give breakfast
to 260 men going into the trenches, and after-
wards there were about 80 or 100 refugees to
feed twice, besides all the wounded, who some-
times now numbered about 500 per day.
Sometimes a soldier would come in and help
in the kitchen, and my own friends were
most kind in looking in at night when I was
alone, and not only helped to take soup
to the train, but often assisted me to cut up
vegetables ; and would frequently keep me com-
pany before the last convoy came in, which
104 FURNES.
was generally between eleven o'clock and mi
night. The three Belgian Sisters took entire
charge of preparing the coffee and worked from
early morning till 6 p.m., and we had a better
coffee grinder now. I was told to keep the
little blue windmill one in case it should come
in useful. But I gave it to a soldier when no
one was looking, and was glad to get rid of it !
The work divided itself into shifts, which
made it easier than might be imagined. The
convoys came in at 10.30, at 4 o'clock (at
which time some of the Furnes ladies helped
to pass food round), and again at near midnight.
The midnight convoy always seemed to me the
most sad, as it certainly often vsras the largest
that arrived. The men used to come in half-
frozen from the road-train (which there was
no means of warming), and were hardly able to
walk. Very many of them had frost-bitten
feet through standing in the bitter cold water
knee-deep in the trenches. Every one wore
bandages which gleamed white in the light of
the dim oil lamp that burned in the big entrance
hall of the station, and I used sometimes to
think that only the pen of a Zola could fittingly
describe the scene.
When it was possible, I used to place my soup-
cart under the lamp, and ladle out the soup as
the men entered. But this plan had to be given
FURNES. 105
up later because of the number of stretcher-
cases that came in and had to be laid on the
floor.
The order used to be given out, " Preparez vos
quarts, s'il vous plait, Messieurs," and the men
would search stiffly in their wallets for the little
tin cups they carried with them. Under the
smoky lamp one saw one's marmite filled with
its steaming mixture, and above it hands of
every colour — brown, white, or black — holding
out their tin cups. There were dim forms
beyond, and frosty breaths, and bandages show-
ing white in the gloom, and one heard rather
than saw the men drinking soup. Then they
passed out under the archway, and one somewhat
prosaically cleaned up the kitchen and walked
home through the dark little town with one's
lantern gleaming on seas of mud !
Very naturally there was a considerable number
of strangers who looked in to see what was going
on at the kitchen, and these also were so kind
as to lend a hand sometimes with distributing
soup. One began to separate the sheep from
the goats, and to classify one's visitors !
There was one particular class whom I
always called " This-poor-fellow-has-had-none."
I saw these both at the station and in hospitals.
Their attitude (which, I am sure, was quite
unconscious) always seemed to be that until
io6 FURNES.
they arrived on the scene — and they seldom
stayed long ! — no one had had any proper
attention.
In the wards one used to see them stop some
busy nurse to say, " The man in the corner must
have some water ; he says " (reproachfully) " he
has asked for it three times." That the man
had been forbidden water never seemed to occur
to them. Their intentions were good, but they
were not always very useful. Their graceful
attitude as they stooped over a sick man was
often connected with requiring many things
passed to them, and they were really not so
much help as, I am sure, they meant to be.
I was always glad when " This-poor-fellow-has-
had-none " departed, for the indiscriminate
feeding of sick men is attended with a certain
amount of danger.
There were many other types for whom one
often tried to find an adjective. In particular
were those persons who, whenever there was
news of a reverse, always said, " Why don't
we do something ? " and others who meant " to
get things straightened out," and there were two
types who were the antithesis of each other, one
whom I called " I-won't-be-bossed," and the
other " I-will-be-crowned." But all of them
had excellent points, and the average of hu-
manity was, as usual, good. They took the
FURNES. 107
rough with the smooth, and even enjoyed the
rough, or denied that it existed. I heard an
apology made to a delightful visitor, who came
to see us at Furnes for two days, and to whom a
not very appetizing breakfast was offered. She
replied in her cordial way, " I have done very
well, indeed, thank you. I have had a nice piece
of bread and some excellent margarine."
As a matter of fact, that margarine was not
excellent. It was proved afterwards to be some
that had been discarded by the Royal Navy as
unfit for consumption ; its odour was certainly
strong, and I had had grave suspicions about it
from the first.
Some "good sorts" who were bent on rough-
ing it, seemed to believe that war and a want of
house linen were inseparable, while a scarcity of
hand-towels was obligatory ! In this matter, ab-
stention was easy, for I never remember an over-
abundance of them. But then, one must admit
that the supply was somewhat depleted by the
uses they were put to, and I have seen them
serving as pillow-slips, dinner-napkins, table-
cloths, pocket-handkerchiefs, and for Jane to
sleep on !
Jane was a dog. She was large and red, and
with a boisterous manner, and she had been
found by one of our party at Pervyse, and given
a home at Furnes. As a refugee one was
io8 FURNES.
obliged to give Jane a welcome ; but as a dog"
she was not a success. She never took things
seriously, and she always pretended to be asleep
when she had taken the best place (on which
she always left a legacy of red hair). But she
had a gift of cadging for meals which almost
raised her to distinction. I have seen her my-
self looking longingly at food at the villa until
some was placed on the floor beside her ; and
later — for she really was not a dog of high
character — she had exactly the same wistful
appeal in her eye at the hospital, until some
one said, " The poor brute is starving ; "while a
visit to the butcher's shop would disclose the
fact that some charitable Belgians were feeding
her under the table. I never heard if anyone
murdered Jane later on (she developed a habit of
appropriating gloves and candles) ; but I fancy
she was given to some unfortunate Belgian officer,
who may even have had to look pleased with the
gift. She disappeared out of our lives, and only
the red hair, which somehow she managed to
knit skilfully into every cushion she sat on,
remains as a memorial of her.
The butcher's shop was a feature in our
variable menage for a time. There was a sort
of restaurant beyond it, where we had our
meals. At night as one came back through
the butcher's shop, one used to find oneself
FURNES.
109
running into sheep's carcasses, for everything
was very dark in Furnes. One carried a
lantern everywhere, and sometimes it showed
strange unexpected " war pictures " — a regiment
sleeping under an archway, and once, in the
covered way through which I had to pass, a
whole batch of troop horses, tightly packed,
under whose heads and tails I had to dodge to
reach my door ! And above all things, and
through and over all things, it showed one mud !
There may have been something providential
in the fact that rain fell so constantly and so
heavily as it did in Flanders last winter — shut-
ting out, as floods do, the foe ; and one can only
say that, under other circumstances, one could
have done with a little less of it.
Christmas Day was brighter and very cold. I
believe that in many parts of the fighting-line a
truce was held, and soldiers forgathered, and
firing ceased for a time. At Furnes it began
before dawn, and I heard the cannon as I
walked home about i a.m.
At 6 o'clock High Mass was celebrated in the
largest ward in the hospital ; a temporary altar
had been erected by the priests amidst the gay
decorations with which the nurses and doctors
had brightened the bare walls. The altar
candles made little points of flame in the big
darkness of the place, and a boy's voice filled
no FURNES.
1
the ward with his exquisite singing. Every- :
where, across the room and round the windows,
were the bright wreaths and paper decorations
of Christmas, and beyond the Christmas trees,
with their little presents dancing on the boughs,
was the high altar at the far end of the room.
It was a curious scene, half-pagan, half-Christian.
Dimly, and almost like a personal memory, came
the thought of an ancient worship — of a people
who walked in darkness, no doubt, and yet who
made sacred all that they knew of the best, and
who did reverence to the berried plant, whose
roots touched not earth, but grew between it
and heaven, and who heard what the wind was
saying, and knew trees to be their brothers and
their gods. While the forward memory, catch-
ing a radiance from the palely burning candles on
the altar, leapt to a diviner homage, and caught
a fleeting vision of a greater light.
And all round the room wounded men lay in
their narrow beds, and louder than the boy*s
voice at the Mass was the heavy sound of firing
in the dim twilight of the morning.
Our own services were held in one of the
schoolrooms, and there was some singing of
Christmas hymns. At the station all was
much as usual ; but a wounded soldier, who
had passed through there, sent a telegram
to the iiCossaise a la gave wishing me a
FURNES. Ill
happy Christmas, and I was much touched by
this.
In the afternoon there was an entertainment
for all the refugee children at the civil hospital.
Two French officers once opened the door of
the soup kitchen, and one said, "English, of
course ! No one else ever does anything for
anybody."
I was reminded of the remark (which pleased
me more than I like to say) when I was at the
civil hospital on Christmas afternoon. When all
our faults are made into a big heap and laid upon
the scale, I do believe a few humble folk whom
no one has ever heard about, will place on the
other side of the balance a measure of English
kindness. Very humbly I submit that this is a
fine trait in a ruling race.
I wish I dared at this moment — and while the
children are waiting for their Christmas tree —
inflict my own views on some of the character-
istics which have made us beloved and hated in
the world. I wish I could think that anyone
would be sufficiently interested to read a few re-
marks from me about the excellent hearts which
blundering manners do their best to conceal, and
the swagger which often covers a certain innate
humility of which few people suspect our good
Britisher. (I wonder if we should be at war
with Germany now, did she not think we " tried
112 FURNES.
I
to boss ! *') But, above all, there is that plain
and unpretentious kindness which when it
pities always puts its big rough hand into its
pocket and says nothing about it. And I am
not writing quite without knowledge of British
kindness.
The piles of woollen goods alone which have
passed through my own hands, and which I have
seen pass through the hands of others during the
war, have brought a message from home with
them which has often moved me to tears. (On
Christmas morning may one admit this !) The
endless lines of khaki stitches which I have seen !
the countless bales of socks and shirts and scarves
which I have counted ! and none of them — I
can honestly say — have ever seemed to me mere
scarves and socks and shirts, any more than ;
wounded men seem to me to be " cases." Each
one is stamped with a certain individuality and
bears the touch of the maker's hand upon it,
whether it be a wounded man or a pair of
socks ! and each one makes an appeal of its
own. There are the socks with not quite
enough of the same coloured wool to finish them,
and the socks with the bit of extra wool to mend
them, and the socks which have a tiny little
present thrust inside them — a packet of chocolate
or half a dozen cigarettes — and which give such
an amazing amount of pleasure ! An unknown
FURNES. 113
friend in Scotland used to send small books of the
Gospel of St. John in French in the toes of her
socks — and very much were they liked. " Every-
man " in Edinburgh sent me five boxes of groceries ;
and I had gifts from Benger's Food Company and
the Tiptree Jam Works. To give avsray these
things was always as great pleasure to me as it
was to the men to receive them.
The scarves and socks and vests meant the work
of people at home ! These workers never had the
stimulus of seeing for themselves the needs of the
men, nor did they have the pleasure of bestow-
ing their own gifts. Yet the supply never
ceased, and the quality was always of the best.
They represented hours of toil — and the wool
was not got for nothing !
On this very Christmas afternoon, I remember
working in the storeroom with a friend of mine,
and we were discussing the boxes of tobacco
which had been received, and the sacks of
knitted things which came so easily that perhaps
it was excusable sometimes to forget that they
did not drop from heaven like dew ! My friend
drew from a very small parcel a little note which
said : " We should like to send more, but money
is very scarce this week."
Is it any wonder that one didn't see socks and
scarves and Balaclava helmets quite clearly for a
minute or two ! . . .
(1,865) 8
I
114 FURNES.
The children's Christmas Tree was a great
success, and they sang " God sef our nobbier
king" (in English), and nearly lost their heads,
poor babies, over simple boxes of English toys.
They had lost much since the ist of August,
but they and their English allies have found each
other in a very remarkable way. And if any-
one wants joy over presents, he can come to
Belgian children for it !
Many of the little creatures were v/ounded,
and in the hospital was a dear little boy who was
always called the Civilian. One mite was in-
troduced to me as " Une blessee, Madame," and
the women had the clothes they stood up in and
nothing else in the world. But they all enjoyed
Christmas Day, I think, and we came away after
the treat with that parishy feeling which so
intimately recalls England, and is generally con-
nected with " taking a little rest now that it is
all over."
While taking the required rest in a remark-
ably cold room, we were disturbed by shells,
one of which came with its usual unexpectedness
and its long whistling shriek quite close to the
hospital. (Somehow one never expects a shell !)
The next minute a child was brought in covered
with dust and dirt, and crying bitterly. Her
mother had been badly wounded and her arm
completely blown off before the child's eyes.
FURNES.
"5
She got immediate attention, of course. But the
shelling did not cease till about 8.15, when we
had a very cheery Christmas dinner, with crackers
and speeches, and turkey, and plum-pudding.
In all the wards and the refectories, etc., the
fare was the same as our own. But few Belgians
could " stick " the plum-pudding, and, indeed,
one wondered whether a Christmas pudding or
Christmas shells require the greater amount of
nerve.
CHAPTER VIII.
t: FURNES.
If there is one thing which an Enghshman dis-
likes more than asking the way, it is having to
show his passport. The unspoken sug- ^ ,
gestion that he may not have the rip:ht
I o I c
to be where he is, always annoys him. ^ •^'
Women, perhaps, will always rather enjoy the
mot. There is a certain amount of " thrill "
about not being able to get past a barrier with-
out leaning from a car and whispering " Albert "
or " Mons " into a sentinel's ear ; but a man likes
to shout "Ongley" and drive on.
One day I remember going for a considerable
journey with a delightful friend whose know-
ledge of French was limited, and with whom
I had a varied drive. Our horn was a poor
thing, evidently afflicted with a cold in its
head ; so^ instead of using it, my friend always
yelled " A droite ! " to every car or wagon that
we overtook ; and not only so, but expressed
a wish that I should do the same. I fear the
" madness " of the English may have stamped
FURNES,
117
itself anew upon our foreign cousins as we sat
side by side shouting lustily.
But the real trouble was at the barriers, where
we believed we ought to have been sufficiently
well known to pass unchallenged. And the only
thing by which my companion could explain
having to produce his papers was that the guard
must have recently been changed.
We both fumbled in the depths of our cloth-
ing for laissez-passers and identification cards,
while my friend murmured wrathfully to the
guard, " Vous etes nouveau ; vous etes nouveau."
Another friend took me into France with no
equipment in the way of language except two
words, which I understood him to say were
French, and to every sentry and at every barrier
or gateway he remarked conversationally, " Poor
Cally," and then drove on.
I began to feel sorry for some one unknown
who was so evidently to be pitied. Of course,
we never asked the way ! and returning very late
on an absolutely black night, my guide could
only fix his bearings by the colours of the houses
he had passed on his outward journey. I used
to hear him say to himself, " I know we turned
off^ at a blue house ; " and the car would swing
round again, until at last directions were asked
and never understood.
A knowledge of French was not the most
ii8 FURNES.
marked characteristic of the English in Belgiurn,
and it only became fluent when talking to a
Flamand who was unable to understand any
tongue but his own.
The number of wounded who passed through
the station increased very much as the weeks
went by, and it became difficult to leave the
kitchen. The daily stream of suffering men
began to have something very ghastly about it.
The trains (which were now provided with
brancard carriages, and priests in charge of the
wounded, and stoves, etc.) were far more com-
fortable than they had been at first. But they
were, alas, much fuller ! Also, they were made
to leave the station much more quickly than had
been the case in earlier days — because of the shell-
ing that went on — and there was not time to speak
a word to anyone. One never saw again the men
who passed before one in such an endless stream.
One never knew how they fared, or whether
they recovered or not. One fed them and they
went on.
I cannot tell how many men used now to pass
through the station, but I understood that the
trains which left three times in the day held 230
men, and certainly they were often full and some-
times overcrowded.
The worst cases, of course, were those who
had been left longest untended. And it was
FURNES. 119
w^onderful to me how some of these survived.
I remember one man w^ho had lain for four days
in a trench half full of ice-cold w^ater vs^ith both
his legs broken, who did very well in the hos-
pital afterwards. Another who had not been
found for eight days was still living, but he died
later. He was a particularly fine-looking young
fellow, and we were all full of regret that he
had not pulled through.
About this time Furnes became rather an un-
healthy place ! There still continued to be no
regular bombardment, but the whiz of shells
was not uncommon, and there were some very
sad casualties. Some French friends of mine
used to say, " Bon soir, pas d'obus," in much
the same way as at home one says, " Sleep well ! "
A fine morning always brought the Taube out.
One day I remarked to the woman who usually
cleaned my bedroom that she had forgotten to
do it. She replied, " Mais, mademoiselle, il y a
un Taube qui se promene au-dessus de la maison,
et j'ai peur de monter en haut."
It was a novel excuse for not cleaning a room,
but a very genuine one. I liked the qui se pro-
mene which described the flight of an aeroplane.
The pigeons on the church roofs were always the
first to see a Taube coming. They seemed to
know by sight their hateful brothers, and fluttered
with a flash of terrified white wings far away.
120 FURNES.
I
Even children knew the different aeroplanes by
sight, and when I used to return home at night,
a little French girl was always able to inform me
how many bombs had fallen during the day and
how many had burst. One could see that she
had the smallest possible opinion of those which
ne seclatent pas !
We had a sad business at the station one day
when a number of men working on the line and
some soldiers were looking at an aeroplane that
hovered overhead and were nearly all killed by
a shell. It all happened in a moment, and it
produced a very painful impression upon those
of us who worked in the place.
Also, it began to be evident that a station
liable to bombardment was not the place for
wounded men to lie. A story gained credence
at the time that a spy always gave notice of the
arrival and departure of trains. I do not know
whether this was true or not, but I fancy there
was something queer going on, and I can't envy
the man or the woman who could deliberately
direct an enemy's fire on helpless wounded men.
One is always sorry for the soldier to whom
one sometimes hears the question put : '* What
does it feel like to be under fire ? " My own
impression is that anything descending from
above is, subconsciously, so intimately associated
in one's mind with a fall of rain, that it is
FURNES. 121
difficult not to seek some singularly inadequate
shelter where one feels perfectly safe. And I
well remember going and standing under a glass
roof for some time while shelling was going on !
Men have told me that to get inside the canvas
tilt of an ambulance makes them feel quite
secure ! I remarked to a friend that at Antwerp,
as we crossed the road to the hospital under very
heavy fire, I was glad I had an umbrella ; but
she never saw the little joke.
I always thought Furnes rather a weird little
place, but that may have been because I so often
walked through it after dark. The Grand Place
is certainly lovely ; but there is a good deal about
Furnes that is small and rather mean-looking.
Some of our party at this time went out to
Pervyse to establish a poste au secours there.
I went out to see them once, and I wish I
was able to tell more at first hand about their
interesting work there. The fleeting glimpse
I had of them (very uncomfortably established
in the remains of a house in a ruined village, in
which hardly a roof was untouched) gave me a
very high opinion of their tenacity and pluck.
One approached the village by a long straight
line of trees, at the end of which stood a
haggard-looking church like a sentinel with both
eyes shot out. Nothing was left but a blind
stare. The tower had great holes in it ; the
122 FURNES.
aisles had fallen ; and in the debris one
twisted iron and fragments of carved masonry.
The churchyard looked as though some devil
had stalked through it, tearing up crosses and
digging up graves. Even the dead are not left
undisturbed in war ! And many a body, long
since committed to the dust, was disinterred by
deep-burrowing shells.
Many persons believed that ladies should not
expose themselves to the dangers that so con-
stantly threatened Pervyse ; but they not only
did so, but remained till the place was bom-
barded.
As a convoy we were much less together than
I anticipated. Much of the work was scattered,
and the absence of a general mess, where one
might have learned the doings of the various
members, makes it difficult to write anything
more than a personal narrative.
I saw more of the hospital staff than of any?
other, and I was daily struck by their efficiency,
and daily impressed by their attention to duty
and the good work that they did. All the
nurses gave their services gratuitously ; and I
need hardly say that I found this out for myself,
for no one ever mentioned the fact! Alwavs,
about the hospital, there was a friendliness which,
I am quite sure, many strangers appreciated and
will always remember. The simple hospitality
FURNES. 123
that was extended to every one who arrived there,
the good temper of those who had extra work to
do, and the never-failing courtesy of the staff
were very conspicuous at a time when so many
people had no spare time to attend to anything.
The hospital had to contend with all the
difRculties which attend a big undertaking of
this sort at any time. And there were, besides,
those perfectly " unnecessary difficulties " which,
I think, nearly every one noticed during the war,
and whose origin it is difficult to trace. But
nothing was ever allowed to hinder the work.
And it may interest those who subscribed to the
hospital to know that waste of any sort was
unknown. The mess was run at less than a
franc per head a day, and the food was always
abundant.
I always liked the way in which the hospital
opened its doors before it was half ready, because
wounded men wanted to come in. And so long
as there was space to lay a stretcher on the
floor, I don't think anyone was ever refused
admittance.
When the spring came, with its floods and its
cold, the long war became a long wait, where
for months men stood in open graves looking at
a mud wall in front of them and trying to keep
their feet dry.
One night there was some severe trench fighting,
124 FURNES.
and the station was very full that night. A young
French officer, wounded in the head, came and
sat by the kitchen fire ; and I was interested to
listen to his account of the fight, and to notice
how much a man will say when he has only been
for an hour out of the trenches, and to contrast
his early account of a fight with those later
accounts which are sent " to cheer up the missus,"
and which appear afterwards in the pages of the
morning papers.
The French boy by the kitchen fire was not
laughing. He was covering his face with hij
hands, and saying, " Oh, it was awful — awful ! "
And war is awful. Recruiting will go on all
the better if men know they are not going to lay
down their lives for a merry picnic, and that
they are not going to join the army when the
war is " nearly over." But when they know
that men are covered with blood, and moaning,
and that the agony of a shattered limb is not to
be measured by words, then they will respond
till there are no fighting men left in England ;
because, when comrades are falling, one must
be with them. And when death comes in a
horrible form, and boys with their beards hardly
grown are standing up to it grim and steady,
then they will want to do their bit too, if I
know anything at all about it.
I went home for a fortnight's holiday, and
FURNES. 125
found every one working hard and rather fond of
" spy " stories. But I was much struck by the
dignity of acceptance of a terrible time which I
saw on all sides.
It was strange to find oneself down in the
country driving about respectable, quiet lanes,
and I realized, as I had not done before, that
one had grown accustomed to hearing the sound
of firing nearly every day.
The only thing that was difficult to accept
was the often-made statement that England " did
not realize " the war. If it was so, I believe
that the insistent optimism of the Press had
something to do with it, and the ragtime letters
from the front ! Of course, this had its excellent
side ; but war as a " good time '* seems to me
simply ridiculous.
The number of people in deep mourning was
deeply impressive, and the still, settled look on
the women's faces was as tragic and as fine as
anything I have ever seen. One felt that to
have spoken to them of their losses would have
been worse than sending a " card of sympathy.*'
Their best had gone for ever, from homes
which would never be even a little happy again,
and it seemed to me then that one didn't need
to be in Belgium to realize war, but that in its
deepest intensity one saw it written on the faces
of wives and mothers in England.
126 FURNES.
I
When I got back again, I heard that Furnes
was being heavily shelled, and that the hospital
had moved to Hoogstadt, and every one was be-
ing evacuated. I do not fancy it was too soon.
One of our nurses was, alas ! killed by a shell ;
and although all of them volunteered to remain,
it was deemed advisable to shift quarters, and
most people were sent, in the meantime, to
La Panne and to Dunkirk. There was, how-
ever, a considerable section of the English
colony who remained on at Furnes ; and I heard
afterwards that one might have flown the British
flag from every house in the place, so touched
were the Belgians by the devotion of their allies.
The number of casualties in the little town
was sad indeed ; and a girl of our party had
a dreadful experience, being called into a humble
house near the canal where two old people sitting
by their fire had had their heads blown off. The
ambulances were busy all the time, and houses
which we knew well were completely wrecked.
The villa where I myself had stayed all the
winter, and in which, through the kindness
of a Belgian doctor and his wife, I had been
given a room, had all its windows broken by
the impact of a shell, which destroyed the house
next to it. This villa is connected in all our
minds with our first days at Furnes. We found
it empty, and by permission it was commandeered
FURNES. 127
by us. It had only three beds in it, and we
were then a party of eighteen persons ! Even
mattresses were scarce, but we settled down as
we could, and my only regret was for the usage
the poor villa got. We found it just as the
Belgians to whom it belonged had fled from it,
and it used to remind us of some house dug
out of the ruins of Pompeii in which every-
thing had been left suddenly. The cooking
pot was on the stove, and a child's toys on the
table, and some wine-glasses remained as they
had been left. Here we established ourselves
for a time. I grieve to say that the villa was
neither very tidy nor very clean after our
large party had been there. There were so
many overcoats and so much mud, and so many
thick boots to bring it in ! Picture nails
may sometimes serve as clothes pegs. But I
think I never before so fully appreciated the
Scriptural injunction to put candles on candle-
sticks ! The cover of a kitchen tin is not a
good substitute, and every one knows how
disreputable an empty bottle can look by day-
light. Now, a Belgian lady's house is always
the last word in cleanliness and order, and I
shall not soon forget the horror of the poor
doctor's wife when she returned. Nearly all
of us were obliged to find lodgings elsewhere
and madame and her sisters scrubbed and scoured
128 FURNES.
the villa ceaselessly for a week. At the end
of that time I heard a simple good man say
that, on returning to the villa for something,
he had noticed the " w^oman's touch " every-
where.
I feel sure that many people think that
cleanliness and order can be restored by waving
a wand !
There was no real settlement in Furnes after
it had been bombarded. The large hospital
became a sort of dressing-station, where two
young doctors and our commandant remained
all the time, and several of the chauffeurs
remained with them. A small house on the
Ypres road was found for some of the staff.
The soup kitchen moved to Adenkerke station,
and La Panne, which is near by, provided
lodging for the rest of us.
CHAPTER IX.
LA PANNE.
La Panne is a pleasant little seaside place
amongst the dunes ; it has probably never before
. y been inhabited in the winter. All the
^ little villas in the place — and they are
^ ^* set on every sand heap — are designed
for summer visitors, and there is rather a nice
sea frontage, w^ith good hotels.
The largest of these has been turned into a
hospital, w^hich is governed and controlled by
Dr. de Page, the physician to the Queen of the
Belgians. There are a large number of English
nurses there, and as far as an unprofessional eye
like my own is able to judge, it seems to be
excellently managed, and to provide the utmost
comfort that is possible for the wounded. The
big drawing-room overlooking the sea, the
balconies, and the cheerful outlook make the
hospital peculiarly attractive.
On Easter Sunday the drawing-room became
a chapel for the services of the English Church,
and the nurses, with their usual skill in arranging
(1.866) 9
130 LA PANNE.
and designing things out of nothing, had con-
trived a white altar in ascending tiers, and this
was literally covered with beautiful flowers. The
fragrance of them recalled England and all that
it means to most of us, in a manner that was very
poignant, and I suppose I may say very tenden
too. Flowers have been a rare sight during thJ
war in Belgium, and the scent of pheasant-eyeJ
narcissi and white stocks conjured up a thousanc
memories.
I think all the English in La Panne came tc
the Easter service, which, in its own simple
way, struck me as being a very beautiful one.
There were men in khaki, and rows of nursei
with spotless w^hite kerchiefs covering theii
heads, and at the far end of the room was the
high white altar laden with its flowers, anc
outside, seeming to encircle us, was the dim anc
peaceful sea.
It seemed to me that on Easter morning one
was very near all those who had sufi^ered and
had lost, and all those who had died for theii
country in this war. It was the first Resurrec-
tion Morning, as far - as we know, for many
whom we had held very dear. And we thought
of the boys who were gone — not indeed as
angels with white wings, but as we used to
know them — newly promoted to a " topper," per-;
haps (for, alas ! so many of them were very
LA PANNE. 131
young), or in their white cricket flannels at
Eton or at Lord's. We remembered all the
pleasantness of them, their fine frankness and
even their excellent manners, and the clean, good
lives of most of them, and their aspirations which
they never were able to speak about, and their
games of which they spoke so much. We
thought of their fathers and mothers, and we
hoped humbly and sincerely that they would
know somehow that we were thinking of them,
and wishing we could help them.
No doubt all of us prayed for some measure
of comfort and consolation for the desolate wives
too. Many of us could recall marriages of
recent dates, and could see again some church
crowded with friends, and a group of brides-
maids near the door ; or we heard, like an echo,
the band in the Guards Chapel, and saw the
men lining the aisle, and the bridegroom in
uniform, with some good pal beside him, waiting
by the chancel steps.
That was only a year, two years ago, or not
much more. But last December, perhaps, or
later still, in March, we heard that " he was last
seen waving his sword," or was " first into the
trenches." . . .
They put a wooden cross up where he fell.
We thought much, too, of the men and the
women who have learned to love each other
132 LA PANNE.
I
better as the years go on. There is, we believ
something singularly faithful and loyal about
soldier's love for his wife. Most of them ha\
" taken the rough with the smooth " — the plaii
of India or the dull provincial town. The
face everything together, whether it is on
small means or bad climates. And where a
English officer and his wife go there is nev<
much amiss.
They will not be forgotten, these men of hig
honour and courage, whom their regiments lovec
and whom their men followed into hell fin
We knew them in the old days, riding the;
ponies at regimental races or playing polo in th
sun ; and we knew them in South Africa, " huni
ing De Wet," and singing songs (for they wer
fifteen years younger then) about the " Soldiei
of the Queen.'* It was always " Soldiers of th
Queen " in South Africa, and not " Tipperary.
We knew all the cheeriness of them, and the goo
fellowship, and the idealism, too — for it leake
out sometimes — and we thanked them for
making England what it is. They faced most
things blithely, and often went into danger for
the sheer fun of the thing ! We think they
were not afraid when they were called upon to
meet the last enemy, which is Death ; and if they
were, they were " too well-bred to show it."
The news of the fighting at Neuve Chapellc
LA PANNE.
133
reached us in very small supplies, and no doubt
as much of it was known in England as at the
front. It seemed to me to be a terrible victory.
But I heard on all sides that it had " bucked "
our men, who had grown tired of doing nothing.
The spirit of every one seems to have been
excellent, and I know that success in war cannot
always be measured by territory.
We heard such news as came through about
the fighting in the Dardanelles. All the news-
papers I was able to obtain cried victory, and
perhaps cried it too soon. For even victory
may come as an anti-climax when all the big
adjectives have been used up to describe the
preliminaries of a great engagement.
The time at La Panne passed quietly. It is
a brighter place than Furnes, and the lengthening
spring days added much to the cheerfulness of
every one. One saw this in the soldiers, who
enjoyed games with roars of laughter in the
sandy streets ; and the element of personal dis-
comfort was much lessened for every one by the
milder atmosphere which now prevailed.
A Scotsman under very heavy fire said, in a tone
of real North-country grumbling, " Shells make
it uncomfortable for every one." There was an
almost complete absence of shells in La Panne,
but Taubes often arrived, and were not much
regarded by anyone.
134 LA PANNE.
They came out of the blue on any fine mor
ing, and generally rather early, when the soldie
were washing. The Belgians are as fond o
cold water as their English allies, and tb
soldiers can turn out looking neat after a nigh
spent upon straw. At La Panne every villa i
filled with them ; one can hear the sound o
life beginning about six o'clock, or even earliei
when the sky is pale green before the dawn
and the men kindle fires — orange red agains
the quiet early morning light. While the
are busy on annonce a Taube by the blowin
of a steam syren ; a few heavy-footed, elderl
women begin to run, and children are told t
come indoors as one tells them to come in ou
of a shower. The pigeons, of course, ar
annoyed. They hate and fear the giant over
head, and fly from every steeple. Some whit
tufts appear in the sky, followed, perceptible
later, by the sound of bursting shells. Th
soldiers, washing themselves in little villa gardenj
stop their ablutions for a moment, and witl
hands above their eyes or caps held at arm'i
length to keep off the glare, look up into th
sky for a moment, and then go on with thei:
washing. The syren continues to whistle, an
some people get out of bed to look at the Taube
and some lie still.
I think that, to the British mind, there h
LA PANNE. 135
always been something a little comic about
German aircraft.
One day at Adenkerke station we saw one
turned back by the fire that met it, and later,
one of our friends saw a strange sight. The
returning Taube was greeted by a rain of shells,
and in the midst of this and in the thick of
it a British and a French aeroplane came out
and hovered over it like birds of prey, and fired
upon it, and it burst into flames and fell to earth
like a stone.
Both men were dead and charred beyond all
recognition. . . .
About this time the work of the kitchen spread
a little, because of the number of malades and
eclopes who came to Adenkerke for a brief
rest. A sick soldier is as deserving of sympathy
as a wounded one. And yet, naturally perhaps,
he does not get half the attention in war time
that the other does. It seems to me that a
man in good health can bear a great deal of
pain and discomfort, but the man who has
" gone sick " does not know what to make of
himself or what is wrong. As a rule, he is
suffering either from too much work or too
little food, and he often has to put up with a
long spell of suffering before the ambulances,
which are instantaneous in their services on the
wounded, come to take him away.
136 LA PANNE.
At the Pavilion St. Vincent at Adenkerke a
the klopes used to come and rest. They were
men for the most part with " little ailments " —
sore feet, toothache, earache, or such like — and a
few days' rest used to do them a world of good.
The warmth of the stoves alone and the long
sleep they got did much to restore them. Owing
to the kindness of friends one was able to supply
them with all the woollen goods — socks, scarves,
etc. — that they required, and I found that slippers
were more appreciated than anything else. An
Eastbourne work-party, a Craigmillar work-
party, and a mothers' meeting work-party at
Chart Sutton kept me well supplied.
It is impossible to leave La Panne without
saying something about a little hospital which
established itself just opposite the station where
I worked. It belonged to Lady Bagot, and I
always thought that there was something par-
ticularly attractive about it — a quietness and
serenity that was good for sick people. The
one plain wooden ward, with its well-scrubbed
boards, had a friendly air of goodness about it,
which, of course, was due to herself and her staff;
and although the little brown wooden building
was only a " flying " one, it always looked restful
and at peace.
The soup kitchen became rather more mili-
tary at Adenkerke than it had been before,
LA PANNE. 137
and I became officially attached to the Belgian
Army. Two men came on as helpers in the
kitchen. It was not quite so interesting to
distribute soup which one had not entirely
made oneself, but the new plan did not work
at all badly. The only thing that struck me
(if I may venture on so horribly egoistical a
remark) was that, whereas the number of wounded
coming through the station was reduced, owing
to the lull in the war, from hundreds a day
to perhaps a hundred, the work began to be
thought rather strenuous. At Furnes we did
not have any regular assistance, and the Belgian
Sisters and I used to think our soup and coffise
rather good.
I can only imagine that it was the awful and
alarming energy of the small woman that helped
us. I am five feet nothing, and I was a little
bit the tallest !
Meanwhile, the hospital was at Hoogstadt,
and one missed one's friends of the staff, and
hardly ever saw them.
I shall always retain a vision of them all in
the bustling yard of the college filled with motor
ambulances, all of which, whether they were
running or not, tried to make as much noise as
possible and from underneath which men with
rags in their hands and an odour of petrol about
them used to creep unexpectedly. Every one
138 LA PANNE.
was in a hurry and stood about with cigarettes
in their mouths. There was a feeling that one
had to " hop in," followed by hours of alert
waiting for nothing in particular. I fancy
(although I fear to say anything so daringly
indiscreet) that some of those hours were taken
up and fully employed by determined accusations
to each other of having " bagged my things,''
and persistent and indignant denials of the
same.
A habit of " pinching " prevails in war time
which seems to affect even the most honest
persons, and it is allowable to wonder whether
in this respect characters may not be per-
manently destroyed. No property — from motor
tyres to bandages — was safe !
The result of this was that every one used to
go about with all their portable goods in their
pockets. This gave them a very bulgy appear-
ance. Doubtless, however, one used to think
that things carried with so much care and so
carefully guarded must be of considerable
value.
A turned-out pocket generally disclosed a watch
that had long since stopped and never meant to
go again ; a fountain-pen which was not filled
up, and when filled leaked ; an electric torch
that required a refill ; a scarf which had been
pinched from some one else and wanted care-
LA PANNE.
139
ful watching ; a store of cigarettes and no
matches.
There was a convenient habit — where so many
were strangers amongst us — of calling men by
the names of the cars which they drove, and one
of them was always known even to the servants
as " Monsieur le Pipe '* — a name which exactly
suited him.
A foreign chauffeur called the " Goat " always
seemed to have a strange and deleterious effect
upon all persons with whom he came in contact.
No one ever went for a drive with the " Goat **
without coming back a worse man. Tempers,
otherwise serene, were so effectually disturbed by
him that they did not recover for hours after-
wards, and language failed when speaking of or
to the " Goat."
On the only journey I ever made with him he
seemed to be suggesting at every barrier that I
was a German spy, and I think he was the most
timid creature I have ever met. Why we were
not all arrested and shot, on the evidence of his
manner alone, I do not know.
He had a car which always seemed to be part
of him, and without which it is impossible to
picture him. It was lined in an unusual man-
ner with window muslin with blue flowers on it.
It went loudly and slowly all its days, and was
famous for being passed by every one on the road.
140 LA PANNE.
Personally I don*t believe that anyone but the
" Goat " could have knocked a single spark out of
it ! He used to spend all his days with his head
inside the bonnet, coaxing and flattering the en-
gine which he loved, and at night he slept, with
all the windows up, inside the car.
I have a lurking suspicion that he hated us
as much as we hated him. He wanted to speak
to his engine all day, and we wanted him to
drive ; and when we thoroughly understood
each other in this matter, it did not make for
peace.
There was a good fellow who was very much
liked by us, whom we used to call " Boots,'*
because of the very thick ones he wore. They
used to take complete charge of the wearer and
marched him about where they listed. Their
weight was so great that in coming downstairs
they seemed to act like weights pulling him
from step to step, and they had a determined
and unyielding look about them, which gave
one the impression that they led the wearer and
not he them.
" Boots '* had a passion for makeshifts, and was
never so happy as when he was contriving some-
thing out of nothing or diverting things from
their original purpose. He was not really
contented except when he was splitting up old
boxes to serve some wise and great end ; and he
LA PANNE. 141
slept in a storeroom behind a blackboard, and
had his bath in a waterproof sheet stretched over
a motor tyre.
Many people indulged, as English people
abroad always seem to do, in unusual clothing,
and a shower of rain, for instance, would
produce oilskins and sou'westers, which no
fishermen on the wettest day in the west of
Scotland could have beaten.
Belgium is wet, but the size of our boots
was designed for a flood, and we affected hats
of uncompromising sternness.
Some of the ladies wore knitted caps in
which they looked very nice, I thought. But
no mountain-climber, no lady pig-sticker or
huntress of wild beasts ever wore clothing so
abnormally practical as we did. It even soared,
in some cases, to masculinity. And a certain
guileless maiden lady always nervously explained
to Belgian officers that English ladies did not as
a general rule dress in breeches and gaiters.
The kindly Belgians explained it all in their
polite way by saying that " Les Anglaises sont
pratiques."
It has been said that England is bound in
the best portmanteau leather. Straps, certainly,
assist one much, and I am quite sure may even
help some people to feel heroic. But the
khaki and the straps and the gaiters came to
142 LA PANNE.
be associated in people's minds with very good
practical work, and very plucky work too.
" The only real danger," as I heard a young
girl in puttees say, " will be when we return
to London and fall over tight skirts."
CHAPTER X.
LA PANNE.
The weather continued cold but bright at
La Panne. The lengthening days were a great
Tkf^y I QIC. ^^.^^^ht, and spring came late, but
y y J' with a wealth and a marvel of green.
A wind was blowing in from the sea, and lilacs
nodded from over the hedges. The tender corn
rustled its delicate little chimes, and all across it
the light breezes sent arpeggio chords of delicate
music, like a harp played on silver strings. A
big horse-chestnut tree burst suddenly into bloom
and carried its flowers proudly like a bouquet,
and the shy hedges put up a screen all laced and
decorated with white may. It seemed as though
Mother Earth had become young again, and was
tossing her babies up to the summer sky, while
the wind played hide-and-seek or peep-bo or
some other ridiculous game with them. Only
the guns boomed all the time, and the Belgians,
quiet and patient as always, and the little French
marrns, with their charming manners, and the
Zouaves, wholly contemptuous of wounds and of
144 LA PANNE.
suffering, came in as before into the little station,
and sat in the big hall there and talked very
little, and in the evening the train was filled up
as usual with them. The ambulances, with their
brown canvas tilts, came in as they had always
done, and fresh graves were dug in the spring
sunshine.
Mother Earth, with her new-born babies, used
to stop playing then for a time and tell us that
it was all right ; and when a little procession used
to come along the road with its humble burden
carried shoulder high, she who is never unsympa-
thetic as some would have us believe used to
whisper, " They have come back to me, as all
my children do : the leaves next autumn, and
the boys perhaps to-morrow." . . .
The work was not nearly so heavy as it had
been, and one began to have some leisure. Two
friends of mine, who play beautifully, used to
come to practise duets on the piano at the villa
where I lodged, and a great deal of pleasure it
gave me. A painter, invalided for a time from
the trenches, made some excellent portraits ; and
Monsieur de la Haye, the well-known war artist
and a member of the Paris Salon, was constantly
at work with his sketch-book at the station, mak-
ing some of his vigorous and splendid drawings.
I suppose I ought to have known it, but as a
matter of fact I had never realized before that
LA PANNE. 145
art flourishes in Belgium like a plant in a fair
soil. It seems as natural for a Belgian to be a
painter or a musician as it is for him to sleep or to
eat. Even the soldiers whistle in tune, and in a
manner more melodious than I have ever heard,
and everyw^here one finds a love of pictures and
an intimate know^ledge of music. Sometimes I
fancied that the want of art in some other nations
produces a feeling of genuine wonder in the
minds of our allies. To know a good picture,
for instance, is with them an instinct, and nothing
more terribly enforces the realization of the loss
which they have sustained in the destruction of
their beautiful buildings than to discover (as one
was doing every day in Belgium) that these had
been not merely national memorials, to be shown
off with pride to strangers, but the household
gods of a people to whom beauty is a natural
expression far more than a studied part.
Everywhere one was getting evidence of it !
A soldier begs for a stump of pencil, and fills
one's sketch-book with some inimitable studies
of faces ; and a musician, who ought to be laid
up as a treasure in heaven, delights one with his
music on one evening and goes back into the
trenches the next !
After a short period of leisure came a busy
time again. There had been a great deal of
heavy fighting, and some villages subjected to
(1.865) 10
146 LA PANNE.
bombardment had paid the usual toll in the
matter of wounded and killed civilians. Every-
one has noticed the seeming indifference v^ith
w^hich the inhabitants of Flanders — or all that
remains of it — appear to regard the dangers of
war. It has been the greatest difficulty with
those who have had charge of refugee work to
persuade villagers and dwellers in little hamlets
to leave their farms and cottages ; and I have
often heard it said, by men who have seen and
had wide experience of the struggle that is now
going on, that nothing has ever made them so
astonished as seeing some old Belgian woman,
in her black knitted cap, calmly hoeing turnips
or digging up potatoes quite close to the firing-
line, or while shelling has been going on.
Always, these simple villagers are the last to
leave a stricken neighbourhood, and even when
every one else has fled, it is quite a common
sight to see them sitting at their doors, having
appeared from heaven knows where, and enjoying
the evening sunshine, with their children about
them, long after every one else has moved away
to safer quarters.
There is one woman with four little children
who has lived in a tiny house near the canal
at Nieuport ever since that much-bombarded
place was subjected to shell fire. It is hardly
too much to say that a more dangerous position
LA PANNE. 147
would be hard to find. The fields all round are
pitted with shell holes, and woods and trees, and
even the roadway, have suffered throughout a
wide area for many months past. The Flemish
woman stays on in her little cottage, and I am
told that children in Flanders often take food to
the trenches.
I remember particularly one evening at Aden-
kerke when many wounded civilians were being
brought in from Ypres, Poperinghe, and various
places in the neighbourhood. There was an
ambulance filled with wounded children, for
whom, I think, King Herod himself might have
been sorry if he had seen them. They were
such tiny things to be already in the war ! And
they were lifted out of the ambulance wagons
with their arms and legs in splints, or with their
little curly heads bandaged. Two little mites,
sitting on a long, full-sized stretcher, gazed
solemnly at each other, and each was evidently
filled with wonder at the unusual appearance of
his little neighbour. There were sad tales to
tell about nearly all of them. This baby had
been found in a house, and no one could tell
where his mother was. And that one had es-
caped death in some marvellous way when her
parents and her grandmother were killed. One
little creature of three weeks old lay in the
hospital for a long time with both its feet
148 LA PANNE.
wounded. He was " Albert," as all the children
in Belgium are now, and Albert's young mother
had died on the operating table, being, as they
told me, riddled with wounds.
One asked oneself whether this was not fright-
fulness enough, while sorrowfully aware that one
had seen only a very small portion of the suffering
and the wrongs which have befallen Belgium.
The scene at the railway station seemed to
focus itself into an extraordinary picture. The
railway lines run due west, and at the far end of
them, where the gleaming rails seem to con
verge, the sun was setting in a sky of extra-
ordinary splendour. There were level rays of
light which made the station in the unattractive
little town look almost picturesque for the
moment, and all along the platform were lying
stretchers with women and children on them.
The women were brown-haired, decent-looking
young matrons, and it grieved one very deeply
to see these innocent victims of what can only
be called devilry. The long Red Cross com-
partment of the train was first of all filled with
the children, and the usual Englishman in khaki
appeared carrying something with him. He
shoved it down in a corner with the usual guilty
look of an Englishman doing a little bit of
kindness, and we found a box of groceries and
sweet biscuits and milk, and everything that a
LA PANNE.
149
little party of invalids could want on their long
journey to Switzerland. Some young Belgian
soldiers meanwhile had got into the train, and
were making friends with the babies, and after-
wards the women were brought in also. Pres-
ently the train moved slowly off, and one could
hear the plaintive crying of children who were
going to bed in these strange quarters without,
alas ! their mothers to tuck them up ; and one
caught a glimpse once more, as one said good-
bye, of the outstretched forms of the women.
It occurred to one, as it has occurred to many
people both at home and abroad, that it does not
do to look at war too closely. Far away one
may sing songs about it, but there were too
many suffering people in Belgium !
It was touching to see a little family of
terrified children and their mother sheltering in
a roadside Calvary one day when the shells were
coming over. The young mother was holding
up her baby for protection to the Figure on the
Cross, and some little toddling creatures were
clinging about her skirts.
A Belgian officer told us that the most awful
thing he had ever had to do was to order his
men to fire on a German regiment which was
protecting itself behind his own countrywomen.
Some of our corps were evacuating the women
and children at a small village, and one man.
150 LA PANNE.
seeing his wife and daughter stretched out on
the ground, went mad, and ran up and down the
field screaming. One saw a good deal of mad-
ness on all sides.
Another of our corps was helping to carry in
on a stretcher a young girl whose shoulder had
been shot away, and who was dying. A young
Belgian peasant, who walked in front of my
friend, helping to carry the stretcher, turned
round and said quietly, " This is my fiancee."
A dying French soldier, once measuring six
feet four inches, and now lying with both his
legs amputated, looked up and said, smiling to
a friend of mine, " I used often to complain,
mademoiselle, that my bed was too short, but I
shan't have to grumble about that now." His
old father and mother arrived to see him just
after he had breathed his last.
One almost envied the people of whom one
heard it said that they had not begun to realize
yet !
Once there came a sort of British morning,
with a fresh British breeze blowing over the
feathered tops of the waves ; and as I stood on
the sands at La Panne, I saw one of our own
men-of-war blazing away at the coast. The
Germans answered by shells which fell rather
wide, and must have startled the fishes (but no
one else) by the splash they made. There were
LA PANNE.
151
long, swift torpedo-boats, with two great white
wings of cloven foam at their bows, and a
flourish of it in their wake, moving along under
a canopy of their own black smoke. It being a
British day, one was fatuous enough to glory in
the fact that even the coal was British, and to
tell oneself that one knew where it came from,
and to picture once more the grimy workmen
who dwell in the Black Country and get it out
of the ground. The man-of-war in front of us
was burning plenty of it, and when she had done
her work she put up a banner of smoke and
steamed away with a splendid air of dignity
across the white-flecked sea. One knew the
men on board of her ! Probably not a heart
beat faster by a second for all the German shells ;
probably dinner was served as usual, and men
had their tubs and got their clothes brushed
when it was all over.
I went down to my kitchen a little late, but
I had seen something that Drake never saw — a
bit of modern sea-fighting !
In the evening when I returned the long gray
man-of-war was there again. The sun was
westering now, and the sea had turned to gold,
and the gray hull looked black against the glare.
But the fire of the man-of-war's guns was
brighter than the evening sunset ; and she was
a spitfire after all, this dignified lady, for she
152 LA PANNE.
" let 'cm have it ! " while the long, lean torpedo
boats looked on.
About this time (because I was coming home
to lecture at various ammunition centres) I was
given permits to see one or two places which
interested me very much. And most of all, 1
think, I was impressed by visiting Nieuport,
which I had not seen since last November. It
was like coming back and finding a friend much
worse than one had anticipated. Some one said
to me, " Ypres smells of lilac and of death." I
do not think there were any lilacs at Nieuport.
The place was too shockingly destroyed for that.
Everywhere about it there was the most extra-
ordinary atmosphere of desolation and destruc-
tion. So many shells had fallen on the bare
earth and on the fields all round it, on which
no harvest was ripening, that I can only describe
them by saying that they looked like immense
Gruyere cheeses pitted with holes.
But indeed it is as difficult to find words to
describe Nieuport as it is to talk of metaphysics
in slang. The words do not seem to be invented
that will convey the sense of desolation of the
spot, or the supreme and aching quiet of it
under the shock of constantly firing guns.
Hardly anything is left now of the little homely
things that, when I saw the place last time, re-
minded one that this was once a city of living
LA PANNE. 153
human beings. Then, one saw a few interiors,
exposed, it is true, and damaged, but still of this
world ; now, it is one big grave — the grave of
a city and the grave of many of its inhabitants.
At a corner house nine ladies lie under the
piled-up debris that once made their home. In
another, some soldiers met their death, and some
crumbling bricks were heaped over them too.
The houses have all fallen ; some outer walls
remain, but I hardly saw a roof left, and every-
where there are empty window frames and
skeleton rafters. I never knew so surely before
that a town can live and can die. At Nieuport
there is not a heart-beat left to throb in it.
Thousands of shells have fallen into it, and con-
tinue to fall.
And at night the nightingale sings there, and
by day the river flows gently under the ruined
bridge. Every tree in the wood near by is torn
and beheaded ; hardly one has a top remaining.
The new green pushes out amongst the black-
ened trunks. One found oneself speaking low
in Nieuport — the place was so horribly dead.
The streets, heaped up with debris and full of
shell holes, were bright with sunlight, but were
quite deserted. From the cellars in some ruined
buildings, whose insecure walls looked as though
they might totter and fall any minute, some
Zouaves or an occasional French marin appeared.
154 LA PANNE.
Most of these ran out with letters in their hands
for us to post. God knows what they can have
had to write about from that grave !
In the cathedral and amongst its crumbling,
battered walls a strange peace rests, and one
notices — what scores of people have already-
noticed in Belgium — that in the midst of
the ruins there nearly always stands one sacred
figure, which, when everything else has fallen,
holds out pitiful arms in some shrine. In
a little house almost entirely fallen, and with
its remaining walls blackened by fire, I found
a tragic-looking little crucifix still upon the
walls. This I asked to keep. It must once
have been very well carved, I think, and there
was an extraordinary expression on the clear-
cut face, while the broken limbs reminded me
of much that I had seen during the war. Over
the cathedral doorway the figures of a crowned
Mother and her Child remain almost untouched,
while almost at her feet there was a little grave-
yard filled with crosses where the dead lie. A
shell had entered, and torn some bones from their
resting-place, and these lay amongst a few simple
flowers which some soldier had laid on the graves.
We went to see the dim cellars with their
vaulted roofs which form the two pastes au
secours. In the inner recess a doctor has a bed,
and there was a table with a vase of scarlet
LA PANNE. 155
peonies upon it. In the outer cave some sol-
diers were eating. There is no light there, even
during the day, except from the doorway. The
sunlight outside looked blinding compared with
the deep shadows within.
Mrs. Wynne comes every night and most
afternoons to this poste^ driving her own ambu-
lance without lights of any sort, and removing
the wounded who wait for her there to the
French hospital at Zuitecote. All through the
winter, and whether the road has been shelled or
not, she has always been there with a chauffeur
and one of the gentlemen of our ambulance
corps, who has a curious preference for shell fire.
I hope that she will not think it an impertinence
on my part to praise her work, or to record that
it was always done with simplicity and courage.
We wandered about Nieuport for a consider-
able time in the unearthly quiet which persisted,
even when guns began to blaze away close by
us, sending their whizzing shells over our heads ;
and we walked down to the river, and saw the
few boards which are all that remain of the
bridge. As we came away from the place in
the gloaming, a bird broke into a rapture of song
quite close to us. The birds never have any fear
of bursting shells, and I have often heard soldiers
say that they seem to sing all the louder for the
noise that is going on. From many a field of
156 LA PANNE.
battle the larks mount up joyously, and I have
heard of men making pets of robins in the
trenches. There is a nightingale in a little wood
in the long, uninteresting road which lies between
Adenkerke and La Panne. Here every sort of
vehicle is passing all day long, soldiers are
marching, and there is the perpetual sound of
motor horns, bugles, and the like, and in the
midst of it, and especially after rain, the little
brown bird in the bushes sings on undisturbed.
While men are killing each other he loses him-
self in a burst of song that recalls all the old
joyous things which one used to know. The
poetry of life seems to be over for a time. The
war songs are forced and sometimes a little
foolish ; pictures are put away in cellars, and
stained glass, where it can be saved, is removed
from church windows, and books are closed.
But the nightingale sings on, and the old spirit
of youth and of joyfulness looks out through
smoke and carnage, and speaks of evenings in dim
woods at home, or of dawn when one used to
hear birds in the garden and turned round com-
fortably in some sweet-scented chintz-furnished
room and went to sleep again. The nightingale
sings above the sound of death and of tears, and
the little wood close to the tramway line becomes
filled with one of those unexpected voices which
one sometimes hears when one is alone.
CHAPTER XL
FROM A KITCHEN WINDOW.
The last chapter of a woman*s book is always
inclined to be a little discursive, I am afraid. She
. can write with that "restraint," which
June iQi c. . 1 -11
^ -^ reviewers love to praise, throughout a
volume ; but in the last chapter she is apt to
fall from grace a little.
From a kitchen window the great panorama
of war limits itself to a view through little
panes of glass — a glimpse of a limited area seen
through a cloud of steam from boiling pots,
and dimmed, although not necessarily distorted,
by it. Bending over a stove — blackleaded and
inclined to smoke — one may think of many
things ; and when one goes to the window and
looks out, one may think of many more.
There was always a train in front of the
window, and in the train were wounded men,
and in the hospitals were wounded men, and in
the ambulances, and in the waiting-rooms at the
station, were more wounded men. One got
more accustomed to seeing soldiers with ban-
dages than without them, at the railway station
158 FROM A KITCHEN WINDOW.
during the war. And all were suffering, some
less, some more, and nearly all were helpless.
Two words began to say themselves in my
head whenever the convoys of wounded came
in, " Rendered inefficient." No doubt it is the
main object of war, when it does not kill, to
maim. But men meant to be useful, and to
work and to be happy, were now limping, blind,
sometimes mad, and struck off the roll of the
useful ones ! The sight of these impressed me
very painfully, especially, I think, at night. In
the dim light the thin faces had a more haggard
look, and the helplessness of the men on the
stretchers seemed more marked than during the
day. The train used to fill up and move out
of the dim station into the greater dimness
beyond, and the men sat or lay in the unlighted
carriages, each one silent and holding an injured
limb.
The death-roll was very long, and one saw,
day after day, labelled humanity with a number
on it passing in an endless succession upon blood-
stained stretchers. It was not the exception but
the rule to see them. Naturally, it influenced
one's vision. Naturally, the writing of others
who saw the life of soldiers in camp will bear a
very different complexion. My own experience
was much like that of persons who stand on
the beach while others put out to sea, and at
FROM A KITCHEN WINDOW. 159
whose feet pieces of wreck and corpses are
thrown up by the tide. The excitement of the
heart of the storm is not for them, they only see
the results of it. And the results are so pitiful in
their dumbness and their loneliness, and in their
pain ! One scruples to wring the hearts of those
who are already doing all they can do, by a
mere recital of things sad, and one fears still
more to say anything that might even remotely
savour of being sensational ; but there is no one
with the smallest amount of imagination who
cannot picture to himself what men who have
been exposed to shell-fire or a rain of shrapnel,
and who have come out of it alive, are like.
The woman's view is almost bound to obtrude
itself from a kitchen window. And women are
asking many questions now. In the sorrow
which has come to many of them they, who
are not prone to complain, may even be asking
themselves whether territory and commerce and
treasure, and all those other things which men
call "property," should perpetually demand the
sacrifice of what in a very peculiar way belongs
to them. The loss of the lives of their sons will
always appear to women to be too high a price
to pay for anything the world contains or is able
to produce. The whole idea of the value of
life is inherent in them. A woman probably
never thinks of a boy as an eldest son or as an
i6o FROM A KITCHEN WINDOW.
inheritor of lands, but merely as a great joy
which came first. It is hard to part with him.
And there comes a moment when she stands
protesting passionately that she has had no voice
in the making of war, and she rebels utterly and
absolutely against having to pay this unthinkable
price for it. In the almost unbearable pain of
loss she demands to know, what is the logical
connection between boys with their lungs shot
through and their heads blown off, and a mad-
man's greed for territory and power ? Sitting
by some sick-bed when the candles are burn-
ing low, she seeks some explanation of the
sheer, horrible idiocy of the whole thing.
She asks, what docs a boy of eighteen really
know about commerce or world-power ? But
they put him into a trench half-full of cold
water, and plugged down iron and steel upon
him, and sent him down to the station with a
number on his breast, or back to the old house
in the country where he was born, and where
he lies on his back all through the spring days.
What, again, does a little Belgian soldier know
of the gambler playing for high stakes, who tried
to take up a little country as he would gather
up a small coin off the gaming-table ? The little
Belgian soldier lies buried where he fell, and
his womenkind also may be asking themselves
whether there ever was a more mad way of
FROM A KITCHEN WINDOW. i6i
settling a quarrel than to put a lump of lead
into their boy's lungs.
They demand, as of old, " Where shall wisdom
be found ? " And the reply is still the same :
" Destruction and death say. It is not in me."
They do not blame anyone for this war
except the man who brought it about. Even
they know that it must be fought, and fought
to the end. But on broader lines they ask
whether war itself must not come to an end,
and whether men of reason and nations of reason
may not settle their quarrels and their differences
like sober and reasonable beings. They deny
that a need to kill is a male instinct, and they
know men who tell them that when a fine
morning comes they hate to go out and do
each other to death.
They have heard — who has not heard — that
this war is a war of metals and of oil, of petrol
bubbling in engines and steel hurtling through
the air, and the almost naive question which
they put is this : " Why not then eliminate the
human element altogether ? " Let the gun that
can throw farthest fire its shells against so much
thickness of masonry or so much strength of iron
plates. Why bring young men and boys into
the matter ? A little German in spectacles,
ten miles away, may be an excellent marks-
man, and when war really becomes a matter of
(1,8M) 11
i62 FROM A KITCHEN WINDOW.
artillery and ammunition, let him blaze away in
the most approved method at some distant mark
or target.
Women's questions are proverbially difficult
to answer. And the odd part of it is, that they
so often get a hearing. One trembles to write
so big a thing, but the abolition of war may
be one of the tasks which will in the future
belong to them, and will be settled by them.
Meanwhile the Dominion of Force puzzles them
a good deal, because they so often hear its
dominion contradicted or denied.
The only attitude towards this war, and
towards all war, which seems inadmissible, is the
one which regards it with pious horror. Firstly,
because, quite calmly considered, honour is a
thing of more intrinsic value than life ; and
secondly, because the reality of war does not
lie solely in the suffering which it brings.
The reality lies in the dim old battered bugles
blown up to the sky in the early morning ; and
the hungry men " sticking it," with their eyes
grown haggard and the line of their cheek-bones
standing out starkly from their faces. The
reality lies with the tired men marching stolidly
on, and with the sick men staying in the trenches,
and with the simple soldier lying down and dying
on a muddy field, and with the women laughing
at shells and going to their doorways to see them.
FROM A KITCHEN WINDOW. 1O3
And the reality lies also in the extraordinary
sense of freedom which war brings. Because
in war we are up against the biggest thing in
life, and that is death. Most people fear it, but
in war time a curious thing happens, and men
are released from fear. This cannot be explained
by merely saying they have become accustomed
to danger, but in its essence it is something far
greater and more profound than this. War
becomes not so much a fight for freedom as in
itself a freedom. And death is not a release
from suffering, but a release from fear. Soldiers
know this, although they can never explain it.
They have been terrified. They have been
more terrified than their own mothers will ever
know, and their very spines have melted under
the shrieking sounds of shells. And then comes
the day when they " don't mind." Death stalks
just as near as ever, but his face, quite suddenly,
has a friendly air. Bullets and pieces of shell
may come, but it doesn't matter. This is the
day on which the soldier learns to stroll when
the shrapnel is falling, and to look up and laugh
when the bullets sing close by.
In war time all lesser disputes have an end,
and it almost seems as though already we saw
things from some larger standpoint and from
some greater height.
From a height alone, we know that the wider
i64 FROM A KITCHEN WINDOW.
view is obtainable. Thus, already we are won-
dering whether the trade disputes, for instance,
of last year were so serious as we then thought
them. Already we may be saying, quite reason-
ably and meaning every word of it, that man
cannot live by bread alone, whether it be a big
loaf or a little one ; and already we may be
wondering at the great and momentous change
which has come over not our own country only,
but many other countries.
By humiliation Germany, who has already
learned something, may have to learn a lesson
of far more real " Rightfulness " than she has
been able to teach.
France has learned a noble seriousness which
did not formerly belong to her, and France,
believe me, is praying now, as, perhaps, she had
a little bit forgotten how to pray. But she has
not forgiven yet, and perhaps never will for-
give. So when her turn comes, there will be
trouble for those who so grievously and wantonly
hurt and destroyed her !
Belgium was a little country with a potential
soul. A little, exclusive, highly sensitive country,
prosperous and happy, with a people who wanted
to be left alone. By nature and by preference
they were neutrals, until they found, what every
honest-hearted nation must find, that neutrality
is impossible as long as right is right and wrong
FROM A KITCHEN WINDOW. 165
is wrong. Belgium had begun, like some small
clan or proud little family, to be independent,
and, to use the common phrase, to " keep her-
self to herself." She made her own laws and
had her own social life, and her own institu-
tions, and her own way of thinking about
things and of doing them. It was narrow,
but it had the elements of great things in it.
And then there came, as it comes to pass to all
exclusive and proud people, the call to mix with
men — to mix with nations. Belgium had to
rub shoulders with humanity and to suffer ;
above all things to suffer. A tremendous re-birth
had come, and a great soul was born, with a
king for its father, whom the nations acknow-
ledge as a worthy sire.
Belgium had a little distrusted the world
round about her, and was not even much inter-
ested in it. And she found quite suddenly and
unexpectedly that the world wanted her — that
exclusiveness was no longer possible. She had
done the big thing and the right thing, and she
found hearts beating for her and men waiting to
die with her. And the people who she thought
were strangers came at a moment when trouble
was at the door, and they had the faces of old
friends. In her sorrow and in her ruin she
has clasped hands with the world !
And what of England ? She is too dear to
i66 FROM A KITCHEN WINDOW.
us to criticize. Almost one fears to write of
her lest the deadly things which schoolboys
call " slobber " and " gush " should find their
way in, and like the sickly scent of a valentine
almost destroy the motto and the verse !
England had not been at her best for some
time, and there is no disguising the fact.
National sentiment was getting a little bit cold ;
military ardour certainly was not altogether the
fashion ; emotion was exhausting itself without
any adequate results ; and a queer sort of selfish-
ness appeared to be becoming almost a national
characteristic. It never went very deep, but it
deceived our neighbours into thinking we were
utterly degenerate. As a matter of fact, we were
only going through a transition period, such as
every growing child and every growing nation
knows, and we had far too much energy and
not quite enough to do ; and when this state
of affairs returns again, we may probably go
through another transition period. But it will
never be quite the same again, because to our
national memory is added the story of Ypres,
because we have spent the winter in the trenches,
and because we have learned many things which
are far too serious to discuss here. At the back
of it all there is still in England something big
to draw upon — we may call it what we like.
And it is something which is not going to fail
FROM A KITCHEN WINDOW. 167
yet awhile ; and which is certainly not going to
fail until this war is over, and small nations arc
protected, and mothers get their sons again.
Meanwhile we go on learning many things.
And we smile at many things too. We smile
a good deal, for instance, at people who sit in
chairs, holding a balance in their hands, and
deciding that justice consists in keeping that
balance equal ; whereas, of course, justice gener-
ally demands that one side shall weigh to the
ground and the other shall kick the beam. We
smile a little at those who have adopted the wise
and sensible course, which is seldom either wise
or sensible, and have stayed at home, or have
kept out of a quarrel, or are very busy pro-
nouncing judgment upon it. We think (for we
are all schoolboys in war time) that we would
rather be fighting than looking on, however
hard the knocks may be that we get. We
do know a few things now. We know that
heroes are fighting men, and not mere tillers of
the soil nor mere money-getters, and we greet
the parchment-faced old scribes, holding pens
in their knuckled hands, and laugh with them,
because of the asses* heads which they drew on
the figures of the merely rich. Money and
power and self-interest have been taking quite
low seats lately ! And we have been finding
out something about national honour and other
i68 FROM A KITCHEN WINDOW.
beautiful things, and discovering what freedom
means, and exactly how much sacrifice courage
demands, and what is worth while, and what is not.
During the war — it was almost bound to be
so — there have been stories told of psychic ex-
periences, and even of clouds that have stood
between armies, and of glimpses of heavenly
hosts. These may be true or they may not be
true. They may be the result of men's fancy
or of their imagination. But there is one vision
which no one can deny, and which each man
who cares to look may see for himself. It is
the vision of something which lies beyond
sacrifice. And in that bright and heavenly^
atmosphere we shall see — we may indeed se(
to-day — the forms of many who have fallen.
We believe they fight still, although unharme(
now and for evermore, but warriors still on th(
side of right, captains of a host which no mai
can number, and champions of all that we hol(
good. We think that when the last roll ij
called we shall find them still cheery, still un-
wavering, answering to their good names whic]
they carried unstained through a score of fighti
and still — who knows ! — on active service.
THE END.
PIJNTBD IN GREAT BRITAIN,
BINDING SECT. JUL 2 -
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