There is no port in Europe which holds such a dominant position as
Antwerp, and there is none whose history has involved such amazing
changes of fortune. In the middle of the sixteenth century she was the
foremost city in Europe, at its close she was ruined. For two hundred
years she lay prostrate under the blighting influence of Spain and
Austria, and throttled by the commercial jealousy of England and
Holland. A few weeks ago she was the foremost port on the
Continent, the third in the world; now her wharves stand idle, and she
herself is a prisoner in the hands of the enemy. Who can tell what the
next turn of the wheel will bring?
Placed centrally between north and south, on a deep and wide river,
Antwerp is the natural outlet of Central Europe towards the West, and
it is no wonder that four hundred years ago she gathered to herself
the commerce of the Netherlands, in which Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent
had been her forerunners. For fifty years she was the Queen of the
North, and the centre of a vast ocean trade with England, France,
Spain, Portugal, and Italy, till the religious bigotry of Philip II of
Spain and the awful scenes of the Spanish Fury reduced her to
ruin. For two hundred years the Scheldt was blocked by Holland,
and the ocean trade of Antwerp obliterated. Her population disappeared,
her wharves rotted, and her canals were choked with mud. It is
hard to apportion the share of wickedness between a monarch
who destroys men and women to satisfy his own religious lust,
and a nation which drains the life-blood of another to satisfy its
lust for gold. One wonders in what category the instigator of the
present war should appear.
At the very beginning of last century Napoleon visited Antwerp, and
asserted that it was "little better than a heap of ruins." He recognized
its incomparable position as a port and as a fortress, and he
determined to raise it to its former prosperity, and to make it the
strongest fortress in Europe. He spent large sums of money upon it,
and his refusal to part with Antwerp is said to have broken off the
negotiations of Chatillon, and to have been the chief cause of his
exile to St. Helena. Alas his enemies did not profit by his genius. We
are the allies of his armies now, but we have lost Antwerp. Germany
will be utterly and completely crushed before she parts with that
incomparable prize. A mere glance at the map of Europe is sufficient
to convince anyone that in a war between England and Germany it is
a point of the first strategical importance. That our access to it should
be hampered by the control of Holland over the Scheldt is one of the
eccentricities of diplomacy which are unintelligible to the plain man.
The blame for its loss must rest equally between Britain and Belgium,
for Belgium, the richest country in Europe for her size, attempted to
defend her greatest stronghold with obsolete guns; whilst we, who
claim the mastery of the seas, sacrificed the greatest seaport in
Europe to the arrangements of an obsolete diplomacy. If we are to
retain our great position on the seas, Antwerp must be regained. She
is the European outpost of Britain, and, as has so often been pointed
out, the mouth of the Scheldt is opposite to the mouth of the Thames.
In Antwerp, as we saw her, it was almost impossible to realize the
vicissitudes through which she had passed, or to remember that her
present prosperity was of little more than fifty years' growth. On all
sides we were surrounded by wide boulevards, lined by magnificent
houses and public buildings. There are few streets in Europe to
eclipse the great Avenue des Arts, which, with its continuations,
extends the whole length of the city from north to south. The theatres,
the Central Station, the banks, would adorn any city, and the shops
everywhere spoke of a wealth not restricted to the few. The wide
streets, the trees, the roomy white houses, many of them great
palaces, made a deep impression upon us after the darkness and dirt
of London. Even in the poorer quarters there was plenty of light and
air, and on no occasion did we find the slums which surround the
wealthiest streets all over London. In the older parts of the city the
streets were, of course, narrower; but even here one had the
compensation of wonderful bits of architecture at unexpected corners,
splendid relics of an illustrious past. They are only remnants, but they
speak of a time when men worked for love rather than for wages, and
when an artisan took a pride in the labour of his hands. If it had not
been for the hand of the destroyer, what a marvellous city Antwerp
would have been! One likes to think that the great creations of the
past are not all lost, and that in the land to which the souls of the
Masters have passed we may find still living the mighty thoughts to
which their love gave birth. Are our cathedrals only stones and
mortar, and are our paintings only dust and oil?
The inhabitants of Antwerp were as delightful as their city. On all
sides we were welcomed with a kindness and a consideration not
always accorded to those who are so bold as to wish to help their
fellow-men. Everywhere we met with a courtesy and a generosity by
which, in the tragedy of their country, we were deeply touched. They
all seemed genuinely delighted to see us, from the Queen herself to
the children in the streets. Our medical confreres treated us royally,
and the mere thought of professional jealousy with such men is simply
ludicrous. They constantly visited our hospital, and they always
showed the keenest interest in our work and in any novelties in
treatment we were able to show them; and when we went to see
them, we were shown all the best that they had, and we brought away
many an ingenious idea which it was worth while going far to obtain.
Wherever we moved amongst the Belgians, we always found the
same simplicity of purpose, the same generosity of impulse.
Everywhere we met the same gratitude for what England was doing
for Belgium; no one ever referred to the sacrifices which Belgium has
made for England.
The one thing which so impressed us in the character of the Belgians
whom we met was its simplicity, and the men who had risen to high
rank did not seem to have lost it in their climb to fame. But it was just
this, the most delightful of their characteristics, which must have
made war for them supremely difficult. For strict discipline and
simplicity are almost incompatible. None of us tower so far above our
fellows that we can command instant obedience for our own sakes.
We have to cover ourselves with gold lace, to entrench ourselves in
rank, and to provide ourselves with all sorts of artificial aids before we
can rely on being obeyed. These things are foreign to the Belgian
mind, and as a result one noticed in their soldiers a certain lack of the
stern discipline which war demands. Individually they are brave men
and magnificent fighters. They only lacked the organization which has
made the little British Army the envy of the world. The fact is that they
are in no sense a warlike nation, in spite of their turbulent history of
the past, and, indeed, few things could be more incompatible than
turbulence and modern warfare. It demands on the part of the masses
of combatants an obedience and a disregard of life which are
repellent to human nature, and the Belgians are above all things
human. Germany is governed by soldiers, and France by officials.
Unlike the frogs in the fable, the Belgians are content to govern
themselves.
It was our great regret that we had so little time in which to see the
work of the Antwerp hospitals, but we made use of what opportunities
we had. There are many of them, and those we saw were magnificent
buildings, equipped in a way which filled us with envy. The great city
hospital, the Stuivenberg, was a model of what a modern hospital
ought to be. The wards were large and airy and spotlessly clean, and
the nurses seemed to be extremely competent. The kitchens were
equipped with all the latest appliances, steam boilers, and gas and
electric cookers. But the show part of the hospital was the suite of
operating theatres. I have always felt the pardonable pride of a son in
the theatres of the London Hospital, but they were certainly eclipsed
here. Each theatre was equipped with its own anaesthetizing room, its
own surgeon's room, and its own sterilizing rooms and stores, all
furnished with a lavishness beyond the financial capacity of any
hospital in London. Perhaps some of the equipment was unnecessary,
but it was abundantly evident that the State appreciated
the value of first-class surgery, and that it was prepared to pay for it.
I have never heard the same accusation levelled at Great Britain.
At St. Camille we had the good fortune to see M. Xambotte at work.
His reputation as a surgeon is worldwide, and it was pleasant to find
that his dexterity as an operator was equal to his reputation. It is not
always the case. He is an expert mechanic, and himself makes most
of the very ingenious instruments which he uses. He was fixing a
fractured femur with silver wires, and one could see the skilled
workman in all that he did. There is no training-ground for one's
hands like a carpenter's bench, and the embryo surgeon might do
much worse with his time than spend six months of it in a workshop.
When medical training emerges from its medieval traditions, manual
training will certainly form a part, and no one will be allowed to
attempt to mend a bone till he has shown his capacity to mend a
chair-leg. Here, again, the surgeon was surrounded by all the
appliances, and even the luxuries, that he could desire. The lot of the
great surgeon abroad is indeed a happy one.
But there is one thing in which we in England are far better off--in
our nursing staffs. In most of the hospitals we visited the nursing was
carried on by Sisterhoods, and though some of them were evidently
good nurses, most of them had no idea whatever of nursing as it is
practised in our country. Fresh air, for example, is to them full of
dangers. One would almost think that it savoured of the powers of
evil. We went into one huge hospital of the most modern type, and
equipped lavishly, and such wag the atmosphere that in ten minutes I
had to make a rush for the door. One large ward was full of wounded
soldiers, many of them with terrible wounds, gangrenous and horrible,
and every window was tightly shut. How they could live in such an
atmosphere is beyond my comprehension, but the Sisters did not
seem to notice it at all.
Some of the surgeons have their specially trained nurses, but nursing
as a profession for the classes who are alone competent to undertake
it is a conception which has yet to dawn upon the Continent, for only
a woman of education and refinement can really be a nurse.
The absence on the Continent of a nursing profession such as ours is
not without its influence on medicine and surgery abroad. The
individual patient meets with far less consideration than would be the
case in this country, and is apt to be regarded as so much raw
material. In Belgium this tendency is counteracted by the natural
kindliness of the Belgian, but in other countries patients are often
treated with a callousness which is amazing. There is in many of the
great clinics a disregard of the patient's feelings, of his sufferings,
and even of his life, which would be impossible in an English hospital.
The contact of a surgeon with his hospital patients as individuals is
largely through the nursing staff, and his point of view will be largely
influenced by them. There is no one in our profession, from the
youngest dresser to the oldest physician, who does not owe a great
part of his education to Sister.