OVER THE BELGIAN FRONTIER.
Our Clearing Hospital remained at Chocques for four or five days, and
while here had a fair, but not a large, number of wounded. These were
quickly sent off by hospital trains, which pulled on to a siding not far
from us. The Indian Clearing Hospital was now also establishing itself
in the small town, and the Indian hospital assistants were a source of
great and wondering curiosity to the small boys and girls. Our Clearing
Hospital was now ordered to a place farther north, and as I had only
been temporarily attached to it during a time of great rush at Bethune,
my place was now with my own Field Ambulance at the front, and somewhere
near the Belgian frontier.
A motor-car going to Hazebrouck gave me a lift as far as there, and
another driver brought me to Bailleul. Here, after I had reported my
arrival, Surgeon-General Porter informed me of the exact location of my
ambulance.
Bailleul is a town of considerable importance in the north of France, and
has been the object of many visits from Taubes, a sure indication that
there must be a church or a hospital in Bailleul. The church and the
hospital were very close together, and the Taubes made many a gallant
attempt to get them both. One evening one of them got the hospital—a bomb
fell fair on the roof and into a ward full of wounded men, killing two
and wounding again a man already grievously wounded. The old church has
so far escaped. The square at Bailleul near the church was a busy place
in those days, as the town was a Divisional Headquarters and a corps
“poste commandement,” and where there are headquarters and “brass hats”
there also are many rank and file. It was here that, some weeks later, I
saw that fine battalion, the Liverpool Scottish, parade in the street and
march out to the trenches. They were standing on parade in the street for
about twenty minutes before moving off and the day was bitterly cold. The
bare knees of the men looked blue and the kilt did not impress us as a
good winter dress. Why Highlanders choose to expose their knees is quite
beyond me. The knee joint is a big and complex anatomical structure, and
is easily affected by sudden changes of temperature, so why cover up
every other joint in the body and leave this bare?
Greatly daring though the ladies are to-day in their draping
arrangements, they do not dare to walk about with bare knees. What
prevents them must certainly be their appreciation of the delicacy of
this joint—the delicate mechanism of an important articulation.
Twenty years hence, veterans of the Liverpool Scottish will tell their
children how they got rheumatism in their knee joints from the cold mud
of the Flanders trenches in the year of our Lord 1914.
I left Bailleul on a Red-Cross Wolseley car driven by a queer character
who used to be with us on the Aisne doing transport work. He was thought
to have been killed and duly buried, and I was therefore agreeably
surprised to see my odd friend again. He was a wonderfully cheery
pessimist. He usually had a long budget of most depressing news, of
disasters by flood and field, and great disappointments, but he envisaged
them all with a rosy hue and predicted a great to-morrow. He did not
like the war, for although it had not changed his occupation—that of a
chauffeur—it had seriously affected his emoluments. In the piping times
of peace he would take small parties on touring journeys in France,
Germany, and Switzerland—sometimes a honeymoon couple, sometimes an
American millionaire, and he did exceedingly well in tips.
We had a rough passage up from Bailleul and were twice bogged in the mud
beside the road, and had twice to be hauled out. The roads here, and
right over the frontier into southern Belgium, were very bad in these
days. Our men, when on the Aisne, said many hard words about the mud
there, but the Aisne was an asphalt path compared with Belgium.
However, we slowly squelched and skidded our way over the Belgian
frontier and reached Ouderdom, not very far from Ypres. For the last few
miles we had been following Napoleon’s maxim to his Marshals: “Marching
on the sound of the guns.” The heavy artillery, French, British, and
German, was making a deafening roar.
This really completed the journey from the Aisne to Flanders. We were at
our “farthest north,” and this journey impressed one with the length of
the huge battle-line, although it only embraced, after all, a part of
the great whole. From Switzerland to the Channel stretched a wavy line
of trenches, across plains, spanning canals, through and around swamps,
in front of great cities and small villages, traversing great forests
and over mountain passes and peaks. At one end submerged country flooded
by Alpine snow, sand dunes at the other; and in these trenches lined
with soldiers, and swept by artillery, stern fighting was going on over
practically every mile.
Our ambulance headquarters was about the most God-forsaken place that one
could possibly imagine. The first impression one received was a dirty
pond, full of fetid water and surrounded by heaped-up straw manure. The
Belgian, like the Frenchman, loves to have a manure heap at his front
door. Closely abutting on this putrefactive manure was the cottage
itself, with one front room, a small side-room or box off this front
room, a kitchen, a bedroom, and another box at the back. From the kitchen
a rickety stair led up to a windy loft full of corn and hops and bags of
potatoes.
Next the living quarters and part of the house came stalls for cattle,
and the _tout ensemble_ was unlovely and smelly. Twelve medical officers,
two chaplains, and a quartermaster lived in the tiny little front room,
or crowded round a table in it. When the table was in the room there
was barely space to pass between it and the wall. Six or seven officers
slept on the floor of this den at night, and in the morning had to rise
early, roll up their valises and pack them round the wall. The O.C. and a
chaplain slept in the box off our only room, and the rest of us slept in
the loft amidst the wheat and hops and the bitter cold draughts.
Our cooks lived, smoked, worked, and slept in the kitchen, and this
apartment Madame invaded during the day to do her domestic cooking.
Madame “with the terrible voice” gave our cooks a bad time, and
frequently chased them out and took their pots and pans off the fire,
utterly disorganising our meals.
Madame was not popular, and in my dreams I sometimes still hear her
raucous voice.
The Flemish farmer, the proud owner of this very dirty and uninviting
farm, had a family of three little children, and was besides the humble
husband of the lady whose voice was more terrifying than the screech of
bursting shrapnel.
Poor Madame, she did not look kindly on us, and we never even saw her
smile—except once, and that story comes later.
At 4 a.m. her strident, penetrating tones would fill the cottage and wake
us all to a world of cold and discomfort, of greasy bacon, muddy tea, and
sodden mousy bread.
She was watchful and suspicious of our men, who slept with the poultry
in the surrounding stables and out-houses, and openly accused them of
stealing her straw.
What they could do with the straw after having stolen it Madame did not
choose to say—perhaps she thought that they ate it!
We met many Flemish besides Madame and her family at this time, and
although we sympathised greatly with them, we could not bring ourselves
to like them. It was all so different with the French, whom we liked and
who liked us. The Flemings did not seem to care for us; they certainly
never made us any demonstrations of affection. Perhaps it was the
difference in tongue. They spoke French with an Irish-Dutch brogue, and
our accent was, of course, a pure Anglo-Parisian.
French officers told us here that they did not like the Flemings, and
that the Flemings were not cordial with them. Belgian officers, it is
well known, do not see eye to eye with the French officers, but pull
amazingly well with the British, to whom they are warm and communicative.
Tommy Atkins as a rule likes every one, but he neither understood nor
cared for the Flemings. This was quite noticeable. We found those round
Ouderdom, Ypres, and Dickebusch sullen, dour, and suspicious. We were not
welcomed, and their surly, heavy manner towards us was very apparent.
There was no responsiveness, no _gaieté de cœur_, no cheerfulness.
Historical traditions and the likes and hates of centuries die hard. The
Flemings and the English had often been friends in the past, but the
French and Flemings had always been on opposite sides of the fence, and
whenever the French came into the Flemish garden it was to fight, and not
to play.
We wondered if Madame of our cottage knew her Belgian history. We were
quite sure that she would have been more amiable and sweet had she known
that Flanders had been England’s ally in the Hundred Years’ War, and that
the bowmen of Mons were more than once ranged on England’s side; that
Baldwin II., Count of Flanders, a former ruler of the land where stood
Madame’s farm, was a son-in-law of Alfred the Great of England, and that
Baldwin V., also a Count of Flanders, was father-in-law to William the
Conqueror, and fitted out Flemish ships to convey Flemish men to Pevensey
to kill Harold’s Anglo-Saxons.
The Flemings have long memories about the French, and never forget the
“Battle of the Spurs” or the “Battle of Roosebeke,” for in these two
epoch-making battles the French were the enemy.
The manifesto issued by the King of the Belgians to his people at the
beginning of the war in August cited the Battle of the Spurs fought
at Courtrai. At this famous encounter, a band of Flemish artisans
and citizens, armed with billhooks, axes, and scythes, attacked with
the maddest fury a disciplined French army of steel-clad knights and
men-at-arms and utterly defeated it. This battle reference was hardly
quite happy when Joffre was hurrying his Army Corps over the frontier to
Namur.
At Roosebeke, in 1382, the French met another citizen army under
Philip van Artevelde, and slew him and twenty-five thousand men. It is
said that Flemish fathers and mothers handed down this bitter tale to
their children for three centuries, and in later years told of Cassel,
Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet, Jemappes, and Waterloo—all glaring
instances of French turbulence on peaceful Flanders land. So the Flemings
were distrustful always of the Gallic cock, and had apparently forgotten
about their connection with our Alfred the Great and our William of
Normandy.
During our occupation of this mean farmhouse, situated behind its Flemish
manure heap, the weather was bitingly cold. The rain of the first week
was succeeded by a heavy snow and frost, and as we had no fire of any
sort and were not able to take much physical exercise, we were all day
and night chilled to our very marrow.
November 1914 in Flanders will be remembered by many thousands of
Englishmen as a month of intense and bitter cold, when to the dangers and
ever-present death of the trenches were added the miseries and tortures
of frostbitten feet and legs, and a merciless cutting wind. This was the
period when men, stiffened and paralysed with cold, had to be pulled
out of the trenches and dragged or carried to the rear to bring back
a slowing circulation to the affected limbs. This was also the period
when men could not be spared from the firing line, when the Germans were
making those formidable rushes in strong columns, and leaving thousands
of dead to mark the place where the rush had been stayed and the column
crumpled up.
The little town of Dickebusch was on the road to our left, and through
it ran a highway to Ypres. Where the road turned to the right into Ypres
was an advanced station of a Field Ambulance, and, as one of the medical
officers of it was known to me, I walked along this highway one morning
in order to hear the latest news. He was always a very safe man to call
upon for news, for what he did not know authentically, he would invent.
The road to this advanced station lay behind several batteries of French
“seventy-fives,” the pride and glory of the French gunner. The road
was quite close to these guns, but they were so wonderfully concealed
with straw and branches of trees that an ordinary traveller would have
passed them by until their presence was indicated by their mighty roar.
The gunners were hard at it this morning, pouring an unending string of
bursting shells on the German positions, and the din was terrible.
Suddenly the Germans got the range of the road. One shell burst far in
front of me on the road, and one far behind about the same moment, and a
bolt for cover was the immediate sequence. I got into a dug-out behind
some French guns and then witnessed a wonderful display of artillery
practice. Shell after shell fell with marvellous precision up and down
the road, and one followed the other with a lightning speed. The road
was excavated with volcanic craters, of flying stones and earth clouds,
and mighty showers of _débris_ were sprayed tumultuously on every
side. A French officer pointed out where the next shell would land; and
he was always right—he knew the “general idea” possessing the mind of
the German gunner, and correctly surmised that after the road had been
systematically covered, the firing would cease. It was a big waste of
ammunition, for nothing was damaged except the road, and the French
gunners, as soon as the firing was over, ran to their pet “seventy-fives”
and opened furiously back in order to show that their bark was as good as
ever. The French batteries at this particular place did enormous damage
to the Germans in their attacks south of Ypres, and as they are no longer
at this roadside but somewhere farther on, no valuable information is
being given away in relating the fact.
The French gunners, both at this critical phase of the war and on the
Aisne, were wonderful fellows. Night and day, in rain, hail, sleet,
or snow, their great guns never stopped. In the blackest night and in
howling gales of sleety wind they could be heard near by and in the far
distance, for ever pounding into the enemy. This policy of continuous
fire is wonderfully heartening to the French troops in the trenches,
and the moral effect is tremendous. On the Aisne the French guns were
always busy, but the British, alas, were generally silent. I have heard
men on the Aisne pathetically say, “Why don’t our guns fire?” “Why don’t
they reply to the German fire?” and the questioning was not confined to
soldiers, for it was a common topic of conversation amongst officers.
On the Aisne we did not have enough artillery, and we had not enough
ammunition for the artillery we did have. It was the same at this period
at Ypres. England, the greatest engineering country of the world, the
richest and most prosperous Empire of this or any other time, made a very
poor showing on the Continent. Small as our army was, it was not equipped
perfectly. Our army in France may have been the “best shooting army,” but
if so it was with the rifle. In artillery we were entirely outclassed
by the Germans and put to eternal shame by the French. On the Aisne the
Germans had big 8-inch howitzers and we had nothing to meet them. Against
the guns that had battered the forts of Maubeuge and crumpled up Namur
what had we to offer? Nothing. The Germans had an unlimited supply of
machine-guns on the Aisne and the Yser, and we had a paltry few. We were
short of ammunition, but the Germans and the French had plenty.
When we required high explosive shells to beat down entrenchments and
trenches we had nothing but shrapnel, which was absolutely useless for
this purpose. Because shrapnel was effective in the South African War and
high explosives unnecessary there, it was concluded that the same set of
circumstances would be repeated in France and Belgium.
In September 1914 I saw the four 6-inch howitzer batteries arrive on the
Aisne from England, and the news of their arrival spread like wildfire
amongst our men, who thought that at last “mighty England was sending
mighty guns.” They were mighty guns right enough, but there was not
enough ammunition sent with them. As a nation we always muddle through,
but it is rather pitiful to think that muddles mean the death of many
brave men, and that our woeful lack of big guns and ammunition has meant
many British graves in France and Flanders.
A ride through Ypres at this time was an interesting and exciting
affair—interesting from the historic associations of the old Flemish
capital, and exciting from the German “Black Marias” falling about. The
old Cloth Hall was then still standing—only one corner and a door had
been battered about, but Ypres itself was very mournful and desolate.
A bombarded town, empty of all its people and with ruins all round
where once was industry, wealth, and moving crowds, presents a very sad
spectacle. I suppose Ypres, stormy as her history has been in the past,
had never been so empty before. At one time 200,000 people were said
to have lived in Ypres. That was in the days of her splendour as the
ancient capital of Flanders, when the wonderful Cloth Hall was built by
the cloth-workers of the thirteenth century, in that turbulent epoch when
citizens and workpeople were fighting down and curbing the old feudal
tyranny—for it was in Belgium that the common people established the
first free city north of the Alps.
On the ride through this famous old city to our positions beyond, the
terrible evidences of the German bombardment surrounded one in monumental
impressiveness. Dead horses were lying in coagulated pools of blood in
every street. Whole rows of old, closely-built Spanish and Flemish houses
and shops were crumbled and shattered. The _pavé_ was ripped, torn, and
covered with window glass shattered into millions of fine fragments;
roofs had disappeared from some houses, and walls blown out of others.
Tumbled masonry, smoking ashes, and excavated, torn-up roadways—all bore
witness to the terrible character of the first German bombardment.
In one tobacconist’s shop in the square, just opposite the Cloth Hall,
the large plate-glass window had been completely destroyed, but the shop
stood otherwise uninjured and intact. One could easily have taken boxes
of cigars and pipes by simply putting a hand through the window-frame in
passing, but although the temptation was there, not one cigar was touched
by a British soldier. Imagine the genial Saxon or the crucifying Bavarian
letting such a chance slip!
I got off my horse and led it through the street, as it clearly did not
like passing the dead horses on the roadway. After having tied it to a
street-post in front of a fair-sized hotel or _estaminet_, I walked into
the front bar-parlour, which was open to the street. The evidences of a
hasty exit were ludicrously patent. A half-emptied glass of beer and a
full one stood close together on the bar counter, and near them lay a
good pipe full of tobacco which had not been lighted. On a small table
in a corner of the café was a tray with two large empty clean glasses;
on the same table stood a bottle of red wine, and close beside it a
corkscrew, holding the impaled extracted cork. One light chair near this
table lay overturned on the floor; the other had been hastily drawn back,
as was shown by the tracks on the sawdust floor. I thought of Pompeii
when old Vesuvius belched ashes and molten lava and buried the gay Roman
pleasure-city as it stood. The Pompeian wine-bibbers and “mine host”
could not escape from that engulfing darkness and the fiery cinders, and
perforce died nobly standing by their bottles. But in that drinking-room
at Ypres there was no dying the death beside the beer and the good red
wine. No Sherlock Holmes was necessary to reconstruct the picture—the two
cronies drinking their morning ale at the bar, and the two comfortable
Yprian burghers waiting for the filling of their glasses from the bottle
just uncorked, the burly “mine host” in white apron and with bottle in
hand—all suddenly electrified by a sinister whistling overhead, and
then the mighty explosion, the roar of falling masonry, the smashing of
hundreds of window-panes, the concussion of air; then another earthquake
smash, and then another, till the house and street were rocking with the
shocks. This was no time to light a pipe, to drink amber beer and ruddy
wine. It was time to get out of Ypres. So down went the forgotten pipe
and bottle, back went the chairs, and out streamed our terrified quintet
to the tormented street, leaving the room and its contents as I saw it.
On approaching the bridge on the far side of the town I saw the only
remaining inhabitant. This was a middle-aged woman with a grey shawl over
her head and shoulders, and she was looking out of a window of a partly
shattered house. I felt sorry for her, she looked so very lonely in that
broken house.
That afternoon she was arrested by the Belgians as a spy. My compassion
had been utterly thrown away.
Near this same bridge on another occasion my arrival was providential. An
Army Service Corps driver was speeding his motor towards the city when
he was struck by enemy shrapnel. He had just sufficient strength to stop
his lorry before fainting from the shock and the rush of blood from a
grievous wound of the right thigh. Blood was pumping out of the wound,
and it appeared as if the femoral artery had been torn. Fortunately it
was not, and we were soon able to control the hæmorrhage, put the wounded
man on his lorry, and drive him back to one of the ambulance stations in
a cottage near the roadside.
The road from Ypres to our trenches was a busy but pathetic highway—busy
with marching men, waggons, gallopers, generals, and staff officers, and
pathetic from the many graves and small graveyards near the roadside
and the many full ambulance waggons rumbling along on the uneven, jolty
_pavé_.
The road was frequently visited with enemy shells, and no one travelled
along it unless on business. “Trespassers will be prosecuted” was an
unnecessary injunction on the Ypres roads.
The headquarter staff of the 15th Brigade beyond Ypres had a narrow
escape one morning. A big shell burst in the grounds of the château
occupied by the Brigadier and his staff. The staff, who were in the
building at the time, went out to look at the hole it had made. Whilst
looking at the pit, another shell landed on the château itself and burst
into the room just vacated by them. A soldier servant was killed and one
staff officer was wounded.
An advanced ambulance station, with wounded men and medical officers in
it, was struck fairly by another shell and badly holed, causing loss of
life. No place was safe from these long bowls of the enemy, and though
artillery practice of this sort may not be of much military importance,
it yet produces an air of uncertainty and caution and jumpiness.
The country surrounding Ypres and Ypres itself were very dismal. The old
elm trees on the roads, and the silent, deserted streets were shrouded in
a ghostly veil of melancholy.
On a subsequent visit to the site of the old Cloth Hall one saw little
more than ruins, for the famous building had in the interval been
correctly ranged by the enemy guns and duly shattered. Later on more
destruction took place, and visitors of the year 2015 will be shown some
stones and broken pillars, all that was left of a famous hall which had
stood for seven centuries and had been destroyed “one hundred years ago.”
When peace comes again to Belgium, Ypres and its roads, its Hill 60 and
its graves will be a place of holy pilgrimage to thousands of English,
French, and Germans, for here fell and are buried their bravest dead.
But the curious tripper and the Cook’s tourist had better keep away from
Ypres. Let the friends of the dead and the quiet country folk have the
land in their possession for a season.
The railway station at Vlamertinge, near Ypres, frequently had a very
fine armoured train in its sidings. The train was manned by Jack Tars
with naval guns, and the engine and car looked very attractive in a
wonderful coat of futurist colours—splashes of green and khaki and brown.
This _H.M.S Chameleon_ was a very good cruiser and very nippy in moving
across country. The sailors were very cheerful and seemed to like their
ship amazingly.
On the roads near our headquarters running from Renninghelst to
Vlamertinge, and hence along the main highway to Ypres, a large number
of Belgian soldiers were at work repairing the _pavé_ and widening the
road surface by laying prepared trunks of trees laid closely together
in the mud at the sides. They were fine sturdy men and full of life and
cheerfulness, a different type altogether from the countryfolk we met in
the farms. These were the men who had fought from Liége to the Yser, and
were still on Belgian soil. They were very bitter about the Germans. They
said that they asked for no quarter and would give none in the fighting.
These Belgians on the roads were men who had been temporarily sent back
to “recuperate,” and while at this work they enjoyed good food, warm
quarters, and sleep. At eleven o’clock every morning a very fine motor
kitchen would pass along the road. Each man had his canteen ready, the
cook ladled out to him a good helping of mashed potatoes, boiled mutton,
and thick gravy, and another cook handed him a big chunk of white bread.
It was all done very expeditiously and in good order. After getting his
share each man would sit on his rolled-up overcoat on the roadside and
spoon the mutton and potatoes into his mouth with the bread. Knives and
forks and spoons, after all, are really only luxuries.
The roads were in a frightful state during these November weeks. The
narrow _pavé_ was full of ruts, deep and dangerous, and skirted on either
side by a slope of boggy quagmire churned up by the wheels of hundreds of
heavy motor transports, and beyond this again on either side was a deep
ditch.
Any skidding motor would land in the ditch, and the righting of these
embedded cars was at times a titanic task, productive of much loss of
temper and bad language.
The narrow _pavé_ would not permit of two vehicles crossing abreast, and
when two met, neither wished to surrender the “crown of the causeway.”
It was a point of honour not to budge and to wear down the other side by
abusive epithets. Uncle Toby used to say that our army swore horribly
in Flanders, but the swearing in Toby’s day was not a patch on the rich
vocabulary and full-blooded oaths of our London taxi-drivers in Flanders
in 1914.
The London taxi-driver, always eloquent, reached his highest flights when
addressing the quivering blancmange-like mud of a Belgian road.
I have seen old French non-commissioned officers who probably did not
know a single word of what was said on these occasions, but who envisaged
the situation perfectly, stand by with approving and admiring faces while
the driver was embracing in his comprehensive abuse all things living
and dead, the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the
earth.
At Ouderdom we met Alphonse, soldier of France. Two medical officers were
one morning sipping some red wine in an _estaminet_ in the village when
in swaggered a very small French soldier.
He had a boy’s face and figure and voice, but bore the assured manner of
a man of the world. He was small even for a French boy. A carbine was
swung across his back, and his belt carried a bayonet and cartridges. He
wore the French blue overcoat with the ends tucked up in the approved
style and with the buttons polished and bright. His little legs were
encased in the familiar red trousers tucked into heavy boots several
sizes too large for him, and his _képi_ was placed on his small, closely
cropped head at a jaunty angle. Such was Alphonse, the complete soldier
of France, full private in a famous Parisian rifle battalion.
Alphonse swaggered into the café, ordered his glass of red wine with the
_sang-froid_ and assurance of a veteran grenadier, and tossed it off as
easily as a Falstaff.
“How old are you, Alphonse?” “But fourteen years, mon officier.” “Have
you killed many Germans?” “But yes, perhaps thirteen, perhaps fifteen;
who can tell when one is fighting every day? But certainly I kill
many Bosches.” “And with what did you kill them, Alphonse?” “Avec mon
carabine”—this with a smack of his hand on the barrel of the gun. A smart
soldierly salute, and our gallant killer of thirteen, perhaps fifteen,
peaceful, amiable German soldiers strode out of the café.
A corporal of Alphonse’s regiment told us that at the beginning of the
war Alphonse was a young devil of a gamin in Paris. In his leisure
moments he sold newspapers in the streets, and in his working hours he
was up to some devilry.
When this regiment marched out of Paris towards the frontier Alphonse
marched alongside it, a bright-eyed, hopeful, cheerful youth clad in
ragged clothes and down-at-heel boots. He was told to go home, but said
that he had no home and was going instead to kill Germans. So in the good
French way the regiment adopted Alphonse, gave him a uniform and a gun,
and a new pair of boots, and took him on the strength.
The little gamin turned out a very cunning soldier. He was a dead shot,
and the corporal assured us that he had accounted for a good many of the
enemy. At night Alphonse would crawl out of the trenches and scout well
into the enemy lines. Frequently he brought back valuable information of
preparations for a German surprise attack. He was so small and so cute
that he escaped observation.
In December Alphonse was presented to President Poincaré on one of
his many visits to the French front, and the President promised him
a commission and the Legion d’Honneur when he should reach the age
of twenty-one years. I have grave fears for the gallant, snub-nosed,
blue-eyed Alphonse, young in years but old in sin. He is already too
fond of the rich red wine of France, and scouting at night inside the
enemy lines is a duty full of peril. But Alphonse can teach a lesson
in patriotism that many a flower-socked, straw-hatted knut on a London
promenade would do well to learn.
The Flemings are very devout Catholics, perhaps the most Catholic
of all peoples to-day; so our ambulance was given the hall-mark of
respectability because we had with it a Monsignor. The presence of a
Catholic prelate with our ambulance, distinguished it in a notable degree
from all other ambulances, and we tried to live up to our presumed
reputation.
Whenever Monsignor appeared on the roads near Ouderdom the Belgian
soldiers would immediately stop work and, carrying their pickaxes and
shovels, crowd round him for a talk and the latest news. Monsignor was
a good linguist and a cheerful optimist, and never handed on any bad
news to the soldiers. One morning he was asked for news, and appealed
to me what to say. We told them that the Russians had another victory,
and that the German dead could be counted by thousands. This was very
palatable and thoroughly appreciated. We were not asked to give any
details of the victory, which was perhaps fortunate.
Monsignor would sometimes walk along this road with his hands behind
his back and with two or three cigarettes sticking out prominently from
between his fingers. The Belgian soldiers would then stalk after him,
with broad grins on their faces, and pull away a cigarette. Monsignor
never looked behind. That would not be playing the game at all, but his
eyes would twinkle, and I have no doubt whatever that he hugely enjoyed
the fun.
There were days when Monsignor had a wardrobe consisting of but one
shirt and one pair of trousers—the other articles of apparel had all
been given away. Then he would begin again to collect mufflers and socks
when supplies came in, and hand them out almost immediately to some poor
devils who had nothing. If our chaplain appeared any day to be more
cheerful than usual, one could make quite sure that he had just given
away his boots or his shirt or his towel to some poor French, Belgian, or
British Tommy. The only thing he kept a tight hold on was his toothbrush.
One day Monsignor appeared with a cardboard box in his hand and told us
that he was going to Renninghelst, a small town about two miles from
our headquarters. Lieutenant X—— and myself asked leave to accompany
him. We had to ask permission, for Monsignor was a senior chaplain and
a lieutenant-colonel in rank, although he never said anything about
that. We discovered it accidentally. Being a colonel interested him only
in a vague impersonal sort of way. He told us once that a soldier is
diffident and shy before a colonel, but is natural and communicative to
his minister or priest who is not flagged and starred.
[Illustration: MONSIGNOR DISTRIBUTING MEDALS TO BELGIAN SOLDIERS AT THE
ROADSIDE.]
On this lovely winter morning, when the whole countryside was white with
frozen snow, we had a sharp bracing walk to the curious old town, then
the headquarters of General B—— and his staff of a French Division.
The village streets were packed full of French and Belgian soldiery,
from Spahis to Alpine Chasseurs. We worked our way round the carts and
through the jostling men to a little shop opposite the church. Monsignor
was hailed joyfully by many of his old friends, who on this particular
morning were not working on the roads.
The mystery of the cardboard box was then unravelled, for after cutting
the string and throwing away the cover we saw that it was full of
small religious medals and scapularies. There was a big rush for the
medals, and we were all squeezed up together by the pressing soldiers,
hundreds of whom were holding their grimy paws out for the metal discs.
As Monsignor was hard at work I took a hand also and helped in the
distribution. At last all were gone. Hundreds more men had come up with
hands out, but had to leave unsatisfied. I asked Monsignor if the medals
lost any virtue by having been handed out by me, a Protestant. He assured
me that it was all right, as the Belgians and French must have thought I
was a good Catholic.
Every Field Ambulance has two chaplains attached to it. Ours had a Church
of England one and a Roman Catholic. Another ambulance would have perhaps
a Wesleyan and a Catholic, or a Presbyterian and an Anglican. These
chaplains were not designed for the spiritual needs of the ambulance
men, but as each ambulance kept in touch with a brigade consisting of
four battalions, the chaplain could also, by being with the ambulance
headquarters, keep in touch with the brigade, and could also meet the
wounded brought in from that brigade, administer the rites of the Church
to those requiring it, and bury the dead. The chaplains did not restrict
themselves to the men of their own faith, but helped and worked all
they knew for all. After all, an ambulance station full of wounded men
is not the place for religious exercises, and a wise chaplain helped in
making the men as comfortable as possible, bringing round soup, taking
off boots, distributing cigarettes and tobacco, writing letters and
“gossiping”—the wounded like some one to talk to them and to talk to,
and the chaplains could make a “cheery atmosphere” even in such a gloomy
place as a barn full of recently wounded men. Most of the chaplains had a
good sense of proportion. Some had not. One bleak, miserable day, I saw
a well-meaning but mournful chaplain go up to a lorry full of wounded
men packed close together on the straw, uncomfortable and shivering and
miserable. He handed to each of them a small religious tract exhorting
him to read it. The men took them with a polite “Thank you, sir,” but
their faces displayed no enthusiasm. This was not the time for tracts.
Shortly afterwards another chaplain, a man of the world, came up to
the lorry with a “Cheer up, boys. You’ll soon be in warm comfortable
quarters. Have you any smokes?” The men had none, and out came a dozen
packets of Woodbine cigarettes from the chaplain’s pockets and two boxes
of matches. The expression on the men’s faces altered at once. The
atmosphere had altered, the sense of proportion had been restored.
Men in hospital like to hear good news. I knew one chaplain who managed
never to go into a room full of wounded and sick men without bringing
some cheery report for everybody. He never actually fabricated news, but
he had a wonderful gift of exaggeration. If we were in the same position,
we had “held the line against incredible odds.” If the French had taken
an enemy trench, “they had driven a wedge into the German position and
produced consternation.” If Russian cavalry had made a reconnaissance
in the Masurian Lakes, “they were sweeping like locusts all over East
Prussia, and had set fire to the Kaiser’s favourite hunting-lodge.”
The men never inquired about details, general statements were quite good
enough.
This was better than telling men that the “war would be a terribly long
one; that we would have to make great sacrifices; but, please God, we
would win in the end.” I have heard a chaplain talk like this to wounded
men, and I knew that he “wasn’t delivering the right goods.”
Renninghelst is a large village, or rather a very small town. It is
situated close to the Franco-Belgian frontier, and at this period was
of importance as an ambulance centre for wounded French and Belgians
who were occupying the line of trenches in the front. The country all
round is real Flanders land—flat, low-lying, damp, and uninviting. The
renowned Mont de Cats can be seen from it, and round this _mont_ some
hard fighting was taking place. The old village has a queer Dutch-looking
church with a closely packed graveyard around it, planted thickly with
stone and iron crosses to the memory of ancient departed burghers, whose
Flemish-Dutch names are inscribed there to commemorate their ages and
their virtues. Eighty, eighty-five, and ninety seemed to be the usual age
of these old burghers for slipping off this mortal coil in this quiet
sleepy old place in Southern Belgium. There are many new graves now round
the Renninghelst countryside, and they are for men who have died young,
suddenly, and in the springtime of their days. The interior of this old
Flemish church is lofty, and has little in the way of adornment, for
there are no millionaires in its congregation to give great stained-glass
windows or carved pulpits.
On my first visit to the church it was full of French soldiers, some
sleeping and others lolling round on the straw that thickly covered the
stone floor. A big group were crowded round a charcoal brazier warming
themselves and watching the progress of a savoury stew. The French
soldiers are wonderful cooks, and the stew this day was to be a good one,
for the _pièce de résistance_ was a fine fat hare which had been caught
that morning near the front. The two cooks were exercising great care
to make the stew a success, and the air of the place was a cheerful,
expectant one.
Some days after this visit I was again at Renninghelst, and the church
was now a temporary hospital. The floor was still covered with straw,
but wounded men were lying close together on it. The charcoal brazier
was still there and giving out a welcome heat on this cold wintry day.
Ambulance waggons were in the street next the church full of wounded
soldiers, and more were coming up the road.
French army surgeons were busy amongst the red-breeched men in the
church, and three of them were engaged round an improvised operating
table near the altar, where a man deeply under chloroform was having his
jaw wired with silver wire for a bad fracture from a piece of shell.
The old white-haired, weary-looking priest of the parish was leaning over
a dying man and bending his head low to catch the last faint whispers.
Some women of the village were carrying round cups of hot broth to the
men propped along the wall, and others were hurrying in with blankets and
pillows.
One soldier I observed to be very blanched and tossing restlessly on his
straw. Restlessness is always an important sign in wounded men, and on
going up to this poor devil and turning down his rough blanket the cause
of the trouble was apparent. He was bleeding freely through a bandaged
wound of the leg. The dressings were soaked with blood, and as the French
surgeons were occupied I broke a professional rule and treated this
patient without asking his doctor’s permission. The bleeding was soon
controlled, and the threatened death from hæmorrhage averted.
As I was completing the last turns of the bandage a voice murmured
over my shoulder, “Vive l’entente cordiale.” The speaker was the chief
surgeon, just released from his work on the operating table. He thanked
me for helping, and said that he and his two assistants had been up
all night, and had been very busy. Most of the men had been wounded by
shrapnel. Shrapnel makes very bad wounds; it rips, tears, and lacerates
the tissues, and repair is often impossible in face of the anatomical
devastation. The French were having a great deal of trouble with their
wounds, as we were also. All the wounds became septic. There is very
little clean surgery in this war. The wounds rarely heal by first
intention, and a fractured, splintered bone meant months of rest and
painful dressings in hospital and a tardy convalescence.
The fighting all along this front had been extraordinarily severe. The
French hospitals and the French medical staff were taxed to the utmost.
Every available fighting man was in the trenches or waiting as supports.
The German hammer was making mighty swings on the Allied anvil, and
nowhere were the blows so heavy and so long sustained as on that famous
Ypres salient. It was bent and dented, but not broken. The character
of the fighting can be grasped from two incidents. One famous infantry
regiment left England at full strength. All of its original officers were
killed, wounded, or missing. Of the second lot of officers, all were
killed, wounded, or missing. Its third supply of officers were now grimly
up against the same chain of events.
One of the first British Divisions left England with 12,000 men and 400
officers. When it was withdrawn from the front to rest and refit, it
could only muster 2336 men and 44 officers!
A famous French regiment with a long roll of battle honours went into
action one frosty morning near Reims. It went forward a gleaming column
of more than a thousand bayonets. Two days afterwards forty-nine men,
led by an old bearded sergeant, marched back. These were all that were
left. The sergeant had a bloody bandage across his forehead—he had lost
an eye—but the French Brigadier-General embraced and kissed him on the
cheek. The French officers standing near stood rigidly at the salute, and
tears were running down their cheeks.
The losses on our side were heavy indeed, but on the German side I
am glad to know that they were colossal. The annihilation of German
battalions and brigades is an argument that the Germans fully understand,
and the only thing that will convince the German that the game is up is
heavy and continuous loss of fighting men and difficulty in filling their
ranks. This sounds very brutal, but we are living in a hard age.
I was much struck by the splendid way the women of this small Belgian
town rallied round to help the wounded. We found the same thing in
France; no trouble was too great, and all was done so cheerfully and
sympathetically. This is the “women’s day” in France. One cannot help
admiring their courage and ability in France’s hour of trial. Husbands,
sons, brothers, fathers—all are on the frontier, and the women carry on
the business of France. They make the most stupendous sacrifices and
exhibit a sublime patience. None are so joyful as the women when a French
victory is announced, and none so pitiful as they when the wounded, the
corollary to every victory, arrive at the towns and villages.
This war, which the German has carried on with an animal ferocity and
a degenerate lust unequalled in history, has demonstrated to the world
the unfaltering nobility of character of the French woman, and that her
fervent soul can rise serene and cool in the midst of the most appalling
troubles.
When our troops landed at Le Havre in August, it was noticed at once what
a big part the women were taking in the business life of the place. There
were women conductors on the trams, women in the tobacconist shops, women
in the cafés as attendants, in the streets selling newspapers, and in all
the big _magasins_.
In Rouen, women conducted coal and timber yards, vegetable and
produce businesses, bakeries, butcheries, fishmongeries, grocers’ and
ironmongers’ stores. Women drove carts and waggons, acted as tally clerks
on wharves, did everything, in fact—and did it all soberly, quietly, and
well. They were always tidy, smart, and cheerful, and did not stop work
at eleven o’clock for a glass of beer, or spend many quarters of hours
filling and lighting pipes of tobacco.
One woman I know—a rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed Norman dame—did the catering
for a large officers’ mess in one of the camps at Rouen. At 5 a.m. she
was at the mess tent with her pony-cart laden with wine, vegetables,
preserves, and fruit. I have passed her shop at nine o’clock at night and
have seen her then busily selling dried fish, pickles, and vinegar to her
customers. She told me that she was too busy to sleep. This was in 1915,
and she had been running the business with no other help than that of two
small daughters since July 1914.
Her husband was on the Argonne front, and she was keeping the flag flying
till his return. Incidentally, she was making money. Catering for an
officers’ mess is fairly lucrative.
On the march from the Marne to the Aisne, and on the Aisne itself, women
were to be seen doing ordinary farm work—building stacks, carting in the
wheat, driving waggon-loads of hay and peas, milking the cows, making
cider and butter, tilling the soil,—and tending the children into the
bargain.
The most amazing thing of all was to see women working in the fields
behind our batteries only a mile away.
At Venizel, on the Aisne bank, our Engineers were throwing a pontoon
bridge across the river under a heavy shrapnel fire. Shells were bursting
up and down the river’s bank and on the waters of the river, yet about a
quarter of a mile behind three women were busily engaged cutting turnips
for the cows.
On the march from the Aisne to La Bassée, our Field Ambulance bivouacked
at the Château of Longpont. The Comte and Comtesse de M—— were in
residence at the château, and we were told by the Comtesse that General
von Kluck, commanding the right wing of the invading army, had in August
stopped for a day and a night at the château with his _état-major_.
We asked how Von Kluck had behaved, and the Comtesse said that he had
been _très agréable_. When he arrived, she interviewed him and begged
him to respect the old château and its old abbey, the pictures and the
tapestries. The General promised that he would do so, and that he would
give orders that the villagers in the hamlet near the château gates were
not to be molested. It was the apple season, and the apple trees of
Longpont were laden with delicious fruit. Von Kluck “asked permission”
of the Comtesse for his soldiers to take some apples off the trees. This
the Comtesse graciously permitted, and the dusty German soldiery helped
themselves to the apples and did not break a branch off a single tree.
The Comtesse provided new eggs and butter and bread for the General’s
breakfast, and he invited her to honour the meal with her presence.
But the Comtesse sent a note that she would not break bread with her
country’s enemy. This was one of the few châteaux and one of the few
villages that the German Saligoth did not destroy or outrage before
leaving.
Some German Generals approved of outrages and atrocities, to wit,
Rupprecht of Bavaria. Some disapproved, and Von Kluck, it is said, was
one of these—but I “hae ma doots.”
This leads to one of the blackest pictures of this war—a picture grim
and loathsome. It is a subject which the women of France will discuss
freely and openly and with a concentrated bitterness that one can readily
understand. I have spoken to many educated French women on this subject,
and have heard many curious and amazing tales and incidents. The subject
is that of the women who have been ravished and outraged by the German
soldiery.
Many of these victims, married women and young girls, are to-day pregnant
to German fathers, and the burning question with the women of France is
how best to help their unfortunate sisters, and what is to be done for
the offspring.
In the French Chamber of Deputies the subject has been debated with
equal freedom and openness. Leading French newspapers too, such as the
_Figaro_, _Le Temps_, _Echo de Paris_, and others, have envisaged the
position in powerful and appealing articles.
One journal advocated that in the exceptional circumstances it was
perfectly justifiable to carry out abortion and interrupt the period of
gestation. Opinions were sought from leading French physicians and from
the Academy of Medicine. These unhesitatingly condemned such a course,
pointing out that the mission of the medical profession was to save
life; and also that the induction of premature labour was at all times a
dangerous and risky operation to the mother, and in certain circumstances
would be fatal.
The Catholic Church in France spoke strongly and certainly in the same
direction, and condemned as utterly wrong and sinful any measure that had
for its object the death of the unborn child.
The women of France, however, do not share these latter views.
Arrangements have now been completed for the reception of these pitiful
expectant mothers into certain maternity homes, where they will be
attended by skilled doctors and nurses at the State expense. After birth
the child is to be brought up by the State at some place undeclared. The
mother will not see the child at any time, and will know nothing of its
future.
The clergy all over Northern France are attending to this matter,
and everything will be done as secretly as possible in the unusual
circumstances.
No wonder that the French woman speaks of the German soldier as a loathly
thing.