and helped to lift its weight on to the stretcher. Yes, some of the shell
wounds were rather big. One could hardly sew a man together again
with bits of cotton... It was only afterwards, when I had helped to put
the stretcher in a separate room on the other side of the courtyard,
that a curious trembling took possession of me for a moment... The
horror of it all! Were the virtues which were supposed to come from
war, "the binding strength of nations," "the cleansing of corruption,"
all the falsities of men who make excuses for this monstrous crime,
worth the price that was being paid in pain and tears and death? It is
only the people who sit at home who write these things. When one is
in the midst of war false heroics are blown out of one's soul by all its
din and tumult of human agony. One learns that courage itself exists,
in most cases, as the pride in the heart of men very much afraid--a
pride which makes them hide their fear. They do not become more
virtuous in war, but only reveal the virtue that is in them. The most
heroic courage which came into the courtyard at Furnes was not that
of the stretcher-bearers who went out under fire, but that of the
doctors and nurses who tended the wounded, toiling ceaselessly in
the muck of blood, amidst all those sights and sounds. My spirit
bowed before them as I watched them at work. I was proud if I could
carry soup to any of them when they came into the refectory for a
hurried meal, or if I could wash a plate clean so that they might fill it
with a piece of meat from the kitchen stew. I would have cleaned their
boots for them if it had been worth while cleaning boots to tramp the
filthy yard.
"It's not surgery!" said one of the young surgeons, coming out of the
operating-theatre and washing his hands at the kitchen sink; "it's
butchery!"
He told me that he had never seen such wounds or imagined them,
and as for the conditions in which he worked--he raised his hands
and laughed at the awfulness of them, because it is best to laugh
when there is no remedy. There was a scarcity of dressings, of
instruments, of sterilizers. The place was so crowded that there was
hardly room to turn, and wounded men poured in so fast that it was
nothing but hacking and sewing.
"I'm used to blood," said the young surgeon. "It's some years now
since I was put through my first ordeal, of dissecting dead bodies and
then handling living tissue. You know how it's done--by gradual
stages until a student no longer wants to faint at the sight of raw flesh,
but regards it as so much material for scientific work. But this!"--he
looked towards the room into which the wounded came--"It's getting
on my nerves a little. It's the sense of wanton destruction that makes
one loathe it, the utter senselessness of it all, the waste of such good
stuff. War is a hellish game and I'm so sorry for all the poor Belgians
who are getting it in the neck. They didn't ask for it!"
The wooden gates opened to let in another ambulance full of Belgian
wounded, and the young surgeon nodded to me with a smile.
"Another little lot! I must get back into the slaughterhouse. So long!"
I helped out one of the "sitting-up" cases--a young man with a wound
in his chest, who put his arm about my neck and said, "Merci! Merci!"
with a fine courtesy, until suddenly he went limp, so that I had to hold
him with all my strength, while he vomited blood down my coat. I had
to get help to carry him indoors.
And yet there was laughter in the convent where so many men lay
wounded. It was only by gaiety and the quick capture of any jest that
those doctors and nurses and ambulance girls could keep their
nerves steady. So in the refectory, when they sat down for a meal,
there was an endless fire of raillery, and the blue-eyed boy with the
blond hair used to crow like Peter Pan and speak a wonderful mixture
of French and English, and play the jester gallantly. There would be
processions of plate-bearers to the kitchen next door, where a
splendid Englishwoman--one of those fine square-faced, brown-eyed,
cheerful souls--had been toiling all day in the heat of oven and stoves
to cook enough food for fifty-five hungry people who could not wait for
their meals. There was a scramble between two doctors for the last
potatoes, and a duel between one of them and myself in the slicing
up of roast beef or boiled mutton, and amorous advances to the lady
cook for a tit-bit in the baking-pan. There never was such a kitchen,
and a County Council inspector would have reported on it in lurid
terms. The sink was used as a wash-place by surgeons, chauffeurs,
and stretcher-bearers. Nurses would come through with bloody rags
from the ward, which was only an open door away. Lightly wounded
men, covered with Yser mud, would sit at a side table, eating the
remnants of other people's meals. Above the sizzling of sausages
and the clatter of plates one could hear the moaning of the wounded
and the incessant monologue of the fever-stricken. And yet it is
curious I look back upon that convent kitchen as a place of gaiety,
holding many memories of comradeship, and as a little sanctuary from
the misery of war. I was a scullion in it, at odd hours of the day and
night when I was not following the ambulance wagons to the field, or
helping to clean the courtyard or doing queer little jobs which some
one had to do.
"I want you to dig a hole and help me to bury an arm," said one of the
nurses. "Do you mind?"
I spent another hour helping a lady to hang up blankets, not very well
washed, because they were still stained with blood, and not very
sanitary, because the line was above a pile of straw upon which men
had died. There were many rubbish heaps in the courtyard near
which it was not wise to linger, and always propped against the walls
were stretchers soppy with blood, or with great dark stains upon them
where blood had dried. It was like the courtyard of a shambles, this
old convent enclosure, and indeed it was exactly that, except that the
animals were not killed outright, but lingered in their pain.
13
Early each morning the ambulances started on their way to the zone
of fire, where always one might go gleaning in the harvest fields of
war. The direction was given us, with the password of the day, by
young de Broqueville, who received the latest reports from the
Belgian headquarters staff. As a rule there was not much choice. It
lay somewhere between the roads to Nieuport on the coast, and
inland, to Pervyse, Dixmude, St. Georges, or Ramscapelle where the
Belgian and German lines formed a crescent down to Ypres.
The centre of that half-circle girdled by the guns was an astounding
and terrible panorama, traced in its outline by the black fumes of
shell-fire above the stabbing flashes of the batteries. Over Nieuport
there was a canopy of smoke, intensely black, but broken every
moment by blue glares of light as a shell burst and rent the
blackness. Villages were burning on many points of the crescent,
some of them smouldering drowsily, others blazing fiercely like
beacon fires.
Dixmude was still alight at either end, but the fires seemed to have
burnt down at its centre. Beyond, on the other horn of the crescent,
were five flaming torches, which marked what were once the neat
little villages of a happy Belgium. It was in the centre of this
battleground, and the roads about me had been churned up by shells
and strewn with shrapnel bullets. Close to me in a field, under the
cover of a little wood, were some Belgian batteries. They were firing
with a machine-like regularity, and every minute came the heavy bark
of the gun, followed by the swish of the shell, as it flew in a high arc
and then smashed over the German lines. It was curious to calculate
the length of time between the flash and the explosion. Further away
some naval guns belonging to the French marines were getting the
range of the enemy's positions, and they gave a new note of music to
this infernal orchestra. It was a deep, sullen crash, with a tremendous
menace in its tone. The enemy's shells were bursting incessantly,
and at very close range, so that at times they seemed only a few
yards away. The Germans had many great howitzers, and the burst
of the shell was followed by enormous clouds which hung heavily in
the air for ten minutes or more. It was these shells which dug great
holes in the ground deep enough for a cart to be buried. Their moral
effect was awful, and one's soul was a shuddering coward before
them.
The roads were encumbered with long convoys of provisions for the
troops, ambulances, Red Cross motor-cars, gun-wagons, and farm
carts. Two regiments of Belgian cavalry--the chasseurs à cheval--
were dismounted and bivouacked with their horses drawn up in single
line along the roadway for half a mile or more. The men were splendid
fellows, hardened by the long campaign, and amazingly careless of
shells. They wore a variety of uniforms, for they were but the
gathered remnants of the Belgian cavalry division which had fought
from the beginning of the war. I was surprised to see their horses in
such good condition, in spite of a long ordeal which had so steadied
their nerves that they paid not the slightest heed to the turmoil of the
guns.
Near the line of battle, through outlying villages and past broken
farms, companies of Belgian infantry were huddled under cover out of
the way of shrapnel bullets if they could get the shelter of a doorway
or the safer side of a brick wall. I stared into their faces and saw how
dead they looked. It seemed as if their vital spark had already been
put out by the storm of battle. Their eyes were sunken and quite
expressionless. For week after week, night after night, they had been
exposed to shell-fire, and something had died within them--perhaps
the desire to live. Every now and then some of them would duck their
heads as a shell burst within fifty or a hundred yards of them, and I
saw then that fear could still live in the hearts of men who had
become accustomed to the constant chance of death. For fear exists
with the highest valour, and its psychological effect is not unknown to
heroes who have the courage to confess the truth.
14
"If any man says he is not afraid of shell-fire," said one of the bravest
men I have ever met--and at that moment we were watching how the
enemy's shrapnel was ploughing up the earth on either side of the
road on which we stood--"he is a liar!" There are very few men in this
war who make any such pretence. On the contrary, most of the
French, Belgian, and English soldiers with whom I have had wayside
conversations since the war began, find a kind of painful pleasure in
the candid confession of their fears.
"It is now three days since I have been frightened," said a young
English officer, who, I fancy, was never scared in his life before he
came out to see these battlefields of terror.
"I was paralysed with a cold and horrible fear when I was ordered
to advance with my men over open ground under the enemy's
shrapnel," said a French officer with the steady brown eyes of a man
who in ordinary tests of courage would smile at the risk of death.
But this shell-fire is not an ordinary test of courage. Courage is
annihilated in the face of it. Something else takes its place--a
philosophy of fatalism, sometimes an utter boredom with the way in
which death plays the fool with men, threatening but failing to kill; in
most cases a strange extinction of all emotions and sensations, so
that men who have been long under shell-fire have a peculiar rigidity
of the nervous system, as if something has been killed inside them,
though outwardly they are still alive and untouched.
The old style of courage, when man had pride and confidence in his
own strength and valour against other men, when he was on an
equality with his enemy in arms and intelligence, has almost gone. It
has quite gone when he is called upon to advance or hold the ground
in face of the enemy's artillery. For all human qualities are of no avail
against those death-machines. What are quickness of wit, the
strength of a man's right arm, the heroic fibre of his heart, his cunning
in warfare, when he is opposed by an enemy's batteries which belch
out bursting shells with frightful precision and regularity? What is the
most courageous man to do in such an hour? Can he stand erect
and fearless under a sky which is raining down jagged pieces of
steel? Can he adopt the pose of an Adelphi hero, with a scornful
smile on his lips, when a yard away from him a hole large enough to
bury a taxicab is torn out of the earth, and when the building against
which he has been standing is suddenly knocked into a ridiculous
ruin?
It is impossible to exaggerate the monstrous horror of the shell-fire,
as I knew when I stood in the midst of it, watching its effect upon the
men around me, and analysing my own psychological sensations with
a morbid interest. I was very much afraid--day after day I faced that
musis and hated it--but there were all sorts of other sensations
besides fear which worked a change in me. I was conscious of great
physical discomfort which reacted upon my brain. The noises were
even more distressing to me than the risk of death. It was terrifying in
its tumult. The German batteries were hard at work round Nieuport,
Dixmude, Pervyse, and other towns and villages, forming a crescent,
with its left curve sweeping away from the coast. One could see the
stabbing flashes from some of the enemy's guns and a loud and
unceasing roar came from them with regular rolls of thunderous noise
interrupted by sudden and terrific shocks, which shattered into one's
brain and shook one's body with a kind of disintegrating tumult. High
above this deep-toned concussion came the cry of the shells--that
long carrying buzz--like a monstrous, angry bee rushing away from a
burning hive--which rises into a shrill singing note before ending and
bursting into the final boom which scatters death.
But more awful was the noise of our own guns. At Nieuport I stood
only a few hundred yards away from the warships lying off the coast.
Each shell which they sent across the dunes was like one of Jove's
thunderbolts, and made one's body and soul quake with the agony of
its noise. The vibration was so great that it made my skull ache as
though it had been hammered. Long afterwards I found myself
trembling with those waves of vibrating sounds. Worse still, because
sharper and more piercingly staccato, was my experience close to a
battery of French cent-vingt. Each shell was fired with a hard metallic
crack, which seemed to knock a hole into my ear-drums. I suffered
intolerably from the noise, yet--so easy it is to laugh in the midst of
pain---I laughed aloud when a friend of mine, passing the battery in
his motor-car, raised his hand to one of the gunners, and said, "Un
moment, s'il vous plaît!" It was like asking Jove to stop his
thunderbolts.
Some people get accustomed to the noise, but others never. Every
time a battery fired simultaneously one of the men who were with me,
a hard, tough type of mechanic, shrank and ducked his head with an
expression of agonized horror. He confessed to me that it "knocked
his nerves to pieces." Three such men out of six or seven had to be
invalided home in one week. One of them had a crise de nerfs, which
nearly killed him. Yet it was not fear which was the matter with them.
Intellectually they were brave men and coerced themselves into
joining many perilous adventures. It was the intolerable strain upon
the nervous system that made wrecks of them. Some men are
attacked with a kind of madness in the presence of shells. It is what a
French friend of mine called la folie des obus. It is a kind of spiritual
exultation which makes them lose self-consciousness and be caught
up, as it were, in the delirium of those crashing, screaming things. In
the hottest quarter of an hour in Dixmude one of my friends paced
about aimlessly with a dreamy look in his eyes. I am sure he had not
the slightest idea where he was or what he was doing. I believe he
was "outside himself," to use a good old-fashioned phrase. And at
Antwerp, when a convoy of British ambulances escaped with their
wounded through a storm of shells, one man who had shown a
strange hankering for the heart of the inferno, stepped off his car, and
said: "I must go back, I must go back! Those shells call to me." He
went back and has never been heard of again.
Greater than one's fear, more overmastering in one's interest is this
shell-fire. It is frightfully interesting to watch the shrapnel bursting
near bodies of troops, to see the shells kicking up the earth, now in
this direction and now in that; to study a great building gradually losing
its shape and falling into ruins; to see how death takes its toll in an
indiscriminate way--smashing a human being into pulp a few yards
away and leaving oneself alive, or scattering a roadway with bits of
raw flesh which a moment ago was a team of horses, or whipping the
stones about a farmhouse with shrapnel bullets which spit about the
crouching figures of soldiers who stare at these pellets out of sunken
eyes. One's interest holds one in the firing zone with a grip from which
one's intelligence cannot escape whatever may be one's cowardice.
It is the most satisfying thrill of horror in the world. How foolish this
death is! How it picks and chooses, taking a man here and leaving a
man there by just a hair's-breadth of difference. It is like looking into
hell and watching the fury of supernatural forces at play with human
bodies, tearing them to pieces with great splinters of steel and
burning them in the furnace-fires of shell-stricken towns, and in a
devilish way obliterating the image of humanity in a welter of blood.
There is a beauty in it too, for the aestheticism of a Nero. Beautiful
and terrible were the fires of those Belgian towns which I watched
under a star-strewn sky. There was a pure golden glow, as of liquid
metal, beneath the smoke columns and the leaping tongues of flame.
And many colours were used to paint this picture of war, for the
enemy used shells with different coloured fumes, by which I was told
they studied the effect of their fire. Most vivid is the ordinary shrapnel,
which tears a rent through the black volumes of smoke rolling over a
smouldering town with a luminous sphere of electric blue. Then from
the heavier guns come dense puff-balls of tawny orange, violet, and
heliotrope, followed by fleecy little cumuli of purest white. One's mind
is absorbed in this pageant of shell-fire, and with a curious intentness,
with that rigidity of nervous and muscular force which I have
described, one watches the zone of fire sweeping nearer to oneself,
bursting quite close, killing people not very far away.
Men who have been in the trenches under heavy shell-fire,
sometimes for as long as three days, come out of their torment like
men who have been buried alive. They have the brownish, ashen
colour of death. They tremble as through anguish. They are dazed
and stupid for a time. But they go back. That is the marvel of it. They
go back day after day, as the Belgians went day after day. There is
no fun in it, no sport, none of that heroic adventure which used
perhaps--gods know--to belong to warfare when men were matched
against men, and not against unapproachable artillery. This is their
courage, stronger than all their fear. There is something in us, even
divine pride of manhood, a dogged disregard of death, though it
comes from an unseen enemy out of a smoke-wracked sky, like the
thunderbolts of the gods, which makes us go back, though we know
the terror of it. For honour's sake men face again the music of that
infernal orchestra, and listen with a deadly sickness in their hearts to
the song of the shell screaming the French word for kill, which is tue!
tue!
It was at night that I used to see the full splendour of the war's infernal
beauty. After a long day in the fields travelling back in the repeated
journeys to the station of Fortem, where the lightly wounded men
used to be put on a steam tramway for transport to the Belgian
hospitals, the ambulances would gather their last load and go
homeward to Furnes. It was quite dark then, and towards nine o'clock
the enemy's artillery would slacken fire, only the heavy guns sending
out long-range shots. But five towns or more were blazing fiercely in
the girdle of fire, and the sky throbbed with the crimson glare of their
furnaces, and tall trees to which the autumn foliage clung would be
touched with light, so that their straight trunks along a distant highway
stood like ghostly sentinels. Now and again, above one of the burning
towns a shell would burst as though the enemy were not content with
their fires and would smash them into smaller fuel.
As I watched the flames, I knew that each one of those poor burning
towns was the ruin of something more than bricks and mortar. It was
the ruin of a people's ideals, fulfilled throughout centuries of quiet
progress in arts and crafts. It was the shattering of all those things for
which they praised God in their churches--the good gifts of home-life,
the security of the family, the impregnable stronghold, as it seemed,
of prosperity built by labour and thrift now utterly destroyed.
15
I motored over to Nieuport-les-Bains, the seaside resort of the town of
Nieuport itself, which is a little way from the coast. It was one of those
Belgian watering-places much beloved by the Germans before their
guns knocked it to bits--a row of red-brick villas with a few pretentious
hotels utterly uncharacteristic of the Flemish style of architecture,
lining a promenade and built upon the edge of dreary and
monotonous sand-dunes. On this day the place and its neighbourhood
were utterly and terribly desolate. The only human beings I passed
on my car were two seamen of the British Navy, who were fixing
up a wireless apparatus on the edge of the sand. They stared at
our ambulances curiously, and one of them gave me a prolonged
and strenuous wink, as though to say, "A fine old game, mate,
this bloody war!" Beyond, the sea was very calm, like liquid lead,
and a slight haze hung over it, putting a gauzy veil about a line of
British and French monitors which lay close to the coast. Not a soul
could be seen along the promenade of Nieuport-les-Bains, but the
body of a man--a French marine--whose soul had gone in flight upon
the great adventure of eternity, lay at the end of it with his sightless
eyes staring up to the grey sky. Presently I was surprised to see an
elderly civilian and a small boy come out of one of the houses. The
man told me he was the proprietor of the Grand Hotel, "but," he
added, with a gloomy smile, "I have no guests at this moment In a
little while, perhaps my hotel will have gone also." He pointed to a
deep hole ploughed up an hour ago by a German "Jack Johnson." It
was deep enough to bury a taxicab.
For some time, as I paced up and down the promenade, there was
no answer to the mighty voices of the naval guns firing from some
British warships lying along the coast. Nor did any answer come for
some time to a French battery snugly placed in a hollow of the dunes,
screened by a few trees. I listened to the overwhelming concussion of
each shot from the ships, wondering at the mighty flight of the shell,
which travelled through the air with the noise of an express train
rushing through a tunnel. It was curious that no answer came! Surely
the German batteries beyond the river would reply to that deadly
cannonade.
I had not long to wait for the inevitable response. It came with a
shriek, and a puff of bluish smoke, as the German shrapnel burst a
hundred yards from where I stood. It was followed by several shells
which dropped into the dunes, not far from the French battery of cent-
vingt. Another knocked off the gable of a villa.
I had been pacing up and down under the shelter of a red-brick wall
leading into the courtyard of a temporary hospital, and presently,
acting upon orders from Lieutenant de Broqueville, I ran my car up
the road with a Belgian medical officer to a place where some
wounded men were lying. When I came back again the red-brick wall
had fallen into a heap. The Belgian officer described the climate as
"quite unhealthy," as I went away with two men dripping blood on the
floor of the car. They had been brought across the ferry, further on,
where the Belgian trenches were being strewn with shrapnel. Another
little crowd of wounded men was there. Many of them had been
huddled up all night, wet to the skin, with their wounds undressed,
and without any kind of creature comfort. Their condition had reached
the ultimate bounds of misery, and with two of these poor fellows I
went away to fetch hot coffee for the others, so that at last they might
get a little warmth if they had strength enough to drink... That
evening, after a long day in the fields of death, and when I came back
from the village where men lay waiting for rescue or the last escape, I
looked across to Nieuport-les-Bains. There were quivering flames
above it and shells were bursting over it with pretty little puffs of
smoke which rested in the opalescent sky. I thought of the proprietor
of the Grand Hotel, and wondered if he had insured his house against
"Jack Johnsons."
16
Early next morning I paid a visit to the outskirts of Nieuport town,
inland. It was impossible to get further than the outskirts at that time,
because in the centre houses were falling and flames were licking
each other across the roadways. It was even difficult for our
ambulances to get so far, because we had to pass over a bridge to
which the enemy's guns were paying great attention. Several of their
thunderbolts fell with a hiss into the water of the canal where some
Belgian soldiers were building a bridge of boats. It was just an odd
chance that our ambulance could get across without being touched,
but we took the chance and dodged between two shell-bursts. On the
other side, on the outlying streets, there was a litter of bricks and
broken glass, and a number of stricken men lay huddled in the
parlour of a small house to which they had been carried. One man
was holding his head to keep his brains from spilling, and the others
lay tangled amidst upturned chairs and cottage furniture. There was
the photograph of a family group on the mantelpiece, between cheap
vases which had been the pride, perhaps, of this cottage home. On
one of the walls was a picture of Christ with a bleeding heart.
I remember that at Nieuport there was a young Belgian doctor who
had established himself at a dangerous post within range of the
enemy's guns, and close to a stream of wounded who came pouring
into the little house which he had made into his field hospital. He had
collected also about twenty old men and women who had been
unable to get away when the first shells fell. Without any kind of help
he gave first aid to men horribly torn by the pieces of flying shell, and
for three days and nights worked very calmly and fearlessly, careless
of the death which menaced his own life.
Here he was found by the British column of field ambulances, who
took away the old people and relieved him of the last batch of
blessés. They told the story of that doctor over the supper-table that
night, and hoped he would be remembered by his own people.
17
There were picnic parties on the Belgian roadsides. Looking back
now upon those luncheon hours, with khaki ambulances as shelters
from the shrewd wind that came across the marshes, I marvel at the
contrast between their gaiety and the brooding horror in the
surrounding scene. Bottles of wine were produced and no man
thought of blood when he drank its redness, though the smell of
blood reeked from the stretchers in the cars. There were hunks of
good Flemish cheese with' fresh bread and butter, and it was
extraordinary what appetites we had, though guns were booming a
couple of kilometres away and the enemy was smashing the last
strongholds of the Belgians. The women in their field kit, so feminine
though it included breeches, gave a grace to those wayside halts,
and gave to dirty men the chance of little courtesies which brought
back civilization to their thoughts, even though life had gone back to
primitive things with just life and death, hunger and thirst, love and
courage, as the laws of existence. The man who had a corkscrew
could command respect. A lady with gold-spun hair could gnaw a
chicken bone without any loss of beauty. The chauffeurs munched
solidly, making cockney jokes out of full mouths and abolishing all
distinctions of caste by their comradeship in great adventures when
their courage, their cool nerve, their fine endurance at the wheel, and
their skill in taking heavy ambulances down muddy roads with
skidding wheels, saved many men's lives and won a heartfelt praise.
Little groups of Belgian soldiers came up wistfully and lingered round
us as though liking the sight of us, and the sound of our English
speech, and the gallantry of those girls who went into the firing-lines
to rescue their wounded.
"They are wonderful, your English ladies," said a bearded man. He
hesitated a moment and then asked timidly: "Do you think I might
shake hands with one of them?"
I arranged the little matter, and he trudged off with a flush on his
cheeks as though he had been in the presence of a queen, and
graciously received.
The Belgian officers were eager to be presented to these ladies and
paid them handsome compliments. I think the presence of these
young women with their hypodermic syringes and first-aid bandages,
and their skill in driving heavy motor-cars, and their spiritual disregard
of danger, gave a sense of comfort and tenderness to those men
who had been long absent from their women-folk and long-suffering
in the bleak and ugly cruelty of war. There was no false sentiment, no
disguised gallantry, in the homage of the Belgians to those ladies. It
was the simple, chivalrous respect of soldiers to dauntless women
who had come to help them when they were struck down and needed
pity.
Women, with whom for a little while I could call myself comrade, I
think of you now and marvel at you! The call of the wild had brought
some of you out to those fields of death. The need of more
excitement than modern life gives in time of peace, even the chance
to forget, had been the motives with which two or three of you, I think,
came upon these scenes of history, taking all risks recklessly, playing
a man's part with a feminine pluck, glad of this liberty, far from the
conventions of the civilized code, yet giving no hint of scandal to
sharp-eared gossip. But most of you had no other thought than that
of pity and helpfulness, and with a little flame of faith in your hearts
you bore the weight of bleeding men, and eased their pain when it
was too intolerable. No soldiers in the armies of the Allies have better
right to wear the decorations which a king of sorrow gave you for your
gallantry in action.
18
The Germans were still trying to smash their way through the lines
held by the Belgians, with French support. They were making
tremendous attacks at different places, searching for the breaking-
point by which they could force their way to Furnes and on to Dunkirk.
It was difficult to know whether they were succeeding or failing. It is
difficult to know anything on a modern battlefield where men holding
one village are ignorant of what is happening in the next, and where
all the sections of an army seem involved in a bewildering chaos, out
of touch with each other, waiting for orders which do not seem to
come, moving forward for no apparent reason, retiring for other
reasons hard to find, or resting, without firing a shot, in places
searched by the enemy's fire.
The enemy had built eight pontoon bridges over the Yser canal, but
all of them had been destroyed. This was a good piece of news. But
against it was the heavy loss of a Belgian company holding another
bridge further down the river. At Dixmude the Belgians held the outer
streets. Outside there had been heavy trench fighting. The enemy
had charged several times with the bayonet, but had been raked
back by the mitrailleuses.
Things were going on rather well at most parts of the line.
The French batteries were getting the range every time, and their
gunners were guessing at heaps of German dead. The Belgian
infantry was holding firm. Their cavalry was out of action for the time,
trying to keep warm on the roadsides.
That was all the truth that I could get out of a tangle of confused
details. All through another day I watched the business of battle--a
strange, mysterious thing in which one fails to find any controlling
brain. Regiments came out of the trenches and wandered back,
caked with clay, haggard for lack of sleep, with a glint of hunger in
their eyes. Guns passed along the roads with ammunition wagons,
whose axles shrieked over the stones. For an hour a Belgian battery
kept plugging shots towards the enemy's lines. The artillerymen were
leisurely at their work, handling their shells with interludes of
conversation. At luncheon time they lay about behind the guns
smoking cigarettes, and I was glad, for each of their shots seemed to
wreck my own brain. At a neighbouring village things were more
lively. The enemy was turning his fire this way. A captive balloon had
signalled the position, and shrapnels were bursting close. One shell
tore up a great hole near the railway line.
Shell after shell fell upon one dung-heap--mistaken perhaps for a
company of men. Shrapnel bullets pattered into the roadway, a piece
of jagged shell fell with a clatter.
My own chauffeur--a young man of very cool nerve and the best
driver I have known--picked it up with a grin, and then dropped it, with
a sharp cry. It was almost red-hot. The flames of the enemy's
batteries could be seen stabbing through a fringe of trees, perhaps
two kilometres away, by Pervyse. Their shells were making puff-balls
of smoke over neighbouring farms, and for miles round I could see
the clouds stretching out into long, thin wisps. The air throbbed with
horrible concussions, the dull full boom of big guns, the sharp
staccato of the smaller shell, and the high singing note of it as it came
soaring overhead. Gradually one began to realize the boredom of
battle, to acquire some of that fantastic indifference to the chance of
death which enables the soldiers to stir their soup without an upward
glance at a skyful of jagged steel. Only now and then the old question
came to one, "This--or the next?"
It was only the adventure of searching out the wounded that broke
the monotony for the Belgian ambulance men. At first they were not
hard to find--they were crowded upon the straw in cottage parlours,
cleared of all but the cheap vases on the mantelshelf and family
photographs tacked upon walls that had not been built for the bloody
mess of tragedy which they now enclosed. On their bodies they bore
the signs of the tremendous accuracy of the enemy's artillery, and by
their number, increasing during the day, one could guess at the tragic
endurance of the Belgian infantry in the ring of iron which was closing
upon them; drawing just a little nearer by half a village or half a road
as the hours passed. The ambulances carried them away to the
station of Fortem, where those who could still sit up were packed into
a steam tram, and where the stretcher-cases were taken to the civil
hospital at Furnes by motor transport. But in outlying farmsteads in
the zone of fire, and in isolated cottages which had been struck by a
chance shot, were other wounded men difficult to get. It was work for
scouting cars, and too dangerous for ambulances.
Some volunteers made several journeys down the open roads to
places not exactly suitable for dalliance. Lieutenant de Broqueville
called upon me for this purpose several times because I had a fast
little car. I was glad of the honour, though when he pointed to a
distant roof where a wounded man was reported to be lying, it looked
to me a long, long way in the zone of fire. Two houses blown to
pieces by the side of a ditch showed that the enemy's shells were
dropping close, and it was a test of nerves to drive deliberately
through the flat fields with sharp, stabbing flashes on their frontiers,
and right into the middle of an infernal tumult of guns.
It was in the darkness that I went back to Furnes again, with the last
of the wounded--a French corporal, who groaned in anguish at every
jolt in the road, and then was silent with his head flopping sideways in
a way that frightened me. Several times I called back to him,
"Courage, mon vieux! ... Comment allez vous?" But he made no
answer and there were times when I thought I had a dead man
behind me. A biting wind was blowing, and I leaned over his seat to
put a blanket over him. But it always blew off that dead-grey face and
blood-stained body. Once he groaned, and I was glad to hear the
sound and to know that he was still alive. Another man trudging along
the highway, using his rifle as a crutch, called out. He spoke the word
blessé, and I stopped to take him up and sped on again, glancing to
right and left at the villages on fire, at the quick flashes of Belgian and
German artillery signalling death to each other in the night. The
straight trees rushed by like tall, hurrying ghosts. For most of the way
we drove without our head-lights through tunnels of darkness.
"Queer, isn't it?" said my driver, and it was his only comment on this
adventure in the strangest drama of his life.
19
That night the wind came howling across the flat fields into Furnes
and a rain-storm broke in fierce gusts upon the convent walls. In this
old building with many corridors and innumerable windows, panes of
glass rattled and window-sashes creaked and doors banged like
thunderclaps. It was impossible to keep a candle alight down any of
the passages unless it were protected in a lantern, and a cold mist
crept into the house, stealthily striking one with a clammy chill. I
stayed up most of the night in the kitchen, having volunteered to
stoke the fires and fill hot-water bottles for the wounded. Most of the
nurses had gone to bed utterly exhausted. Only two or three of them
remained in the wards with one of the doctors. Every now and then
the outer bell would jangle, and I would hear the wheels of an
ambulance crunching into the courtyard.
"Blessés!" said a woman who was watching the fires with me.
But we could not take in another blessé as there were no more beds
or bed-spaces, and after despairing conversations Belgian
ambulance officers at the front door of the convent went elsewhere.
The house became very quiet except for the noise of the wind and
the rain. In the scullery where I sat by the stoves which were in my
charge, I could only hear one voice speaking. It was speaking two
rooms away, in a long, incessant monologue of madness. Now and
again a white-faced nurse came out for newly-filled water-bottles, and
while I scalded my fingers with screws which would not fit and with
boiling water poured into narrow necks, she told me about a French
officer who was dying.
"He wants his wife so badly. He would die quite happily if he could
only see her for a minute. But she is in Paris, and he will be dead
before the morning comes... I have written a letter for him, and he
kissed it before I wrote his wife's address. He keeps calling out her
name."
The scullery was warm and cosy, in spite of all the draughts. Sitting
back in a wooden chair, I nearly fell asleep, because I had had a long
day in the fields and fatigue threatened to overwhelm me. But I
wakened with a start when a door opened, letting in a sudden blast of
cold air and the noise of the beating rain, and then banged with
violence. I seemed to hear footsteps coming across the kitchen floor,
and, with an eerie feeling of some new presence in the convent, I
strode out of the scullery. A queer little figure startled me. It was
a girl in man's clothes, except for a white cap on her head,
tight-fitting above her eyes. She was dripping wet and caked in
slimy mud, and she faltered forward a little and spoke in French.
"I am very wet. And so tired and hungry! If I could sleep here, on the
floor, and dry myself a little-----"
"Who are you?" I asked. There seemed something uncanny in this
little figure coming out of the wild night.
It appeared that she was one of two Belgian girls who since the
beginning of the war had acted as infirmières with the Belgian troops,
giving the first aid in the trenches, carrying hot soup to them, and
living with them under fire. She seemed hardly more than a child, and
spoke childishly in a pitiful way, while she twisted the corner of her
jacket so that water came out and made a pool about her on the
boards. She dried herself in front of the fire and ate--ravenously--
some food which had been left on a side-table, and then lay down in
a corner of the refectory, falling into the deepest sleep as soon as her
head had touched the mattress. She did not wake next morning,
though fifty-five people made a clatter at the breakfast-table, and at
four in the afternoon she was still sleeping, like a sick child, with her
head drooping over the mattress.
20
That day, owing to the heavy rain in the night, the roads were slimy
with mud, so that the cars skidded almost over the brim of the dykes.
There was more movement among the troops, less sitting about for
orders. Officers were riding up and down the roads, and wheeling into
little groups for quick discussion. Something was happening--
something more than the ding-dong slam of the guns. A regiment of
Belgian infantry came plodding through the mud, covered with whitish
clay even to their top-hats. They were earth-men, with the blanched
look of creatures who live below ground. The news was whispered
about that the enemy was breaking through along one of the roads
between Nieuport and Fumes. Then the report came through that
they had smashed their way to Wulpen.
"We hope to hold them," said an officer, "but Fumes is in danger. It
will be necessary to clear out."
In consequence of this report, it was necessary to be quick in the
search for the wounded who had been struck down in the night. The
medical men were resolute not to go until they had taken in all that
could be removed in time. A little crowd of them were in a small villa
along the road. They were wet to the skin and quite famished, without
food or drink. A car went back for hot coffee and bread. There was
another group of wounded in the church of Oudecapelle.
They were bad cases, and lay still upon the straw. I shall never forget
the picture of that church with its painted statues huddled together
and toppled down. St. Antony of Padua and St. Sebastian were there
in the straw, and crude pictures of saints on the walls stared down
upon those bodies lying so quiet on the floor. It was the house of
God, but it was filled with the cruelty of life, and those statues seemed
to mock at men's faith.
In Furnes the news of the danger seemed to have been scented by
the people. They had packed a few things into bundles and made
ready to leave their homes. In the convent where I had helped to
wash up and to fill the part of odd-job man when I was not out with
the "flying column," the doctors and nurses were already loading the
ambulances with all their cases. The last of the wounded was sent
away to a place of safety. He was a man with a sabre-cut on his
head, who for four days had lain quite still, with a grave Oriental face,
which seemed in the tranquillity of death.
A group of nuns pleaded to be taken with the doctors and nurses.
They could help in the wards or in the kitchen--if only they might go
and escape the peril of the German soldiery.
I went across the square to my own room in the Hôtel de la
Couronne, and put a few things together. A friend of mine who helped
me told the story of a life--the mistakes that had nearly ruined it, the
adventures of a heart. A queer conversation at a time when the
enemy was coming down the road. The guns were very loud over
Wulpen way. They seemed to be coming closer. Yet there was no
panic. There was even laughter in the courtyard of the hospital, where
the doctors tossed blankets, mattresses, food stores and stoves into
the motor ambulances. They were in no hurry to go. It was not the
first or the second time they had to evacuate a house menaced by
the enemy. They had made a habit of it, and were not to be flurried. I
helped the blue-eyed boy to lift the great stoves. They were "some"
weight, as an American would say, and both the blue-eyed boy and
myself were plastered with soot, so that we looked like sweeps calling
round for orders. I lifted packing-cases which would have paralysed
me in times of peace and scouted round for some of the thousand
and one things which could not be left behind without a tragedy. But
at last the order was given to start, and the procession of motor-cars
started out for Poperinghe, twenty-five kilometres to the south. Little
by little the sound of the guns died away, and the cars passed
through quiet fields where French troops bivouacked round their
camp fires. I remember that we passed a regiment of Moroccans half-
way to Poperinghe, and I looked back from the car to watch them
pacing up and down between their fires, which glowed upon their red
cloaks and white robes and their grave, bearded Arab faces. They
looked miserably cold as the wind flapped their loose garments, but
about these men in the muddy field there was a sombre dignity which
took one's imagination back to the day when the Saracens held
European soil.
21
It was dark when we reached Poperinghe and halted our cars in the
square outside the Town Hall, among a crowd of other motor-cars,
naval lorries, mitrailleuses, and wagons. Groups of British soldiers
stood about smoking cigarettes and staring at us curiously through
the gloom as though not quite sure what to make of us. And indeed
we must have looked an odd party, for some of us were in khaki and
some of us in civilian clothes with Belgian caps, and among the
crowd of nurses was a carriage-load of nuns, huddled up in their
black cloaks. Warning of our arrival in Poperinghe should have been
notified to the municipal authorities, so that they might find lodgings
for us; and the Queen of the Belgians had indeed sent through a
message to that effect, But there seemed to be some trouble about
finding a roof under which to lay our heads, and an hour went by in
the square while the lady in charge of the domesticity department
interviewed the mayor, cajoled the corporation, and inspected
convents down side streets. She came back at last with a little
hopelessness in her eyes.
"Goodness knows where we can go! There doesn't seem room for a
mouse in Poperinghe, and meanwhile the poor nurses are dying of
hunger. We must get into some kind of shelter."
I was commissioned to find at least a temporary abode and to search
around for food; not at all an easy task in a dark town where I had
never been before and crowded with the troops of three nations. I
was also made the shepherd of all these sheep, who were
commanded to keep their eyes upon me and not to go astray but to
follow where I led. It was a most ridiculous position for a London
journalist of a shy and retiring nature, especially as some of the
nurses were getting out of hand and indulging in private adventures.
One of them, a most buxom and jolly soul, who, as she confided to
me, "didn't care a damn," had established friendly relations with a
naval lieutenant, and I had great trouble in dragging her away from
his engaging conversation. Others had discovered a shop where hot
coffee was being served to British soldiers who were willing to share it
with attractive ladies. A pretty shepherd I looked when half my flock
had gone astray!
Then one of the chauffeurs had something like an apoplectic stroke in
the street--the effect of a nervous crisis after a day under shell-fire--
and with two friendly "Tommies" I helped to drag him into the Town
Hall. He was a very stout young man, with well-developed muscles,
and having lain for some time in a state of coma, he suddenly
became delirious and tried to fight me. I disposed of him in a
backyard, where he gradually recovered, and then I set out again in
search of my sheep. After scouting about Poperinghe in the
darkness, I discovered a beer tavern with a fair-sized room in which
the party might be packed with care, and then, like a pocket patriarch
with the children of Israel, I led my ladies on foot to the place of
sanctuary and disposed the nuns round the bar, with the reverend
mother in the centre of them, having a little aureole round her head
from the glamour of the pewter pots. The others crowded in anyhow
and said in a dreadful chorus, like Katherine in "The Taming of the
Shrew," "We want our supper!"
A brilliant inspiration came to me. As there were British troops in
Poperinghe, there must also be British rations, and I had glorious
visions of Maconochie and army biscuits. Out into the dark streets
again I went with my little car, and after wayside conversations with
British soldiers who knew nothing but their own job, found at last the
officer in charge of the commissariat. He was a tall fellow and rather
haughty in the style of a British officer confronted abruptly with an
unusual request. He wanted to know who the devil I was, not liking
my civilian clothes and suspecting a German spy. But he became
sympathetic when I told him, quite dishonestly, that I was in charge of
a British field ambulance under the Belgian Government, which had
been forced to evacuate Fumes as the enemy had broken through
the Belgian lines. I expressed my gratitude for his kindness, which I
was sure he would show, in providing fifty-five army rations for fifty-
five doctors and nurses devilishly hungry and utterly destitute. After
some hesitation he consented to give me a "chit," and turning to a
sergeant who had been my guide down a dark street, said: "Take this
officer to the depot and see that he gets everything he wants." It was
a little triumph not to be appreciated by readers who do not know the
humiliations experienced by correspondents in time of war.
A few minutes later the officer came padding down the street after
me, and I expected instant arrest and solitary confinement to the end
of the war. But he was out for information.
"I beg your pardon, sir," he said, very politely, "but would you mind
giving me a sketch of the military situation round your part?"
I gave him an outline of the affair which had caused the Belgian
headquarters staff to shift from Furnes, and though it was, I fancy,
slightly over-coloured, he was very much obliged... So, gloriously, I
drove back to the beer-tavern with the fifty-five army rations which
were enough to feed fifty-five starving people for a week, and was
received with cheers. That night, conscious of good deeds, I laid
down in the straw of a school-house which had been turned into a
barracks, and by the light of several candle-ends, scribbled a long
dispatch, which became a very short one when the British censor had
worked his will with it.
22
After all, the ambulance column did not have to stay in Poperinghe,
but went back to their old quarters, with doctors, nurses and nuns,
and all their properties. The enemy had not followed up its
advantages, and the Belgian troops, aided by French marines and
other French troops who now arrived in greater numbers, thrust them
back and barred the way to Dunkirk. The waters of the Yser had
helped to turn the tide of war. The sluice-gates were opened and
flooded the surrounding fields, so that the enemy's artillery was
bogged and could not move.
For a little while the air in all that region between Furnes and Nieuport,
Dixmude and Pervyse, was cleansed of the odour and fume of battle.
But there were other causes of the German withdrawal after one day,
at least, when it seemed that nothing short of miraculous aid could
hold them from a swift advance along the coast. The chief cause was
to be found at Ypres, where the British army sustained repeated and
most desperate onslaughts. Ypres was now the storm centre in a ten-
days' battle of guns, which was beyond all doubt the most ferocious
and bloody episode in the first year of war on the Western side of
operations. Repeatedly, after being checked in their attacks by a
slaughter which almost annihilated entire regiments, the Germans
endeavoured to repair their shattered strength by bringing up every
available man and gun for another bout of blood. We know now that it
was one of the most awful conflicts in which humanity has ever
agonized. Heroism shone through it on both sides. The resistance
and nerve strength of the British troops were almost superhuman;
and in spite of losses which might have demoralized any army,
however splendid in valour, they fought on with that dogged spirit
which filled the trenches at Badajoz and held the lines of Torres
Vedras, a hundred years before, when the British race seemed to be
stronger than its modern generation.
There were hours when all seemed lost, when it was impossible to
bring up reserves to fill the gaps in our bleeding battalions, when so
many dead and wounded lay about and so few remained to serve the
guns and hold the trenches that another attack pushed home would
have swept through our lines and broken us to bits. The cooks and
the commissariat men took their places in the trenches, and every
man who could hold a rifle fired that day for England's sake, though
England did not know her peril.
But the German losses were enormous also, and during those ten
days they sacrificed themselves with a kind of Oriental valour, such
as heaped the fields of Omdurman with Soudanese. The Kaiser was
the new Mahdi for whom men died in masses, going with fatalistic
resignation to inevitable death. After a lull for burning and burial, for
the refilling of great gaps in regiments and divisions, the enemy
moved against us with new masses, but again death awaited them, in
spite of all their guns, and the British held their ground.
They held their ground with superb and dauntless valour, and out of
the general horror of it all there emerges the fine, bright chivalry of
young officers and men who did amazing deeds, which read like fairy
tales, even when they are told soberly in official dispatches. In this
slaughter field the individual still found a chance now and then of
personal prowess, and not all his human qualities had been
annihilated or stupefied by the overwhelming power of artillery.
23
The town of Ypres was added to the list of other Belgian towns like
those in which I saw the ruin of a nation.
It existed no longer as a place of ancient beauty in which men and
women made their homes, trustful of fate. Many of its houses had
fallen into the roadways and heaped them high with broken bricks
and shattered glass. Others burned with a fine, fierce glow inside the
outer walls. The roofs had crashed down into the cellars. All between,
furniture and panelling and household treasures, had been burnt out
into black ash or mouldered in glowing embers.
The great Cloth Hall, which had been one of the most magnificent
treasures of ancient architecture in Europe, was smashed and
battered by incessant shells, so that it became one vast ruin of
broken walls and fallen pillars framed about a scrapheap of twisted
iron and calcined statues, when one day later in the war I wandered
for an hour or more, groping for some little relic which would tell the
tale of this tragedy.
On my desk now at home there are a few long, rusty nails, an old lock
of fifteenth-century workmanship, and a little broken window with
leaded panes, which serve as mementoes of this destruction.
The inhabitants of Ypres had gone, unless some of them were hiding,
or buried in their cellars. A few dogs roamed about, barking or
whining at the soldiers who passed through the outskirts staring at all
this destruction with curious eyes, and storing up images for which
they will never find the right words.
Two young naval officers who went into Ypres one day tried to coax
one of the dogs to come with them. "Might have brought us luck,"
they said, hiding their pity for a poor beast. But it slunk back into the
ruin of its master's house, distrustful of men who did things not
belonging to the code of beasts.
24
Human qualities were not annihilated, I have said. Yet in a general
way that was the effect of modern weapons, and at Ypres masses of
men did not fight so much as stand until they died.
"We just wait for death," said a Belgian officer one night, "and wonder
if it doesn't reach us out of all this storm of shells. It is a war without
soul or adventure. In the early days, when I scoured the country with
a party of motor scouts there was some sport in it. Any audacity we
had, or any cunning, could get some kind of payment. The individual
counted."
"But now, in the business round Ypres, what can men do--infantry,
cavalry, scouts? It is the gun that does all the business heaving out
shells, delivering death in a merciless way. It is guns, with men as
targets, helpless as the leaves that are torn from these autumn trees
around us by a storm of hail. Our men are falling like the leaves, and
the ground is heaped with them, and there is no decisive victory on
either side. One week of death is followed by another week of death.
The position changes a little, that is all, and the business goes on
again. It is appalling."
The same words were used to me on the same night by a surgeon
who had just come from the station of Dunkirk, where the latest batch
of wounded--a thousand of them--were lying on the straw. "It is
appalling," he said. "The destruction of this shell-fire is making a
shambles of human bodies. How can we cope with it? What can we
do with such a butchery?"
Round about Furnes there was a fog in the war zone. In the early
dawn until the morning had passed, and then again as the dusk fell
and the mists crept along the canals and floated over the flat fields,
men groped about it like ghosts, with ghostly guns.
Shells came hurtling out of the veil of the mist and burst in places
which seemed hidden behind cotton-wool. An unseen enemy was
killing unseen men, and other guns replied into this grim, grey
mystery, not knowing what destruction was being done.
It was like the war itself, which was utterly shrouded in these parts by
a fog of mystery. Watching it close at hand (when things are more
difficult to sort into any order of logic) my view was clouded and
perplexed by the general confusion. A few days previously, it seemed
that the enemy had abandoned his attack upon the coast-line and the
country between Dixmude and Nieuport. There was a strange silence
behind the mists, but our aeroplanes, reconnoitring the enemy's lines,
were able to see movements of troops drifting southwards towards
the region round Ypres.
Now there was an awakening of guns in places from which they
seemed to be withdrawn. Dixmude, quiet in its ruins, trembled again,
and crumbled a little more, under the vibration of the enemy's shells,
firing at long range towards the Franco-Belgian troops.
Here and there, near Pervyse and Ramscapelle, guns, not yet
located, fired "pot shots" on the chance of killing something--soldiers
or civilians, or the wounded on their stretchers.
Several of them came into Furnes, bursting quite close to the
convent, and one smashed into the Hôtel de la Noble Rose, going
straight down a long corridor and then making a great hole in a
bedroom wall. Some of the officers of the Belgian staff were in the
room downstairs, but not a soul was hurt.
French and Belgian patrols thrusting forward cautiously found
themselves under rifle-fire from the enemy's trenches which had
previously appeared abandoned. Something like an offensive
developed again, and it was an unpleasant surprise when Dixmude
was retaken by the Germans.
As a town its possession was not of priceless value to the enemy.
They had retaken a pitiful ruin, many streets of skeleton houses filled
with burnt-out ashes, a Town Hall with gaping holes in its roof, an
archway which thrust up from a wreck of pillars like a gaunt rib, and a
litter of broken glass, bricks and decomposed bodies.
If they had any pride in the capture it was the completeness of their
destruction of this fine old Flemish town.
But it was a disagreeable thing that the enemy, who had been thrust
back from this place and the surrounding neighbourhood, and who
had abandoned their attack for a time in this region, should have
made such a sudden hark-back in sufficient strength to regain ground
which was won by the Belgian and French at the cost of many
thousands of dead and wounded.
The renewed attack was to call off some of the allied troops from the
lines round Ypres, and was a part of the general shock of the
offensive all along the German line in order to test once more the
weakest point of the Allies' strength through which to force a way.
25
The character of the fighting in this part of Flanders entered into the
monotone of the winter campaign and, though the censorship was
blamed for scarcity of news, there was really nothing to conceal in the
way of heroic charges by cavalry, dashing bayonet attacks, or rapid
counter-movements by infantry in mass. Such things for which public
imagination craved were not happening.
What did happen was a howling gale shrieking across the dunes, and
swirling up the sands into blinding clouds, and tearing across the flat
marshlands as though all the invisible gods of the old ghost world
were racing in their chariots.
In the trenches along the Yser men crouched down close to the moist
mud to shelter themselves from a wind which was harder to dodge
than shrapnel shells. It lashed them with a fierce cruelty. In spite of all
the woollen comforters and knitted vests made by women's hands at
home, the wind found its way through to the bones and marrow of the
soldiers so that they were numbed. At night it was an agony of cold,
preventing sleep, even if men could sleep while shells were searching
for them with a cry of death.
The gunners dug pits for themselves, and when they ceased fire for a
time crawled to shelter, smoking through little outlets in the damp
blankets in which they had wrapped their heads and shoulders. They
tied bundles of straw round their legs to keep out the cold and packed
old newspapers inside their chests as breast-plates, and tried to keep
themselves warm, at least in imagination.
There was no battlefield in the old idea of the world. How often must
one say this to people at home who think that a modern army is
encamped in the fields with bivouac fires and bell tents? The battle
was spread over a wide area of villages and broken towns and
shattered farmhouses, and neat little homesteads yet untouched by
fire or shell. The open roads were merely highways between these
points of shelter, in which great bodies of troops were huddled--the
internal lines of communication connecting various parts of the
fighting machine.
It was rather hot, as well as cold, at Oudecapelle and Nieucapelle,
and along the line to Styvekenskerke and Lom-bardtzyde. The
enemy's batteries were hard at work again belching out an
inexhaustible supply of shells. Over there, the darkness was stabbed
by red flashes, and the sky was zigzagged by waves of vivid
splendour, which shone for a moment upon the blanched faces of
men who waited for death.
Through the darkness, along the roads, infantry tramped towards the
lines of trenches, to relieve other regiments who had endured a spell
in them. They bent their heads low, thrusting forward into the heart of
the gale, which tore at the blue coats of these Frenchmen and
plucked at their red trousers, and slashed in their faces with cruel
whips. Their side-arms jingled against the teeth of the wind, which
tried to snatch at their bayonets and to drag the rifles out of their grip.
They never raised their heads to glance at the Red Cross carts
coming back.
Some of the French officers, tramping by the side of their men,
shouted through the swish of the gale:
"Courage, mes petits!"
"II fait mauvais temps pour les sales Boches!"
In cottage parlours near the fighting lines--that is to say in the zone of
fire, which covered many villages and farmsteads, French doctors,
buttoned up to the chin in leather coats, bent over the newest
batches of wounded.
"Shut that door! Sacred name of a dog; keep the door shut! Do you
want the gale to blow us up the chimney?"
But it was necessary to open the door to bring in another stretcher
where a man lay still.
"Pardon, mon capitaine," said one of the stretcher-bearers, as the
door banged to, with a frightful clap.
Yesterday the enemy reoccupied Dixmude.
So said the official bulletin, with its incomparable brevity of eloquence.
26
For a time, during this last month in the first year of the war, I made
my headquarters at Dunkirk, where without stirring from the town
there was always a little excitement to be had. Almost every day, for
instance, a German aeroplane--one of the famous Taube flock--
would come and drop bombs by the Town Hall or the harbour, killing
a woman or two and a child, or breaking many panes of glass, but
never destroying anything of military importance (for women and
children are of no importance in time of war), although down by the
docks there were rich stores of ammunition, petrol, and material of
every kind. These birds of death came so regularly in the afternoon
that the Dunquerquoises, who love a jest, even though it is a bloody
one, instead of saying "Trois heures et demie," used to say, "Taube
et demie" and know the time.
There was a window in Dunkirk which looked upon the chief square.
In the centre of the square is the statue of Jean-Bart, the famous
captain and pirate of the seventeenth century, standing in his sea-
boots (as he once strode into the presence of the Sun-King) and with
his sword raised above his great plumed hat. I stood in the balcony of
the window looking down at the colour and movement of the life
below, and thinking at odd moments--the thought always thrust
beneath the surface of one's musings--of the unceasing slaughter of
the war not very far away across the Belgian frontier. All these people
here in the square were in some way busy with the business of death.
They were crossing these flagged stones on the way to the
shambles, or coming back from the shell-stricken towns, là bas, as
the place of blood is called, or taking out new loads of food for guns
and men, or bringing in reports to admirals and the staff, or going to
churches to pray for men who have done these jobs before, and now,
perhaps, lie still, out of it.
This square in Dunkirk contained many of the elements which go to
make up the actions and reactions of this war. It seemed to me that a
clever stage manager desiring to present to his audience the typical
characters of this military drama--leaving out the beastliness, of
course--would probably select the very people and groups upon
whom I was now looking down from the window. Motor-cars came
whirling up with French staff officers in dandy uniforms (the stains of
blood and mud would only be omitted by Mr. Willie Clarkson). In the
centre, just below the statue of Jean-Bart, was an armoured-car
which a Belgian soldier, with a white rag round his head, was
explaining to a French cuirassier whose long horse-hair queue fell
almost to his waist from his linen-covered helm. Small boys mounted
the step and peered into the wonder-box, into the mysteries of this
neat death-machine, and poked grubby fingers into bullet-holes which
had scored the armour-plates. Other soldiers--Chasseurs Alpins in
sky-blue coats, French artillery men in their dark-blue jackets, Belgian
soldiers wearing shiny top-hats with eye-shades, or dinky caps with
gold or scarlet tassels, and English Tommies in mud-coloured khaki--
strolled about the car, and nodded their heads towards it as though to
say, "That has killed off a few Germans, by the look of it. Better sport
than trench digging."
The noise of men's voices and laughter--they laugh a good deal in
war time, outside the range of shells--came up to the open window;
overpowered now and then by the gurgles and squawks of motor-
horns, like beasts giving their death-cries. With a long disintegrating
screech there came up a slate-grey box on wheels. It made a
semicircular sweep, scattering a group of people, and two young
gentlemen of the Royal Naval Air Service sprang down and shouted
"What-ho!" very cheerily to two other young gentlemen in naval
uniforms who shouted back "Cheer-o!" from the table under my
balcony.
I knew all of them, especially one of the naval airmen who flies what
he calls a motor-bus and drops bombs with sea curses upon
the heads of any German troops he can find on a morning's
reconnaissance. He rubs his hand at the thought that he has "done
in" quite a number of the "German blighters." With a little luck he
hopes to nobble a few more this afternoon. A good day's work like
this bucks him up wonderfully, he says, except when he comes down
an awful whop in the darned old motor-bus, which is all right while she
keeps going but no bloomin' use at all when she spreads her skirts in
a ploughed field and smashes her new set of stays. Oh, a bad old
vixen, that seaplane of his! Wants a lot of coaxin'.
A battery of French artillery rattled over the cobblestones. The wheels
were caked with clay, and the guns were covered with a grey dust.
They were going up Dixmude way, or along to Ramscapelle. The
men sat their horses as though they were glued to the saddles. One
of them had a loose sleeve pinned across his chest, but a strong grip
on his bridle with his left hand. The last wheels rattled round the
corner, and a little pageant, more richly coloured, came across the
stage. A number of Algerian Arabs strode through the square, with a
long swinging gait. They were wearing blue turbans above the flowing
white "haik" which fell back upon their shoulders, and the white
burnous which reached to their ankles. They were dark, bearded
men; one of them at least with the noble air of Othello, the Moor, and
with his fine dignity.
They stared up at the statue of Jean-Bart, and asked a few questions
of a French officer who walked with a shorter step beside them. It
seemed to impress their imagination, and they turned to look back at
that figure with the raised sword and the plumed hat. Three small
boys ran by their side and held out grubby little hands, which the
Arabs shook, with smiles that softened the hard outlines of their
faces.
Behind them a cavalcade rode in. They were Arab chiefs, on little
Algerian horses, with beautifully neat and clean limbs, moving with
the grace of fallow deer across the flagged stones of Dunkirk. The
bridles glistened and tinkled with silver plates. The saddles were
covered with embroidered cloths. The East came riding to the West.
These Mohammedans make a religion of fighting. It has its ritual and
its ceremony--even though shrapnel makes such a nasty mess of
men.
So I stood looking down on these living pictures of a city in the war
zone. But now and again I glanced back into the room behind the
window, and listened to the scraps of talk which came from the
lounge and the scattered chairs. There was a queer collection of
people in this room. They, too, had some kind of business in the job
of war, either to kill or to cure. Among them was a young Belgian
lieutenant who used to make a "bag" of the Germans he killed eaeh
day with his mitrailleuse until the numbers bored him and he lost
count. Near him were three or four nurses discussing wounds and
dying wishes and the tiresome hours of a night when a thousand
wounded streamed in suddenly, just as they were hoping for a quiet
cup of coffee. A young surgeon spoke some words which I heard as I
turned my head from the window.
"It's the frightful senselessness of all this waste of life which makes
one sick with horror..."
Another doctor came in with a tale from Ypres, where he had taken
his ambulances under shell-fire.
"It's monstrous," he said, "all the red tape! Because I belong to a
volunteer ambulance the officers wanted to know by what infernal
impudence I dared to touch the wounded. I had to drive forty miles to
get official permission, and could not get it then... And the wounded
were lying about everywhere, and it was utterly impossible to cope
with the numbers of them... They stand on etiquette when men are
crying out in agony! The Prussian caste isn't worse than that."
I turned and looked out of the window again. But I saw nothing of the
crowd below. I saw only a great tide of blood rising higher and higher,
and I heard, not the squawking of motor-horns, but the moans of men
in innumerable sheds, where they lie on straw waiting for the
surgeon's knife and crying out for morphia. I saw and heard, because
I had seen and heard these things before in France and Belgium.
In the room there was the touch of quiet fingers on a piano not too
bad. It was the music of deep, soft chords. A woman's voice spoke
quickly, excitedly.
"Oh! Some one can play. Ask him to play! It seems a thousand years
since I heard some music. I'm thirsty for it!"
A friend of mine who had struck the chords while standing before the
piano, sat down, and smiled a little over the notes.
"What shall it be?" he asked, and then, without waiting for the answer,
played. It was a reverie by Chopin, I think, and somehow it seemed to
cleanse our souls a little of things seen and smelt. It was so pitiful that
something broke inside my heart a moment. I thought of the last time
I had heard some music. It was in a Flemish cottage, where a young
lieutenant, a little drunk, sang a love-song among his comrades, while
a little way off men were being maimed and killed by bursting shells.
The music stopped with a slur of notes. Somebody asked, "What was
that?"
There was the echo of a dull explosion and the noise of breaking
glass. I looked out into the square again from the open window, and
saw people running in all directions.
Presently a man came into the room and spoke to one of the doctors,
without excitement.
"Another Taube. Three bombs, as usual, and several people
wounded. You'd better come. It's only round the corner."
It was always round the corner, this sudden death. Just a step or two
from any window of war.
27
Halfway through my stay at Dunkirk I made a trip to England and
back, getting a free passage in the Government ship Invicta, which
left by night to dodge the enemy's submarines, risking their floating
mines. It gave me one picture of war which is unforgettable. We were
a death-ship that night, for we carried the body of a naval officer who
had been killed on one of the monitors which I had seen in action
several times off Nieuport. With the corpse came also several
seamen, wounded by the same shell. I did not see any of them until
the Invicla lay alongside the Prince of Wales pier. Then a party of
marines brought up the officer's body on a stretcher. They bungled
the job horribly, jamming the stretcher poles in the rails of the
gangway, and, fancying myself an expert in stretcher work, for I had
had a little practice, I gave them a hand and helped to carry the
corpse to the landing-stage. It was sewn up tightly in canvas, exactly
like a piece of meat destined for Smithfield market, and was treated
with no more ceremony than such a parcel by the porters who
received it.
"Where are you going to put that, Dick?"
"Oh, stow it over there, Bill!"
That was how a British hero made his home-coming.
But I had a more horrible shock, although I had been accustomed to
ugly sights. It was when the wounded seamen came up from below.
The lamps on the landing-stage, flickering in the high wind, cast their
white light upon half a dozen men walking down the gangway in
Indian file. At least I had to take them on trust as men, but they
looked more like spectres who had risen from the tomb, or obscene
creatures from some dreadful underworld. When the German shell
had burst on their boat, its fragments had scattered upwards, and
each man had been wounded in the face, some of them being
blinded and others scarred beyond human recognition. Shrouded in
ship's blankets, with their heads swathed in bandages, their faces
were quite hidden behind masks of cotton-wool coming out to a point
like beaks and bloody at the tip. I shuddered at the sight of them, and
walked away, cursing the war and all its horrors.
After my return to Dunkirk, I did not stay very long there. There was a
hunt for correspondents, and my name was on the black list as a
man who had seen too much. I found it wise to trek southwards,
turning my back on Belgium, where I had had such strange
adventures in the war-zone. The war had settled down into its winter
campaign, utterly dreary and almost without episodes in the country
round Furnes. But I had seen the heroism of the Belgian soldiers in
their last stand against the enemy who had ravaged their little
kingdom, and as long as life lasts the memory of these things will
remain to me like a tragic song. I had been sprinkled with the blood of
Belgian soldiers, and had helped to carry them, wounded and dead. I
am proud of that, and my soul salutes the spirit of those gallant men--
the remnants of an army--who, without much help from French or
English, stood doggedly in their last ditches, refusing to surrender,
and with unconquerable courage until few were left, holding back the
enemy from their last patch of soil. It was worth the risk of death to
see those things.