_P_----, May, 1916.
P---- was close by the famous Ypres and had the honour at the moment of
being a bombarded town. Hardly a day passed that shells did not fall
here in greater or less quantity. Have you ever been in a bombarded
town? Gloom? You could cut it with a knife, and yet I could not
make out why the gloom was so oppressive. The streets were full of
soldiers--Tommies, Canadians, Australians--bustling about, cheerfully
whistling, talking in groups or going about their individual duties.
Peasant women were in evidence too, and the little shops had window
displays; but oh the gloom! Many of the houses were destroyed and in
some sections there was no such thing as a pane of glass left. The
noise of the guns was almost constant.
I was staying in a hospital with the Countess V----, a front line
ambulance in this section where fighting had been heavy. It was an
old red brick building, probably the home of one of P----'s wealthier
residents. The high-ceilinged rooms were bare of furniture and in its
place were rows of cheap iron cots with a wounded man in each. The
Countess was one of those charming, dainty feminine creatures with a
will of iron and a courage beyond words. The story of her life during
the first invasion of Belgium and her escape from German territory
was thrilling. She came to P----, where she cared not only for this
house full of wounded soldiers, but worked and planned with others the
support and care of civilian wounded, men, women and little children,
and of hundreds of little orphan boys and girls. My room was on the
ground floor. It had half a window pane, one boarded-up window and
some heavy blankets to hang up at night to hide the candle light from
a prying aero. I simply can't describe the gloom. The Countess said
that when she felt that she could not go on another minute, she just
hunted out the box her husband had sent her when she got word to him
that she had no more clothes and to send on some of her old ones. The
box contained three filmy negligees, the ones he loved her best in. She
got them out and spread them about the dismal room, and then she stood
in the middle and laughed and cried until she felt better.
I sat outside on a bench one morning talking to a young Belgian
officer who was so badly wounded the first year of the war that he
will probably never go back to the front. We were talking of beautiful
things, music, painting and such like. One of the ambulances drove in.
He paid no attention, it was such a common occurrence, but I was all
eyes. You have seen the ice wagon dripping on a warm day? The ambulance
was dripping too, but the drops were red! One stretcher was lifted out
and an orderly standing by raised the cover at one end. I saw something
that had once been a head with a human face on it. The next stretcher
contained a man wounded in the legs. One of the nurses spoke to him
and he tried to smile. The next was carried without comment to the
tiny stone hut in the fast-growing little graveyard just back of the
house. These kind folk would find time to bury him and send a picture
of his grave with a few words of how bravely he had died, together with
the number of the chain at his wrist, to Headquarters to be forwarded
to his family. And he was a cook who had never held a gun or seen an
enemy. So they emptied the ambulance to the number of six and then
they turned the hose on it and started it back for its next load. And
may I tell you how the ever-present contrast came in here? Upstairs in
the convalescent ward a boy, to cheer his comrades, was banging the
jolliest kind of music on an old tin piano, impatiently waiting the day
when he would be declared well enough to go back to be wounded again....