This is a "Journal of Impressions," and it is nothing more. It will not
satisfy people who want accurate and substantial information about
Belgium, or about the War, or about Field Ambulances and Hospital Work,
and do not want to see any of these things "across a temperament." For
the Solid Facts and the Great Events they must go to such books as Mr.
E. A. Powell's "Fighting in Flanders," or Mr. Frank Fox's "The Agony of
Belgium," or Dr. H. S. Souttar's "A Surgeon in Belgium," or "A Woman's
Experiences in the Great War," by Louise Mack.
For many of these impressions I can claim only a psychological accuracy;
some were insubstantial to the last degree, and very few were actually
set down there and then, on the spot, as I have set them down here. This
is only a Journal in so far as it is a record of days, as faithful as I
could make it in every detail, and as direct as circumstances allowed.
But circumstances seldom _did_ allow, and I was always behindhand with
my Journal--a week behind with the first day of the seventeen, four
months behind with the last.
This was inevitable. For in the last week of the Siege of Antwerp, when
the wounded were being brought into Ghent by hundreds, and when the
fighting came closer and closer to the city, and at the end, when the
Germans were driving you from Ghent to Bruges, and from Bruges to Ostend
and from Ostend to Dunkirk, you could not sit down to write your
impressions, even if you were cold-blooded enough to want to. It was as
much as you could do to scribble the merest note of what happened in
your Day-Book.
But when you had made fast each day with its note, your impressions were
safe, far safer than if you had tried to record them in their flux as
they came. However far behind I might be with my Journal, it was _kept_.
It is not written "up," or round and about the original notes in my
Day-Book, it is simply written _out_. Each day of the seventeen had its
own quality and was soaked in its own atmosphere; each had its own
unique and incorruptible memory, and the slight lapse of time, so far
from dulling or blurring that memory, crystallized it and made it sharp
and clean. And in writing _out_ I have been careful never to go behind
or beyond the day, never to add anything, but to leave each moment as it
was. I have set down the day's imperfect or absurd impression, in all
its imperfection or absurdity, and the day's crude emotion in all its
crudity, rather than taint its reality with the discreet reflections
that came after.
I make no apology for my many errors--where they were discoverable I
have corrected them in a footnote; to this day I do not know how wildly
wrong I may have been about kilometres and the points of the compass,
and the positions of batteries and the movements of armies; but there
were other things of which I was dead sure; and this record has at least
the value of a "human document."
* * * * *
There is one question that I may be asked: "Why, when you had the luck
to go out with a Field Ambulance Corps distinguished by its
gallantry--why in heaven's name have you not told the story of its
heroism?"
Well--I have not told it for several excellent reasons. When I set out
to keep a Journal I pledged myself to set down only what I had seen or
felt, and to avoid as far as possible the second-hand; and it was my
misfortune that I saw very little of the field-work of the Corps.
Besides, the Corps itself was then in its infancy, and it is its
infancy--its irrepressible, half-irresponsible, whole engaging
infancy--that I have touched here. After those seventeen days at Ghent
it grew up in all conscience. It was at Furnes and Dixmude and La Panne,
after I had left it, that its most memorable deeds were done.[A]
And this story of the Corps is not mine to tell. Part of it has been
told already by Dr. Souttar, and part by Mr. Philip Gibbs, and others.
The rest is yet to come.