MONDAY
A golden, laughing day is this 5th of October.
As I fly along in my car I soon sense a new current, vivid and electric,
flowing along with the stream of Belgian life.
Oh, the change in the sad, hollow-eyed Belgian officers and men! They
felt that help was coming at last. All this time they had fought alone,
unaided. There was no one who could come to them, no one free to help
them. And the weeks passed into months, and Liège, and Louvain, and
Brussels, and Aerschot, and Namur, and Malines, and Termonde have all
fallen, one by one. And high hopes have been blighted, and the enemy in
its terrific strength has swept on and on, held back continually by the
ardour and valour of the little Belgian Army which is still indomitable
at heart, but tired, very tired. Haggard, hollow-eyed, exhausted,
craving the rest they may not have, these glorious heroes revive as if
by magic under the knowledge that other troops are coming to help theirs
in this gargantuan struggle for Antwerp. The yellow khaki seems to sweep
along with the blue uniforms like sunlight. But the gentle-faced,
slow-speaking English are humble and modest enough, God knows!
"It's the high-explosive shells that we mind most," says a Belgian
Lieutenant to an English Tommy.
"P'raps we'll mind them too," says Tommy humbly. "We ain't seen them
yet!"
At the War Office, Count Chabeau has given me a special permit to go to
Lierre.
Out past Mortsell, I notice a Belgian lady standing among a crowd of
soldiers. She wears black. Her dress is elegant, yet simple. I admire
her furs, and I wonder what on earth she is doing here, right out in the
middle of the fortifications, far from the city. Belgian ladies are
seldom seen in these specified zones.
Suddenly her eyes meet mine, and she comes towards me, drawn by the
knowledge that we are both women.
She leans in at my car window. And then she tells me her story, and I
learn why she looks so pale and worried.
Just down the road, a little further on, in the region in which we may
not pass, is her villa, which has been suddenly requisitioned by the
English. All in a hurry yesterday, Madame packed up, and hurried away to
Antwerp, to arrange for her stay there. This morning she has returned to
fetch her dogs.
But voilà! She reaches this point and is stopped. The way is blocked.
She must not go on. No one can pass without a special laisser-passer;
which she hasn't got.
[Illustration: A SPECIAL PERMIT.]
So here, hour after hour, since six o'clock in the morning, she stands,
waiting pitifully for a chance to get back to her villa and take away
her dogs, that she fears may be starving.
"Mes pauvre chiens!" she keeps exclaiming.
And now a motor car approaches from the direction of Lierre, with an
English officer sitting beside the chauffeur.
I tell him the story of the dogs and ask what can be done.
The officer does not reply.
He almost looks as if he has not heard.
His calm, cool face shows little sign of anything at all.
He merely turns his car round and flashes away along the white
tree-shadowed and cannon-lined road that he has just traversed.
Ten minutes go by, then another ten.
Then back along the road flashes the grey car.
And there again is Colonel Farquharson, cool, calm, and unperturbed.
And behind him, in the car, barking joyfully at the sight of their
mistress, are three big dogs.
"Mais comme les Anglais sont gentils!" say the Belgian soldiers along
the road.
* * * * *
Out of the burning town of Lierre that same day a canary and a grey
Congo parrot are tenderly handed over to my care by a couple of English
Tommies who have found them in a burning house.
The canary is in a little red cage, and the Tommies have managed to put
in some lumps of sugar.
"The poor little thing is starving!" says a Tommy compassionately.
"It'll be better with you, ma'am."
I bring the birds back in my car to Antwerp.
But the parrot is very frightened.
He will not eat. He will not drink. He looks as if he is going to die,
until I ask Mr. Cherry Kearton to come and see him. And then, voilà! The
famous English naturalist bends over him, talks, pets him, and in a few
minutes "Coco" is busy trimming Cherry Kearton's moustache with his
little black beak, and from that very moment the bird begins to recover.
As I write the parrot and canary sit here on my table, the parrot
perching on the canary's cage.
The boom of cannon is growing fainter and fainter as the Germans appear
to be pushed further and further back; the canary is singing, and the
grey parrot is cracking nuts; and I think of the man who rescued them,
and hope that all goes well with him, who, with death staring him in the
face, had time and thought to save the lives of a couple of birds. His
name he told me was Sergeant Thomas Marshall of Winston Churchill's
Marines.
He said: "If you see my wife ever, you can tell her you've met me,
ma'am."