"'TWAS A FAMOUS VICTORY"
FROM MY JOURNAL:
LA PANNE, January 25th, 10 P.M.
I am at the Belgian Red Cross hospital to-night. Have had supper and
have been given a room on the top floor, facing out over the sea.
This is the base hospital for the Belgian lines. The men come here
with the most frightful injuries. As I entered the building to-night
the long tiled corridor was filled with the patient and quiet figures
that are the first fruits of war. They lay on portable cots, waiting
their turn in the operating rooms, the white coverings and bandages
not whiter than their faces.
11 P.M. The Night Superintendent has just been in to see me. She says
there is a baby here from Furnes with both legs off, and a nun who
lost an arm as she was praying in the garden of her convent. The baby
will live, but the nun is dying.
She brought me a hot-water bottle, for I am still chilled from my long
ride, and sat down for a moment's talk. She is English, as are most of
the nurses. She told me with tears in her eyes of a Dutch Red Cross
nurse who was struck by a shell in Furnes, two days ago, as she
crossed the street to her hospital, which was being evacuated. She was
brought here.
"Her leg was shattered," she said. "So young and so pretty she was,
too! One of the surgeons was in love with her. It seemed as if he
could not let her die."
How terrible! For she died.
"But she had a casket," the Night Superintendent hastened to assure
me. "The others, of course, do not. And two of the nurses were
relieved to-day to go with her to the grave."
I wonder if the young surgeon went. I wonder--
The baby is near me. I can hear it whimpering.
Midnight. A man in the next room has started to moan. Good God, what a
place! He has shell in both lungs, and because of weakness had to be
operated on without an anæsthetic.
2 A.M. I cannot sleep. He is trying to sing "Tipperary."
English battleships are bombarding the German batteries at Nieuport
from the sea. The windows rattle all the time.
6 A.M. A new day now. A grey and forbidding dawn. Sentries every
hundred yards along the beach under my window. The gunboats are moving
out to sea. A number of French aeroplanes are scouting overhead.
The man in the next room is quiet.
* * * * *
Imagine one of our great seaside hotels stripped of its bands, its gay
crowds, its laughter. Paint its many windows white, with a red cross
in the centre of each one. Imagine its corridors filled with wounded
men, its courtyard crowded with ambulances, its parlours occupied by
convalescents who are blind or hopelessly maimed, its card room a
chapel trimmed with the panoply of death. For bathchairs and bathers
on the sands substitute long lines of weary soldiers drilling in the
rain and cold. And over all imagine the unceasing roar of great guns.
Then, but feebly, you will have visualised the Ambulance Ocean at La
Panne as I saw it that first winter of the war.
The town is built on the sand dunes, and is not unlike Ostend in
general situation; but it is hardly more than a village. Such trees as
there are grow out of the sand, and are twisted by the winds from the
sea. Their trunks are green with smooth moss. And over the dunes is
long grass, then grey and dry with winter, grass that was beaten under
the wind into waves that surge and hiss.
The beach is wide and level. There is no surf. The sea comes in in
long, flat lines of white that wash unheralded about the feet of the
cavalry horses drilling there. Here and there a fisherman's boat close
to the line of villas marks the limit of high tide; marks more than
that; marks the fisherman who has become a soldier; marks the end of
the peaceful occupations of the little town; marks the change from a
sea that was a livelihood to a sea that has become a menace and a
hidden death.
The beach at La Panne has its story. There are guns there now,
waiting. The men in charge of them wait, and, waiting, shiver in the
cold. And just a few minutes away along the sands there was a house
built by a German, a house whose foundation was a cemented site for a
gun. The house is destroyed now. It had been carefully located,
strategically, and built long before the war began. A gun on that
foundation would have commanded Nieuport.
Here, in six villas facing the sea, live King Albert and Queen
Elisabeth and their household, and here the Queen, grief-stricken at
the tragedy that has overtaken her innocent and injured people, visits
the hospital daily.
La Panne has not been bombarded. Hostile aëroplanes are always
overhead. The Germans undoubtedly know all about the town; but it has
not been touched. I do not believe that it will be. For one thing, it
is not at present strategically valuable. Much more important, Queen
Elisabeth is a Bavarian princess by birth. Quite aside from both
reasons, the outcry from the civilised world which would result from
injury to any member of the Belgian royal house, with the present
world-wide sympathy for Belgium, would make such an attack
inadvisable.
And yet who knows? So much that was considered fundamental in the
ethics of modern warfare has gone by the board; so certainly is this
war becoming one of reprisals, of hate and venom, that before this is
published La Panne may have been destroyed, or its evacuation by the
royal family have been decided.
The contrast between Brussels and La Panne is the contrast between
Belgium as it was and as it is. The last time I was in Belgium, before
this war, I was in Brussels. The great modern city of three-quarters
of a million people had grown up round the ancient capital of Brabant.
Its name, which means "the dwelling on the marsh," dates from the
tenth century. The huge Palais de Justice is one of the most
remarkable buildings in the world.
Now in front of that great building German guns are mounted, and the
capital of Belgium is a fishing village on the sand dunes. The King of
Belgium has exchanged the magnificent Palais du Roi for a small and
cheaply built house--not that the democratic young King of Belgium
cares for palaces. But the contrast of the two pictures was impressed
on me that winter morning as I stood on the sands at La Panne and
looked at the royal villa. All round were sentries. The wind from the
sea was biting. It set the long grey grass to waving, and blew the
fine sand in clouds about the feet of the cavalry horses filing along
the beach.
I was quite unmolested as I took photographs of the stirring scenes
about. It was the first daylight view I had had of the Belgian
soldiers. These were men on their twenty-four hours' rest, with a part
of the new army that was being drilled for the spring campaign. The
Belgian system keeps a man twenty-four hours in the trenches, gives
him twenty-four hours for rest well back from the firing line, and
then, moving him up to picket or reserve duty, holds him another
twenty-four hours just behind the trenches. The English system is
different. Along the English front men are four days in the trenches
and four days out. All movements, of course, are made at night.
The men I watched that morning were partly on rest, partly in reserve.
They were shabby, cold and cheery. I created unlimited surprise and
interest. They lined up eagerly to be photographed. One group I took
was gathered round a sack of potatoes, paring raw potatoes and eating
them. For the Belgian soldier is the least well fed of the three
armies in the western field. When I left, a good Samaritan had sent a
case or two of canned things to some of the regiments, and a favoured
few were being initiated into the joys of American canned baked beans.
They were a new sensation. To watch the soldiers eat them was a joy
and a delight.
I wish some American gentleman, tiring of storing up his treasures
only in heaven, would send a can or a case or a shipload of baked
beans to the Belgians. This is alliterative, but earnest. They can
heat them in the trenches in the cans; they can thrive on them and
fight on them. And when the cans are empty they can build fires in
them or hang them, filled with stones, on the barbed-wire
entanglements in front of the trenches, so that they ring like bells
on a herd of cows to warn them of an impending attack.
And while we are on this subject, I wish some of the women who are
knitting scarfs would stop,[B] now that winter is over, and make jelly
and jam for the brave and cheerful little Belgian army. I am aware
that it is less pleasant than knitting. It cannot be taken to lectures
or musicales. One cannot make jam between the courses of a luncheon or
a dinner party, or during the dummy hand at bridge. But the men have
so little--unsweetened coffee and black bread for breakfast; a stew of
meat and vegetables at mid-day, taken to them, when it can be taken,
but carried miles from where it is cooked, and usually cold. They pour
off the cold liquor and eat the unpalatable residue. Supper is like
breakfast with the addition of a ration of minced meat and potatoes,
also cold and not attractive at the best.
[Footnote B: This was written in the spring. By the time this book is
published knitted woollens will be again in demand. Socks and mittens,
abdominal belts and neck scarfs are much liked. A soldier told me he
liked his scarf wide, and eight feet long, so he can carry it around
his body and fasten it in the back.]
Sometimes they have bully beef. I have eaten bully beef, which is a
cooked and tinned beef, semi-gelatinous. The Belgian bully beef is
drier and tougher than the English. It is not bad; indeed, it is quite
good. But the soldier needs variety. The English know this. Their
soldiers have sugar, tea, jam and cheese.
If I were asked to-day what the Belgian army needs, now that winter is
over and they need no longer shiver in their thin clothing, I should
say, in addition to the surgical supplies that are so terribly
necessary, portable kitchens, to give them hot and palatable food.
Such kitchens may be bought for two hundred and fifty dollars, with a
horse to draw them. They are really sublimated steam cookers, with the
hot water used to make coffee when they reach the trenches. I should
say, then, surgical supplies and hospital equipment, field kitchens,
jams of all sorts, canned beans, cigarettes and rubber boots! A number
of field kitchens have already been sent over. A splendid Englishman
attached to the Belgian Army has secured funds for a few more. But
many are needed. I have seen a big and brawny Belgian officer, with a
long record of military bravery behind him, almost shed tears over the
prospect of one of these kitchens for his men.
I took many pictures that morning--of dogs, three abreast, hauling
_mitrailleuse_, the small and deadly quick-firing guns, from the word
_mitraille_, a hail of balls; of long lines of Belgian lancers on
their undipped and shaggy horses, each man carrying an eight-foot
lance at rest; of men drilling in broken boots, in wooden shoes
stuffed with straw, in carpet slippers. I was in furs from head to
foot--the same fur coat that has been, in turn, lap robe, bed clothing
and pillow--and I was cold. These men, smiling into my camera, were
thinly dressed, with bare, ungloved hands. But they were smiling.
Afterward I learned that many of them had no underclothing, that the
blue tunics and trousers were all they had. Always they shivered, but
often also they smiled. Many of them had fought since Liège; most of
them had no knowledge of their families on the other side of the line
of death. When they return to their country, what will they go back
to? Their homes are gone, their farm buildings destroyed, their horses
and cattle killed.
But they are a courageous people, a bravely cheery people. Flor every
one of them that remained there, two had gone, either to death,
captivity or serious injury. They were glad to be alive that morning
on the sands of La Panne, under the incessant roaring of the guns. The
wind died down; the sun came out. It was January. In two months, or
three, it would be spring and warm. In two months, or three, they
confidently expected to be on the move toward their homes again.
What mattered broken boots and the mud and filth of their trenches?
What mattered the German aëroplane overhead? Or cold and insufficient
food? Or the wind? Nothing mattered but death, and they still lived.
And perhaps, beyond the line--
That afternoon, from the Ambulance Ocean, a young Belgian officer was
buried.
It was a bright, sunny afternoon, but bitterly cold. Troops were lined
up before the hospital in the square; a band, too, holding its
instruments with blue and ungloved fingers.
He had been a very brave officer, and very young. The story of what he
had done had been told about. So, although military funerals are many,
a handful of civilians had gathered to see him taken away to the
crowded cemetery. The three English gunboats were patrolling the sea.
Tall Belgian generals, in high blue-and-gold caps and great cape
overcoats, met in the open space and conferred.
The dead young officer lay in state in the little chapel of the
hospital. Ten tall black standards round him held burning candles, the
lights of faith. His uniform, brushed of its mud and neatly folded,
lay on top of the casket, with his pathetic cap and with the sword
that would never lead another charge. He had fought very hard to live,
they said at the hospital. But he had died.
The crowd opened, and the priest came through. He wore a purple velvet
robe, and behind him came his deacons and four small acolytes in
surplices. Up the steps went the little procession. And the doors of
the hospital closed behind it.
The civilians turned and went away. The soldiers stood rigid in the
cold sunshine, and waited. A little boy kicked a football over the
sand. The guns at Nieuport crashed and hammered.
After a time the doors opened again. The boy picked up his football
and came closer. The musicians blew on their fingers to warm them. The
dead young officer was carried out. His sword gleamed in the sun. They
carried the casket carefully, not to disorder the carefully folded
tunic or the pathetic cap. The body was placed in an ambulance. At a
signal the band commenced to play and the soldiers closed in round the
ambulance.
The path of glory, indeed!
But it was not this boyish officer's hope of glory that had brought
this scene to pass. He died fighting a defensive war, to save what was
left to him of the country he loved. He had no dream of empire, no
vision of commercial supremacy, no thrill of conquest as an invaded
and destroyed country bent to the inevitable. For months since Liège
he had fought a losing fight, a fight that Belgium knew from the
beginning must be a losing fight, until such time as her allies could
come to her aid. Like the others, he had nothing to gain by this war
and everything to lose.
He had lost. The ambulance moved away.
I was frequently in La Panne after that day. I got to know well the
road from Dunkirk, with its bordering of mud and ditch, its heavy
transports, its grey gunboats in the canals that followed it on one
side, its long lines of over-laden soldiers, its automobiles that
travelled always at top speed. I saw pictures that no artist will ever
paint--of horrors and beauties, of pathos and comedy; of soldiers
washing away the filth of the trenches in the cold waters of canals
and ditches; of refugees flying by day from the towns, and returning
at night to their ruined houses to sleep in the cellars; of long
processions of Spahis, Arabs from Algeria, silhouetted against the
flat sky line against a setting sun, their tired horses moving slowly,
with drooping heads, while their riders, in burnoose and turban, rode
with loose reins; of hostile aëroplanes sailing the afternoon breeze
like lazy birds, while shells from the anti-aircraft guns burst
harmlessly below them in small balloon-shaped clouds of smoke.
But never in all that time did I overcome the sense of unreality, and
always I was obsessed by the injustice, the wanton waste and cost and
injustice of it all. The baby at La Panne--why should it go through
life on stumps instead of legs? The boyish officer--why should he have
died? The little sixteen-year-old soldier who had been blinded and who
sat all day by the phonograph, listening to Madame Butterfly,
Tipperary, and Harry Lauder's A Wee Deoch-an'-Doris--why should he
never see again what I could see from the window beside him, the
winter sunset over the sea, the glistening white of the sands, the
flat line of the surf as it crept in to the sentries' feet? Why? Why?
All these wrecks of boys and men, where are they to go? What are they
to do? Blind and maimed, weak from long privation followed by great
suffering, what is to become of them when the hospital has fulfilled
its function and they are discharged "cured"? Their occupations, their
homes, their usefulness are gone. They have not always even clothing
in which to leave the hospital. If it was not destroyed by the shell
or shrapnel that mutilated them it was worn beyond belief and
redemption. Such ragged uniforms as I have seen! Such tragedies of
trousers! Such absurd and heart-breaking tunics!
When, soon after, I was presented to the King of the Belgians, these
very questions had written lines in his face. It is easy to believe
that King Albert of Belgium has buried his private anxieties in the
common grief and stress of his people.