It is at its worst when Jean and Max, the convalescent orderlies, come
in to remove the ruins of our mess. They are pathetic and adorable with
their close-cropped heads in the pallor of their convalescence (Jean is
attired in a suit of yellowish linen and Max in striped flannels).
Jean's pallor is decorated (there is no other word for it) with
blue-grey eyes, black eyebrows, black eyelashes and a little black
moustache. He is martial and ardent and alert. But the pallor of Max is
unredeemed; it is morbid and profound. It has invaded his whole being.
His eyelids and his small sensitive mouth are involved; and his round
dark eyes have the queer grey look of some lamentable wonder and
amazement. But neither horror nor discipline have spoiled his engaging
air--the air of a very young _collegien_ who has broken loose and got
into this Military Hospital by mistake.
I do not know whether intuition is a French or Belgian gift. Jean and
Max are not Belgian but French, and they have it to a marvellous degree.
They seemed to know in an instant what was the matter with the English
lady; and they set about curing the malady. I have seldom seen such
perfect tact and gentleness as was then displayed by those two hospital
orderlies, Max and Jean. They had been wounded not so very long ago. But
they think nothing of that. They intimate that if I insist on helping
them with their plates and dishes they will be wounded, and more
severely, in their honour.
We converse.
It is in conversation that they are most adorable. They gaze at you with
candid, innocent eyes; not a quiver of a lip or an eyelash betrays to
you the outrageous quality of your French. The behaviour of your
sentences would cause a scandal in a private boarding school for young
ladies, it is so fantastically incorrect. But Max and Jean receive each
phrase with an imperturbable and charming gravity. By the subtlest
suggestion of manner they assure you that you speak with fluency and
distinction, that yours is a very perfect French. Only their severe
attentiveness warns you of the strain you are putting on them.
Max lingered long after Jean had departed to his kitchen. And presently
he gave up his secret. He is a student, and they took him from his
College (his course unfinished) to fight for his country. When the War
broke out his mother went mad with the horror of it. He told me this
quite simply, as if he were relating a common incident of war-time.
Then, with a little air of mystery, he signed to me to follow him along
the corridor. He stopped at a closed door and showed me a name inscribed
in thick ornamental Gothic characters on a card tacked to the panel:
Prosper Panne.
Max is not his real name. It is the name that Prosper Panne has taken to
disguise himself while he is a servant. Prosper Panne--_il est ecrivain,
journaliste_. He writes for the Paris papers. He looked at me with his
amazed, pathetic eyes, and pointed with a finger to his breast to
assure me that he is he, Prosper Panne.
And in the end I asked him whether it would bore the wounded frightfully
if I took them some cigarettes? (I laid in cigarettes this morning as a
provision for this desolate afternoon.)
And--dear Prosper Panne--so thoroughly did he understand my malady, that
he himself escorted me. It is as if he knew the _peur sacre_ that
restrains me from flinging myself into the presence of the wounded.
Soft-footed and graceful, turning now and then with his instinct of
protection, the orderly glides before me, smoothing the way between my
shyness and this dreaded majesty of suffering.
I followed him (with my cigarettes in my hand and my heart in my mouth)
into the big ward on the ground floor.
I don't want to describe that ward, or the effect of those rows upon
rows of beds, those rows upon rows of bound and bandaged bodies, the
intensity of physical anguish suggested by sheer force of
multiplication, by the diminishing perspective of the beds, by the clear
light and nakedness of the great hall that sets these repeated units of
torture in a world apart, a world of insufferable space and agonizing
time, ruled by some inhuman mathematics and given over to pure
transcendent pain. A sufficiently large ward full of wounded really
does leave an impression very like that. But the one true thing about
this impression is its transcendence. It is utterly removed from and
unlike anything that you have experienced before. From the moment that
the doors have closed behind you, you are in another world, and under
its strange impact you are given new senses and a new soul. If there is
horror here you are not aware of it as horror. Before these multiplied
forms of anguish what you feel--if there be anything of _you_ left to
feel--is not pity, because it is so near to adoration.
If you are tired of the burden and malady of self, go into one of these
great wards and you will find instant release. You and the sum of your
little consciousness are not things that matter any more. The lowest and
the least of these wounded Belgians is of supreme importance and
infinite significance. You, who were once afraid of them and of their
wounds, may think that you would suffer for them now, gladly; but you
are not allowed to suffer; you are marvellously and mercilessly let off.
In this sudden deliverance from yourself you have received the ultimate
absolution, and their torment is your peace.
In the big ward very few of the men were well enough to smoke. So we
went to the little wards where the convalescents are, Max leading.
I do not think that Max has received absolution yet. It is quite evident
that he is proud of his _entree_ into this place and of his intimacy
with the wounded, of his role of interpreter.
But how perfectly he does it! He has no Flemish, but through his subtle
gestures even the poor Flamand, who has no French, understands what I
want to say to him and can't. He turns this modest presentation of
cigarettes into a high social function, a trifle ambitious, perhaps, but
triumphantly achieved.
All that was over by about three o'clock, when the sanctuary cast us
out, and Max went back to his empty kitchen and became Prosper Panne
again, and remembered that his mother was mad; and I went to the empty
mess-room and became my miserable self and remembered that the Field
Ambulance was still out, God knows where.
The mess-room windows look south over the railway lines towards the
country where the fighting is. From the balcony you can see the lines
where the troop trains run, going north-west and south-east. The
Station, the Post Office, the Telegraph and Telephone Offices are here,
all in one long red-brick building that bounds one side of the _Place_.
It stands at right angles to the Flandria and stretches along opposite
its flank. It has a flat roof with a crenelated parapet. Grass grows on
the roof. No guns are mounted there, for Ghent is an open city. But in
German tactics bombardment by aeroplane doesn't seem to count, and our
situation is more provocative now than the Terminus Hotel at Ostend.
Beyond the straight black railway lines are miles upon miles of flat
open country, green fields and rows of poplars, and little woods, and
here and there a low rise dark with trees. Under our windows the white
street runs south-eastward, and along it scouting cars and cycling corps
rush to the fighting lines, and military motor-cars hurry impatiently,
carrying Belgian staff officers; the ammunition wagons lumber along, and
the troops march in a long file, to disappear round the turn of the
road. That is where the others have gone, and I'd give everything I
possess to go with them.
They have come back, incredibly safe, and have brought in four wounded.
There was a large crowd gathered in the _Place_ to see them come, a
crowd that has nothing to do and that lives from hour to hour on this
spectacle of the wounded. Intense excitement this time, for one of the
four wounded is a German. He was lying on a stretcher. No sooner had
they drawn him out of the ambulance than they put him back again. (No
Germans are taken in at our Hospital; they are all sent to the old
_Hopital Militaire_ No. I.) He thrust up his poor hand and grabbed the
hanging strap to raise himself a little in his stretcher, and I saw him.
He was ruddy and handsome. His thick blond hair stood up stiff from his
forehead. His little blond moustache was turned up and twisted fiercely
like the Kaiser's. The crowd booed at him as he lay there. His was a
terrible pathos, unlike any other. He was so defiant and so helpless.
And there's another emotion gone by the board. You simply could not hate
him.
Later in the evening both cars were sent out, Car No. 1 with the
Commandant and, if you will believe it, Ursula Dearmer. Heavens! What
can the Military Power be thinking of? Car No. 2 took Dr. Wilson and
Mrs. Torrence. The Military Power, I suppose, has ordained this too. And
when I think of Mrs. Torrence's dream of getting into the greatest
possible danger, I am glad that the Commandant is with Ursula Dearmer.
We pledged our words, he and I, that danger and Ursula Dearmer should
never meet.
They all come back, impossibly safe. They are rather like children after
the party, too excited to give a lucid and coherent tale of what they've
done. My ambulance Day-Book stores the stuff from which reports and
newspaper articles are to be made. I note that Car No. 1 has brought
three wounded to Hospital I., and that Car No. 2 has brought four
wounded to Hospital II., also that a dum-dum bullet has been found in
the hand of one of the three. There is a considerable stir among the
surgeons over this bullet. They are vaguely gratified at its being found
in our hospital and not the other.
Little Janet McNeil and Mr. Riley and all the others who were left
behind have gone to bed in hopeless gloom. Even the bullet hasn't roused
them beyond the first tense moment.