morning we carried out one or two or one-half dozen dead. The wounds
were severe, the air of the whole countryside was septic from the sour
dead in the fields, who kept working to the surface from their shallow
burial. There was a morning when we had gone early to the front on a
hurry call. In our absence two girl nurses carried out ten dead from the
wards into the convent lot, to the edge of the hasty graves made ready
for their coming.
There is one woman whom we have watched at work for twelve months. She
is a trained nurse, a certified midwife, a licensed motor-car driver, a
veterinarian and a woman of property. Her name is Mrs. Elsie Knocker, a
widow with one son. She helped to organize our corps. I was with her one
evening when a corporal ordered her to go up a difficult road. He was
the driver of a high-power touring car which could rise on occasion to
seventy miles an hour. He carried a rifle in his car, and told us he had
killed over fifty Germans since Liège. He dressed in bottle green, the
uniform of a cyclist, and he looked like a rollicking woodlander of the
Robin Hood band. It was seven o'clock of the evening. The night was
dark. He pitched a bag of bandages into the motor ambulance.
"Take those to the dressing station that lies two miles to the west of
Caeskerke," he ordered Mrs. Knocker. I cranked up the machine; Mrs.
Knocker sat at the wheel. We were at Oudecappelle. The going was halfway
decent as far as the crossroads of Caeskerke. Here we turned west on a
road through the fields which had been intermittently shelled for
several days. The road had shell holes in it from one to three feet
deep. We could not see them because we carried no lights and the sky
overhead was black. A mile to our right a village was burning. There
were sheets of flame rising from the lowland, and the flame revealed the
smoke that was thick over the ruins. We bumped in and out of the holes.
All roads in Belgium were scummy with mud. It is like butter on bread.
The big brown-canopied ambulance skidded in this paste.
We reached the dressing station and delivered one bag of bandages. In
return we received three severely wounded men, who lay at length on the
stretched canvas and swung on straps. Then we started back over the same
mean road. This was the journey that tested Mrs. Knocker's driving,
because now she had helpless men who must not be jerked by the swaying
car. Motion tore at their wounds. Above all, they must not be
overturned. An overturn would kill a man who was seriously wounded.
Driving meant drawing all her nervous forces into her directing brain
and her two hands. A village on fire at night is an eerie sight. A dark
road, pitted with shell holes and slimy with mud, is chancy. The car
with its human freight, swaying, bumping, sliding, is heavy on the
wrist. The whole focused drive of it falls on the muscles of the
forearm. And when on the skill of that driver depends the lives of three
men the situation is one that calls for nerve. It was only luck that the
artillery from beyond the Yser did not begin tuning up. The Germans had
shelled that road diligently for many days and some evenings. Back to
the crossroads Mrs. Knocker brought her cargo, and on to Oudecappelle,
and so to the hospital at Furnes, a full ten miles. Safely home in the
convent yard, the journey done, the wounded men lifted into the ward,
she broke down. She had put over her job, and her nerves were tired.
Womanlike she refused to give in till the work was successfully
finished.
How would a man have handled such a strain? I will tell you how one man
acted. Our corporal drove his touring car toward Dixmude one morning. He
ordered Tom, the cockney driver, to follow with the motor ambulance. In
it were Mrs. Knocker and Miss Chisholm, sitting with Tom on the front of
the car. Things looked thick. The corporal slowed up, and so did Tom
just behind him. Now there is one sure rule for rescue work at the
front--when you hear the guns close, always turn your car toward home,
away from the direction of the enemy. Turn it before you get your
wounded, even though they are at the point of death, and leave your
power on, even when you are going to stay for a quarter of an hour.
Pointed toward safety, and under power, the car can carry you out of
range of a sudden shelling or a bayonet charge. The enemy's guns began
to place shrapnel over the road. The cloud puffs were hovering about a
hundred feet overhead a little farther down the way. The bullets
clicked on the roadbed. The corporal jumped out of his touring car.
[Illustration: BRETON SAILORS READY FOR THEIR NOON MEAL IN A VILLAGE
UNDER DAILY SHELL FIRE.
Throughout this Yser district British nurses drove their ambulances and
rescued the wounded.]
"Turn my car," he shouted to Tom. Tom climbed from the ambulance,
boarded the touring car and turned it. The corporal peered out from his
shelter, behind the ambulance, saw the going was good and ran to his own
motor. He jumped in and sped out of range at full tilt. The two women
sat quietly in the ambulance, watching the shrapnel. Tom came to them,
turned the car and brought them beyond the range of fire.
But the steadiest and most useful piece of work done by the women was
that at Pervyse. Mrs. Knocker and two women helpers, one Scotch and one
American, fitted up a miniature hospital in the cellar of a house in
ruined Pervyse. They were within three minutes of the trenches. Here, as
soon as the soldiers were wounded, they could be brought for immediate
treatment. A young private had received a severe lip wound. Unskilful
army medical handling had left it gangrened, and it had swollen. His
face was on the way to being marred for life. Mrs. Knocker treated him
every few hours for ten days--and brought him back to normal. A man
came in with his hand a pulp from splintered shell. The glove he had
been wearing was driven into the red flesh. Mrs. Knocker worked over his
hand for half an hour, picking out the shredded glove bit by bit.
Except for a short walk in the early morning and another after dark,
these women lived immured in their dressing station, which they moved
from the cellar to a half-wrecked house. They lived in the smell of
straw, blood and antiseptic. The Germans have thrown shells into the
wrecked village almost every day. Some days shelling has been vigorous.
The churchyard is choked with dead. The fields are dotted with hummocks
where men and horses lie buried. Just as I was sailing for America in
March, 1915, the house where the women live and work was shelled. They
came to La Panne, but later Mrs. Knocker and Miss Chisholm returned to
Pervyse to go on with their work, which is famous throughout the Belgian
army.
As regiment after regiment serves its turn in the trenches of Pervyse it
passes under the hands of these women. "The women of Pervyse" are known
alike to generals, colonels and privates who held steady at Liège and
who have struggled on ever since. For many months these nurses have
endured the noise of shell fire and the smells of the dead and the
stricken. The King of the Belgians has with his own hands pinned upon
them the Order of Leopold II. The King himself wears the Order of
Leopold I. They have eased and saved many hundreds of his men.
"No place for a woman," remarked a distinguished Englishman after a
flying visit to their home.
"By the law of probabilities, your corps will be wiped out sooner or
later," said a war correspondent.
Meantime the women will go on with their cool, expert work. The only way
to stop them is to stop the war.
HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN
(BY MRS. ARTHUR GLEASON)
Life at the front is not organized like a business office, with sharply
defined duties for each worker. War is raw and chaotic, and you take
hold wherever you can lock your grip. We women that joined the Belgian
army and spent a year at the front, did duty as ambulance riders, "dirty
nurses," in a Red Cross rescue station at the Yser trenches, in relief
work for refugees, and in the commissariat department. We tended wounded
soldiers, sick soldiers, sick peasants, wounded peasants, mothers,
babies, and colonies of refugees.
This war gave women one more chance to prove themselves. For the first
time in history, a few of us were allowed through the lines to the front
trenches. We needed a man's costume, steady masculine nerves, physical
strength. But the work itself became the ancient work of woman--nursing
suffering, making a home for lonely, hungry, dirty men. This new thrust
of womanhood carried her to the heart of war. But, once arriving there,
she resumed her old job, and became the nurse and cook and mother to
men. Woman has been rebelling against being put into her place by man.
But the minute she wins her freedom in the new dramatic setting, she
finds expression in the old ways as caretaker and home-maker. Her
rebellion ceases as soon as she is allowed to share the danger. She is
willing to make the fires, carry the water, and do the washing, because
she believes the men are in the right, and her labor frees them for
putting through their work.
It all began for me in Paris. I was studying music, and living in the
American Art Students' Club, in the summer of 1914. That war was
declared meant nothing to me. There was I in a comfortable room with a
delightful garden, the Luxembourg, just over the way. That was the first
flash of war. I went down to the Louvre to see the Venus, and found the
building "Fermé." I went over to the Luxembourg Galleries--"Fermé,"
again--and the Catacombs. Then it came into my consciousness that all
Paris was closed to me. The treasures had been taken away from me. The
things planned couldn't be done. War had snatched something from me
personally.
Next, I took solace in the streets. I had to walk. Paris went mad with
official speed--commandeered motors flashed officers down the boulevards
under martial law. They must get a nation ready, and Paris was the
capital. War made itself felt, still more, because we had to go through
endless lines,--_permis de sejours_ at little police stations--standing
on line all day, dismissed without your paper, returning next morning.
Friends began to leave Paris for New York. I was considered queer for
wishing to stay on. The chance to study in Paris was the dream of a
lifetime. But, now, the sound of the piano was forbidden in the city,
and that made the desolation complete. Work and recreation had been
taken away, and only war was left. And when Marie, our favorite maid in
the club, sent her husband, our doorkeeper, to the front, that brought
war inside our household.
As the Germans drew near Paris, many of the club girls thought that they
would be endangered. Every one was talking about the French Revolution.
People expected the horrors of the Revolution to be repeated. Jaures had
just been shot, the syndicalists were wrecking German milk shops, and at
night the streets had noisy mobs. People were fearing revolution inside
Paris, more than the enemy outside the city gates. War was going to let
loose that terrible thing which we believed to be subliminal in the
French nature.
Women had to be off the streets before nine o'clock. By day we went up
the block to the Boulevard, and there were the troops--a band, the
tricolor, the officers, the men in sky blue. Their sweethearts, their
wives and children went marching hand in hand with them, all singing the
"Marseillaise." In a time like that, where there is song, there is
weeping. The marching, singing women were sometimes sobbing without
knowing it, and we that were watching them in the street crowd were
moved like them.
When I crossed to England, I found that I wanted to go back and have
more of the wonder of war, which I had tasted in Paris. The wonder was
the sparkle of equipment. It was plain curiosity to see troops line up,
to watch the military pageant. There I had been seeing great handsome
horses, men in shining helmets with the horsehair tail of the casque
flowing from crest to shoulder, the scarlet breeches, the glistening
boots with spurs. It was pictures of childhood coming true. I had hardly
ever seen a man in military uniform, and nothing so startling as those
French cuirassiers. And I knew that gay vivid thing was not a passing
street parade, but an array that was going into action. What would the
action be? It is what makes me fond of moving pictures--variety, color,
motion, and mystery. The story was just beginning. How would the plot
come out?
Those pictures of troops and guns, grouping and dissolving, during all
the twelve months in Flanders, never failed to grip. But rarely again
did I see that display of fine feathers. For the fighting men with whom
I lived became mud-covered. Theirs was a dug-in and blown-out existence,
with the spatterings of storm and black nights on them. Their clothing
took on the soberer colors and weather-worn aspect of the life itself
which was no sunny boulevard affair, but an enduring of wet trenches and
slimy roads. Those people in Paris needed that high key to send them
out, and the early brilliance lifted them to a level which was able to
endure the monotony.
I went to the war because those whom I loved were in the war. I wished
to go where they were.
Finally, there was real appeal in that a little unprotected lot of
people were being trampled.
I crossed in late September to Ostend as a member of the Hector Munro
Ambulance Corps. With us were two women, Elsie Knocker, an English
trained nurse, and Mairi Chisholm Gooden-Chisholm, a Scotch girl. There
were a round dozen of us, doctors, chauffeurs, stretcher bearers. Our
idea of what was to be required of women at the front was vague. We
thought that we ought to know how to ride horseback, so that we could
catch the first loose horse that galloped by and climb on him. What we
were to do with the wounded wasn't clear, even in our own minds. We
bought funny little tents and had tent practice in a vacant yard. The
motor drive from Ostend to Ghent was through autumn sunshine and beauty
of field flowers. It was like a dream, and the dream continued in Ghent,
where we were tumbled into the Flandria Palace Hotel with a suite of
rooms and bath, and two convalescing soldiers to care for us. We looked
at ourselves and smiled and wondered if this was war. My first work was
the commissariat for our corps.
Then came the English Naval Reserves and Marines _en route_ to Antwerp.
They had been herded into the cars for twelve hours. They were happy to
have great hunks of hot meat, bread, and cigarettes. Just across the
platform, a Belgian Red Cross train pulled in--nine hundred wounded men,
bandaged heads with only the eyes showing, stumps of arms flapping a
welcome. The Belgians had been shot to pieces, holding the line. And,
now, here were the English come to save them.
This looked more like war to us. From the Palace windows we hung out
over the balcony to see the Taubes. I knew that at last we were on the
fringes of war. Later, we were to be at the heart of it. It was at Melle
that I learned I was on the front lines.
We went up the road from Ghent to Melle in blithe ignorance, we three
women. The day before, the enemy had held the corner with a machine gun.
"Let's go on foot, and see where the Germans were," suggested "Scotch."
We came to burned peasants' houses. Inside the wreckage, soldiers
crouched with rifles ready at the peek-holes. A Reckitt's bluing factory
was burning, and across the field were the Germans. The cottages without
doors and windows were like toothless old women. Piles of used
cartridges were strewed around. There stood a gray motor-car, a wounded
German in the back seat, his hands riddled, the car shot through, with
blood in the bottom from two dead Germans. I realized the power of the
bullet, which had penetrated the driver, the padded seat, the sheet
metal and splintered the wood of the tonneau. We saw a puff of white
smoke over the field from a shrapnel. That was the first shell I had
seen close. It meant nothing to me. In those early days, the hum of a
shell seemed no more than the chattering of sparrows. That was the way
with all my impressions of war--first a flash, a spectacle; later a
realization, and experience.
I went into Alost during a mild bombardment. The crashing of timbers was
fascinating. It is in human nature to enjoy destruction. I used to love
to jump on strawberry boxes in the woodshed and hear them crackle. And
with the plunge of the shells, something echoed back to the delight of
my childhood. I enjoyed the crash, for something barbaric stirred. There
was no connection in my mind between the rumble and wounded men. The
curiosity of ignorance wanted to see a large crash. Shell-fire to me was
a noise.
I still had no idea of war. Of course I knew that there would be hideous
things which I didn't have in home life. I knew I could stand up to
dirty monotonous work, but I was afraid I should faint if I saw blood.
When very young, I had seen a dog run over, and I had seen a boy
playmate mutilate a turtle. I was sickened. Years later, I came on a
little child crying, holding up its hand. The wrist was bent back
double, and the blood spurting till the little one was drenched. Those
shocks had left a horror in me of seeing blood. But this thing that I
feared most turned out not to have much importance. I found that the man
who bled most heavily lay quiet. It was not the bloodshed that unnerved
me. It was the writhing and moaning of men that communicated their pain
to me. I seemed to see those whom I loved lying there. I transferred the
wound to the ones I love. Sometimes soldiers gave me the address of wife
and mother, to have me write that they were well. Then when the wounded
came in, I thought of these wives and mothers. I knew how they felt,
because I felt so. I knew, as the Belgian and French women know, that
the war must be waged without wavering, and yet I always see war as
hideous. There was no glory in those stricken men. I had no fear of
dying, but I had a fear of being mangled.
One evening I walked into the Convent Hospital where the wounded lay so
thickly that I had to step over the stretcher loads. The beds were full,
the floor blocked, only one door open. There was a smell of foul blood,
medicines, the stench of trench clothes. It came on an empty stomach, at
the end of a tired day.
"Sister, will you hold this lamp?" a nurse said to me.
I held it over a man with a yawning hole in his abdomen. He lay
unmurmuring. When the doctor pressed, the muscles twitched. I asked some
one to hold the lamp. I went into the courtyard, and fainted. Hard work
would have saved me.
One other time, there had been a persistent fire all day. A boy of
nineteen was brought in screaming. He wanted water and he wanted his
mother. In our dressing station room were crowded two doctors, three
women, two stretcher bearers, a chauffeur, and ten soldiers. They cut
away his uniform and boots. His legs were jelly, with red mouths of
wounds. His leg gave at the knee, like a piece of limp twine. I went
into the next room, and recovered myself. Then I returned, and stayed
with the wounded. The greatest comfort was a doctor, who said it was a
matter of stomach, not of nerve. A sound woman doesn't faint at the
sight of blood any quicker than a man does. Those two experiences were
the only times when the horror was too much for me. I saw terrible
things and was able to see them. With the dead it seems different. They
are at peace. It is motion in the wounded that transfers suffering to
oneself. A red quiver is worse than a red calm.
Antwerp fell. The retreating Belgian army swarmed around us, passed us.
In the excitement every one lost her kit and before two days of actual
warfare were over we had completely forgotten those little tents that we
had practised pitching so carefully, and that we had meant to sleep in
at night. Little, dirty, unkempt, broken-hearted men came shuffling in
the dust of the road by day, shambling along the road at night.
Thousands of them passed. No sound, save the fall of footsteps. No
contrast, save where a huddle of refugees passed, their children beside
them, their household goods, or their old people, on their backs. We
picked up the wounded. There was no time for the dead. In and out and
among that army of ants, retreating to the edge of Belgium and the sea,
we went. There seemed nothing but to return to England.
The war minister of Belgium saw us. He placed his son, Lieutenant Robert
de Broqueville, in military command of us. We had access to every line,
all the way to the trench and battlefield. We became a part of the
Belgian army. We made our headquarters at Furnes. Luckily, a physician's
house had been deserted, with china and silver on the table, apples,
jellies and wines in the cellar. We commandeered it.
Winter came. The soldiers needed a dressing station somewhere along the
front from Nieuport to Dixmude. Mrs. Knocker established one thirty
yards behind the front line of trenches at Pervyse. Miss Chisholm and I
joined her. In its cellar we found a rough bedstead of two pieces of
unplaned lumber, with clean straw for a mattress, awaiting us. Any
Englishwoman is respected in the Belgian lines. The two soldiers who had
been living in our room had given it up cheerily. They had searched the
village for a clean sheet, and showed it to us with pride. They lumped
the straw for our pillows, and stood outside through the night,
guarding our home with fixed bayonets. It was the most moving courtesy
we had in the twelve months of war. The air in the little room was both
foul and chilly. We took off our boots, and that was the extent of our
undressing.
[Illustration: SLEEPING QUARTERS FOR BELGIAN SOLDIERS.
Disguised as a haystack, this shelter stands out in a field within easy
shell fire of the enemy. A concealed battery, in which these boys are
gunners, is near by. In their spare time they smoke, read, swim, carve
rings out of shrapnel, play cards and forget the strain of war.]
The dreariness of war never came on us till we went out there to live
behind the trenches. To me it was getting up before dawn, and washing in
ice-cold water, no time to comb the hair, always carrying a feeling of
personal mussiness, with an adjustment to dirt. It is hard to sleep in
one's clothes, week after week, to look at hands that have become
permanently filthy. One morning our chauffeur woke up, feeling grumpy.
He had slept with a visiting doctor. He said the doctor's revolver had
poked him all night long in the back. The doctor had worn his entire
equipment for warmth, like the rest of us. I suffered from cold wet
feet. I hated it that there was never a moment I could be alone. The
toothbrush was the one article of decency clung to. I seemed never to go
into the back garden to clean my teeth without bringing on shell-fire. I
got a sense of there being a connection between brushing the teeth and
the enemy's guns. You find in roughing it that a coating of dirt seems
to keep out chill. We women suffered, but we knew that the boys in
tennis shoes suffered more in that wet season, and the soldiers without
socks, just the bare feet in boots.
In the late fall, we rooted around in the deserted barns for potatoes.
Once, creeping into a farm, which was islanded by water, "Jane Pervyse,"
our homeless dog, led us up to the wrecked bedroom. A bonnet and best
dress were in the cupboard. A soldier put on the bonnet and grimaced.
Always after that, in passing the house, "Jane Pervyse" trembled and
whined as if it had been her home till the destruction came.
In our house, we cleaned vegetables. There was nothing romantic about
our work in these first days. It was mostly cooking, peeling hundreds of
potatoes, slicing bushels of onions, cutting up chunks of meat, until
our arms were aching. These bits were boiled together in great black
pots. Our job, when it wasn't to cook the stew, was to take buckets of
it to the trenches. Here we ladled it out to each soldier. Always we
went early, while mist still hung over the ground, for we could see the
Germans on clear days. It was an adventure, tramping in the freezing
cold of night to the outposts and in early morning to the trenches, back
to the house to refill the buckets, back to the trenches. The mornings
were bitterly cold. Very early in my career as a nurse, I rid myself of
skirts. Boots, covered with rubber boots to the knees in wet weather, or
bound with puttees in warm; breeches; a leather coat and as many jerseys
as I could walk in--these were my clothes. But, as I slept in them, they
didn't keep me very warm in the early morning.