The position of the hospital at Furnes was very different from
that which it had held at Antwerp. There we were in a modern
city, with a water-supply and modern sanitary arrangements.
Here we were in an old Continental country town, or, in other
words, in medieval times, as far as water and sanitation were
concerned. For it is only where the English tourist has
penetrated that one can possibly expect such luxuries. One
does not usually regard him as an apostle of civilization, but he
ought certainly to be canonized as the patron saint of continental
sanitary engineering. As a matter of fact, in a country as flat as
Belgium the science must be fraught with extraordinary difficulties,
and they certainly seem to thrive very well without it. We were
established in the Episcopal College of St. Joseph, a large
boys' school, and not badly adapted to the needs of a hospital
but for the exceptions I have mentioned. Our water-supply
came, on a truly hygienic plan, from wells beneath the building,
whilst we were entirely free from any worry about drains. There
were none. However, it did not seem to affect either ourselves
or our patients, and we all had the best of health, though we took
the precaution of sterilizing our water.
We were now the official advanced base hospital of the Belgian
Army, and not merely, as in Antwerp, a free organization
working by itself. The advantage of this arrangement was that
we had a constant supply of wounded sent to us whenever
there was any fighting going on, and that the evacuation of our
patients was greatly facilitated. Every morning at ten o'clock
Colonel Maestrio made the tour of our wards, and arranged for
the removal to the base hospital at Dunkirk of all whom we
wished to send away. It gave us the further advantage of
special privileges for our cars and ambulances, which were
allowed to go practically anywhere in search of the wounded
with absolute freedom. Formerly we had owed a great deal to
the assistance of the Belgian Croix Rouge, who had been very
good in supplementing our supply of dressings, as well as in
getting us army rations for the patients. This, of course, had all
come to an end, and we now had to rely on our own resources.
Our personnel had undergone considerable alteration, for while
several of our original members had dropped out, we had
joined forces with Dr. Hector Munro's Ambulance Corps, and
four of their doctors had joined our medical staff. Dr. Munro and
his party had worked in connection with the hospitals of Ghent
till the German advance forced both them and ourselves to
retreat to Ostend. There we met and arranged to carry on our
work together at Furnes. The arrangement was of the greatest
possible advantage to both of us, for it gave us the service of
their splendid fleet of ambulances, and it gave them a base to
which to bring their wounded. We were thus able to get the
wounded into hospital in an unusually short space of time, and
to deal effectively with many cases which would otherwise have
been hopeless. Smooth coordination with an ambulance party
is, in fact, the first essential for the satisfactory working of an
advanced hospital. If full use is to be made of its advantages,
the wounded must be collected and brought in with the minimum
of delay, whilst it must be possible to evacuate at once all who
are fit to be moved back to the base. In both respects we were
at Furnes exceptionally well placed.
We were established in a large straggling building of no
attraction whatever except its cubic capacity. It was fairly new,
and devoid of any of the interest of antiquity, but it presented
none of the advantages of modern architecture. In fact, it was
extremely ugly and extremely inconvenient, but it was large.
Two of the largest classrooms and the refectory were converted
into wards. At first the question of beds was a serious difficulty,
but by the kind intervention of the Queen we were able to
collect a number from houses in the town, whilst Her Majesty
herself gave us twenty first-class beds with box-spring
mattresses. Later on we got our supplies from England, and we
could then find beds for a hundred patients. Even then we were
not at the end of our capacity, for we had two empty classrooms,
the floors of which we covered with straw, on which another fifty
patients could lie in comfort until we could find better accommodation
for them. We could not, of course, have fires in these rooms,
as it would have been dangerous, but we warmed them by the
simple plan of filling them with patients and shutting all the windows and
doors. For the first few nights, as a matter of fact, we had to sleep
in these rooms on straw ourselves, and in the greatest luxury. No
one who has slept all his life in a bed would ever realize how
comfortable straw is, and for picturesqueness has it an equal?
I went into the Straw Ward on my round one wild and stormy
night. Outside the wind was raging and the rain fell in torrents,
and it was so dark that one had to feel for the door. Inside a
dozen men lay covered up with blankets on a thick bed of
straw, most of them fast asleep, while beside one knelt a nurse
with a stable lantern, holding a cup to his lips. It was a picture
that an artist might have come far to see--the wounded soldiers
in their heavy coats, covered by the brown blankets; the nurse
in her blue uniform and her white cap, the stable lantern throwing
flickering shadows on the walls. It was something more than
art, and as I glanced up at the crucifix hanging on the wall
I felt that the picture was complete.
Above the two larger wards was a huge dormitory, divided up
by wooden partitions into some sixty cubicles, which provided
sleeping accommodation for the bulk of our staff. They were
arranged in four ranks, with passages between and washing
arrangements in the passages, and the cubicles themselves
were large and comfortable. It was really quite well planned,
and was most useful to us, though ventilation had evidently not
appealed to its architect. Two rows were reserved for the
nurses, and in the others slept our chauffeurs and stretcher-bearers,
with a few of the priests. Our friends were at first much shocked
at the idea of this mixed crowd, but as a matter of fact it worked
very well, and there was very little to grumble at. The only real
disadvantage was the noise made by early risers in the morning,
convincing us more than ever of the essential selfishness of
the early bird. A few of us occupied separate rooms over in
the wing which the priests had for the most part reserved for
themselves, and these we used in the daytime as our offices.
But the real sights of our establishment were our kitchen and
our chef; we might almost have been an Oxford college. Maurice
had come to us in quite a romantic way. One night we took in a soldier
with a bullet wound of the throat. For some days he was pretty
bad, but he won all our hearts by his cheerfulness and pluck.
When at last he improved sufficiently to be able to speak, he
told us that he was the assistant chef at the Hotel Metropole
in Brussels. We decided that he ought to be kept in a warm,
moist atmosphere for a long time, and he was installed in the
kitchen. He was a genius at making miracles out of nothing,
and his soups made out of bacon rind and old bones, followed
by entrees constructed from bully beef, were a dream. He was
assisted by the nuns from Louvain who had accompanied us
to Poperinghe, and who now worked for us on the sole condition
that we should not desert them. They were very picturesque
working in the kitchen in their black cloaks and coifs. At meal-times
the scene was a most animated one, for, as we had no one
to wait on us, we all came in one after the other, plate in hand,
while Maurice stood with his ladle and presided over the
ceremonies, with a cheery word for everyone, assisted by the silent nuns.
The getting of supplies became at times a very serious
question. Needless to say, Furnes was destitute of anything to
eat, drink, burn, or wear, and Dunkirk was soon in a similar
case. We had to get most of our provisions over from England,
and our milk came every morning on the Government transport,
from Aylesbury. For some weeks we were very hard up, but the
officer in charge of the naval stores at Dunkirk was very good to
us, and supplied us with bully beef, condensed milk, cheese,
soap, and many other luxuries till we could get further supplies
from home. We used a considerable quantity of coal, and on
one occasion we were faced by the prospect of an early famine,
for Furnes and Dunkirk were empty. But nothing was ever too
great a strain for the resources of our housekeeper. She
discovered that there was a coal-heap at Ramscapelle, five
miles away, and in a few hours an order had been obtained
from the Juge d'Instruction empowering us to take the coal if we
could get it, and the loan of a Government lorry had been
coaxed out of the War Lords. The only difficulty was that for the
moment the Germans were shelling the place, and it was too
dangerous to go near even for coal; so the expedition had to be
postponed until they desisted. It seemed to me the most
original method of filling one's coal-cellar of which I had ever
heard. And it was typical of a large number of our arrangements.
There is something of the Oriental about the Belgians and the
French. If we wanted any special favour, the very last thing we
thought of doing was to go and ask for it. It was not that they
were not willing to give us what we asked for, but they did
not understand that method of approach. What we did was
to go to breakfast with the Juge, or to lunch with the Minister,
or to invite the Colonel to dinner. In the course of conversation
the subject would be brought up in some indirect way till the
interest of the great man had been gained; then everything
was easy. And surely there is something very attractive about
a system where everything is done as an act of friendship, and
not as the soulless reflex of some official machine. It is easier
to drink red wine than to eat red tape, and not nearly so wearing
to one's digestion.
As we were fifteen miles from Dunkirk, and as everything had to
be brought out from there, transport was a serious problem.
Every morning one of our lorries started for our seaport soon
after nine, carrying the hospital mailbag and as many messages
as a village carrier. The life of the driver was far more exciting
than his occupation would suggest, and it was always a moot
point whether or not he would succeed in getting back the
same night. The road was of the usual Belgian type, with a
paved causeway in the middle just capable of allowing two
motors to pass, and on each side was a morass, flanked on
the right by a canal and on the left by a field. The slightest
deviation from the greasy cobbles landed the car in the mud,
with quite a chance of a plunge into the canal. A constant
stream of heavy army lorries tore along the road at thirty or
more miles an hour, and as a rule absolutely refused to give
way. It took a steady nerve to face them, encouraged as one
was by numbers of derelicts in the field on the one side and half
in the canal on the other. On one bridge a car hung for some
days between heaven and earth, its front wheels caught over
the parapet, and the car hanging from them over the canal--a
heartening sight for a nervous driver. It was rarely that our lorry
returned without some tale of adventure. The daily round, the
common task, gave quite enough occupation to one member of
the community.