lively, and our inner mood dances to the tune. Some of us will perhaps
always feel that we spent our day on October 21, 1914. For we were
allowed to go into a town that fell in that one afternoon and to come
out again alive. It was the afternoon when Dixmude was leveled from a
fair upstanding city to a heap of scorched brick and crumbled plaster.
The enemy guns from over the Yser were accurate on its houses.
We received our first taste of the dread to come, while we were yet a
little way out. In the road ahead of us, a shell had just splashed an
artillery convoy. Four horses, the driver, and the splintered wood of
the wagon were all worked together into one pulp, so that our car
skidded on it. We entered the falling town of Dixmude. It was a thick
mess into which we rode, with hot smoke and fine masonry dust blowing
into the eyes. Houses around us crumpled up at one blast, and then shot
a thick brown cloud of dust, and out of the cloud a high central flame
that leaped and spread. With the wailing of shells in the air, every
few seconds, the thud and thunder of their impact, the scattering of the
shattered metal, it was one of the hot, thorough bombardments of the
war. It cleared the town of troops, after tearing their ranks. But it
left wounded men in the cellar of the Hotel de Ville. The Grand Place
and the Hotel were the center of the fire. Here we had to wait fifteen
minutes, while the wounded were made ready for our two cars. It was then
we turned to tobacco as to a friend. I remember the easement that came
when I found I had cigars in my waistcoat pocket. The act of lighting a
cigar, and pulling at it briskly, was a relief.
There was a second of time when we could hear a shell, about to burst
close, before it struck. It came, sharpening its nose on the air, making
a shrill whistle with a moan in it, that gathered volume as it neared.
There was a menace in the sound. It seemed to approach in a vast
enveloping mass that can't be escaped, filling all out-doors, and sure
to find you. It was as if the all-including sound were the missile
itself, with no hiding place offered. And yet the shell is generally a
little three-or-four inch thing, like a flower-pot, hurtling through
the scenery. But bruised nerves refuse to listen to reason, and again
and again I ducked as I heard that high wail, believing I was about to
be struck.
[Illustration: DOOR CHALKED BY THE GERMANS.
One of the 100 houses in Termonde with the direction "Do not Burn"
written in German. One thousand one hundred houses were burned, house by
house. Photograph by Radclyffe Dugmore.]
In that second of tension, it was a pleasant thing to draw in on a
butt--to discharge the smoke, a second later, carelessly, as who should
say, "It is nothing." The little cylinder was a lightning conductor to
lead away the danger from a vital part. It let the nervousness leak off
into biting and puffing, and making a play of fingering the stub,
instead of striking into the stomach and the courage. It gave the
troubled face something to do, and let the writhing hand busy itself. It
saved me from knowing just how frightened I was.
But what of the wounded themselves? They have to endure all that
dreariness of long waiting, and the pressure of danger, and then, for
good measure, a burden of pain. So I come to the men who are revealing
human nature at a higher pitch than any others in the war. The
trench-digging, elderly chaps are patient and long-enduring, and the
fighting men are as gallant as any the ballad-mongers used to rime
about.
But it is of the wounded that one would like to speak in a way to win
respect for them rather than pity. I think some American observers have
missed the truth about the wounded. They have told of the groaning and
screaming, the heavy smells, the delays and neglect. It is a picture of
vivid horror. But the final impression left on me by caring for many
hundred wounded men is that of their patience and cheeriness. I think
they would resent having a sordid pen picture made of their suffering
and letting it go at that. After all, it is their wound: they suffered
it for a purpose, and they conquer their bodily pain by will power and
the Gallic touch of humor. Suffering borne nobly merits something more
than an emphasis on the blood and the moan. To speak of these wounded
men as of a heap of futile misery is like missing the worthiness of
motherhood in the details of obstetrics.
It was thought we moderns had gone soft, but it seems we were storing up
reserves of stoic strength and courage. This war has drawn on them more
heavily than any former test, and they have met all its demands.
Sometimes, being tired, I would drop my corner of the stretcher, a few
inches suddenly. This would draw a quick intake of the breath from the
hurt man and an "aahh"--but not once a word of blame. I should want to
curse the careless hand that wrenched my wound, but these soldiers of
France and Belgium whom I carried had passed beyond littleness.
Once we had a French Zouave officer on the stretcher. He was wounded in
the right arm and the stomach. Every careen of the ambulance over cobble
and into shell-hole was a thrust into his hurt. We had to carry him all
the way from the Nieuport cellar to Zuydcoote Hospital, ten miles. The
driver was one more of the American young men who have gone over into
France to pay back a little of what we owe her. I want to give his name,
Robert Cardell Toms, because it is good for us to know that we have
brave and tender gentlemen. On this long haul, as always, he drove with
extreme care, changing his speed without the staccato jerk, avoiding
bumps and holes of the trying road. When we reached the hospital, he
ran ahead into the ward to prepare the bed. The officer beckoned me to
him. He spoke with some difficulty, as the effort caught him in the
wound of his stomach.
"Please be good enough," he said, "to give my thanks to the chauffeur.
He has driven me down with much consideration. He cares for wounded
men."
Where other races are grateful and inarticulate, the French are able to
put into speech the last fine touch of feeling.
My friend kept a supply of cigarettes for his ambulance cases, and as
soon as the hour-long drive began we dealt them out to the bandaged men.
How often we have started with a groaning man for the ride to Zuydcoote,
and how well the trip went, when we had lighted his cigarette for him.
It brought back a little of the conversation and the merriment which it
had called out in better days. It is such a relief to be wounded. You
have done your duty, and now you are to have a little rest. With a clear
conscience, you can sink back into laziness, far away from noise and
filth. Luck has come along and pulled the pack off your back, and the
responsibility from your sick mind. No weary city clerk ever went to his
seashore holiday with more blitheness than some of our wounded showed as
they came riding in from the Nieuport trenches at full length on the
stretcher, and singing all the way. What is a splintered forehead or a
damaged leg compared to the happiness of an honorable discharge? Nothing
to do for a month but lie quietly, and watch the wholesome, clean-clad
nurse. I am not forgetting the sadness of many men, nor the men hurt to
death, who lay motionless and did not sing, and some of whom died while
we were on the road to help. I am only trying to tell of the one man in
every four who was glad of his enforced rest, and who didn't let a
little thing like agony conquer his gaiety. Those men were the Joyous
Wounded. I have seldom seen men more light hearted.
Word came to my wife one day that several hundred wounded were
side-tracked at Furnes railway station. With two nurses she hurried to
them, carrying hot soup. The women went through the train, feeding the
soldiers, giving them a drink of cold water, and bringing some of them
hot water for washing. Then, being fed, they were ready for a smoke, and
my wife began walking down the foul-smelling ambulance car with boxes of
supplies, letting each man take out a cigarette and a match. The car was
slung with double layers of stretcher bunks. Some men were freshly
wounded, others were convalescent. A few lay in a stupor. She provided
ten or a dozen soldiers with their pleasure, and they lighted up and
were well under way. She had so many patients that day that she was not
watching the individual man in her general distribution. She came half
way down the car, and held out her store to a soldier without looking at
him. He glanced up and grinned. The men in the bunks around him laughed
heartily. Then she looked down at him. He was flapping the two stumps of
his arms and was smiling. His hands had been blown off. She put the
cigarette in his mouth and lit it for him. Only his hands were gone.
Comradeship was left for him, and here was the lighted cigarette
expressing that comradeship.
WAS IT REAL?
The man was an old-time friend. In the days of our youth, we had often
worked together. He was small and nervous, with a quick eye. He always
wore me down after a few hours, because he was restless and untiring. He
was named Romeyn Rossiter--one of those well-born names. We had met in
times before the advent of the telescopic lens, and he used a box
camera, tuned to a fiftieth of a second. Together we snapped polo
ponies, coming at full tilt after the ball, riding each other off, while
he would stand between the goal-posts, as they zigzagged down on him. I
had to shove him out of the way, at the last tick, when the hoofs were
loud. I often wondered if those ponies didn't look suddenly large and
imminent on the little glass rectangle into which he was peering. That
was the kind of person he was. He was glued to his work. He was a
curious man, because that nerve of fear, which is well developed in most
of us, was left out of his make-up. No credit to him. It merely wasn't
there. He was color-blind to danger. He had spent his life everywhere by
bits, so he had the languages. I used to admire that in him, the way he
could career along with a Frenchman, and exchange talk with a German
waiter: high speed, and a kind of racy quality.
I used to write the text around his pictures, captions underneath them,
and then words spilled out over the white paper between his six by tens.
We published in the country life magazines. They gave generous big
display pages. In those days people used to read what I wrote, because
they wanted to find out about the pictures, and the pictures were fine.
You must have seen Rossiter's work--caribou, beavers, Walter Travis
coming through with a stroke, and Holcombe Ward giving a twist delivery.
We had the field to ourselves for two or three years, before the other
fellows caught the idea, and broke our partnership. I turned to
literature, and he began drifting around the world for long shots. He'd
be gone six months, and then turn up with big game night pictures out of
Africa--a lion drinking under a tropical moon. Two more years, and I
had lost him entirely. But I knew we should meet. He was one of those
chaps that, once in your life, is like the _motif_ in an opera, or like
the high-class story, which starts with an insignificant loose brick on
a coping and ends with that brick smiting the hero's head.
It was London where I ran into him at last.
"Happy days?" I said, with a rising inflection.
"So, so," he answered.
He was doing the free-lance game. He had drifted over to England with
his $750 moving-picture machine to see what he could harvest with a
quiet eye, and they had rung in the war on him. He wasn't going to be
happy till he could get the boys in action. Would I go to Belgium with
him? I would.
Next day, we took the Channel ferry from Dover to Ostend, went by train
to Ghent, and trudged out on foot to the battle of Alost.
Those were the early days of the war when you could go anywhere, if you
did it nicely. The Belgians are a friendly people. They can't bear to
say No, and if they saw a hard-working man come along with his eye on
his job, they didn't like to turn him back, even if he was mussing up an
infantry formation or exposing a trench. They'd rather share the risk,
as long as it brought him in returns.
When we footed it out that morning, we didn't know we were in for one of
the Famous Days of history. You never can tell in this war. Sometimes
you'll trot out to the front, all keyed up, and then sit around among
the "Set-Sanks" for a month playing pinochle, and watching the flies
chase each other across the marmalade. And then a sultry dull day will
suddenly show you things....
Out from the Grand Place of Alost radiate narrow little streets that run
down to the canal, like spokes of a wheel. Each little street had its
earthworks and group of defenders. Out over the canal stretched
footbridges, and these were thickly sown with barbed wire.
"Great luck," said Rossiter. "They're making an old-time barricade. It's
as good as the days of the Commune. Do you remember your street-fighting
in Les Miserables?"
"I surely do," I replied. "Breast high earthworks, and the 'citizens'
crouched behind under the rattle of bullets."
"This is going to be good," he went on in high enthusiasm. The soldiers
were rolling heavy barrels to the gutter, and knocking off the heads.
The barrels were packed with fish, about six inches long, with scales
that went blue and white in the fresh morning light. The fish slithered
over the cobbles, and the soldiers stumbled on their slippery bodies.
They set the barrels on end, side by side, and heaped the cracks between
and the face with sods of earth, thick-packed clods, with grass growing.
The grass was bright green, unwilted. A couple of peasant hand-carts
were tilted on end, and the flooring sodded like the barrels.
"Look who's coming," pointed Rossiter, swiveling his lens sharply
around.
Steaming gently into our narrow street from the Grand Place came a great
Sava mitrailleuse--big steel turret, painted lead blue, three men
sitting behind the swinging turret. One of the men, taller by a head
than his fellows, had a white rag bound round his head, where a bullet
had clipped off a piece of his forehead the week before. His face was
set and pale. Sitting on high, in the grim machine, with his bandage
worn as a plume, he looked like the presiding spirit of the fracas.
"It's worth the trip," muttered Romeyn, grinding away on his crank.
There was something silent and efficient in the look of the big man and
the big car, with its slim-waisted, bright brass gun shoving through.
"Here, have a cigarette," said Rossiter, as the powerful thing glided
by.
He passed up a box to the three gunners.
"_Bonne chance_," said the big man, as he puffed out rings and fondled
the trim bronze body of his Lady of Death. They let the car slide down
the street to the left end of the barricade, where it came to rest.
Over the canal, out from the smoke-misted houses, came a peasant
running. In his arms he carried a little girl. Her hair was light as
flax, and crested with a knot of very bright red ribbon. Hair and gay
ribbon caught the eye, as soon as they were borne out of the doomed
houses. The father carried the little one to the bridge at the foot of
our street, and began crossing towards us. The barbed wire looked angry
in the morning sun. He had to weave his way patiently, with the child
held flat to his shoulder. Any hasty motion would have torn her face on
the barbs. Shrapnel was sailing high overhead between the two forces,
and there, thirty feet under the crossfire, this man and his child
squirmed their way through the barrier. They won through, and were
lifted over the barricade. As the father went stumbling past me, I
looked into the face of the girl. Her eyes were tightly closed. She
nestled contentedly.
"Did you get it, man? Did you get it?" I asked Rossiter.
"Too far," he replied, mournfully, "only a dot at that distance."
Now, all the parts had fitted into the pattern, the gay green grass
growing out of the stacked barrels and carts, and the sullen, silent,
waiting mitrailleuse which can spit death in a wide swathe as it
revolves from side to side, like the full stroke of a scythe on nodding
daisies. The bark of it is as alarming as its bite--an incredibly rapid
rat-tat that makes men fall on their faces when they hear, like
worshipers at the bell of the Transubstantiation.
"She talks three hundred words to the minute," said Romeyn to me.
"How are you coming?" I asked.
"Great," he answered, "great stuff. Now, if only something happens."
He had planted his tripod fifty feet back of the barricade, plumb
against a red-brick, three-story house, so that the lens raked the
street and its defenses diagonally. Thirty minutes we waited, with shell
fire far to the right of us, falling into the center of the town with a
rumble, like a train of cars heard in the night, when one is half
asleep. That was the sense of things to me, as I stood in the street,
waiting for hell to blow off its lid. It was a dream world, and I was
the dreamer, in the center of the strange unfolding sight, seeing it all
out of a muffled consciousness.
Another quarter hour, and Rossiter began to fidget.
"Do you call this a battle?" he asked.
"The liveliest thing in a month," replied the lieutenant.
"We've got to brisk it up," Rossiter said. "Now, I tell you what we'll
do. Let's have a battle that looks something like. These real things
haven't got speed enough for a five-cent house."
In a moment, all was action. Those amazing Belgians, as responsive as
children in a game, fell to furiously to create confusion and swift
event out of the trance of peace. The battered giant in the Sava
released a cloud of steam from his car. The men aimed their rifles in
swift staccato. The lieutenant dashed back and forth from curb to curb,
plunging to the barricade, and then to the half dozen boys who were
falling back, crouching on one knee, firing, and then retreating. He
cheered them with pats on the shoulder, pointed out new unsuspected
enemies. Then, man by man, the thirty perspiring fighters began to
tumble. They fell forward on their faces, lay stricken on their backs,
heaved against the walls of houses, wherever the deadly fire had caught
them. The street was littered with Belgian bodies. There stood Rossiter
grinding away on his handle, snickering green-clad Belgians lying strewn
on the cobbles, a half dozen of them tense and set behind the barricade,
leveling rifles at the piles of fish. Every one was laughing, and all of
them intent on working out a picture with thrills.
The enemy guns had been growing menacing, but Rossiter and the Belgians
were very busy.
"The shells are dropping just back of us," I called to him.
"Good, good," he said, "but I haven't time for them just yet. They must
wait. You can't crowd a film."
Ten minutes passed.
"It is immense," began he, wiping his face and lighting a smoke, and
turning his handle. "Gentlemen, I thank you."
"Gentlemen, we thank you," I said.
"There's been nothing like it," he went on. "Those Liège pictures of
Wilson's at the Hippodrome were tame."
He'd got it all in, and was wasting a few feet for good measure.
Sometimes you need a fringe in order to bring out the big minute in your
action.
[Illustration: STREET FIGHTING IN ALOST.
This is part of the motion-picture which we took while the Germans were
bombarding the town.]
Suddenly, we heard the wailing overhead and louder than any of the other
shells. Louder meant closer. It lasted a second of time, and then
crashed into the second story of the red house, six feet over Rossiter's
head. A shower of brown brick dust, and a puff of gray-black smoke
settled down over the machine and man, and blotted him out of sight for
a couple of seconds. Then we all coughed and spat, and the air cleared.
The tripod had careened in the fierce rush of air, but Rossiter had
caught it and was righting it. He went on turning. His face was streaked
with black, and his clothes were brown with dust.
"Trying to get the smoke," he called, "but I'm afraid it won't
register."
Maybe you want to know how that film took. We hustled it back to London,
and it went with a whizz. One hundred and twenty-six picture houses
produced "STREET FIGHTING IN ALOST." The daily illustrated
papers ran it front page. The only criticism of it that I heard was
another movie man, who was sore--a chap named Wilson.
"That picture is faked," he asserted.
"I'll bet you," I retorted, "that picture was taken under shell fire
during the bombardment of Alost. That barricade is the straight goods.
The fellow that took it was shot full of gas while he was taking it.
What's your idea of the real thing?"
"That's all right," he said; "the ruins are good, and the smoke is
there. But I've seen that reel three times, and every time the dead man
in the gutter laughed."
"CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!"
Here at home I am in a land where the wholesale martyrdom of Belgium is
regarded as of doubtful authenticity. We who have witnessed widespread
atrocities are subjected to a critical process as cold as if we were
advancing a new program of social reform. I begin to wonder if anything
took place in Flanders. Isn't the wreck of Termonde, where I thought I
spent two days, perhaps a figment of the fancy? Was the bayoneted girl
child of Alost a pleasant dream creation? My people are busy and
indifferent, generous and neutral, but yonder several races are living
at a deeper level. In a time when beliefs are held lightly, with tricky
words tearing at old values, they have recovered the ancient faiths of
the race. Their lot, with all its pain, is choicer than ours. They at
least have felt greatly and thrown themselves into action. It is a stern
fight that is on in Europe, and few of our countrymen realize it is our
fight that the Allies are making.
Europe has made an old discovery. The Greek Anthology has it, and the
ballads, but our busy little merchants and our clever talkers have never
known it. The best discovery a man can make is that there is something
inside him bigger than his fear, a belief in something more lasting than
his individual life. When he discovers that, he knows he, too, is a man.
It is as real for him as the experience of motherhood for a woman. He
comes out of it with self-respect and gladness.
The Belgians were a soft people, pleasure-loving little chaps, social
and cheery, fond of comfort and the café brightness. They lacked the
intensity of blood of unmixed single strains. They were cosmopolitan,
often with a command over three languages and snatches of several
dialects. They were easy in their likes. They "made friends" lightly.
They did not have the reserve of the English, the spiritual pride of the
Germans. Some of them have German blood, some French, some Dutch. Part
of the race is gay and volatile, many are heavy and inarticulate; it is
a mixed race of which any iron-clad generalization is false. But I have
seen many thousands of them under crisis, seen them hungry, dying, men
from every class and every region; and the mass impression is that they
are affectionate, easy to blend with, open-handed, trusting.
This kindly, haphazard, unformed folk were suddenly lifted to a national
self-sacrifice. By one act of defiance Albert made Belgium a nation. It
had been a mixed race of many tongues, selling itself little by little,
all unconsciously, to the German bondage. I saw the marks of this
spiritual invasion on the inner life of the Belgians--marks of a
destruction more thorough than the shelling of a city. The ruins of
Termonde are only the outward and visible sign of what Germany has
attempted on Belgium for more than a generation.