‘Here is the hard paradox: war ... this devilish, bestial,
senseless thing, produces in masses—as peace distinctly does
not produce them—brothers and sisters to Christ.’—G. A. B.
DEWAR.
Wynchcombe Friars without Mark was no place to tarry in, but there seemed
no end to the delays; and Keith turned even these to good account by
teaching Sheila to drive the Forsyth-Macnair car. Two drivers with one
orderly would get through twice the work.
It was near the middle of October when, at last, they found themselves
speeding towards Folkestone. Keith, who had laid aside philosophy ‘for
the duration of the war,’ delighted in his own small ark of salvation
as a captain delights in his ship. From ‘stem to stern’ she was perfect
as skill and money could make her; fitted up with four stretchers and
bedding; crammed to the limit of her capacity with first-aid appliances
and a minimum of luggage.
Here and there autumn had laid a fiery finger on the woods. Birches
and elms were tipped with gold. Otherwise the October sun, riding in a
cloudless heaven, suggested high summer. Mark had been gone nearly a
fortnight. Two brief cheerful letters assured his mother he was alive
and well. Till she could see him again, those simple facts were all
that vitally concerned herself; though pessimists prophesied invasion
by Zeppelin and transport; and over there across the Channel, Belgium
continued her heroic stand against the all-devouring, all-defiling German
Army.
The fall of Antwerp had resounded through Europe like the knell of doom.
For a time, even the bravest were shaken with dismay, and the stream of
refugees increased daily. The streets of Folkestone overflowed with that
pitiful flotsam of wrecked cities. Some wept; some cursed; some prayed;
but the prevailing expression was a terrible stunned indifference, as
though shock on shock had hammered them into automata that could move and
eat and sleep, but could no longer feel.
In Boulogne—when they reached it—the flotsam of wrecked battalions
was more in evidence. Things were still primitive here as regards
organisation, but already the place was an English colony. The British
Red Cross Society was beginning to make things move and owners of private
cars were doing splendid service. To these were now added the unrelated
trio from Wynchcombe Friars. But their first objective was Rouen, where
a young Stuart nephew lay badly wounded, craving for the sight of a face
from home. His invalid mother could not get to him; so Lady Forsyth went
in her stead, only to find on arrival that the boy had been dead an
hour. For the sake of that far-away mother she asked to see him, though
privately she dreaded the ordeal. She was aware, suddenly, of a very
unheroic shrinking from close contact with the awful actualities of war.
But that shrinking in no way affected her zeal for the work in hand.
News that a train-load of casualties was expected that evening sent them
full speed to the station. It was dusk when they arrived to find the
train in and the process of unloading begun. At the entrance, a group of
Red Cross officials stood talking and laughing, hardened by habit to the
painful scene. As the car drew up they crowded round, admiring it and
questioning Macnair, while tragic burdens were carried past them in the
half light.
Helen, too overwrought to make allowances, wondered how Keith had the
patience to answer them.
Presently, her attention was caught by a number of black shadows, like
wheelbarrows abnormally large and high.
‘What are those?’ she asked a porter, and discovered that they were
severely wounded men, on wheeled stretchers, either too brave or too
exhausted to utter a sound of complaint.
At that she could restrain herself no longer.
‘Keith,’ she exclaimed, flagrantly interrupting a Medical Authority with
a passion for cars, ‘_why_ are those unfortunate men kept hanging about
in this noisy place? Can’t we get four of them away?’
But Medical Authority checked her impatience in a tone of mild reproof.
‘Those fellows are all right where they are, Lady Forsyth,’ he said.
‘They’re not fit to be moved off their stretchers. So we’re waiting for
the trams. If you like to back into the station, you may pick up some
milder cases who’ll be glad of a lift.’
They backed in accordingly and picked up two maimed men and a remarkably
cheerful subaltern with his left arm in a sling and a bandage across one
eye. As they passed out, Keith offered to return for another load; and,
to Helen’s disgust, the offer was politely declined.
By the time they reached the field hospital—a collection of marquees,
fitted up with electric light—it was nearly ten o’clock.
‘Quite early; but as we don’t seem to be _wanted_, I suppose we must go
to bed,’ Helen remarked with doleful emphasis, as they re-settled the
car. ‘I feel distinctly snubbed. Four out of three hundred! What’s that?’
‘A beginning—and no bad one!’ Keith answered placidly, filling his pipe.
‘Fanshawe says if we report ourselves at Boulogne we shall get all the
work we want. There’s heavy fighting on the north—a big battle developing
for Ypres and Calais.’
To Boulogne they returned accordingly, and had no cause this time to feel
either snubbed or superfluous. There was still a famine of cars at the
Base and the wounded were arriving in thousands: their bodies mangled and
mutilated; their spirits, in the main, unquenched.
Macnair and his party drove up to their hotel at noon, and their greeting
from the Red Cross Authority was very much to the point.
‘All available cars wanted immediately at the Gare Maritime. Better get
some lunch first.’
That lunch was of the briefest. Keith dumped their luggage in the hall
without so much as asking if there were rooms to be had. Helen did
not even open the coveted letter from Mark till they were back in the
motor, speeding towards the bare unsheltered gare, where impromptu and
comfortless hospital trains disgorged their tragic loads. Mercifully the
sun of that miraculous autumn still shone unclouded; and, by the time
autumn gave place to the wettest winter in decades, better arrangements
had been made.
All that afternoon they worked unceasingly, and late into the night.
Back and forth, back and forth between station and hospital, jolting
inevitably over railway lines, and a strip of merciless cobble pavement
that, for men with shattered limbs, hurriedly dressed, involved several
minutes of excruciating agony.
‘Keith, couldn’t they possibly take up that cruel bit of _pavé_?’ Helen
pleaded after their seventh journey with three men at death’s door. ‘Even
a raw road would be better than those stones.’
‘I’ll move heaven and earth to get it improved,’ he assured her, little
guessing that he had pledged himself to a labour of Hercules.
* * * * *
By the time they could take breath and think about finding beds, they
were all dead weary, sustained only by the knowledge that they had given
their mite of service to the utmost of their power. In Mark’s letter,
which Helen had scarcely found time to read, there was a sentence on this
head that had haunted her brain throughout those strenuous hours.
‘Oh Mums, if only the good casual folk at home could be made _see_ even
the half of what we see in the way of wanton destruction and calculated
brutality, wherever the gentle German has left his trail, they’d possibly
begin to realise the powers of evil we’re up against in this war, and
things in general would march to a different tune. But they can’t _see_.
That’s the trouble. And hearing about such things isn’t the same at
all. If we’re ever going to win through hell to human conditions again,
it won’t be merely by signing cheques and making speeches, but by the
individual personal service of every man and woman in whatever capacity;
and I’m proud to feel you three are giving it like Trojans. God bless you
all!’
She stood gleaning a few more scraps under an electric light, when Keith
came up to say he had secured a room for her and Sheila; and a friendly
Irish doctor had offered him a bed in his hospital train.
‘I’m in great luck with my two assistants,’ he added, smiling down at her
eager, tired face. ‘Sheila betters my expectation, which is saying a good
deal. Her self-possession to-day astonished me. She’d have the nerve for
advance ambulance work in the firing line, I do believe. But I’m glad
we’ve got her safe here.’
He glanced towards her where she sat at a writing-table, scribbling a
hurried letter to Mark in praise of their mutually beloved Mums. Then he
went up and touched her shoulder.
‘Good-night, Sheila,’ he said. ‘Get to bed sharp, both of you. I’ll call
for you to-morrow.’
‘We’ll be ready early,’ she answered, looking up at him; and he
discovered, to his surprise, that her eyes were swimming in tears.
* * * * *
There was a certain monotony about the days of unremitting work that
followed—a monotony tinged with its own peculiar high lights and shadows;
with beauty and terror, fortitude and anguish, the incoming and outgoing
pulse-beat of life at the Base. Scarcely a day passed without some minor
incident, some flash of human revelation that none of them would forget
while they lived.
For Helen—with every nerve responsive to the suffering around them—the
strain of it all proved no light matter; yet, in retrospect, she counted
those terrible days as among the richest experiences of her life.
To her it was distracting that wounded men should suffer additional
miseries from the fact that even in two and a half months of war it had
been impossible to cope with all the complex needs of the situation.
Hospitals were few and quite inadequate. The magnificent ambulance
trains of later days were still in the workshops at home; while untiring
men on the spot did the best they could with the high, comfortless
passenger coaches of France. Even the more luxurious sleeping carriages
were too cramped for the ingress and egress of badly wounded men; and
when, at last, these were landed, like so many bales of goods, on the
unsheltered platform of the _gare_, shortage of ambulance cars and
trained stretcher-bearers added the finishing touch to their nightmare
journey. But soon after Keith’s arrival, the zeal and organisation of the
British Red Cross began to make themselves felt, in this respect as in
others. Every ambulance that could be raised in London was rushed across
to Boulogne, till in a few days there were eighty of one kind or another
plying between train and hospital and ship.
For all that, there was still need of superhuman exertion to cope,
even inadequately, with the terrible stream of wounded—the backwash,
as it were, from the Homeric struggle round Ypres. In that region the
Belgians were making their last desperate stand, and war-worn British
divisions—haggard, sleepless, cruelly depleted—were still miraculously
holding their own against army corps on army corps of fresh German
troops heartened by an overwhelming superiority in guns and shells.
There—during those awful days—whole battalions of the finest troops on
earth practically ceased to exist; and thence came the main influx of
comfortless, overcrowded trains.
Steadily the tale of wounded swelled, till it reached an average of two
thousand a day. And what were eighty cars among so many? Little better
than the five loaves and two small fishes in Galilee; and here was no
hope of miraculous intervention. The outstanding miracle of that golden
October—when England neither knew her peril nor the full cost of her
salvation—was the superhuman fortitude of those that were broken on the
wheel and the untiring energy of those who served them in the teeth of
baffling conditions.
Day after day the open platform was thronged with men on stretchers
in all stages of mental and bodily collapse: British, Indian, French,
Belgian, German—brothers all, for the moment, in suffering if in nothing
else. Some stared wildly and talked nonsense; some were apathetic; some
incurably cheerful, though often their wounds had not been dressed for
days.
The lack of trained stretcher-bearers was a serious difficulty till St.
John Ambulance Association came to the rescue. Porters, willing but
unskilful, did what they could. Keith himself, and others like him,
helped to carry scores of men. From early morning till near midnight the
cars of rescue ran to and fro; but in spite of every effort there were
unavoidable delays. Men died there on the stretchers, or in draughty
cars, while red-tape regulations kept them waiting outside hospitals and
ships. And that cruel strip of _pavé_ remained unsmoothed, though Keith
had pressed the point with unauthorised persistence. And Helen cursed—so
far as her ladyhood permitted—every time they crossed it with patients in
the last extremity.
The unceasing rush of work left small leisure for nightmares, or even
for anxiety; but the strain and pain of it were taxing her nerves to
breaking-point. Always, as they drew near the familiar crowded station,
there sprang the inevitable question: ‘Will it be Mark this time?’ But,
though the passing days brought many from his regiment, Mark was not
found among them.
As for Sheila, her sensitive spirit felt the test more acutely than
either of the elders, who kept watchful eyes on her, were allowed to
suspect. Only by clinging desperately to her childhood’s code of courage
could she save herself, at times, from the ignominy of collapse. It was
sustaining, too, to feel that Keith trusted her, that Helen relied on
her; and Mark’s occasional letters—full of a brotherly tenderness that
showed little in his speech—made it seem possible to win through anything
without flinching visibly. The fact that she could face this inferno
of pain and death and mental anguish without a sense of bitterness or
rebellion was more of an asset than she knew. It was, in fact, the
keystone of her character, the secret of her spiritual poise. For to
accept, actively to accept, spells capacity to transcend; but that she
had still to discover.
They had little time, any of them, for abstract or personal thought. The
war, and its pressing demands on them, constituted their life. Keith
had secured a small private sitting-room, where they could enjoy an
occasional evening of quiet and rest. But as work was seldom over till
near eleven, such oases were rare indeed. At times their heads felt
stunned with the eternal rattling to and fro, their hearts numbed by
contact with the awful harvest of a modern battlefield. But on the whole
they loved their work, and would not have been otherwhere for a kingdom.
They grew skilled in the art of talking the men’s minds away from their
sufferings; and Sheila—‘Mouse’ though she was—showed so notable a gift
for this form of spiritual healing, that Lady Forsyth finally christened
her ‘Queen of the Poor Things.’ Some mother-quality in her touch and tone
seemed to go straight to their hearts. Men who left the station groaning
and clenching their teeth, to keep the curses back, would surprisingly
soon be conjured into recounting their adventures, or, better still,
talking of wives and children at home.
Keith himself confessed that he had never properly appreciated the
British Tommy till he carried him wounded, and Helen lost her heart a
dozen times over. More than once, when they chanced upon men shattered
and bandaged past human recognition, she came very near losing her head;
but only once did she disgrace herself by fainting outright.
On that occasion Keith carried her straight back to their hotel, laid her
on the sofa and stayed by her till she was sufficiently recovered to feel
very much ashamed of herself.
‘Promise I won’t do it again,’ she assured him, as he stood leaning over
her.
‘No, that you _certainly_ won’t,’ he said sternly. ‘If ever you do, I
shall pack you straight off home. To-night, for a punishment, you’ll go
early to bed. Sheila will be quite safe with me.’
Argument and rebellion were useless. Moreover, she was honestly
exhausted, and before ten o’clock she was sound asleep. But even
weariness could not break the habit of short rest, and by one of the
morning she was amazingly wide awake.
Some distant sound had roused her, and now it drew nearer—footsteps and
voices; men cheering and singing of ‘la gloire’ and ‘la mort.’ Nearer
still they came, tramping along the pavement, till they were almost under
her open window.
Then she was aware of a discordant note in that gallant chorus. One
voice, raised in terror and remonstrance, was trying to dominate those
other voices that were obviously shouting it down.
‘J’ai peur! Mon Dieu, camarades, j’ai peur!’
The words reached her distinctly now. But the rest, unheeding, sang
louder than ever of ‘la mort’ and ‘la gloire.’
Possibly they were sorry for him. The coward is the unhappiest of men.
Yet he too, being ‘enfant de la patrie,’ must go, even as others went;
and Helen Forsyth, hearing him go, found the tears streaming down her
face—not for the coercion of one reluctant citizen, but for the unending
horror and misery of it all: the fear and the anguish and the calculated
cruelty that were so infinitely worse than death.
Sheila, sleeping the profound sleep of healthily exhausted youth, stirred
not an eyelash even when the noise was at its height. But for Helen that
pitiful interlude had put an end to rest and had opened the door to
nightmare memories and her own most private fears.
Since the letter that greeted her, there had been one barren field
post-card. Even that was ten days old. And away there, in the trenches,
the struggle seemed to wax fiercer every hour.
The blank parallelogram of her window gleamed pale grey before, in spite
of herself, she fell asleep.
* * * * *
The strain of Mark’s sudden silence told upon the others also. It was
tacitly assumed that postal arrangements were disorganised. Each hoped
that the rest believed in that consoling fiction; but privately, they
were sceptics all.
Helen continued to post his paper and her own thick envelope every other
day in the hope that he was still to be found somewhere in the terrible
maze of trenches that drew England’s best and bravest as a magnet draws
steel.
Meantime they were thankful for unremitting work—for the constant
movement and interest of life at the Base. Young officers, eager for
action, might be bored to extinction by a few weeks in camp or in one of
the crowded hotels; but an observer, blessed with humour and a large love
of human nature, could not fail to find at every turn food for thought,
for laughter and for tears.
War is neither all horror, nor all heroism, or it could not be waged
by flesh and blood. Soldiers who can die like gods, or fight as the
beasts that perish, are, in the intervals, men of like passions with
their kind. And genuine soldiers were scarce among those who now poured
into Boulogne, to fill the gaps in that dangerously thin line round
Ypres—Territorials and schoolmasters, clergymen and clerks, lords of
commerce and lords of the land; dissimilar in almost every essential,
yet welded together by one common resolve, one common faith: a crusade
indeed, as Mark had said.
And the manifold needs of a host undreamed of by the wildest, wickedest
‘militarists,’ demanded the existence of that other army chiefly
congregated at the Base: doctors, nurses, chaplains, ambulance folk,
owners of private cars, and those sorrowful birds of passage—relations
of dying or dangerously wounded men. On the quays, in streets and hotels
they thronged, those incongruous fragments of the world’s greatest drama;
and Lady Forsyth never tired of watching them or listening to their
snatches of talk. Neither weariness, nor nightmare visions, nor anxiety,
even, could blunt the edge of her keen interest in the human panorama.
‘Oh, Sheila, my lamb,’ she exclaimed one evening after a day of very
varied emotions, ‘aren’t people—all sorts and kinds of them—passionately
interesting? Even when I’m laid on the uttermost shelf I shall still be
always peeping over the edge!’
‘And you’ll always find _me_ peeping up at you,’ the girl answered,
smiling at the quaint conceit. ‘It’s simply wonderful, being with
you—through all this!’
A temporary lull in the stream of wounded was followed, too soon, by a
renewed rush of hospital trains filled to overflowing—the harvest of a
fresh German onslaught. But by this time there were more cars and more
stretcher-bearers. Ambulance trains, splendidly equipped, were being
hurried out from England; and the Customs sheds at the station had
become a great shelter, roughly partitioned into dressing-stations, for
those who had need of immediate care. From this seed of voluntary effort
there sprang up, in time, a big stationary hospital; but by then the
Forsyth-Macnair car was needed elsewhere.
Meantime, in every effort to minimise the sufferings of the men he
served, Keith was actively to the fore. Helen herself was amazed at
his energy and versatility—he whom she had hitherto regarded as a man
wedded entirely to books and thought. But among all the surprises of a
war rich in surprise, good and evil, were none more remarkable than such
unlooked-for revelations of human capacity and character.
Day in, day out, the work went on. There were strange discoveries, sad
and glad, on that ever-crowded platform; but of the three they looked
for—Mark, Maurice and Ralph—never a sign, as yet.
(_To be continued._)