A LUCKY MEETING
To meet some one you know at the Front is an experiment in psychology,
deeply interesting, amusing sometimes, and often strangely illuminative.
Indeed you never really know people till you meet them under the sound
of guns.
It is at Furnes that I meet accidentally a very eminent journalist and a
very well-known author.
Suddenly, up drives a funny old car with all its windows broken.
Clatter, clatter, over the age-old cobbled streets of Furnes, and the
car comes to a stop before the ancient little Flemish Inn. Out jump four
men. Hastening, like school-boys, up the steps, they come bursting
breezily into the room where I have just finished luncheon.
I look! They look!! We all look!!!
One of them with a bright smile comes forward.
"How do you do?" says he.
He is the chauffeur, if you please, the chauffeur in the big
golden-brown overcoat, with a golden-brown hood over his head. He looks
like a monk till you see his face. Then he is all brightness, and
sharpness, and alertness. For in truth he is England's most famous
War-Photographer, this young man in the cowl, with the hatchet profile
and dancing green eyes, and we last saw each other in the agony of the
Bombardment of Antwerp.
And then I look over his shoulder and see another face.
I can scarcely believe my eyes.
Here, at the world's end, as near the Front as anyone can get, driving
about in that old car with the broken windows, is our eminent
journalist, in baggy grey knee breeches and laced-up boots.
"Having a look round," says the journalist simply. "Seeing things for
myself a bit!"
"How splendid!"
"Well, to tell you the truth, I can't keep away. I've been out before,
but never so near as this. The sordidness and suffering of it all makes
me feel I simply can't stay quietly over there in London. I want to see
for myself how things are going."
Then, dropping the subject of himself swiftly, but easily, the
journalist begins courteously to ask questions; what am I doing here?
where have I come from? where am I going?
"Well, at the present moment," I answer, "I'm trying to get to La Panne.
I want to see the Queen of the Belgians waiting for the King, and
walking there on the yellow, dreamy sands by the North Sea. But the tram
isn't running any longer, and the roads are bad to-day, very bad
indeed!"
All in an instant, the journalistic instinct is alive in him, and
crying.
I watch, fascinated.
I can see him seeing that picture of pictures, the sweet Queen walking
on the lonely winter sands, waiting for her hero to come back from the
battlefields, just over there.
"Let us take you in our car! What are we doing? Where were we going?
Anyway, it doesn't matter. We'll take the car to La Panne!"
And after luncheon off we go.
Every now and then I turn the corner of my eye on the man beside me as
he sits there, hunched up in a heavy coat with a big cigar between his
babyish lips, talking, talking; and what is so glorious about it all is
that this isn't the journalist talking, it is the idealist, the
practical dreamer, who, by sheer belief in his ideals has won his way to
the top of his profession.
I see a face that is one of the most curiously fascinating in Europe. A
veiled face, but with its veil for ever shifting, for ever lifting, for
ever letting you get a glimpse of the man behind. Power and will are
sunk deep within the outer veil, and when you look at him at first you
say to yourself, "What a nice big boy of a man!" For those lips are
almost babyish in their curves, the lips of a man who would drink the
cold pure water of life in preference to its coloured vintages, the lips
of an idealist. Who but an idealist could keep a childish mouth through
the intense worldliness of the battle for life as this man has fought
it, right from the very beginning?
Over the broad, thoughtful brow flops a lock of brown hair every now and
then. His eyes are grey with blue in them. When you look at them they
look straight at you, but it is not a piercing glance. It seems like a
glance from far away. All kinds of swift flashing thoughts and impulses
go sweeping over those eyes, and what they don't see is really not worth
seeing, though, when I come to think of it, I cannot recall catching
them looking at anything. As far as faces go this is a fine face.
Decidedly, a fine arresting face. Sympathetic, likeable. And the strong,
well-made physique of a frame looks as if it could carry great physical
burdens, though more exercise would probably do it good.
Above and beyond everything he looks young, this man; young with a youth
that will never desert him, as though he holds within himself "the
secrets of ever-recurring spring."
On we fly.
We are right inside the Belgian lines now; the Belgian soldiers are all
around us, brave, wonderful "_Petits Belges!_"
They always speak of themselves like that, the Belgian Army: "Les Petits
Belges!"
Perhaps the fact that they have proved themselves heroes of an
immortality that every race will love and bow down to in ages to come,
makes these blue-coated men thus lightly refer to themselves, with that
inimitable flash of the Belgian smile, as "little Belgians."
For never before was the Belgian Army greater than it is to-day, with
its numbers depleted, its territory wrested from it, its homes ruined,
its loved ones scattered far and wide in strange lands.
Like John Brown's Army it "still goes fighting on," though many of its
uniforms, battered and stained with the blood and mud and powder of one
campaign after another, are so ragged as to be almost in pieces.
"We are no longer chic!"
A Belgian Captain says it with a grin, as he chats to us at a halt where
we shew our passes.
He flaps his hands in his pockets of his ragged overcoat and smiles.
In a way, it is true! Their uniforms are ragged, stained, burnt, torn,
too big, too little, full of a hundred pitiful little discrepancies that
peep out under those brand new overcoats that some of them are lucky
enough to have obtained. They have been fighting since the beginning of
the War. They have left bits of their purple-blue tunics at Liège,
Namur, Charleroi, Aerschot, Termonde, Antwerp. They have lost home,
territory, family, friends. But they are fighting harder than ever. And
so gloriously uplifted are they by the immortal honour they have wrested
from destiny, that they can look at their ragged trousers with a grin,
and love them, and their torn, burnt, blackened tunics, even as a
conqueror loves the emblems of his glory that will never pale upon the
pages of history.
A soldier loosens a bandage with his teeth, and breaks into a song.
It is so gay, so naive, so insouciant, so truly and deliciously Belge,
that I catch it ere it fades,--that mocking song addressed to the
Kaiser, asking, in horror, who are these ragged beings:
THE BELGIAN TO THE GERMAN.
Ils n'ont pas votre bel tunique,
Et ils n'ont pas votre bel air
Mais leur courage est magnifique.
Si ils n'ont pas votre bel tunique!
A votre morgue ils donnent la nicque.
Au milieu de leur plus gros revers,
Si ils n'ont pas votre bel tunique,
Et ils n'ont pas votre bel air!
"What those poor fellows want most," says the journalist as we flash
onwards, "is boots! They want one hundred thousand boots, the Belgian
Army. You can give a friend all sorts of things. But he hardly likes it
if you venture to give him boots. And yet they want them, these poor,
splendid Belgians. They want them, and they must have them. We must give
them to them somehow. Lots of them have no boots at all!"
"I heard that the Belgians were getting boots from America," the author
puts in suddenly.
The journalist turns his head with a jerk.
"What do you mean," he asks sharply. "Do you mean that they have
_ordered_ them from America, or that America's _giving_ them."
"I believe what my informant, a sick officer in the Belgian Army, whom
I visited this morning, told me was that the Americans were _giving_ the
boots."
"Are you sure it's _giving_?" the journalist persists. "We English ought
to see to that. Last night I had an interview with the Belgian Minister
of War and I tried to get on this subject of boots. But somehow I felt
it was intrusive of me. I don't know. It's a delicate thing. It wants
handling. Yet _they must have the boots._"
And I fancy they will get them, the heroes of Belgium. I think they will
get their hundred thousand boots.
Then a whiff of the sea reaches us and the grey waves of the North Sea
stretch out before us over the edge of the endless yellow sands, where
bronze-faced Turcos are galloping their beautiful horses up and down.
We are in La Panne.
The journalist sits still in his corner of the car, not fussing, not
questioning, leaving it all to me. This is my show. It is I who have
come here to see the gracious Queen on the sands. All the part he plays
in it is to bring me.
So the journalist, and the author and the others remain in the car. That
is infinitely considerate, exquisitely so, indeed.
For no writer on earth would care to go looking around with the Jupiter
of Journalists at her elbow!
* * * * *
Rush, rush, we are on our way back now. The cold wind of wet, flat
Flanders strikes at us as we fly along. It hits us in the face and on
the back. It flicks us by the ear and by the throat. The window behind
us is open. The window to right and the window to left are open too. All
the windows are open because, as I said before, they are all broken!
In fact, there are no windows! They've all been smashed out of
existence. There are only holes.
"We were under shell-fire this morning," observes the journalist
contentedly. Then truthfully he adds, "I don't like shrapnel!"
Any woman who reads this will know how I felt in my pride when a
malicious wind whisked my fur right off my shoulders, and flung it
through the back window, far on the road behind.
If it hadn't been sable I would have let it go out of sheer humiliation.
But instead, after a moment's fierce struggle, remembering all the
wardrobe I had already lost in Antwerp, I whispered gustily, "My stole!
It's blown right out of the window."
How did I hope the journalist would not be cross, for we were racing
back then against time, _without lights_, and it was highly important to
get off these crowded roads with the soldiers coming and going, coming
and going, before night fell.
Cross indeed!
I needn't have worried.
Absence of fuss, was, as I decided later, the most salient point about
this man. In fact, his whole desire seemed to make himself into an
entire nonentity. He never asserted himself. He never interfered. He
never made any suggestions. He just sat quiet and calm in his corner of
the car, puffing away at his big cigar.
Another curious thing about him was the way in which this man, used to
bossing, organizing, suggesting, commanding, fell into his part, which
was by force of circumstances a very minor one.
He was incognito. He was not the eminent journalist at all. He was just
an eager man, out looking at a War. He was there,--in a manner of
speaking, on suffrance. For in War time, civilians are _not_ wanted at
the Front! And nobody recognized this more acutely than the man with the
cigar between his lips, and the short grey knee breeches showing sturdy
legs in their dark grey stockings and thick laced-up boots.
The impression he gave me was of understanding absolutely the whole
situation, and of a curiously technical comprehension of the wee little
tiny part that he could be allowed to play.
"Where are you staying in Dunkirk?" he asked.
"In a room over a milliner's shop. The town's full. I couldn't get in
anywhere else."
"Then will you dine with us to-night at half-past seven, at the Hotel
des Arcades?"
"I should love to."
And we ran into Dunkirk.
And the lights flashed around me, and that extraordinary whirl of
officers and men, moving up and down the cobbled streets, struck at us
afresh, and we saw the sombre khaki of Englishmen, and the blue and red
of the Belgian, and the varied uniforms and scarlet trousers of the
Piou-Piou, and the absolutely indescribable life and thrill and crowding
of Dunkirk in these days, when the armies of three nations moved surging
up and down the narrow streets.
At seven-thirty I went up the wide staircase of the Hotel des Arcades in
the Grand Place of Dunkirk. Quite a beautiful and splendid hotel though
innumerable Taubes had sailed over it threatening to deface it with
their ugly little bombs, but luckily without success so far,--very
luckily indeed considering that every day at lunch or dinner some poor
worn-out Belgian Officer came in there to get a meal.
Precisely half-past seven, and there hastening towards me was our host.
He had not "dressed," as we say in England. He had merely exchanged the
short grey Norfolk knickerbockers for long trousers, and the morning
coat for a short dark blue serge.
His eyes were sparkling.
"There's a Belgian here whom I want you to meet," he said in his boyish
manner, that admirably concealed the power of this man that one was for
ever forgetting in his presence, only to remember it all the more
acutely when one thought of him afterwards. "It's the chief of the
Belgian Medical Department. He's quite a wonderful man."
And we went in to dinner.
The journalist arranged the table.
It was rather an awkward one, numerically, and I was interested to see
how he would come out of the problematic affair of four men and one
woman.
But with one swift wave of his hand he assigned us to our places.
He sat on one side of the table with the Head of the Belgian Medical
Corps at his right.
I sat opposite to him, and the author sat on my left, and the other man
who had something to do with Boy Scouts on his left, and there we all
were, and a more delightful dinner could not be imagined, for in a way
it was exciting through the very fact of being eaten in a city that the
Germans only the day before had pelted with twenty bombs.
Personalities come more clearly into evidence at dinner than at any
other time, and so I was interested to see how the journalist played his
part of host.
What would he be like?
There are so many different kinds of hosts. Would he be the all-seeing,
all-reaching, all-divining kind, the kind that knows all you want, and
ought to want, and sees that you get it, the kind that says always the
right thing at the right moment, and keeps his party alive with his
sally of wit and gaiety, and bonhomie, and makes everyone feel that they
are having the time of their lives?
No!
One quickly discovered that the journalist was not at all that kind of
host.
At dinner, where some men become bright and gay and inconsequential,
this man became serious.
The food part of the affair bored him.
Watching him and studying him with that inner eye that makes the bliss
of solitude, one saw he didn't care a bit about food, and still less
about wine. It wouldn't have mattered to him how bad the dinner was. He
wouldn't know. He couldn't think about it. For he was something more
than your bon viveur and your social animal, this man with his wide grey
eyes and the flopping lock on his broad forehead. He was the dreamer of
dreams as well as the journalist. And at dinner he dreamed--Oh, yes,
indeed, he dreamed tremendously. It was all the same to him whether or
not he ate pâté de fois gras, or fowl bouillé, or sausage. He was rapt
in his discussion with the Belgian Doctor on his right.
Anæsthetics and antiseptics,--that's what they are talking about so
hard.
And suddenly out comes a piece of paper.
The journalist wants to send a telegram to England.
"I'm going to try and get Doctor X. to come out here. He's a very clever
chap. He can go into the thing thoroughly. It's important. It must be
gone into."
And there, on the white cloth, scribbled on the back of a menu, he
writes out his telegram.
"But then," says the journalist, reflectively, "if I sign that the
censor will hold it up for three days!"
The Head of the Belgian Medical Department smiles.
He knows what that telegram would mean to the Belgian Army.
"Let _me_ sign it," he says in a gentle voice, "let me sign it and send
it. My telegrams are not censored, and your English Doctor will meet us
at Calais to-morrow, and all will be well with your magnificent idea!"
Just then the author on the left appears a trifle uneasy.
He holds up an empty Burgundy bottle towards the light.
"A dead 'un!" he announces, distinctly.
But our host, in his abstraction, does not hear.
The author picks up the other bottle, holds it to the light, screws up
one eye at it, and places it lengthwise on the table.
"That's a dead 'un too," he says.
Just then, with great good luck, he manages to catch the journalist's
grey eye.
"That's a dead 'un too," he repeats loudly.
How exciting to see whether the author, in his quite natural desire to
have a little more wine, will succeed in penetrating his host's
dreaminess and absorption in the anæsthetics of the Belgian Army.
And then all of a sudden the journalist wakes up.
"Would you like some more wine?" he inquires.
"These are both dead 'uns," asserts the author courageously.
"We'll have some more!" says the journalist.
And more Burgundy comes! But to the eminent journalist it is
non-existent. For his mind is still filled with a hundred thousand
things the Belgian Army want,--the iodine they need, and the
anæsthetics. And nothing else exists for him at that moment but to do
what he can for the nation that has laid down its life for England.
Burgundy, indeed!
And yet one feels glad that the author eventually gets his extra bottle.
He has done something for England too. He has given us laughter when our
days were very black.
And our soldiers love his yarns!