_EXPERIENCE_
(_By way of Preface_)
Of these sketches that tell of ruined Belgium, I must say that I saw
what I have told of. They are not meditations in a library. Because of
the great courtesy of the Prime Minister of Belgium, who is the war
minister, and through the daily companionship of his son, our little
group of helpers were permitted to go where no one else could go, to
pass in under shell fire, to see action, to lift the wounded out of the
muddy siding where they had fallen. Ten weeks of Red Cross work showed
me those faces and torn bodies which I have described. The only details
that have been altered for the purpose of story-telling are these: The
Doctor who rescued the thirty aged at Dixmude is still alive; Smith did
not receive the decoration, but Hilda did; it was a candlestick on the
piano of Pervyse that vibrated to shell fire; the spy continues to
signal without being caught; "Pervyse," the war-baby, was not adopted by
an American financier; motor ambulances were given to the Corps, not to
an individual. With these exceptions, the incidents are lifted over from
the experience of two English women and my wife in Pervyse, and my own
weeks as stretcher-bearer on an ambulance.
In that deadlock of slaughter where I worked, I saw no pageantry of war,
no glitter and pomp, at all. Nothing remains to me of war pictures
except the bleakness. When I think suddenly of Belgium, I see a town
heavy with the coming horror:--almost all the houses sealed, the
curtains drawn, the friendly door barred. And then I see a town after
the invaders have shelled it and burned it, with the homeless dogs
howling in the streets, and the pigeons circling in search of their
cote, but not finding it. Or I look down a long, lonely road, gutted
with shell holes, with dead cattle in the fields, and farm-houses in a
heap of broken bricks and dust.
And when I do not see a landscape, dreary with its creeping ruin, I see
men in pain. Sometimes I see the faces of dead boys--one boy
outstretched at length on a doorstep with the smoke of his burning body
rising through the mesh of his blue army clothing; and then a half mile
beyond, in the yard of a farm-house, a young peasant spread out as he
had fallen when the chance bullet found him.
That alone which seemed good in the horror was the courage of the modern
man. He dies as simply and as bravely as the young of Thermopylæ. These
men of the factory and office are crowding more meaning into their brief
weeks by the Yser and under the shattering of Ypres than is contained in
all the last half century of clerk routine.
I