LA PANNE
From Calais to La Panne is fifty miles. Calais is under military law.
It is difficult to enter, almost impossible to leave in the direction
in which I wished to go. But here again the Belgian Red Cross achieved
the impossible. I was taken before the authorities, sharply
questioned, and in the end a pink slip was passed over to the official
of the Red Cross who was to take me to the front. I wish I could have
secured that pink slip, if only because of its apparent fragility and
its astounding wearing qualities. All told, between Calais and La
Panne it was inspected--texture, weight and reading matter, front and
reverse sides, upside down and under glass--by some several hundred
sentries, officials and petty highwaymen. It suffered everything but
attack by bayonet. I found myself repeating that way to madness of
Mark Twain's:
_Punch, brothers, punch with care,
Punch in the presence of the passenjaire,
A pink trip slip for a five-cent fare_--
and so on.
Northeast then, in an open grey car with "Belgian Red Cross" on each
side of the machine. Northeast in a bitter wind, into a desolate and
almost empty country of flat fields, canals and roads bordered by
endless rows of trees bent forward like marching men. Northeast
through Gravelines, once celebrated of the Armada and now a
manufacturing city. It is curious to think that a part of the Armada
went ashore at Gravelines, and that, by the shifting of the English
Channel, it is now two miles inland and connected with the sea by a
ship canal. Northeast still, to Dunkirk.
From Calais to Gravelines there had been few signs of war--an
occasional grey lorry laden with supplies for the front; great
ambulances, also grey, and with a red cross on the top as a warning to
aëroplanes; now and then an armoured car. At Gravelines the country
took on a more forbidding appearance. Trenches flanked the roads,
which were partly closed here and there by overlapping earthworks, so
that the car must turn sharply to the left and then to the right to
get through. At night the passage is closed by barbed wire. In one
place a bridge was closed by a steel rope, which a sentry lowered
after another operation on the pink slip.
The landscape grew more desolate as the daylight began to fade, more
desolate and more warlike. There were platforms for lookouts here and
there in the trees, prepared during the early days of the war before
the German advance was checked. And there were barbed-wire
entanglements in the fields. I had always thought of a barbed-wire
entanglement as probably breast high. It was surprising to see them
only from eighteen inches to two feet in height. It was odd, too, to
think that most of the barbed wire had been made in America. Barbed
wire is playing a tremendous part in this war. The English say that
the Boers originated this use for it in the South African War.
Certainly much tragedy and an occasional bit of grim humour attach to
its present use.
With the fortified town of Dunkirk--or Dunkerque--came the real
congestion of war. The large square of the town was filled with
soldiers and marines. Here again were British uniforms, British
transports and ambulances. As a seaport for the Allied Armies in the
north, it was bustling with activity. The French and Belgians
predominated, with a sprinkling of Spahis on horseback and Turcos. An
air of activity, of rapid coming and going, filled the town. Despatch
riders on motor cycles, in black leather uniforms with black leather
hoods, flung through the square at reckless speed. Battered
automobiles, their glass shattered by shells, mud guards crumpled,
coated with clay and riddled with holes, were everywhere, coming and
going at the furious pace I have since learned to associate with war.
And over all, presiding in heroic size in the centre of the Square,
the statue of Jean Bart, Dunkirk's privateer and pirate, now come into
his own again, was watching with interest the warlike activities of
the Square. Things have changed since the days of Jean Bart, however.
The cutlass that hangs by his side would avail him little now. The
aeroplane bombs that drop round him now and then, and the processions
of French "seventy-five" guns that rumble through the Square, must
puzzle him. He must feel rather a piker in this business of modern
war.
Dunkirk is generally referred to as the "front." It is not, however.
It is near enough for constant visits from German aeroplanes, and has
been partially destroyed by German guns, firing from a distance of
more than twenty miles. But the real line begins fifteen miles farther
along the coast at Nieuport.
So we left Dunkirk at once and continued toward La Panne. A drawbridge
in the wall guards the road out of the city in that direction. And
here for the first time the pink slip threatened to fail us. The Red
Cross had been used by spies sufficiently often to cover us with cold
suspicion. And it was worse than that. Women were not allowed, under
any circumstances, to go in that direction--a new rule, being enforced
with severity. My little card was produced and eyed with hostility.
My name was assuredly of German origin. I got out my passport and
pointed to the picture on it. It had been taken hastily in Washington
for passport purposes, and there was a cast in the left eye. I have no
cast in the left eye. Timid attempts to squint with that eye failed.
But at last the officer shrugged his shoulders and let us go. The two
sentries who had kept their rifles pointed at me lowered them to a
more comfortable angle. A temporary sense of cold down my back retired
again to my feet, whence it had risen. We went over the ancient
drawbridge, with its chains by which it may be raised, and were free.
But our departure was without enthusiasm. I looked back. Some eight
sentries and officers were staring after us and muttering among
themselves.
Afterward I crossed that bridge many times. They grew accustomed to
me, but they evidently thought me quite mad. Always they protested and
complained, until one day the word went round that the American lady
had been received by the King. After that I was covered with the
mantle of royalty. The sentries saluted as I passed. I was of the
elect.
There were other sentries until the Belgian frontier was passed. After
that there was no further challenging. The occasional distant roar of
a great gun could be heard, and two French aeroplanes, winging home
after a reconnaissance over the German lines, hummed overhead. Where
between Calais and Dunkirk there had been an occasional peasant's cart
in the road or labourer in the fields, now the country was deserted,
save for long lines of weary soldiers going to their billets, lines
that shuffled rather than marched. There was no drum to keep them in
step with its melancholy throbbing. Two by two, heads down, laden with
intrenching tools in addition to their regular equipment, grumbling as
the car forced them off the road into the mud that bordered it,
swathed beyond recognition against the cold and dampness, in the
twilight those lines of shambling men looked grim, determined,
sinister.
"We are going through Furnes," said my companion. "It has been shelled
all day, but at dusk they usually stop. It is out of our way, but you
will like to see it."
I said I was perfectly willing, but that I hoped the Germans would
adhere to their usual custom. I felt all at once that, properly
conserved, a long and happy life might lie before me. I mentioned that
I was a person of no importance, and that my death would be of no
military advantage. And, as if to emphasise my peaceful fireside at
home, and dinner at seven o'clock with candles on the table, the fire
re-commenced.
"Artillery," I said with conviction, "seems to me barbarous and
unnecessary. But in a moving automobile--"
It was a wrong move. He hastened to tell me of people riding along
calmly in automobiles, and of the next moment there being nothing but
a hole in the road. Also he told me how shrapnel spread, scattering
death over large areas. If I had had an idea of dodging anything I saw
coming it vanished.
We went into the little town of Furnes. Nothing happened. Only one
shell was fired, and I have no idea where it fell. The town was a dead
town, its empty streets full of brick and glass. I grew quite calm and
expressed some anxiety about the tires. Although my throat was dry, I
was able to enunciate clearly! We dared not light the car lamps, and
our progress was naturally slow.
Furnes is not on the coast, but three miles inland. So we turned sharp
to the left toward La Panne, our destination, a small seaside resort
in times of peace, but now the capital of Belgium. It was dark now,
and the roads were congested with the movements of troops, some going
to the trenches, those out of the trenches going back to their billets
for twenty-four hours' rest, and the men who had been on rest moving
up as pickets or reserves. Even in the darkness it was easy to tell
the rested men from the ones newly relieved. Here were mostly
Belgians, and the little Belgian soldier is a cheery soul. He asks
very little, is never surly. A little food, a little sleep--on straw,
in a stable or a church--and he is happy again. Over and over, as I
saw the Belgian Army, I was impressed with its cheerfulness under
unparalleled conditions.
Most of them have been fighting since Liege. Of a hundred and fifty
thousand men only fifty thousand remain. Their ration is meagre
compared with the English and the French, their clothing worn and
ragged. They are holding the inundated district between Nieuport and
Dixmude, a region of constant struggle for water-soaked trenches,
where outposts at the time I was there were being fought for through
lakes of icy water filled with barbed wire, where their wounded fall
and drown. And yet they are inveterately cheerful. A brave lot, the
Belgian soldiers, brave and uncomplaining! It is no wonder that the
King of Belgium loves them, and that his eyes are tragic as he looks
at them.
La Panne at last, a straggling little town of one street and rows of
villas overlooking the sea. La Panne, with the guns of Nieuport
constantly in one's ears, and the low, red flash of them along the
sandy beach; with ambulances bringing in their wounded now that night
covers their movements; with English gunboats close to the shore and a
searchlight playing over the sea. La Panne, with just over the sand
dunes the beginning of that long line of trenches that extends south
and east and south again, four hundred and fifty miles of death.
It was two weeks and four days since I had left America, and less than
thirty hours since I boarded the one-o'clock train at Victoria
Station, London. Later on I beat the thirty-hour record twice, once
going from the Belgian front to England in six hours, and another time
leaving the English lines at Béthune, motoring to Calais, and arriving
in my London hotel the same night. Cars go rapidly over the French
roads, and the distance, measured by miles, is not great. Measured by
difficulties, it is a different story.