THURSDAY
Thursday is a queer day, a day of no beginning and no ending.
It is haunted by such immense noise that it loses all likeness to what
we know in ordinary life as "a day"--the thing that comes in between two
nights.
It is, in fact, nothing but one cataclysmal bang and shriek of shells
and shrapnel. The earth seems to break open from its centre every five
minutes or so, and my brain begins to formulate to itself a tremendous
sense of height and space, as well as of noise, until I feel as though I
am in touch with the highest skies as well as with the lowest earth,
because things that seem to belong essentially to earth are now
happening in the skies.
The roof of the world is now enacting a rôle that is just as strange and
just as surprising as if the roof of a theatre had suddenly begun to
take part in a drama.
One looks above as often as one looks below or around one.
Flinging themselves forward with thin whinging cries like millions of
mosquitoes on the attack, the shrapnel rushes perpetually overhead, and
the high-explosive shells pour down upon the city, deafening,
stupefying, until at last, by the very immensity of their noise, they
gradually lose their power to affect one, even though they break all
round.
Instead of listening to the bombardment I find myself listening crossly
to the creaking of our lift, which makes noises exactly like those of
the shrapnel outside.
In fact, when I am in my bedroom, and the lift is going up and down, I
really don't know which is lift and which is shrapnel.
* * * * *
Seven o'clock on Thursday morning.
The bombardment goes on fiercely, but I forget about it here in the big,
bare, smoky café, because I cannot hear the lift.
A waiter brings me some coffee and I stand and drink it and look about
me.
The café is surrounded with glass doors, and through these doors I see
thousands and thousands of people hurrying for dear life along the
roads.
As time goes on their numbers increase, until they are flowing by as
steadily as some ceaseless black stream moving Holland-wards.
Men, women, children, nuns, priests, motor cars, carriages, cabs, carts,
drays, trolleys, perambulators, every species of human being and of
vehicle goes hurrying past the windows, and always the vehicles are
laden to the very utmost with their freight of human life.
One's brain reels before the immensity of this thing that is happening
here; a city is being evacuated by a million inhabitants; the city is in
flames and shells are raining down on it; yet the cook is making soup in
the kitchen....
Among the human beings struggling onwards towards the Breda Gate which
will lead them to Holland, making strange little notes in the middle of
the human beings, I see every now and then some poor pathetic animal,
moving along in timid bewilderment--a sheep--a dog--a donkey--a cow--a
horse--more cows perhaps than anything, big, simple, wondering cows,
trudging along behind desolate little groups of peasants with all their
little worldly belongings tied up in a big blue-and-white check
handkerchief, while crash over their heads goes on the cannonading from
the forts, and with each fresh shock the vast concourse of fleeing
people starts and hurries forward.
It seems to me as though the End of the World will be very like to-day.
A huge gun-carriage, crowded with people, is passing. It is twenty feet
long, and drawn by two great, bulky Flemish horses. Sitting all along
the middle, with great wood stakes fixed along the edges to keep them
from falling out, are different families getting away into Holland.
Fathers, mothers, children. Two men go by with a clothes-basket covered
with a blanket. Dozens of beautiful dogs, bereft of their collars in
this final parting with their masters, run wildly back and forth along
the roads. A boy with a bicycle is wheeling an old man on it. Three
wounded blue and scarlet soldiers march along desolately, carrying brown
paper parcels. Belgian Boy Scouts in khaki, with yellow handkerchiefs
round their necks, flash past on bicycles. A man pushes a dog-cart with
his three children and his wife in it, while the yellow dog trots along
underneath, his tongue out. A black-robed priest rides by, mounted on a
great chestnut mare, with a scarlet saddle cloth.
All the dramas of Æschylus pale into insignificance before this
scene....
It is more than a procession of human beings. It is a procession of
broken hearts, of torn, bleeding souls, and ruined homes, of desolate
lives, of blighted hopes, and grim, grey despair--grim, grey despair in
a thousand shapes and forms; and ever It hurries along the roads, ever
It blocks the hotel windows, casting its thick shadows as the sun rises
in the heavens, defying the black smoke palls that hang athwart the
skies.
Sometimes I find tears streaming down my cheeks, and as they splash on
my hands I look at them stupidly, and wonder what they are, and why they
come, for no one can think clearly now.
Once it is the sight of a little, young, childlike nun, guarding an old,
tottering, white-bearded man who is dumb as well as deaf, and who can
only walk with short, little, halting steps. Is she really going to try
and get him to Holland, I wonder?