and scrubbed and pared potatoes, men from the lines played for us.
There were other things, necessities, that we lacked. Water, except for
the stagnant green liquid that lay in the ditches where dead men and
dead horses rotted, we went without--once for as long as three days.
During that time we boiled the ditch water and made tea of it. Even
then, it was a deep purplish black and tasted bitter.
All we could do to help the wounded was to wash off mud and apply the
simplest of first-aids, iodine and bandages. We burned bloody clothing
and scoured mackintoshes and scrubbed floors. The odors were bad, a
mixture of decaying matter and raw flesh and cooking food and
disinfectant.
Pervyse was one more dear little Flemish village, with yawning holes in
the houses, and through the holes you saw into the home, the precious
intimate things which revealed how the household lived--the pump,
muffled for winter, the furniture placed for occupancy, a home lately
inhabited. In the burgomaster's house, there were two old mahogany
frames with rare prints, his store of medicines, the excellent piano
which cheered us, in his attic a skeleton. So you saw him in his home
life as a quiet, scholarly man of taste and education. You entered
another gaping house, with two or three bits of inherited
mahogany--clearly, the heirlooms of an old family. Another house
revealed bran new commonplace trinkets. Always the status of the family
was plain to see--their mental life, their tastes, and ambitions. You
would peek in through a broken front and see a cupboard with crotched
mahogany trimmings, one door splintered, the other perfect. You would
catch a glimpse of a round center table with shapely legs, a sofa drawn
up in front of a fireplace. When we went, Pervyse was still partly
upstanding, but the steady shelling of the winter months slowly
flattened it into a wreck. It is the sense of sight through which war
makes its strongest impression on me.
The year falls into a series of pictures, evenings of song when a boy
soldier would improvise verses to our head nurse; a fight between a
Belgian corporal and an English nurse with seltzer bottles; the night
when our soldiers were short of ammunition and we sat up till dawn
awaiting the attack that might send us running for our lives; the black
nights when some spy back of our lines flashed electric messages to the
enemy and directed their fire on our ammunition wagons.
And deeper than those pictures is the consciousness of how adaptable is
the human spirit. Human nature insists on creating something. Under
hunger and danger, it develops a wealth of resource--in art and music,
and carving, making finger-rings of shrapnel, playing songs of the
Yser. Something artistic and playful comes to the rescue. Instead of war
getting us as Andreieff's "Red Laugh" says it does, making regiments of
men mad, we "got" war, and remained sane. If we hadn't conquered it by
spells of laughing relief, we shouldn't have had nerve when the time
came. Too much strain would break down the bravest Belgian and the
gayest Fusilier Marin.
I came to feel I would rather get "pinked" in Pervyse than retire to
Furnes, seven miles back of the trenches. Pervyse seemed home, because
we belonged there with necessary work to do. Then, too, there was a
certain regularity in the German gun-fire. If they started shelling from
the Château de Vicoigne, they were likely to continue shelling from that
point. So we lived that day in the front bedroom. If they shelled from
Ramscappelle, the back kitchen became the better room, for we had a
house in between. We were so near their guns, that we could plot the arc
of flight. Pervyse seemed to visitors full of death, simply because it
received a daily dose of shell-fire, like a little child sitting up and
gulping its medicine. With what unconcern in those days we went out by
ambulance to some tight angle, and waited for something to happen.
"We're right by a battery." But the battery was interesting.
"If this is danger, all right. It's great to be in danger." I have sat
all day writing letters by our artillery. Every time a gun went off my
pencil slid. The shock was so sudden, my nerves never took it on. Yet I
was able to sleep a few yards in front of a battery. It would pound
through the night, and I never heard it. The nervous equipment of an
American would ravel out, if it were not for sound sleep. If shells came
no nearer than four hundred yards, we considered it a quiet day.
One day I learned the full meaning of fear. We had had several quiet
safe hours. Night was coming on, and we were putting up the shutters,
when a shell fell close by in the trench. Next, our floor was covered
with dripping men, five of them unbandaged. Shells and wounds were
connected in my mind by that close succession.
No one was secure in that wrecked village of Pervyse. Along the streets,
homeless dogs prowled, pigeons circled, hungry cats howled. Behind the
trenches, the men had buried their dead and had left great mounds where
they had tried to bury the horses. Shells dropped every day, some days
all day. I have seen men running along the streets, flattening
themselves against a house whenever they heard the whirr of a shell.
It is not easy to eat, and sleep, and live together in close quarters,
sometimes with rush work, sometimes through severer hours of aimless
waiting. Again and again, we became weary of one another, impatient over
trifles.
[Illustration: BELGIAN SOLDIERS TELEPHONING TO AN ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUN THE
APPROACH OF A GERMAN TAUBE.
These lookout posts for observing and directing gun fire carry a
portable telephone, adapted to sudden changes of position.]
What war does is to reveal human nature. It does not alter it. It
heightens the brutality and the heroism. Selfishness shines out nakedly
and kindliness is seen clearer than in routine peace days. War brings
out what is inside the person. Sentimental pacifists sit around three
thousand miles away and say, "War brutalizes men," and when I hear them
I think of the English Tommies giving me their little stock of
cigarettes for the Belgian soldiers. Then I read the militarists and
they say, "Be hard. Live dangerously. War is beneficent," and I see the
wrecked villages of Belgium, with the homeless peasants and the orphaned
babies. War ennobles some men by sacrifice, by heroism. It debases other
men by handing over the weak to them for torture and murder. What is in
the man comes out under the supreme test, where there are no courts of
appeal, no public opinion, no social restraint; only the soldier alone
with helpless victims.
You can't share the chances of life and death with people, without
feeling a something in common with them, that you do not have even with
life-long friends. The high officer and the cockney Tommy have that
linking up. There was one person whom I couldn't grow to like. But with
him I have shared a ticklish time, and there is that cord of connection.
Then, too, one is glad of a record of oneself. There is some one to
verify what you say. You have passed through an unbelievable thing
together, and you have a witness.
Henri, our Belgian orderly, has that feeling for us, and we for him. It
isn't respect, nor fondness, alone. Companionship meant for him new
shirts, dry boots, more chocolate, a daily supply of cigarettes. It
meant our seeing the picture of wife and child in Liège, hearing about
his home. It was the sharing of danger, the facing together of the
horror that underlies life, and which we try to forget in soft peace
days. The friendships of war are based on a more fundamental thing than
the friendships of safe living. In the supreme experience of motherhood,
the woman goes down alone into the place of suffering, leaving the man,
however dear, far away. But in this supreme experience of facing death
to save life, you go together. The little Belgian soldier is at your
side. Together you sit tight under fire, put the bandages on the
wounded, and speed back to a safer place.
Once I went to the farthest outpost. A Belgian soldier stepped out of
the darkness.
"Come along, miss, I've a good gun. I'll take you."
Walking up the road, not in the middle where machine guns could rake us,
but huddled up by the trees at the siding, we went. It will be a
different thing to meet him one day in Antwerp, than it will be to greet
again the desk-clerk of the La Salle Hotel in Chicago. It lies deeper
than doing you favors, and assigning a sunny room.
The men are not impersonal units in an army machine. They become
individuals to us, with sharply marked traits. It is impossible to see
them as cases. Out of the individuals, we built our types--we
constructed our Belgian soldier, out of the hundreds who had told us of
their work and home.
"You must have met so many you never came to know their stories."
It was the opposite. Paul Collaer, who played beautifully; Gilson, the
mystic; Henri of Liège; the son of Ysaye, they were all clear to us.
There was a splendid fat doctor who felt physical fear, but never
shirked his job. He used to go and hide behind the barn, with his pipe,
till there was work for him. His wasn't the fear that spreads disaster
through a crowd. He was fat and funny. A fat man is comfortable to have
around, at any time, even when he is unhappy. No one lost respect for
this man. Every one enjoyed him thoroughly.
Commandant Gilson of the Belgian army was one of our firm friends. My
introduction to him was when I heard a bit of a Liszt rhapsody floating
into the kitchen from our piano, the fingers rapid and fluent, and long
nails audible on the keys. I remember the first meal with him, a
luncheon of fried sardines, fruit cake, bread and cheese. The doctor
across the way had sent a bottle of champagne. After luncheon he
received word of an attack. He kissed the hand of each of us, said
good-by, and went out to clean his gun. We did not think we should see
him again. He retook the outpost and had many more meals with us. He
would rise from broken English into swift French--stories of the Congo,
one night till 2 a.m. Always smoking a cigarette--his mustache sometimes
singed from the fire of the diminishing butt. For orderly, he had a
black fat Congo boy, in dark blue Belgian uniform, flat-nosed, with
wrinkles down the forehead. He was Gilson's man, never looking at him in
speaking, and using an open vowel dialect. Before one of the attacks, a
soldier came to Gilson with his wife's picture, watch, ring, and money,
and his home address.
"I'm not going to come out," said the soldier.
It happened so.
The Commandant's pockets were heavy with these mementoes of the
predestined--the letters of boys to their mothers. He had that
tenderness and agreeable sentiment which seem to go with bravery. He
filled his uniform with souvenirs of pleasant times, a china
slipper--our dinner favor to him--a roadside weed, a paper napkin from a
happy luncheon--a score or more little pieces of sentimental value. When
he went into dangerous action, he never ordered any one to follow him.
He called for volunteers, and was grieved that it was the lads of
sixteen and seventeen years that were always the first to offer.
We had grown to care for these men. From the first, soldiers of France
and Belgium had given us courtesy. In Paris, it was a soldier who stood
in line for me, and got the paper. It was a soldier who shared his food
and wine on the fourteen-hour trip from Paris to Dieppe--four hours in
peace days, fourteen hours in mobilization. It was a soldier who left
the car and found out the change of train and the hour--always a soldier
who did the helpful thing. It did not require war to create their
quality of friendliness and unselfish courtesy.
How could Red Cross work be impersonal? No one would go over to be shot
at on an impersonal errand of mercy. You risk yourself for individual
men, for men in whose cause you believe. Surely, the loyal brave German
women feel as we felt. Red Cross work is not only a service to suffering
flesh. It is work to remake a soldier, who will make right prevail. The
Red Cross worker is aiming her rifle at the enemy by every bandage she
ties on wounded Belgians. She is rebuilding the army. She is as
efficient and as deadly as the workman that makes the powder, the
chauffeur that drives it to the trench in transports, and the gunner
that shoots it into the hostile line. The mother does not extend her
motherliness to the destroyer of her family. There is no hater like the
mother when she faces that which violates her brood. The same mother
instinct makes you take care of your own, and fight for your own. We all
of us would go for a Belgian first, and tend to a Belgian first. We
would take one of our own by the roadside in preference, if there was
room only for one. But if you brought in a German, wounded, he became an
individual in need of help. There was a high pride in doing well by him.
We would show them of what stuff the Allies were made. Clear of hate and
bitterness, we had nothing but good will for the gallant little German
boys, who smiled at us from their cots in Furnes hospital. And who could
be anything but kindly for the patient German fathers of middle age, who
lay in pain and showed pictures of "Frau" and the home country, where
some of them would never return. Two or three times, the Queen of the
Belgians stopped at our base hospital. She talked with the wounded
Germans exactly as she talked to her own Belgians--the same modest
courtesy and gift of personal caring.
I think the key to our experience was the mother instinct in the three
women. What we tried to do was to make a home out of an emergency
station at the heart of war. We took hold of a room knee-high with
battered furniture and wet plaster, cleaned it, spread army blankets on
springs, found a bowl and jug, and made a den for the chauffeur. In our
own room, we arranged an old lamp, then a shade to soften the light. On
a mantel, were puttees, cold cream and a couple of books; in the wall,
nails for coats and scarfs. The soldiers, entering, said it was
homelike. It was a rest after the dreariness of the trench. We brought
glass from Furnes, and patched the windows. We dined, slept, lived, and
tended wounded men in the one room. In another room, a shell had sprayed
the ceiling, so we had to pull the plaster down to the bare lathing. We
commandeered a stove from a ruined house. Night after night, we carried
a sick man there and had a fire for him. We treated him for a bad
throat, and put him to bed. A man dripping from the inundations, we
dried out. For a soldier with bruised feet, we prepared a pail of hot
water, and gave a thorough soaking.
In the early morning we took down the shutters, carried our own coal,
built our own fires, brought water from a ditch, scrubbed table tops
and swept the floor, prepared tincture of iodine, the bandages, and
cotton wool. We went up the road around 8.30, for the Germans had a
habit of shelling at 9 o'clock. Sometimes they broke their rule, and
began lopping them in at half-past eight. Then we had to wait till ten.
We kept water hot for sterilizing instruments. We sat around, reading,
thinking, chatting, letter-writing, waiting for something to happen.
There would be long days of waiting. There were days when there was no
shelling. Besides the wounded, we had visits from important
personages--the Mayor of Paris, the Queen of the Belgians, officers from
headquarters, Maxine Elliott. For a very special supper, we would jug a
Belgian hare or cook curry and rice, and add beer, jam, and black army
bread. An officer gave us an order for one hundred kilos of meat, and we
could send daily for it. On Christmas Day, 1914, for eight of us, we had
plum puddings, a bottle of port, a bottle of champagne, a tiny pheasant
and a small chicken, and a box of candies. We had a steady stream of
shells, and a few wounded. It was a day of sunshine on a light fall of
snow.
I learned in the Pervyse work that an up-to-date skirt is no good for a
man's work. With rain five days out of seven, rubber boots, breeches,
raincoat, two pairs of stockings, and three jerseys are the correct
costume. We were criticized for going to Dunkirk in breeches. So I put
on a skirt one time when I went there for supplies. I fell in alighting
from the motor-car, collecting a bigger crowd by sprawling than any of
us had collected by our uniform. Later, again in a skirt, I jumped on a
military motor-car, and couldn't climb the side. I had to pull my skirt
up, and climb over as a man climbs. If women are doing the work of a
man, they must have the dress of a man.
That way of dressing and of living released me from the sense of
possession, once and for all. When I first went to Belgium with a pair
of fleece-lined gloves, I was sure, if I ever lost that pair, that they
were irreplaceable. I lost them. I lost article after article, and was
freed from the clinging. I lost a pin for the bodice. I left my laundry
with a washerwoman. Her village was bombarded, and we had to move on. I
lost my kit. A woman has a tie-in with those material things, and the
new life brought freedom from that.
I put on a skirt to return to London for a rest. I found there people
dressed modishly, and it looked uncomfortable. Styles had been changing:
women were in funny shoes and hats. I went wondering that they could
dress like that.
And then an overpowering desire for pretty things came on me--for a
piece of old lace, a pink ribbon. After sleeping by night in the clothes
worn through the day, wearing the same two shirts for four months, no
pajamas, no sheets, with spots of grease and blood on all the costume, I
had a longing for frivolous things, such as a pink tea gown. Old
slippers and a bath and shampoo seemed good. I had a wholesome delight
in a modest clean blouse and in buying a new frock.
I returned to Pervyse. The Germans changed their range: an evening, a
morning and an afternoon--three separate bombardments with heavy
shells. The wounded were brought in. Nearly every one died. We piled
them together, anywhere that they wouldn't be tripped over. To the back
kitchen we carried the bodies of two boys. One of the orderlies knew
them. He went in with us to remove the trinkets from their necks. Every
now and then, he went back again, to look at them. They were very
beautiful, young, healthy, lying there together in the back kitchen. It
was a quiet half hour for us, after luncheon. The doctors and nurses
were reading or smoking. I was writing a letter.
A shell drove itself through the back kitchen wall and exploded over the
dead boys, bringing rafters and splintered glass and bricks down on
them. My pencil slid diagonally across the sheet, and I got up. Our two
orderlies and three soldiers rushed in, holding their eyes from the blue
fumes of the explosion. When one shell comes, the chances are that it
will be followed by three more, aimed at the same place. It had always
been my philosophy that it is better to be "pinked" in the house than on
the road, but not on this particular day. An army ambulance was standing
opposite our door, with its nose turned toward the trenches. The
Belgian driver rushed for the door, slammed it shut because of the
shells, opened it again. He ran to the car, cranked it, turned it
around. We stood in the doorway and waited, watching the shells dropping
with a wail, tearing up the road here, then there. After that we moved
back to La Panne.
[Illustration: POSTCARDS SKETCHED AND BLOCKED BY A BELGIAN WORKMAN, A.
VAN DOORNE.
Belgium suffering, but united, is the idea he brings out in his work.]
There I stayed on with Miss Georgie Fyfe, who is doing such excellent
work among the Belgian refugees. She is chief of the evacuation of
civilians who still remain in the bombarded villages and farms. She
brings the old and the sick and the children out of shell fire and finds
them safe homes. To the Refugee House she takes the little ones to be
cared for till there are fifty. Then she sends them to Switzerland,
where brothers and sisters are kept unseparated in family groups until
the war is over. The Queen busies herself with these children. For the
newest generation of Belgians Miss Fyfe has established a Maternity
Hospital. Nearly one hundred babies have come to live there.
It was my work to keep track of clothes and supplies. On a flying trip
to Paris, I told the American Relief Committee the story of this work,
and Geoffrey Dodge sent thirty complete layettes, bran-new, four big
cases, four gunny-sack bags, full of clothing for men, women, and
children, special brands of milk for young mothers in our maternity
hospital. Later, he sent four more sacks and four great wooden cases.
We used to tramp through many fields, over a single plank bridging the
ditches, to reach the lonely shelled farm, and persuade the stubborn,
unimaginative Flemish parents to give up their children for a safe home.
One mother had a yoke around her neck, and two heavy pails.
"When can I send my child?" she asked.
She had already sent two and had received happy letters from them. Other
mothers are suspicious of us, and flatly refuse, keeping their children
in the danger zone till death comes. During a shelling, the curé would
telephone for our ambulance. He would collect the little ones and sick
old people. Miss Fyfe could persuade them to come more easily when the
shells were falling. At the moment of parting, everybody cries. The
children are dressed. The one best thing they own is put on--a pair of
shoes from the attic, stiff new shoes, worked on the little feet unused
to shoes. Out of a family of ten children we would win perhaps three.
Back across the fields they trooped to our car, clean faces, matted
dirty hair, their wee bundle tied up in a colored handkerchief, no hats,
under the loose dark shirt a tiny Catholic charm. We lifted the little
people into the big yellow ambulance--big brother and sister, sitting at
the end to pin them in. We carried crackers and chocolate. They are soon
happy with the sweets, chattering, enjoying their first motor-car ride,
and eager for the new life.
LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE
The boy soldier is willing to make any day his last if it is a good
day. It is not so with the middle-aged man. He is puzzled by the
war. What he has to struggle with more than bodily weakness is the
malady of thought. Is the bloody business worth while?
I SAW him first, my middle-aged man, one afternoon on the boards of an
improvised stage in the sand-dunes of Belgium. On that last thin strip
of the shattered kingdom English and French and Belgians were grimly
massed. He was a Frenchman, and he was cheering up his comrades. With
shining black hair and volatile face, he played many parts that day. He
recited sprightly verses of Parisian life. He carried on amazing
twenty-minute dialogues with himself, mimicking the voice of girl and
woman, bully and dandy. His audience had come in stale from the
everlasting spading and marching. They brightened visibly under his
gaiety. If he cared to make that effort in the saddened place, they
were ready to respond. When he dismissed them, the last flash of him was
of a smiling, rollicking improvisator, bowing himself over to the
applause till his black hair was level with our eyes.
And then next day as I sat in my ambulance, waiting orders, he trudged
by in his blue, "the color of heaven" once, but musty now from nights
under the rain. His head of hair, which the glossy black wig had
covered, was gray-white. The sparkling, pantomimic face had dropped into
wrinkles. He was patient and old and tired. Perhaps he, too, would have
been glad of some one to cheer him up. He was just one more
territorial--trench-digger and sentry and filler-in. He became for me
the type of all those faithful, plodding soldiers whose first strength
is spent. In him was gathered up all that fatigue and sadness of men for
whom no glamour remains.