The Last Stand Of The Belgians
1
During the first two and a half months of the war I was a wanderer in
France, covering many hundreds of miles in zig-zag journeys
between Nancy and the west coast, always on the move, backwards
and forwards, between the lines of the French and British armies, and
watching with a tireless though somewhat haggard interest the drama
of a great people engaged in a life-and-death struggle against the
most formidable army in the world. I had been in the midst of
populations in flight, armies in retreat, and tremendous movements of
troops hurled forward to new points of strategical importance. Now
and again I had come in touch with the British army and had seen
something of the men who had fought their way down from Mons to
Meaux, but for the most part my experience had been with the
French, and it was the spirit of France which I had done my best to
interpret to the English people.
Now I was to see war, more closely and intimately than before, in
another nation; and I stood with homage in my heart before the spirit
of Belgium and that heroic people who, when I came upon them, had
lost all but the last patch of territory, but still fought, almost alone, a
tenacious, bloody and unending battle against the Power which had
laid low their cities, mangled their ancient beauties, and changed their
little land of peaceful industry into a muck-heap of slaughter and
destruction.
Even in France I had this vision of the ruin of a nation, and saw its
victims scattered. Since that day when I came upon the first trainload
of Belgian soldiers near Calais, weary as lame dogs after their retreat,
I had seen an interminable procession of fugitives from that stricken
country and heard from them the tale of Alost, Louvain, Termonde
and other towns where only horror dwelt above incinerated stones
and scraps of human flesh. The fall of Antwerp resounded into
France, and its surrender after words of false hope that it would never
fall shook the soul of the French people with a great dismay. It was
idle to disguise the importance of this German victory at the time
when France, with every nerve strained and with England by her side,
could hardly stem back the tide of those overflowing armies which
had been thrust across the Marne but now pressed westward
towards Calais with a smashing strength. The capture of Antwerp
would liberate large numbers of the enemy's best troops. Already,
within a day of this disaster to the Allied armies, squadrons of
German cavalry swept across the frontiers into France, forcing their
way rapidly through Lille and Armentières towards Béthune and La
Bassée, cutting lines which had already been cut and then repaired,
and striking terror into French villages which had so far escaped from
these hussars of death. As a journalist, thwarted at every turn by the
increasing severity of military orders for correspondent catching, the
truth was not to be told at any cost. I had suspected the doom of
Antwerp some days before its fate was sealed, and I struck northward
to get as near as possible to the Belgian frontier. The nearest I could
get was Dunkirk, and I came in time to see amazing scenes in that
port of France. They were scenes which, even now as I write months
afterwards, stir me with pity and bring back to my imagination an
immense tragedy of history.
2
The town of Dunkirk, from which I went out to many adventures in the
heart of war, so that for me it will always hold a great memory, was on
that day in October a place of wild chaos, filled with the murmur of
enormous crowds, and with the steady tramp of innumerable feet
which beat out a tragic march. Those weary footsteps thumping the
pavements and the cobble-stones, made a noise like the surging of
waves on a pebble beach--a queer, muffled, shuffling sound, with a
rhythm in it which stupefied one's senses if one listened to it long. I
think something of this agony of a people in flight passed into my own
body and brain that day. Some sickness of the soul took possession
of me, so that I felt faint and overcome by black dejection. There was
a physical evil among those vast crowds of Belgians who had come
on foot, or in any kind of vehicle, down the big, straight roads which
led to France, and now struggled down towards the docks, where
thousands were encamped. From their weariness and inevitable
dirtiness, from the sweat of their bodies, and the tears that had dried
upon their cheeks, from the dust and squalor of bedraggled clothes,
there came to one's nostrils a sickening odour. It was the stench of a
nation's agony. Poor people of despair! There was something
obscene and hideous in your miserable condition. Standing
among your women and children, and your old grandfathers and
grandmothers, I was ashamed of looking with watchful and observant
eyes. There were delicate ladies with their hats awry and their hair
dishevelled, and their beautiful clothes bespattered and torn, so that
they were like the drabs of the slums and stews. There were young
girls who had been sheltered in convent schools, now submerged in
the great crowd of fugitives, so utterly without the comforts of life that
the common decencies of civilization could not be regarded, but gave
way to the unconcealed necessities of human nature. Peasant
women, squatting on the dock-sides, fed their babes as they wept
over them and wailed like stricken creatures. Children with scared
eyes, as though they had been left alone in the horror of darkness,
searched piteously for parents who had been separated from them in
the struggle for a train or in the surgings of the crowds. Young fathers
of families shouted hoarsely for women who could not be found. Old
women, with shaking heads and trembling hands, raised shrill voices
in the vain hope that they might hear an answering call from sons or
daughters. Like people who had escaped from an earthquake to
some seashore where by chance a boat might come for them all,
these Belgian families struggled to the port of Dunkirk and waited
desperately for rescue. They were in a worse plight than shipwrecked
people, for no ship of good hope could take them home again.
Behind them the country lay in dust and flames, with hostile armies
encamped among the ruins of their towns.
For a little while I left these crowds and escaped to the quiet
sanctuary of a restaurant in the centre of the town. I remember that
some English officers came in and stared at me from their table with
hard eyes, suspicious of me as a spy, or, worse still, as a journalist.
In those days, having to dodge arrest at every turn, I had a most
unpatriotic hatred of those British officers whose stern eyes gimletted
my soul. They seemed to me so like the Prussian at his worst.
Afterwards, getting behind this mask of harness, by the magic of
official papers, I abandoned my dislike and saw only the virtue of our
men. I remember also that I ate at table opposite a pretty girl, with a
wanton's heart, who prattled to me, because I was an Englishman, as
though no war had come to make a mockery of love-in-idleness. I
stood up from the table, upsetting a glass so that it broke at the stem.
Outside the restaurant was the tramp of another multitude. But the
rhythm of those feet was different from the noise I had heard all day.
It was sharper and more marked. I guessed at once that many
soldiers were passing by, and that upon striding to the door I should
see another tragedy. From the doorway I watched an army in retreat.
It was the army of Antwerp marching into Dunkirk. I took off my hat
and watched with bared head.
They were but broken regiments, marching disorderly for the most
part, yet here and there were little bodies of men keeping step, with
shouldered rifles, in fine, grim pride. The municipal guards came by,
shoulder to shoulder, as on parade, but they were followed by long
convoys of mounted men on stumbling horses, who came with heaps
of disorderly salvage piled on to dusty wagons. Saddles and bridles
and bits, the uniforms of many regiments flung out hurriedly from
barrack cupboards; rifles, swords, and boots were heaped on to beds
of straw, and upon the top of them lay men exhausted to the point of
death, so that their heads flopped and lolled as the carts came jolting
through the streets. Armoured cars with mitrailleuses, motor-cars
slashed and plugged by German bullets, forage carts and
ambulances, struggled by in a tide of traffic between bodies of foot-
soldiers slouching along without any pride, but dazed with weariness.
Their uniforms were powdered with the dust of the roads, their faces
were blanched and haggard for lack of food and sleep. Some of them
had a delirious look and they stared about them with rolling eyes in
which there was a gleam of madness. Many of these men were
wounded, and spattered with their blood. Their bandages were
stained with scarlet splotches, and some of them were so weak that
they left their ranks and sat in doorways, or on the kerb-stones, with
their heads drooping sideways. Many another man, footsore and
lame, trudged along on one boot and a bandaged sock, with the
other boot slung to his rifle barrel.
Riding alone between two patrols of mounted men was a small boy
on a high horse. He was a fair-haired lad of twelve or so, in a Belgian
uniform, with a tasselled cap over one ear, and as he passed the
Dunquerquoises clapped hands and called out: "Bravo! Bravo!" He
took the ovation with a grin and held his head high.
The cafés in this part of France were crowded with Belgian officers of
all grades. I had never seen so many generals together or such a
medley of uniforms. They saluted each other solemnly, and there
were emotional greetings between friends and brothers who had not
seen each other after weeks of fighting in different parts of the lines,
in this city across the border. Most of the officers were fine, sturdy,
young fellows of stouter physique than the French among whom I
had been roving. But others had the student look and stared
mournfully from gold-rimmed spectacles. There were many middle-
aged men among them who wore military uniforms, but without a
soldier's ease or swagger. When Germany tore up that "scrap of
paper" which guaranteed the integrity of Belgium, every patriotic man
there volunteered for the defence of his country and shouldered a
rifle, though he had never fired a blank cartridge, and put on some
kind of uniform, though he had never drilled in a barrack square.
Lawyers and merchants, schoolmasters and poets, actors and
singers, farmers and peasants, rushed to take up arms, and when
the vanguards of the German army struck across the frontier they
found themselves confronted not only by the small regular army of
Belgium, but by the whole nation. Even the women helped to dig the
trenches at Liège, and poured boiling water over Uhlans who came
riding into Belgian villages. It was the rising of a whole people which
led to so much ruthlessness and savage cruelty. The German
generals were afraid of a nation of franc-tireurs, where every man or
boy who could hold a gun shot at the sight of a pointed helmet. Those
high officers to whom war is a science without any human emotion or
pity in its rules, were determined to stamp out this irregular fighting by
blood and fire, and "frightfulness" became the order of the day. I
have heard English officers uphold these methods and use the same
excuse for all those massacres which has been put forward by the
enemy themselves. "War is war... One cannot make war with
rosewater... The franc-tireur has to be shot at sight. A civil population
using arms against an invading army must be taught a bloody lesson.
If ever we get into Germany we may have to face the same trouble,
so it is no use shouting words of horror." War is war, and hell is hell.
Let us for the moment leave it at that, as I left it in the streets of
Dunkirk, where the volunteer army of Belgium and their garrison
troops had come in retreat after heroic resistance against
overwhelming odds, in which their courage without science was no
match for the greatest death machine in Europe, controlled by
experts highly trained in the business of arms.
That night I went for a journey in a train of tragedy I was glad to get
into the train. Here, travelling through the clean air of a quiet night, I
might forget for a little while the senseless cruelties of this war, and
turn my eyes away from the suffering of individuals smashed by its
monstrous injustice.
But the long train was packed tight with refugees. There was only
room for me in the corridor if I kept my elbows close, tightly wedged
against the door. Others tried to clamber in, implored piteously for a
little space, when there was no space. The train jerked forward on
uneasy brakes, leaving a crowd behind.
Turning my head and half my body round, I could see into two of the
lighted carriages behind me, as I stood in the corridor. They were
overfilled with various types of these Belgian people whom I had
been watching all day--the fugitives of a ravaged country. For a little
while in this French train they were out of the hurly-burly of their
flight. For the first time since the shells burst over Antwerp they
had a little quietude and rest.
I glanced at their faces, as they sat back with their eyes closed. There
was a young Belgian priest there, with a fair, clean-shaven face. He
wore top boots splashed with mud, and only a silver cross at his
breast showed his office. He had fallen asleep with a smile about his
lips. But presently he awakened with a start, and suddenly there
came into his eyes a look of indescribable horror... He had
remembered.
There was an old lady next to him. The light from the carriage lamp
glinted upon her silver hair, and gave a Rembrandt touch to a fair old
Flemish face. She was looking at the priest, and her lips moved as
though in pity. Once or twice she glanced at her dirty hands, at her
draggled dress, and then sighed, before bending her head, and
dozing into forgetfulness.
A young Flemish mother cuddled close to a small boy with flaxen hair,
whose blue eyes stared solemnly in front of him with an old man's
gravity of vision. She touched the child's hair with her lips, pressed
him closer, seemed eager to feel his living form, as though nothing
mattered now that she had him safe.
On the opposite seat were two Belgian officers--an elderly man with a
white moustache and grizzled eyebrows under his high képi and a
young man in a tasselled forage cap, like a boy-student. They both
sat in a limp, dejected way. There was defeat and despair in their
attitude It was only when the younger man shifted his right leg with a
sudden grimace of pain that I saw he was wounded.
Here in these two carriages through which I could glimpse were a few
souls holding in their memory all the sorrow and suffering of poor,
stricken Belgium. Upon this long train were a thousand other men
and women in the same plight and with the same grief.
Next to me in the corridor was a young man with a pale beard and
moustache and fine delicate features. He had an air of distinction,
and his clothes suggested a man of some wealth and standing. I
spoke to him, a few commonplace sentences, and found, as I had
guessed, that he was a Belgian refugee.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
He smiled at me and shrugged his shoulders slightly.
"Anywhere. What does it matter? I have lost everything. One place is
as good as another for a ruined man."
He did not speak emotionally. There was no thrill of despair in his
voice. It was as though he were telling me that he had lost his watch.
"That is my mother over there," he said presently, glancing towards
the old lady with the silver hair. "Our house has been burnt by the
Germans and all our property was destroyed. We have nothing left.
May I have a light for this cigarette?"
One young soldier explained the reasons for the Belgian debacle.
They seemed convincing:
"I fought all the way from Liège to Antwerp. But it was always the
same. When we killed one German, five appeared in his place. When
we killed a hundred, a thousand followed. It was all no use. We had to
retreat and retreat. That is demoralizing."
"England is very kind to the refugees," said another man. "We shall
never forget these things."
The train stopped at wayside stations. Sometimes we got down to
stamp our feet. Always there were crowds of Belgian refugees on the
platforms--shadow figures in the darkness or silhouetted in the light of
the station lamps. They were encamped there with their bundles and
their babies.
On the railway lines were many trains, shunted into sidings. They
belonged to the Belgian State Railways, and had been brought over
the frontier away from German hands--hundreds of them. In their
carriages little families of refugees had made their homes. They are
still living in them, hanging their washing from the windows, cooking
their meals in these narrow rooms. They have settled down as
though the rest of their lives is to be spent in a siding. We heard their
voices, speaking Flemish, as our train passed on. One woman was
singing her child to sleep with a sweet old lullaby. In my train there
was singing also. A party of four young Frenchmen came in, forcing
their way hilariously into a corridor which seemed packed to the last
inch of space. I learnt the words of the refrain which they sang at
every station:
A bas Guillaume!
C'est un filou
II faut le pendre
Il faut le pendre
La corde à son cou!
The young Fleming with a pale beard and moustache smiled as he
glanced at the Frenchmen.
"They have had better luck," he said. "We bore the first brunt."
I left the train and the friends I had made. We parted with an "Au
revoir" and a "Good luck!" When I went down to the station the next
morning I learnt that a train of refugees had been in collision at La
Marquise, near Boulogne. Forty people had been killed and sixty
injured.
After their escape from the horrors of Antwerp the people on this train
of tragedy had been struck again by a blow from the clenched fist of
fate.
4
I went back to Dunkirk again and stayed there for some days in the
hope of getting a pass which would allow me to cross the Belgian
frontier and enter the zone of battle. Even to get out of the railway
station into this fortified town required diplomacy bordering upon
dishonesty, for since the retreat of the Belgian army of volunteers,
Dunkirk had an expectation of a siege and bombardment and no
civilian strangers were allowed to enter. Fortunately I was enabled to
mention a great name, with the implied and utterly untruthful
suggestion that its influence extended to my humble person, so that a
French gentleman with a yard-long bayonet withdrew himself from the
station doorway and allowed me to pass with my two friends.
It struck me then, as it has a thousand times since the war began,
how all precautions must fail to keep out a spy who has a little tact
and some audacity. My two friends and I were provided with
worthless passes which failed to comply with official regulations. We
had no authorized business in Dunkirk, and if our real profession had
been known we should have been arrested by the nearest French or
British officer, sent down to British headquarters under armed guard
and, after very unpleasant experiences as criminals of a dangerous
and objectionable type, expelled from France with nasty words on our
passports. Yet in spite of spy-mania and a hundred methods of spy-
catching, we who were classed with spies--passed all barriers and
saw all the secrets of the town's defence. If instead of being a mild
and inoffensive Englishman I had been a fierce and patriotic German,
I might have brought away a mass of military information of the
utmost value to General von Kluck; or, if out for blood, I might have
killed some very distinguished officers before dying as a faithful son
of the Fatherland. No sentries at the door of the Hôtel des Arcades, in
the Place Jean-Bart, challenged three strangers of shabby and
hungry look when they passed through in search of food. Waiters
scurrying about with dishes and plates did not look askance at them
when they strolled into a dining-room crowded with French and British
staff officers. At the far end of the room was a great general--drinking
croûte-au-pot with the simple appetite of a French poilu--who would
have been a splendid mark for anyone careless of his own life and
upholding the law of frightfulness as a divine sanction for
assassination. It was "Soixante-dix Pau," and I was glad to see that
brave old man who had fought through the terrible year of 1870, and
had been en retraite in Paris when, after forty-four years, France was
again menaced by German armies. Left "on the shelf" for a little while,
and eating his heart out in this inactivity while his country was
bleeding from the first wounds of war, he had been called back to
repair the fatal blunders in Alsace. He had shown a cool judgment
and a masterly touch. From Alsace, after a reorganization of the
French plan of attack, he came to the left centre and took part in the
councils of war, where General Joffre was glad of this shrewd old
comrade and gallant heart. He was given an advisory position, un-
hampered by the details of a divisional command, and now it seemed
to me that his presence in Dunkirk hinted at grave possibilities in this
fortified town. He had not come merely to enjoy a good luncheon at
the Hôtel des Arcades.
The civilian inhabitants of Dunkirk were beginning to feel alarmed.
They knew that only the last remnant of the active Belgian army stood
between their great port and the enemy's lines. Now that Antwerp had
fallen they were beginning to lose faith in their girdle of forts and in
their garrison artillery. The German guns had assumed a mythical
and monstrous significance in the popular imagination. It seemed that
they could smash the strongest defences with their far-reaching
thunderbolts. There was no outward panic in the town and the
citizens hid their fears under a mask of contempt for the "sacrés
Boches." But on some faces--of people who had no fear of death
except for those they loved--it was a thin mask, which crumbled and
let through terroi when across the dykes and ramparts the rumours
came that the German army was smashing forward, and closer.
The old landlady of the small hotel in which I stayed had laughed very
heartily with her hands upon her bulging stays when a young Belgian
officer flirted in a comical way with her two pretty daughters--a blonde
and a brunette, whose real beauty and freshness and simplicity
redeemed the squalor of their kitchen.
But presently she grabbed me by the arm, closing the door with the
other hand.
"Monsieur, I am an old fool of a woman, because I have those two
beauties there. It is not of myself that I am afraid. If I could strangle a
German and wring his neck, I would let the rest cut me into bits. But
those girls of mine--those two roses! I can't let them take risks! You
understand--those Germans are a dirty race. Tell me, is it time for us
to go?"
I could not tell her if it were time to go. With two such girls I think I
should have fled, panic-stricken. And yet I did not believe the
Germans would find Dunkirk an easy place to take. I had been round
its fortifications, and had seen the details of elaborate works which
even against German guns might prove impregnable. Outside the
outer forts the ground was bare and flat, so that not a rabbit could
scuttle across without being seen and shot. Sandbag entrenchments
and earthworks, not made recently, because grass had clothed them,
afforded splendid cover for the French batteries. Bomb-proof shelters
were dotted about the fields, and for miles away, as far as the Belgian
frontier, were lines of trenches and barbed-wire entanglements. To
the eye of a man not skilled in military science all these signs of a
strong defence were comforting. And yet I think they were known to
be valueless if the enemy broke through along the road to Dunkirk.
A cheerful priest whom I met across an iron bridge told me the secret
of Dunkirk's real defences.
"We have just to turn on a tap or two," he said, laughing at the
simplicity of the operation, "and all those fields for miles will be
flooded within an hour or two. Look, that low-lying land is under water
already. The enemy's guns would sink in it."
He pointed away to the south-west, and I saw that many of the fields
were all moist and marshy, as though after torrential rain. Nearer to
us, on the dry land, a body of soldiers marched up and down, drilling
industriously.
The priest pointed to them.
"They fought untrained, those Belgian boys. Next time they will fight
with greater discipline. But not with greater courage, Monsieur! I lift
my hat to the heroic spirit of brave little Belgium, which as long as
history tells a splendid tale, will be remembered. May God bless
Belgium and heal its wounds!"
He took off his broad black hat and stood bareheaded, with a great
wind blowing his soutane, gazing at those Belgian soldiers who, after
the exhaustion of retreat, gathered themselves into rank again and
drilled so that they might fight once more for the little kingdom they
had lost.
A few days later I saw how Belgians were still fighting on their own
soil, miserable but magnificent, sick at heart but dauntless in spirit.
5
It was in Calais, to which I had gone back for a day or two, that I
found my chance to get into the firing lines in Belgium. I was sitting at
an open window with my two friends when I saw a lady's face in the
street. The last time I had seen it was in an old English mansion, filled
with many gallant and gentle ghosts of history, and with laughing girls
who went scampering out to a game of tennis on the lawn below the
terrace from which a scent of roses and climbing plants was wafted
up on the drowsy air of an English summer. It was strange to see one
of those girls in Calais, where such a different game was being
played. She had a gravity in her eyes which I had not seen before in
England, and yet, afterwards, I heard her laughter ring out within a
little distance of bursting shells. She had a motor-car and a pass to
the Belgian front, and a good, nature which gave me a free seat,
provided I was "jolly quick." I was so quick that, with a few things
scrambled into a handbag, I was ready in two shakes of a jiffy,
whatever that may be, and had only time to give a hasty grip to the
hands of the two friends who had gone along many roads with me in
this adventure of war, watching its amazing dramas. The Philosopher
and the Strategist are but shadows in this book, but though I left them
on the kerbstone, I took with me the memory of a comradeship which
had been good to have.
6
The town of Furnes, in Belgium, into which I came when dusk crept
into its streets and squares, was the headquarters of King Albert and
his staff, and its people could hear all day long the roll of guns a few
kilometres away, where the remnant of their army held the line of the
Yser canal and the trenches which barred the roads to Dixmude,
Pervyse and other little towns and villages on the last free patch of
Belgian soil. I drove into the Grande Place and saw the beauty of this
old Flemish square, typical of a hundred others, not less quaint and
with not less dignity, which had been smashed to pieces by German
guns. Three great buildings dominated its architecture--the Town Hall,
with a fine stately façade, and two ancient churches, with massive
brick towers, overshadowing the narrow old houses and timber-front
shops with stepped gables and wrought-iron signs. For three
centuries or more time had slept here, and no change of modern life
had altered the character of this place, where merchant princes had
dwelt around the market. If there had been peace here in that velvety
twilight which filled the square when I first passed through it, I should
have expected to see grave burghers in furred hoods pacing across
the cobble stones to the Hôtel de Ville, and the florid-faced knights
whom Franz Hals loved to paint, quaffing wine inside the Hotel de la
Couronne, and perhaps a young king in exile known as the Merry
Monarch smiling with a roguish eye at some fair-haired Flemish
wench as he leaned on the arm of my lord of Rochester on his way to
his lodging on the other side of the way. But here was no peace. It
was a backyard of war, and there was the rumble of guns over the
stones, and a litter of war's munitions under the church wall.
Armoured cars were parked in the centre of the square, a corps of
military cyclists had propped their machines against gun wagons and
forage carts, out of the black shadows under high walls poked the
snouts of guns, wafts of scented hay came from carts with their
shafts down in the gutters, sentries with bayonets which caught the
light of old lanterns paced up and down below the Town Hall steps,
Belgian soldiers caked in the mud of the trenches slouched wearily in
the side streets, and staff officers in motor-cars with glaring headlights
and shrieking horns threaded their way between the wagons and the
guns. From beyond the town dull shocks of noise grumbled, like
distant thunder-claps, and through the tremulous dusk of the sky
there came an irregular repetition of faint flashes.
As the twilight deepened and the shadows merged into a general
darkness I could see candles being lit through the bull's-eye windows
of small shops, and the rank smell of paraffin lamps came from
vaulted cellars, into which one descended by steps from the roadway,
where soldiers were drinking cups of coffee or cheap wine in a
flickering light which etched Rembrandt pictures upon one's vision.
A number of staff officers came down the steps of the Town Hall and
stood at the foot of the steps as though waiting for some one. They
had not long to wait, for presently a very tall soldier came out to join
them. For a moment he stood under the portico lighting a cigarette,
and the flare of his match put a glamour upon his face. It was the
King of the Belgians, distinguished only by his height from the simple
soldiers who stood around him, and as he came down the steps he
had the dignity of his own manhood but no outward sign of royalty. I
could hardly see his face then, but afterwards in the daylight I saw
him pass down the lines of some of his heroic regiments and saw his
gravity and the sadness of his eyes, and his extreme simplicity... The
first time I had seen him was in a hall in Brussels, when he opened
the Great Exhibition in royal state, in the presence of many princes
and ministers and all his Court. Even then it seemed to me he had a
look of sadness--it may have been no more than shyness--as though
the shadow of some approaching tragedy touched his spirit. I spoke
of it at the time to a friend of mine and he smiled at the foolishness of
the remark.
Here in Furnes his personality was touched with a kind of sanctity
because his kingship of the last piece of Belgian soil symbolized all
the ruin and desolation of his poor country and all the heroism of its
resistance against an overpowering enemy and all the sorrows of
those scattered people who still gave him loyalty. Men of Republican
instincts paid a homage in their hearts to this young king, sanctified
by sorrow and crowned with martyrdom. Living plainly as a simple
soldier, sharing the rations, the hardships and the dangers of his
men, visiting them in their trenches and in their field-hospitals,
steeling his nerves to the sight of bloody things and his heart to the
grim task of fighting to the last ditch of Belgian ground, he seemed to
be the type of early kingship, as it was idealized by poets and
minstrels, when those who were anointed by the Church dedicated
their souls to the service of the people and their swords to justice. He
stood in this modern world and in this modern war as the supreme
type of the Hero, and mythical stories are already making a legend of
his chivalrous acts and virtue, showing that in spite of all our
incredulities and disillusions hero-worship is still a natural instinct in
the minds of men.
7
I had a job to do on my first night in Furnes, and earned a dinner, for
a change, by honest work. The staff of an English hospital with a
mobile column attached to the Belgian cavalry for picking up the
wounded on the field, had come into the town before dusk with a
convoy of ambulances and motorcars. They established themselves
in an old convent with large courtyards and many rooms, and they
worked hurriedly as long as light would allow, and afterwards in
darkness, to get things ready for their tasks next day, when many
wounded were expected. This party of doctors and nurses, stretcher-
bearers and chauffeurs, had done splendid work in Belgium. Many of
them were in the siege of Antwerp, where they stayed until the
wounded had to be taken away in a hurry; and others, even more
daring, had retreated from town to town, a few kilometres in advance
of the hostile troops. I had met some of the party in Malo-les-Bains,
where they had reassembled before coming to Fumes, and I had
been puzzled by them. In the "flying column," as they called their
convoy of ambulances, were several ladies very practically dressed in
khaki coats and breeches, and very girlish in appearance and
manners. They did not seem to me at first sight the type of woman to
be useful on a battlefield or in a field-hospital. I should have expected
them to faint at the sight of blood, and to swoon at the bursting of a
shell. Some of them at least were too pretty, I thought, to play about
in fields of war among men and horses smashed to pulp. It was only
later that I saw their usefulness and marvelled at the spiritual courage
of these young women, who seemed not only careless of shell-fire
but almost unconscious of its menace, and who, with more nervous
strength than that of many men, gave first-aid to the wounded without
shuddering at sights of agony which might turn a strong man sick.
It is not an easy task to settle down into a new hospital, especially in
time of war not far from the enemy's lines, and as a volunteer in the
work I was able to make myself useful by lending a hand with
mattresses and beds and heavy cases of medical material. It was a
strange experience, as far as I was concerned, and sometimes
seemed a little unreal as, with a bed on my head, I staggered across
dark courtyards, or with my arms full of lint and dressings. I groped
my way down the long, unlighted corridors of a Flemish convent.
Nurses chivvied about with little squeals of laughter as they bumped
into each other out of the shadow world, but not losing their heads or
their hands, with so much work to do. Framed in one or other of the
innumerable doorways stood a Belgian nun, with a white face, staring
out upon those flitting shadows. The young doctors had flung their
coats off and were handling the heaviest stuff like dock labourers at
trade union rates, though with more agility. I made friends with them
on the other side of cases too heavy for one man to handle--with a
golden-haired, blue-eyed boy from Bart's (I think), who made the
most preposterous jokes in the darkness, so that I laughed and
nearly dropped my end of the box (I saw him in the days to come
doing heroic and untiring work in the operating theatre), and with
another young surgeon whose keen, grave face lighted up
marvellously when an ironical smile caught fire in his brooding eyes,
and with other men in this hospital and ambulance column who will be
remembered in Belgium as fine and fearless men. With the
superintendent of the commissariat department--an Italian lady with a
pretty sense of humour and a devil-may-care courage which she
inherited from Stuart ancestors--I went on a shopping expedition into
the black gulfs of Fumes, stumbling into holes and jerking up against
invisible gun-wagons, but bringing back triumphantly some fat bacon
and, more precious still, some boxes of tallow candles, of great worth
in a town which had lost its gas.
I lighted dozens of these candles, like an acolyte in a Catholic church,
setting them in their own grease on window-sills and ledges of the
long corridors, so that the work of moving might go on more steadily.
But there was a wind blowing, and at the bang of distant doors out
went one candle after another, and nurses carrying other candles and
shielding the little flames with careful hands cried in laughing dismay
as they were puffed out by malicious draughts.
There was chaos in the kitchen, but out of it came order and a good
meal, served in the convent refectory, where the flickering light of
candles in beer-bottles sheltered from the wind, gleamed upon holy
pictures of the Sacred Heart and the Madonna and Child and glinted
upon a silver crucifix where the Man of Sorrows looked down upon a
supper party of men and women who, whatever their creed or faith or
unbelief, had dedicated themselves to relieve a suffering humanity
with a Christian chivalry--which did not prevent the blue-eyed boy
from making most pagan puns, or the company in general from
laughing as though war were all a jest.
Having helped to wash up--the young surgeons fell into queue before
the washtubs--I went out into the courtyard again. Horses were
stabled there, guarded by a man who read a book by the rays of an
old lantern, which was a little oasis of light in this desert of darkness.
The horses were listening. Every now and then they jerked their
heads up in a frightened way. From a few miles away came the boom
of great guns, and the black sky quivered with tremulous bars of light
as shell after shell burst somewhere over the heads of men waiting
for death. With one of the doctors, two of the nurses, and a man who
led the way, I climbed up to a high room in the convent roof. Through
a dormer window we looked out across the flat country beyond
Furnes and saw, a few miles away, the lines of battle. Some village
was burning there, a steady torch under a heavy cloud of smoke
made rosy and beautiful as a great flower over the scarlet flames.
Shells were bursting with bouquets of light and then scattered stars
into the sky. Short, sharp stabs revealed a Belgian battery, and very
clearly we could hear the roll of field guns, followed by enormous
concussions of heavy artillery.
"There will be work to do to-morrow!" said one of the nurses. Work
came before it was expected in the morning Quite early some Belgian
ambulances came up to the great gate of the convent loaded with
wounded. A few beds were made ready for them and they were
brought in by the stretcher-bearers and dressers. Some of them
could stagger in alone, with the help of a strong arm, but others were
at the point of death as they lay rigid on their stretchers, wet with
blood. For the first time I felt the weight of a man who lies
unconscious, and strained my stomach as I helped to carry these
poor Belgian soldiers. And for the first time I had round my neck the
arm of a man who finds each footstep a torturing effort, and who after
a pace or two halts and groans, and loses the strength of his legs, so
that all his weight hangs upon that clinging arm. Several times I nearly
let these soldiers fall, so great was the burden weighing down my
shoulders. It was only by a kind of prayer that I could hold them up
and guide them to the great room where stretchers were laid out for
lack of beds.
In a little while the great hall where I had helped to sort out packages
was a hospital ward where doctors and nurses worked very quietly
and from which there came faint groans of anguish, horrible in their
significance. Already it was filled with that stench of blood and dirt and
iodoform which afterwards used to sicken me as I helped to carry in
the wounded or carry out the dead.
8
In the courtyard the flying column was getting ready to set out in
search of other wounded men, not yet rescued from the firing line.
The officer in command was a young Belgian gentleman, Lieutenant
de Broqueville, the son of the Belgian Prime Minister, and a man of
knightly valour. He was arranging the order of the day with Dr. Munro,
who had organized the ambulance convoy, leading it through a series
of amazing adventures and misadventures--not yet to be written in
history--to this halting-place at Furnes. Three ladies in field kit stood
by their cars waiting for the day's commands, and there were four
stretcher-bearers, of whom I was the newest recruit. Among them
was an American journalist named Gleeson, who had put aside his
pen for a while to do manual work in fields of agony, proving himself
to be a man of calm and qifiet courage, always ready to take great
risks in order to bring in a stricken soldier. I came to know him as a
good comrade, and in this page greet him again.
The story of the adventure which we went out to meet that day was
written in the night that followed it, as I lay on straw with a candle by
my side, and because it was written with the emotion of a great
experience still thrilling in my brain and with its impressions
undimmed by any later pictures of the war I will give it here again as it
first appeared in the columns of the Daily Chronicle, suppressing only
a name or two because those whom I wished to honour hated my
publicity.
9
We set out before noon, winding our way through the streets of
Furnes, which were still crowded with soldiers and wagons. In the
Town Hall square we passed through a mass of people who
surrounded a body of 150 German prisoners who had just been
brought in from the front. It was a cheering sight for Belgians who had
been so long in retreat before an overpowering enemy. It was a sign
that the tide of fortune was changing. Presently we were out in open
country, by the side of the Yser Canal. It seemed very peaceful and
quiet. Even the guns were silent now, and the flat landscape, with its
long, straight lines of poplars between the low-lying fields, had a spirit
of tranquillity in the morning sunlight. It seemed impossible to believe
that only a few kilometres away great armies were ranged against
each other in a death-struggle. But only for a little while. The spirit of
war was forced upon our imagination by scenes upon the roadside. A
squadron of Belgian cavalry rode by on tired horses. The men were
dirty in the service of war, and haggard after long privations in the
field. Yet they looked hard and resolute, and saluted us with smiles as
we passed. Some of them shouted out a question: "Anglais?" They
seemed surprised and glad to see British ambulances on their way to
the front. Belgian infantrymen trudged with slung rifles along the
roads of the villages through which we passed. At one of our halts,
while we waited for instructions from the Belgian headquarters, a
group of these soldiers sat in the parlour of an inn singing a love-song
in chorus. One young officer swayed up and down in a rhythmic
dance, waving his cigarette. He had been wounded in the arm, and
knew the horror of the trenches; but for a little while he forgot, and
was very gay because he was alive.
Our trouble was to know where to go. The righting on the previous
night had covered a wide area, but a good many of the wounded had
been brought back. Where the wounded still lay the enemy's shell-fire
was so heavy that the Belgian ambulances could get nowhere near.
Lieutenant de Broqueville was earnestly requested not to lead his little
column into unnecessary risks, especially as it was difficult to know
the exact position of the enemy until reports came in from the field
officers.
It was astonishing--as it is always in war--to find how soldiers quite
near to the front are in utter ignorance of the course of a great battle.
Many of the officers and men with whom we talked could not tell us
where the allied forces were, nor where the enemy was in position,
nor whether the heavy fighting during the last day and night had been
to the advantage of the Allies or the Germans. They believed, but
were not sure, that the enemy had been driven back many kilometres
between Nieuport and Dixmude.
At last, after many discussions and many halts, we received our
orders. We were asked to get into the town of Dixmude, where there
were many wounded.
It was about sixteen kilometres away from Furnes, and about half that
distance from where we had halted for lunch. Not very far away, it will
be seen, yet, as we went along the road, nearer to the sound of great
guns which for the last hour or two had been firing incessantly again,
we passed many women and children. It had only just occurred to
them that death was round the corner, and that there was no more
security in those little stone or plaster houses of theirs, which in time
of peace had been safe homes against all the evils of life. It had
come to their knowledge, very slowly, that they were of no more
protection than tissue paper under a rain of lead. So they were now
leaving for a place at longer range. Poor old grandmothers in black
bonnets and skirts trudged under the lines of poplars, with younger
women who clasped their babes tight in one hand while with the other
they carried heavy bundles of household goods. They did not walk
very fast. They did not seem very much afraid. They had a kind of
patient misery in their look. Along the road came some more German
prisoners, marching rapidly between mounted guards. Many of them
were wounded, and all of them had a wild, famished, terror-stricken
look. I caught the savage glare of their eyes as they stared into my
car. There was something beast-like and terrible in their gaze like that
of hunted animals caught in a trap.
At a turn in the road the battle lay before us, and we were in the zone
of fire. Away across the fields was a line of villages, with the town of
Dixmude a little to the right of us, perhaps two kilometres away. From
each little town smoke was rising in separate columns, which met at
the top in a great pall of smoke, as a heavy black cloud cresting
above the light on the horizon line. At every moment this blackness
was brightened by puffs of electric blue, extraordinarily vivid, as shells
burst in the air. Then the colour gradually faded out, and the smoke
darkened and became part of the pall. From the mass of houses in
each town came jabs of flame, following the explosions which
sounded with terrific, thudding shocks.
Upon a line of fifteen kilometres there was an incessant cannonade
and in every town there was a hell. The furthest villages were already
alight. I watched how the flames rose, and became great glowing
furnaces, terribly beautiful. Quite close to us--only a kilometre away
across the fields to the left--there were Belgian batteries at work, and
rifle-fire from many trenches. We were between two fires, and the
Belgian and German shells came screeching across our heads. The
enemy's shells were dropping close to us, ploughing up the fields with
great pits. We could hear them burst and scatter, and could see them
burrow. In front of us on the road lay a dreadful barrier, which brought
us to a halt. An enemy's shell had fallen right on top of an ammunition
convoy. Four horses had been blown to pieces, and lay strewn
across the road. The ammunition wagon had been broken into
fragments, and smashed and burnt to cinders by the explosion of its
own shells. A Belgian soldier lay dead, cut in half by a great fragment
of steel. Further along the road were two other dead horses in pools
of blood. It was a horrible and sickening sight from which one turned
away shuddering with a cold sweat. But we had to pass after some of
this dead flesh had been dragged away. Further down the road we
had left two of the cars in charge of the three ladies. They were to
wait there until we brought back some of the wounded, whom they
would take from us so that we could fetch some more out of
Dixmude. The two ambulances came on with our light car,
commanded by Lieutenant de Broqueville and Dr. Munro. Mr.
Gleeson asked me to help him on the other end of his own stretcher.
I think I may say that none of us quite guessed what was in store for
us. At least I did not guess that we had been asked to go into the
open mouth of Death. I had only a vague idea that Dixmude would be
just a little worse than the place at which we now halted for final
instructions as to the geography of the town.
It was a place which made me feel suddenly cold, in spite of a little
sweat which made my hands moist.
It was a halt between a group of cottages, where Belgian soldiers
were huddled close to the walls under the timber beams of the barns.
Several of the cottages were already smashed by shell-fire. There
was a great gaping hole through one of the roofs. The roadway was
strewn with bricks and plaster, and every now and then a group of
men scattered as shrapnel bullets came pattering down. We were in
an inferno of noise. It seemed as though we stood in the midst of the
guns within sight of each other's muzzles. I was deafened and a little
dazed, but very clear in the head, so that my thoughts seemed
extraordinarily vivid. I was thinking, among other things, of how soon I
should be struck by one of those flying bullets, like the men who lay
moaning inside the doorway of one of the cottages. On a calculation
of chances it could not be long.
The Belgian official in charge of this company was very courteous
and smiling. It was only by a sudden catch of the breath between his
words that one guessed at the excitement of his brain. He explained
to us, at what seemed to me needless length, the ease with which we
could get into Dixmude, where there were many wounded. He drew a
map of the streets, so that we could find the way to the Hôtel de Ville,
where some of them lay. We thanked him, and told the chauiîeurs to
move on. I was in one of the ambulances and Gleeson sat behind me
in the narrow space between the stretchers. Over my shoulder he
talked in a quiet voice of the job that lay before us. I was glad of that
quiet voice, so placid in its courage.
We went forward at what seemed to me a crawl, though I think it was
a fair pace. The shells were bursting round us now on all sides.
Shrapnel bullets sprayed the earth about us. It appeared to me an
odd thing that we were still alive.
Then we came into Dixmude. It was a fair-sized town, with many
beautiful buildings, and fine old houses in the Flemish style--so I was
told. When I saw it for the first time it was a place of death and horror.
The streets through which we passed were utterly deserted and
wrecked from end to end as though by an earthquake. Incessant
explosions of shell-fire crashed down upon the walls which still stood.
Great gashes opened in the walls, which then toppled and fell. A roof
came tumbling down with an appalling clatter. Like a house of cards
blown down by a puff of wind a little shop suddenly collapsed into a
mass of ruins. Here and there, further into the town, we saw living
figures. They ran swiftly for a moment and then disappeared into dark
caverns under toppling porticoes. They were Belgian soldiers.
We were now in a side street leading into the Town Hall square. It
seemed impossible to pass owing to the wreckage strewn across the
road.
"Try to take it," said Dr. Munro, who was sitting beside the chauffeur.
We took it, bumping over the high débris, and then swept round into
the square. It was a spacious place, with the Town Hall at one side of
it, or what was left of the Town Hall. There was only the splendid shell
of it left, sufficient for us to see the skeleton of a noble building which
had once been the pride of Flemish craftsmen. Even as we turned
towards it parts of it were falling upon the ruins already on the ground.
I saw a great pillar lean forward and then topple down. A mass of
masonry crashed down from the portico. Some stiff, dark forms lay
among the fallen stones. They were dead soldiers. I hardly glanced at
them, for we were in search of living men. The cars were brought to a
halt outside the building and we all climbed down. I lighted a cigarette,
and I noticed two of the other men fumble for matches for the same
purpose. We wanted something to steady us. There was never a
moment when shell-fire was not bursting in that square about us. The
shrapnel bullets whipped the stones. The enemy was making a target
of the Hôtel de Ville, and dropping their shells with dreadful exactitude
on either side of it. I glanced towards a flaring furnace to the right of
the building. There was a wonderful glow at the heart of it. Yet it did
not give me any warmth at that moment.
Dr. Munro and Lieutenant de Broqueville mounted the steps of the
Town Hall, followed by another brancardier and myself. Gleeson was
already taking down a stretcher. He had a little smile about his lips.
A French officer and two men stood under the broken archway of the
entrance between the fallen pillars and masonry. A yard away from
them lay a dead soldier--a handsome young man with clear-cut
features turned upwards to the gaping roof. A stream of blood was
coagulating round his head, but did not touch the beauty of his face.
Another dead man lay huddled up quite close, and his face was
hidden.
"Are there any wounded here, sir?" asked our young lieutenant.
The other officer spoke excitedly. He was a brave man, but could not
hide the terror of his soul because he had been standing so long
waiting for death which stood beside him but did not touch him. It
appeared from his words that there were several wounded men
among the dead, down in the cellar. He would be obliged to us if we
could rescue them. We stood on some steps looking down into that
cellar. It was a dark hole--illumined dimly by a lantern, I think. I caught
sight of a little heap of huddled bodies. Two soldiers still unwounded,
dragged three of them out, handed them up, delivered them to us.
The work of getting those three men into the first ambulance seemed
to us interminable. It was really no more than fifteen to twenty
minutes, while they were being arranged.
During that time Dr. Munro was moving about the square in a dreamy
sort of way, like a poet meditating on love or flowers in May.
Lieutenant de Broqueville was making inquiries about other wounded
in other houses. I lent a hand to one of the stretcher-bearers. What
others were doing I don't know, except that Gleeson's calm face
made a clear-cut image on my brain. I had lost consciousness of
myself. Something outside myself, as it seemed, was talking now that
there was no way of escape, that it was monstrous to suppose that all
these bursting shells would not smash the ambulances to bits and
finish the agony of the wounded, and that death is very hideous. I
remember thinking also how ridiculous it is for men to kill each other
like this, and to make such hells.
Then Lieutenant de Broqueville spoke a word of command. "The first
ambulance must now get back."
I was with the first ambulance, in Gleeson's company. We had a full
load of wounded men--and we were loitering. I put my head outside
the cover and gave the word to the chauffeur. As I did so a shrapnel
bullet came past my head, and, striking a piece of ironwork, flattened
out and fell at my feet. I picked it up and put it in my pocket--though
God alone knows why, for I was not in search of souvenirs. So we
started with the first ambulance, through those frightful streets again,
and out into the road to the country.
"Very hot," said one of the men. I think it was the chauffeur.
Somebody else asked if we should get through with luck.
Nobody answered the question. The wounded men with us were very
quiet. I thought they were dead. There was only the incessant
cannonade and the crashing of buildings. Mitrailleuses were at work
now spitting out bullets. It was a worse sound than the shells. It
seemed more deadly in its rattle. I stared back behind the car and
saw the other ambulance in our wake. I did not see the motor-car.
Along the country road the fields were still being ploughed by shell,
which burst over our heads. We came to a halt again at the place
where the soldiers were crouched under the cottage walls. There
were few walls now, and inside some of the remaining cottages many
wounded men. Their own comrades were giving them first aid, and
wiping the blood out of their eyes. We managed to take some of
these on board. They were less quiet than the others we had, and
groaned in a heartrending way.
And then, a little later, we made a painful discovery. Lieutenant de
Broqueville, our gallant young leader, was missing. By some horrible
mischance he had not taken his place in either of the ambulances or
the motor-car. None of us had the least idea what had happened to
him. We had all imagined that he had scrambled up like the rest of
us, after giving the order to get away. We looked at each other in
dismay. There was only one thing to do, to get back in search of him.
Even in the half-hour since we had left the town Dixmude had burst
into flames and was a great blazing torch. If young de Broqueville
were left in that furnace he would not have a chance of life.
It was Gleeson and another stretcher-bearer who with great gallantry
volunteered to go back and search for our leader. They took the light
car and sped back towards the burning town.
The ambulances went on with their cargo of wounded, and I was left
in a car with one of the ladies while Dr. Munro was ministering to a
man on the point of death. It was the girl whom I had seen on the
lawn of an old English house in the days before the war. She was
very worried about the fate of de Broqueville, and anxious beyond
words as to what would befall the three friends who were now
missing. We drove back along the road towards Dixmude, and
rescued another wounded man left in a wayside cottage. By this time
there were five towns blazing in the darkness, and in spite of the
awful suspense which we were now suffering, we could not help
staring at the fiendish splendour of that sight. Dr. Munro joined us
again, and after a consultation we decided to get as near Dixmude as
we could, in ease our friends had to come out without their car or
wounded.
The enemy's bombardment was now terrific. All its guns were
concentrated upon Dixmude and the surrounding trenches. In the
darkness close under a stable wall I stood listening to the great
crashes for an hour, when I had not expected such a grace of life.
Inside the stable, soldiers were sleeping in the straw, careless that
any moment a shell might burst through upon them and give them
unwaking sleep. The hour seemed a night. Then we saw the gleam of
headlights, and an English voice called out.
Our two friends had come back. They had gone to the entry of
Dixmude, but could get no further owing to the flames and shells.
They, too, had waited for an hour, but had not found de Broqueville. It
seemed certain that he was dead, and very sorrowfully, as there was
nothing to be done, we drove back to Furnes.
At the gate of the convent were some Belgian ambulances which had
come from another part of the front with their wounded. I helped to
carry one of them in, and strained my shoulders with the weight of the
stretcher. Another wounded man put his arm round my neck, and
then, with a dreadful cry, collapsed, so that I had to hold him in a
strong grip. A third man, horribly smashed about the head, walked
almost unaided into the operating-room. Gleeson and I led him, with
just a touch on his arm. Next morning he lay dead on a little pile of
straw in a quiet corner of the courtyard.
I sat down to a supper which I had not expected to eat. There was a
strange excitement in my body, which trembled a little after the day's
adventures. It seemed very strange to be sitting down to table with
cheerful faces about me. But some of the faces were not cheerful.
Those of us who knew of the disappearance of de Broqueville sat
silently over our soup.
Then suddenly there was a sharp exclamation of surprise--of sheer
amazement--and Lieutenant de Broqueville came walking briskly
forward, alive and well. ... It seemed a miracle.
It was hardly less than that. For several hours after our departure
from Dixmude he had remained in that inferno. He had missed us
when he went down into the cellars to haul out another wounded
man, forgetting that he had given us the order to start. There he had
remained with the buildings crashing all around him until the enemy's
fire had died down a little. He succeeded in rescuing his wounded, for
whom he found room in a Belgian ambulance outside the town, and
walked back along the road to Furnes. So we gripped his hands and
were thankful for his escape.
10
Early next morning I went into Dixmude again with some of the men
belonging to the "flying column." It was more than probable that there
were still a number of wounded men there, if any of them were left
alive after that night of horror when they lay in cellars or under the
poor shelter of broken walls. Perhaps also there were men but lately
wounded, for before the dawn had come some of the Belgian infantry
had been sent into the outlying streets with mitrailleuses, and on the
opposite side German infantry were in possession of other streets or
of other ruins, so that bullets were ripping across the mangled town.
The artillery was fairly quiet. Only a few shells were bursting over the
Belgian lines--enough to keep the air rumbling with irregular
thunderclaps. But as we approached the corner where we had waited
for news of de Broqueville one of these shells burst very close to us
and ploughed up a big hole in a field across the roadside ditch. We
drove more swiftly with empty cars and came into the streets of
Dixmude. They were sheets of fire, burning without flame but with a
steady glow of embers. They were but cracked shells of houses,
unroofed and swept clean of their floors and furniture, so that all but
the bare walls and a few charred beams had been consumed by the
devouring appetite of fire. Now and again one of the beams broke
and fell with a crash into the glowing heart of the furnace, which had
once been a Flemish house, raising a fountain of sparks.
Further into the town, however, there stood, by the odd freakishness
of an artillery bombardment, complete houses hardly touched by
shells and, very neat and prim, between masses of shapeless ruins.
One street into which I drove was so undamaged that I could hardly
believe my eyes, having looked back the night before to one great
torch which men called "Dixmude." Nevertheless some of its window-
frames had bulged with heat, and panes of glass fell with a splintering
noise on to the stone pavement. As I passed a hail of shrapnel was
suddenly flung upon the wall on one side of the street and the bullets
played at marbles in the roadway. In this street some soldiers were
grouped about two wounded men, one of them only lightly touched,
the other--a French marine--at the point of death, lying very still in a
huddled way with a clay-coloured face smeared with blood. We
picked them up and put them into one of the ambulances, the dying
man groaning a little as we strapped him on the stretcher.
The Belgian soldiers who had come into the town at dawn stood
about our ambulances as though our company gave them a little
comfort. They did not speak much, but had grave wistful eyes like
men tired of all this misery about them but unable to escape from it.
They were young men with a stubble of fair hair on their faces and
many days' dirt.
"Vous êtes très aimable," said one of them when I handed him a
cigarette, which he took with a trembling hand. Then he stared up the
street as another shower of shrapnel swept it, and said in a hasty
way, "C'est l'enfer... Pour trois mois je reste sous feu. C'est trop,
n'est-ce pas?"
But there was no time for conversation about war and the effects of
war upon the souls of men. The German guns were beginning to
speak again, and unless we made haste we might not rescue the
wounded men.
"Are there many blessés here?" asked our leader.
One of the soldiers pointed to a house which had a tavern sign above
it.
"They've been taken inside," he said. "I helped to carry them." We
dodged the litter in the roadway, where, to my amazement, two old
ladies were searching in the rubbish-heaps for the relics of their
houses. They had stayed in Dixmude during this terrible
bombardment, hidden in some cellar, and now had emerged, in their
respectable black gowns, to see what damage had been done. They
seemed to be looking for something in particular--some little object
not easy to find among these heaps of calcined stones and twisted
bars of iron. One old woman shook her head sadly as though to say,
"Dear me, I can't see it anywhere." I wondered if they were looking for
some family photograph--or for some child's cinders. It might have
been one or the other, for many of these Belgian peasants had
reached a point of tragedy when death is of no more importance than
any trivial loss. The earth and sky had opened, swallowing up all their
little world in a devilish destruction. They had lost the proportions of
everyday life in the madness of things.
In the tavern there was a Belgian doctor with a few soldiers to help
him, and a dozen wounded in the straw which had been put down on
the tiled floor. Another wounded man was sitting on a chair, and the
doctor was bandaging up a leg which looked like a piece of raw meat
at which dogs had been gnawing. Something in the straw moved and
gave a frightful groan. A boy soldier with his back propped against the
wall had his knees up to his chin and his face in his grimy hands
through which tears trickled. There was a soppy bandage about his
head. Two men close to where I stood lay stiff and stark, as though
quite dead, but when I bent down to them I heard their hard breathing
and the snuffle of their nostrils. The others more lightly wounded
watched us like animals, without curiosity but with a horrible sort of
patience in their eyes, which seemed to say, "Nothing matters...
Neither hunger nor thirst nor pain. We are living but our spirit is dead."
The doctor did not want us to take away his wounded at once. The
German shells were coming heavily again, on the outskirts of the
town through which we had to pass on our way out. An officer had
just come in to say they were firing at the level crossing to prevent the
Belgian ambulances from coming through. It would be better to wait a
while before going back again. It was foolish to take unnecessary
risks.
I admit frankly that I was anxious to go as quickly as possible with
these wounded A shell burst over the houses on the opposite side of
the street. When I stood outside watching two soldiers who had been
sent further down to bring in two other wounded men who lay in a
house there, I saw them dodge into a doorway for cover as another
hail of shrapnel whipped the stones about them. Afterwards they
made an erratic course down the street like drunken men, and
presently I saw them staggering back again with their wounded
comrades, who had their arms about the necks of their rescuers. I
went out to aid them, but did not like the psychology of this street,
where death was teasing the footsteps of men, yapping at their heels.
I helped to pack up one of the ambulances and went back to Furnes
sitting next to the driver, but twisted round so that I could hold one of
the stretcher poles which wanted to jolt out of its strap so that the
man lying with a dead weight on the canvas would come down with a
smash upon the body of the man beneath.
"Ca y est," said my driver friend, very cheerfully. He was a gentleman
volunteer with his own ambulance and looked like a seafaring man in
his round yachting cap and blue jersey. He did not speak much
French, I fancy, but I loved to hear him say that "Ca y est," when he
raised a stretcher in his hefty arms and packed a piece of bleeding
flesh into the top of his car with infinite care lest he should give a jolt
to broken bones.
One of the men behind us had his leg smashed in two places. As we
went over roads with great stones and the rubbish of ruined houses
he cried out again and again in a voice of anguish:
"Pas si vite! Pour l'amour de Dieu... Pas si vite!"
Not so quickly. But when we came out of the burnt streets towards
the level crossing of the railway it seemed best to go quickly. Shells
were falling in the fields quite close to us. One of them dug a deep
hole in the road twenty yards ahead of us. Another burst close
behind. Instinctively I yearned for speed. I wanted to rush along that
road and get beyond the range of fire. But the driver in the blue
jersey, hearing that awful cry behind him, slowed down and crawled
along.
"Poor devil," he said. "I can imagine what it feels like when two bits of
broken bone get rubbing together. Every jolt and jar must give him
hell."
He went slower still, at a funeral pace, and looking back into the
ambulance said "Ça y est, mon vieux... Bon courage!"
Afterwards, this very gallant gentleman was wounded himself, and lay
in one of the ambulances which he had often led towards adventure,
with a jagged piece of steel in his leg, and two bones rasping together
at every jolt. But when he was lifted up, he stifled a groan and gave
his old cheerful cry of "Ca y est!"
11
During the two days that followed the convent at Furnes was
overcrowded with the wounded. All day long and late into the night
they were brought back by the Belgian ambulances from the zone of
fire, and hardly an hour passed without a bang at the great wooden
gates in the courtyard which were flung open to let in another tide of
human wreckage.
The Belgians were still holding their last remaining ground--it did not
amount to more than a few fields and villages between the French
frontier and Dixmude--with a gallant resistance which belongs without
question to the heroic things of history. During these late days in
October, still fighting almost alone, for there were no British soldiers to
help them and only a few French batteries with two regiments of
French marines, they regained some of their soil and beat back the
enemy from positions to which it had advanced. In spite of the most
formidable attacks made by the German troops along the coastline
between Westende and Ostende, and in a crescent sweeping round
Dixmude for about thirty kilometres, those Belgian soldiers, tired out
by months of fighting with decimated regiments and with but the poor
remnant of a disorganized army, not only stood firm, but inflicted
heavy losses upon the enemy and captured four hundred prisoners.
For a few hours the Germans succeeded in crossing the Yser,
threatening a general advance upon the Belgian line. Before Nieuport
their trenches were only fifty metres away from those of the Belgians,
and on the night of October 22 they charged eight times with the
bayonet in order to force their way through.
Each assault failed against the Belgian infantry, who stayed in their
trenches in spite of the blood that eddied about their feet and the
corpses that lay around them. Living and dead made a rampart which
the Germans could not break. With an incessant rattle of mitrailleuses
and rifle-fire, the Belgians mowed down the German troops as they
advanced in solid ranks, so that on each of those eight times the
enemy's attack was broken and destroyed. They fell like the leaves
which were then being scattered by the autumn wind and their bodies
were strewn between the trenches. Some of them were the bodies of
very young men--poor boys of sixteen and seventeen from German
high schools and universities who were the sons of noble and well-to-
do families, had been accepted as volunteers by Prussian war-lords
ruthless of human life in their desperate gamble with fate. Some of
these lads were brought to the hospitals in Furnes, badly wounded.
One of them carried into the convent courtyard smiled as he lay on
his stretcher and spoke imperfect French very politely to
Englishwomen who bent over him, piteous as girls who see a
wounded bird. He seemed glad to be let off slightly with only a wound
in his foot which would make him limp for life; very glad to be out of all
the horror of those trenches on the German side of the Yser. One
could hardly call this boy an "enemy." He was just a poor innocent
caught up by a devilish power, and dropped when of no more use as
an instrument of death. The pity that stirs one in the presence of one
of these broken creatures does not come to one on the field of battle,
where there is no single individuality, but only a grim conflict ol
unseen powers, as inhuman as thunderbolts, or as the destructive
terror of the old nature gods. The enemy, then, fills one with a hatred
based on fear. One rejoices to see a shell burst over his batteries and
is glad at the thought of the death that came to him of that puff of
smoke. But I found that no such animosity stirs one in the presence
of the individual enemy or among crowds of their prisoners. One only
wonders at the frightfulness of the crime which makes men kill each
other without a purpose of their own, but at the dictate of powers far
removed from their own knowledge and interests in life.
12
That courtyard in the convent at Furnes will always haunt my mind as
the scene of a grim drama. Sometimes, standing there alone, in the
darkness, by the side of an ambulance, I used to look up at the stars
and wonder what God might think of all this work if there were any
truth in old faiths. A pretty mess we mortals made of life! I might
almost have laughed at the irony of it all, except that my laughter
would have choked in my throat and turned me sick. They were
beasts, and worse than beasts, to maim and mutilate each other like
this, having no real hatred in their hearts for each other, but only a
stupid perplexity that they should be hurled in masses against each
other's ranks, to slash and shoot and burn in obedience to orders by
people who were their greatest enemies--Ministers of State, with cold
and calculating brains, high inhuman officers who studied battlefields
as greater chessboards. So I--a little black ant in a shadow on the
earth under the eternal sky--used to think like this, and to stop
thinking these silly irritating thoughts turned to the job in hand, which
generally was to take up one end of a stretcher laden with a bloody
man, or to give my shoulder to a tall soldier who leaned upon it and
stumbled forward to an open door which led to the operating-table
and an empty bed, where he might die if his luck were out.
The courtyard was always full of stir and bustle in the hours when the
ambulance convoys came in with their cargoes of men rescued from
the firing zone. The headlights of the cars thrust shafts of blinding
light into the darkness as they steered round in the steep and narrow
road which led to the convent gates between two high thick walls, and
then, with a grinding and panting, came inside to halt beside cars
already at a standstill. The cockney voices of the chauffeurs called to
each other.
"Blast yer, Bill... Carn't yer give a bit of elber room? Gord almighty,
'ow d'yer think I can get in there?"
Women came out into the yard, their white caps touched by the light
of their lanterns, and women's voices spoke quietly.
"Have you got many this time?" "We can hardly find an inch of
room." "It's awful having to use stretchers for beds." "There were
six deaths this afternoon."
Then would follow a silence or a whispering of stretcher-bearers,
telling their adventures to a girl in khaki breeches, standing with one
hand in her jacket pocket, and with the little flare of a cigarette
glowing upon her cheek and hair.
"All safe? ... That was luck!"
"O mon Dieu! O, cré nom! O! O!"
It was a man's voice crying in agony, rising to a shuddering, blood-
curdling scream:
"O Jésus! O! O!"
One could not deafen one's ears against that note of human agony. It
pierced into one's soul. One could only stand gripping one's hands in
this torture chamber, with darkness between high walls, and with
shadows making awful noises out of the gulfs of blackness.
The cries of the wounded men died down and whimpered out into a
dull faint moaning.
A laugh came chuckling behind an ambulance.
"Hot? ... I should think it was! But we picked the men up and crossed
the bridge all right... The shells were falling on every side of us. ... I
was pretty scared, you bet... It's a bit too thick, you know!"
Silence again. Then a voice speaking quietly across the yard:
"Anyone to lend a hand? There's a body to be carried out."
I helped to carry out the body, as every one helped to do any small
work if he had his hands free at the moment. It was the saving of
one's sanity and self-respect. Yet to me, more sensitive perhaps than
it is good to be, it was a moral test almost greater than my strength of
will to enter that large room where the wounded lay, and to approach
a dead man through a lane of dying. (So many of them died after a
night in our guest-house. Not all the skill of surgeons could patch up
some of those bodies, torn open with ghastly wounds from German
shells.) The smell of wet and muddy clothes, coagulated blood and
gangrened limbs, of iodine and chloroform, sickness and sweat of
agony, made a stench which struck one's senses with a foul blow. I
used to try and close my nostrils to it, holding my breath lest I should
vomit. I used to try to keep my eyes upon the ground, to avoid the
sight of those smashed faces, and blinded eyes, and tattered bodies,
lying each side of me in the hospital cots, or in the stretchers set upon
the floor between them. I tried to shut my eyes to the sounds in this
room, the hideous snuffle of men drawing their last breaths, the long-
drawn moans of men in devilish pain, the ravings of fever-stricken
men crying like little children--"Maman! O Maman!"--or repeating over
and over again some angry protest against a distant comrade.
But sights and sounds and smells forced themselves upon one's
senses. I had to look and to listen and to breathe in the odour of
death and corruption. For hours afterwards I would be haunted with
the death face of some young man, lying half-naked on his bed while
nurses dressed his horrible wounds. What waste of men! What
disfigurement of the beauty that belongs to youth! Bearded soldier
faces lay here in a tranquillity that told of coming death. They had
been such strong and sturdy men, tilling their Flemish fields, and
living with a quiet faith in their hearts. Now they were dying before
their time, conscious, some of them, that death was near, so that
weak tears dropped upon their beards, and in their eyes was a great
fear and anguish.
"Je ne veux pas mourir!" said one of them. "O ma pauvre femme! Je
ne veux pas mourir!"
He did not wish to die... but in the morning he was dead.
The corpse that I had to carry out lay pinned up in a sheet. The work
had been very neatly done by the nurse. She whispered to me as I
stood on one side of the bed, with a friend on the other side.
"Be careful. ... He might fall in half."