sixteen months. You shovel yourself into a stinking hole in the ground.
At seven in the morning, you boil yourself some muddy coffee that tastes
like the River Thames at Battersea Bridge. You take a knife that's had
knicks hacked out of it, and cut a hunk of dry bread that chews like
sand. You eat some 'bully beef out of a tin, same tinned stuff as you've
been eating ever since your stomach went on strike a year ago. Once a
week for a treat, you cut a steak off the flank of a dead horse. That
tastes better, because it's fresh meat. When you're sent back a few
miles, _en 'piquet_, you sleep in a village that looks like Sodom after
the sulphur struck it. Houses singed and tumbled, dead bodies in the
ruins, a broken-legged dog, trailing its hind foot, in front of the
house where you are. Tobacco--surely. You'd die if you didn't have a
smoke. But the rotten little cigarettes with no taste to them that smoke
like chopped hay. And the cigars made out of rags and shredded
toothpicks--"
"Here, have a cigarette," suggested the youngest doctor.
But the man was too busy in working out his own thoughts.
"The whole thing," he continued, "is a mixture of a morgue and a
hospital--only those places have running water, and people in white
aprons to tidy things up. And a battle--Three days under bombardment,
living in the cellar. The guns going off five, six times to the minute,
and then waiting a couple of hours and dropping one in, next door. The
crumpling noise when a little brick house caves in, like a man when you
hit him in the stomach, just going all together in a heap. And the sick
smell that comes out of the mess from plaster and brick dust.
"And getting wounded, that's jolly, isn't it? Rifle ball through your
left biceps. Dick walks you back to the dressing station. Doctor busy at
luncheon with a couple of visiting officers. Lie down in the straw.
Straw has a pleasant smell when it's smeared with iodine and blood. Wait
till the doctor has had his bottle of wine.
"'Nothing very much,' he says, when he gets around to you. Drops some
juice in, ties the white rag around, and you go back to your straw.
Three, four hours, and along come the body snatchers--the chauffeur chap
doesn't know how to drive, bumps into every shell hole for seven miles.
Every half mile, drive down into the ditch mud, to get out of the way of
some ammunition wagons going to the front. The wheel gets stuck. Put on
power, in jumps, to bump the car out. Every jerk tears at your open
sore, as if the wheel had got stuck in your arm and was being pulled
out. Two hours to do the seven miles. Get to the field hospital. No time
for you. Lie on your stretcher in the court, where the flies swarm on
you. Always flies. Flies on the blood of the wounded, glued to the
bandage. Flies on the face of the dead."
So he had once spoken and left them wondering. But that whirling burst
of words was long before, in those earlier days of his work. Nothing
like that had happened in weeks. No such vivid pictures lighted him now.
The man slept on.
There was a scratching at the window, then a steady tapping, then a
resounding fist on the casement. Gradually, the sleeping man came up
through the deep waters of unconsciousness. His eyes were heavy. He sat
a moment, brooding, then turned toward the insistent noise.
"Monsieur Watts!" said a voice.
"Yes," answered the man. He stretched himself, and raised the sash. A
brisk little French Marin was at the window.
"The doctors are at luncheon. They are waiting for you," the soldier
said in rapid Breton French; "today you are their guest."
"Of course," replied the man, "I had forgotten. I will come at once."
He stretched his arms over his head--a tall figure of a man, but bent at
the shoulders, as if all the dreariness of his surroundings had settled
there. He had the stoop of an old man, and the walk. He stepped out of
his room, into the street, and stood a moment in the midday sunshine,
blinking. Then he walked down the village street to the Poste, and
pushed through the dressing-rooms to the dining-room at the rear. The
doctors looked up as he entered. He nodded, but gave no speech back for
their courteous, their cordial greeting. In silence he ate the simple
relishes of sardines and olives. Then the treat of the luncheon was
brought in by the orderly. It was a duckling, taken from a refugee farm,
and done to a brown crisp. The head doctor carved and served it.
"See here," said Watts loudly. He lifted his wing of the duckling where
a dead fly was cooked in with the gravy. He pushed his chair back. It
grated shrilly on the stone floor. He rose.
"Flies," he said, and left the room.
* * * * *
Watts was the guest at the informal trench luncheon. The officers showed
him little favors from time to time, for he had served their wounded
faithfully for many months. It is the highest honor they can pay when
they admit a civilian to the first line of trenches. Shelling from
Westend was mild and inaccurate, going high overhead and falling with a
mutter into the seven-times wrecked and thoroughly deserted houses of
Nieuport village. But the sound of it gave a gentle tingle to the act of
eating. There was occasional rifle fire, the bullet singing close.
"They're improving," said the Commandant, "a fellow reached over the
trench this morning for his Billy-can, and they got him in the hand."
Two Marins cleared away the plank on which bread and coffee and tinned
meat had been served.
The hot August sun cooked the loose earth, and heightened the smells of
food. A swarm of flies poured over the outer rim and dropped down on
squatting men and the scattered commissariat. Watts was sitting at a
little distance from the group. He closed his eyes, but soon began
striking methodically at the settling flies. He fought them with the
right arm and the left in long heavy strokes, patiently, without
enthusiasm. The soldiers brought out a pack of cards, and leaned forward
for the deal. Suddenly Watts rose, lifted his arms above the trench, and
deliberately stretched. Three faint cracks sounded from across the
hillock, and he tumbled out at full length, as if some one had flung him
away. The men hastened to him, coming crouched over but swiftly.
"Got him in the right arm," said the Commandant.
"Thank God," muttered Watts, sleepily.
* * * * *
It was the Convent Hospital of Furnes. There was quiet in the ward of
twenty-five beds, where side by side slept the wounded of France and
Germany and Belgium and England. Suddenly, a resounding whack rang
through the ward. A German boy jumped up sitting in his cot. The sound
had awakened memories. He looked over to the tall Englishman in the next
cot, who had struck out at one of the heavy innumerable flies, who hover
over wounded men, and pry down under bandages.
"Let me tell you," said the youth eagerly, "I have a preparation--I'm a
chemist, you know--I've worked out a powder that kills flies."
Watts looked up from his pillow. His face was weary.
"It's sweet, you know, and attracts them," went on the boy, "then the
least sniff of it finishes them. They trail away, and die in a few
minutes. You can clear a room in half an hour. Then all you have to do
is to sweep up."
"See here," he said, "I'll show you. Sister," he called. The nurse
hurried to his side.
"Sister? You were kind enough to save my kit. May I have it a moment?"
He took out a tin flask, and squeezed it--a brown powder puffed through
the pin-point holes at the mouth. It settled in a dust on the white
coverlet.
"Please be very quiet," he said. He settled back, as if for sleep, but
his half-shut eyes were watchful. A couple of minutes passed, then a fly
circled his head, and made for the spot on the spread. It nosed its way
in, crawled heavily a few inches up the coverlet, and turned its legs
up. Two more came, alighted, sniffed and died.
"You see," he said.
* * * * *
Next day, the head of the Coxyde Poste motored over to Furnes for a call
on his wounded helper.
"Where does all that chatter come from?" he asked.
Sister Teresa smiled.
"It's your silent friend," she said. "He is the noisiest old thing in
the ward."
"Talking to himself?" inquired the doctor.
"Have a look for yourself," urged the nurse. They stepped into the ward,
and down the stone floor, till they came to the supply table. Here they
pretended to busy themselves with lint.
"Most interesting," Watts was saying. "That is a new idea to me. Here
they've been telling me for a year that there's no way but the slow
push, trench after trench--"
"Let me say to you," interrupted the Saxon lad.
"You will pardon me, if I finish what I am saying," went on Watts in
full tidal flow. "What was it I was saying? Oh, yes, I remember--that
slow hard push is not the only way, after all. You tell me--"
"That's the way it is all day long," explained the sister. "Chatter,
chatter, chatter. They are telling each other all they know. You would
think they would get fed up. But as fast as one of them says something,
that seems to be a new idea to the other. Mr. Watts acts like a man who
has been starved."
Watts caught sight of his friend.
"We've killed all the flies," he shouted.
WOMEN UNDER FIRE
This war has been a revelation of womanhood. To see one of these cool,
friendly creatures, American and English, shove her motor car into
shell-fire, make her rescue of helpless crippled men, and steam back to
safety, is to watch a resourceful and disciplined being. They may be,
they are, "ministering angels," but there is nothing meek in their
demeanor. They have stepped to a vantage from which nothing in man's
contemptuous philosophy will ever dislodge them. They have always
existed to astonish those who knew them best, and have turned life into
a surprise party from Eden to the era of forcible feeding. But assuredly
it would make the dogmatists on the essentially feminine nature, like
Kipling, rub their eyes, to watch modern women at work under fire. They
haven't the slightest fear of being killed. Give them a job under
bombardment, and they unfold the stretcher, place the pillow and tuck in
the blanket, without a quiver of apprehension. That, too, when some of
the men are scampering for cover, and ducking chance pellets from the
woolly white cloud that breaks overhead. The women will eat their
luncheon with relish within three hundred feet of a French battery in
full blaze. Is there a test left to the pride of man that the modern
woman does not take lightly and skilfully? Gone are the Victorian nerves
and the eighteenth-century fainting. All the old false delicacies have
been swamped. She has been held back like a hound from the hunting, till
we really believed we had a harmless household pet, who loved security.
We had forgotten the pioneer women who struck across frontiers with a
hardihood that matched that of their mates. And now the modern woman
emerges from her protected home, and pushes forward, careless and
curious.
"What are women going to do about this war?" That question my wife and I
asked each other at the outbreak of the present conflict. There were
several attitudes that they might take. They could deplore war, because
it destroyed their own best products. They could form peace leagues and
pass resolutions against war. They could return to their ancient job of
humble service, and resume their familiar location in the background.
They did all these things and did them fervently; but they did something
else in this war--they stepped out into the foreground, where the air
was thick with danger, and demonstrated their courage. The mother no
longer says: "Return, my gallant one, with your shield or on it," and
goes back to her baking. She packs her kit and jumps into a motor
ambulance headed for the dressing station.
We have had an excellent chance to watch women in this war. Our corps
have had access to every line from Nieuport on the sea, down for twenty
miles. We were able to run out to skirmishes, to reach the wounded where
they had fallen. We have gone where the fighting had been at such close
range that in one barnyard in Ramscappelle lay thirteen dead--Germans,
French and Belgians. We brought back three wounded Germans from the
stable. We were in Dixmude on the afternoon when the Germans destroyed
the town by artillery fire. We were in Ypres on November first, the day
after the most terrible battle in history, when fifty thousand English
out of a hundred and twenty thousand fell. For three months my wife
lived in Pervyse, with two British women. Not one house in the town
itself is left untouched by shell-fire. The women lived in a cellar for
the first weeks. Then they moved into a partially demolished house, and
a little later a shell exploded in the kitchen. The women were at work
in the next room. We have had opportunity for observing women in war,
for we have seen several hundred of them--nurses, helpers, chauffeurs,
writers--under varying degrees of strain and danger.
The women whom I met in Belgium were all alike. They refused to take
"their place." They were not interested in their personal welfare. There
have been individual men, a few of them--English, French and Belgian,
soldiers, chauffeurs and civilians--who have turned tail when the danger
was acute. But the women we have watched are strangely lacking in fear.
I asked a famous war writer, whose breast was gay with the ribbons of
half a dozen campaigns, what was the matter with all these women, that
they did not tremble and go green under fire, as some of us did. He
said:
"They don't belong out here. They have no business to be under fire.
They ought to be back at the hospitals down at Dunkirk. They don't
appreciate danger. That's the trouble with them; they have no
imagination."
That's an easy way out. But the real reasons lie deeper than a mental
inferiority. These women certainly had quite as good an equipment in
mentality as the drivers and stretcher bearers. They could not bear to
let immense numbers of men lie in pain. They wished to bring their
instinct for help to the place where it was needed.
The other reason is a product of their changed thinking under modern
conditions. "I want to see the shells," said a discontented lady at
Dunkirk. She was weary of the peace and safety of a town twenty miles
back from the front. Women suddenly saw their time had come to strip man
of one more of his monopolies. For some thousand years he had been
bragging of his carriage and bearing in battle. He had told the women
folks at home how admirable he had been under strain, and he went on to
claim special privileges as the reward for his gallant behavior. He
posed as their protector. He assumed the right to tax them because they
did not lend a hand when invasion came. Now women are campaigning in
France and Belgium to show that man's much-advertised quality of courage
is a race possession.
They had already shown it while peace was still in the land, but their
demonstration met with disfavor. Just before the war broke out I saw a
woman suffragist thrown into a pond of water at Denmark Hill. I saw
another mauled and bruised by a crowd of men in Hyde Park. They were the
same sort of women as these hundreds at the front, who are affirming a
new value. The argument is hotly contended whether women belong in the
war zone. Conservative Englishmen deem them a nuisance, and wish them
back in London. Meanwhile, they come and stay. English officials tried
to send home the three of our women who had been nursing within thirty
yards of the trenches at Pervyse. But the King of the Belgians, and
Baron de Broqueville, Prime minister of Belgium, had been watching
their work, and refused to move them.
One morning we came into the dining-room of our Convent Hospital at
Furnes, and there on a stretcher on the floor was a girl sleeping
profoundly. We thought at first we had one more of our innumerable
wounded who overflowed the beds and wards during those crowded days. She
rested through the morning and through the noon meal. The noise about
did not disturb her. She did not stir in her heavy sleep, lying under
the window, her face of olive skin, with a touch of red in the right
cheek, turned away from the light. She awoke after twenty hours.
Silently, she had come in the evening before, wearied to exhaustion
after a week of nursing in the Belgian trenches.
That was the thing you were confronted with--woman after woman hurling
herself at the war till spent. They wished to share with men the
hardship and peril. If risks were right for the men, then they were
right for women. If the time had come for nations to risk death, these
women refused to claim the exemptions of sex difference. If war was
unavoidable, then it was equally proper for women to be present and
carry on the work of salvage.
Of a desire to kill they have none. A certain type of man under
excitement likes to shoot and reach his mark. I have had soldiers tell
me with pride of the number of enemies they have potted. It sounds very
much like an Indian score-card of scalps or a grouse hunter's bag of
game. Our women did not talk in these terms, nor did they act so. They
gave the same care to German wounded as to Belgian, French and English
wounded, and that though they knew they would not receive mercy if the
enemy came across the fields and stormed the trenches. A couple of
machine guns placed on the trench at Pervyse could have raked the ruined
village and killed our three nurses. They shared the terms of peril with
the soldiers; but they had no desire for retaliation, no wish to wreak
their will on human life. Their instinct is to help. The danger does not
excite them to a nervous explosion where they grab for a gun and shoot
the other fellow.
I was with an English physician one day before he was seasoned. We were
under the bank at Grembergen, just across the river from Termonde. The
enemy were putting over shells about one hundred yards from where we
were crawling toward a machine-shop sheltering wounded men. The _obus_
were noisy and the dirt flew high. Scattered bits of metal struck the
bank. As we heard the shell moaning for that second of time when it
draws close, we would crawl into one of the trenches scooped out in the
green bank, an earthen cave with a roof of boughs.
"Let's get out of this," said the doctor. "It's too hot for our kind of
work. If I had a rifle and could shoot back I shouldn't mind it. But
this waiting round and doing nothing in return till you are hit, I don't
like it."
But that is the very power that women possess. They can wait round
without wishing to strike back. Saving life gives them sufficient
spiritual resource to stand up to artillery. They have no wish to
relieve their nervousness by sighting an alien head and cracking it.
One of our corps was the daughter of an earl. She had all the
characteristics of what we like to think is the typical American girl.
She had a bonhomie that swept class distinctions aside. Her talk was
swift and direct. She was pretty and executive, swift to act and always
on the go.
One day, as we were on the road to the dressing stations, the noise of
guns broke out. The young Belgian soldier who was driving her stopped
his motor and jumped out.
"I do not care to go farther," he said.
Lady ----, who is a skilful driver, climbed to the front seat, drove the
car to the dressing station and brought back the wounded. I have seen
her drive a touring car, carrying six wounded men, from Nieuport to
Furnes at eight o'clock on a pitch-dark night, no lights allowed, over a
narrow, muddy road on which the car skidded. She had to thread her way
through silent marching troops, turn out for artillery wagons, follow
after tired horses.
She was not a trained nurse, but when Dr. Hector Munro was working over
a man with a broken leg she prepared a splint and held the leg while he
set it and bound it. She drove a motor into Nieuport when the troops
were marching out of it. Her guest for the afternoon was a war
correspondent.
"This is a retreat," he said. "It is never safe to enter a place when
the troops are leaving it. I have had experience."
"We are going in to get the wounded," she replied. They went in.
At Ypres she dodged round the corner because she saw a captain who
doesn't believe in women at the front. A shell fell in the place where
she had been standing a moment before. It blew the arm from a soldier.
Her nerve was unbroken, and she continued her work through the morning.
Her notion of courage is that people have a right to feel frightened,
but that they have no right to fail to do the job even if they are
frightened. They are entitled to their feelings, but they are not
entitled to shirk the necessary work of war. She believes that cowardice
is not like other failings of weakness, which are pretty much man's own
business. Cowardice is dangerous to the group.
Lady ----'s attitude at a bombardment was that of a child seeing a
hailstorm--open-eyed wonder. She was the purest exhibit of careless
fearlessness, carrying a buoyancy in danger. Generations of riding to
hounds and of big game shooting had educated fear out of her stock. Her
ancestors had always faced uncertainty as one of the ingredients of
life: they accepted danger in accepting life. The savage accepted fear
because he had to. With the English upper class, danger is a fine art, a
cult. It is an element in the family honor. One cannot possibly shrink
from the test. The English have expressed themselves in sport. People
who are good sportsmen are, of course, honorable fighters. The Germans
have allowed their craving for adventure to seethe inside themselves,
and then have aimed it seriously at human life. But the English have
taken off their excess vitality by outdoor contests.
What Lady ---- is the rest of the women are. Miss Smith, an English girl
nurse, jumped down from the ambulance that was retreating before the
Germans, and walked back into Ghent, held by the Germans, to nurse an
English officer till he died. A few days later she escaped, by going in
a peasant's cart full of market vegetables, and rejoined us at Furnes.
Sally Macnaughtan is a gray-haired gentlewoman of independent means who
writes admirable fiction. She has laid aside her art and for months
conducted a soup kitchen in the railway station at Furnes. She has fed
thousands of weakened wounded men, working till midnight night after
night. She remained until the town was thoroughly shelled.
The order is strict that no officer's wife must be near the front. The
idea is that she will divert her husband's mind from the work in hand.
He will worry about her safety. But Mrs. B----, a Belgian, joined our
women in Pervyse, and did useful work, while her husband, a doctor with
the rank of officer, continued his work along the front. She is a girl
of twenty-one years.
Recently the Queen of the Belgians went into the trenches at a time when
there was danger of artillery and rifle fire breaking loose from the
enemy. She had to be besought to keep back where the air was quieter, as
her life was of more value to the Belgian troops and the nation than
even a gallant death.
One afternoon most of the corps were out on the road searching for
wounded. Mairi Chisholm, a Scotch girl eighteen years old, and a young
American woman had been left behind in the Furnes Hospital. With them
was a stretcher bearer, a man of twenty-eight. A few shells fell into
Furnes. The civilian population began running in dismay. The girls
climbed up into the tower of the convent to watch the work of the
shells. The man ordered the women to leave the town with him and go to
Poperinghe. The two girls refused to go.
For weeks Furnes was under artillery fire from beyond Nieuport. One of
our hospital nurses was killed as she was walking in the Grand Place.
I saw an American girl covered by the pistol of an Uhlan officer. She
did not change color, but regarded the incident as a lark. I happened to
be watching her when she was sitting on the front seat of an ambulance
at Oudecappelle, eating luncheon. A shell fell thirty yards from her in
the road. The roar was loud. The dirt flew high. The metal fragments
tinkled on the house walls. The hole it dug was three feet deep. She
laughed and continued with her luncheon.
I saw the same girl stand out in a field while this little drama took
place: The French artillery in the field were well covered by shrubbery.
They had been pounding away from their covert till the Germans grew
irritated. A German Taube flew into sight, hovered high overhead and
spied the hidden guns. It dropped three smoke bombs. These puffed out
their little clouds into the air, and gave the far-away marksmen the
location for firing. Their guns broke out and shrapnel shells came
overhead, burst into trailing smoke and scattered their hundreds of
bullets. The girl stood on the arena itself. Of concern for her personal
safety she had none. It was all like a play on the stage to her. You
watch the blow and flash but you are not a part of the action.