[_Monday, 28th._]
We have been here a hundred years.
Car No. 1 went out at eight-thirty this morning, with the Commandant and
Dr. Bird and Ursula Dearmer and Mr. Grierson and a Belgian Red Cross
guide. With Tom, the chauffeur, that makes six. Tom's face, as he sees
this party swarming on his car, is expressive of tumultuous passions.
Disgust predominates.
Their clothes seem stranger than ever by contrast with the severe
military khaki of the car. Dr. Bird has added to his civilian costume a
Belgian forage cap with a red tassel that hangs over his forehead. It
was given to him yesterday by way of homage to his courage and his
personal charm. But it makes him horribly vulnerable. The Chaplain,
standing out from the rest of the Corps in complete khaki, is an even
more inevitable mark for bullets. Tom stares at everybody with eyes of
violent inquiry. He still evidently wants to know whether we call
ourselves a field ambulance. He starts his car with movements of
exasperation and despair. We are to judge what his sense of discipline
must be since he consents to drive the thing at all.
The Commandant affects not to see Tom. Perhaps he really doesn't see
him.
It is just as well that he can't see Mrs. Torrence, or Janet McNeil or
Mr. Riley or Dr. Haynes. They are overpowered by this tragedy of being
left behind. Under it the discipline of the ---- Hospital breaks down.
The eighteen-year-old child is threatening to commit suicide or else go
home. She regards the two acts as equivalent. Mr. Riley's gloom is now
so awful that he will not speak when he is spoken to. He looks at me
with dumb hostility, as if he thought that I had something to do with
it. Dr. Haynes's melancholy is even more heart-rending, because it is
gentle and unexpressed.
I try to console them. I point out that it is a question of arithmetic.
There are only two cars and there are fourteen of us. Fourteen into two
won't go, even if you don't count the wounded. And, after all, we
haven't been here two days. But it is no good. We have been here a
hundred years, and we have done nothing. There isn't anything to do.
There are not enough wounded to go round. We turn our eyes with longing
towards Antwerp, so soon to be battered by the siege-guns from Namur.
And Bert, poor Bert! he has crawled into Ambulance Car No. 2 where it
stands outside in the hospital yard, and he has hidden himself under the
hood.
Mrs. Lambert is a little sad, too. But we are none of us very sorry for
Mrs. Lambert. We have gathered that her husband is a journalist, and
that he is special correspondent at the front for some American paper.
He has a motor-car which we assume rashly to be the property of his
paper. He is always dashing off to the firing-line in it, and Mrs.
Lambert is always at liberty to go with him. She is mistaken if she
thinks that her sorrow is in any way comparable with ours.
But if there are not enough wounded to go round in Ghent, there are
more refugees than Ghent can deal with. They are pouring in by all the
roads from Alost and Termonde. Every train disgorges multitudes of them
into the _Place_.
This morning I went to the Matron, Madame F., and told her I wasn't much
good, but I'd be glad if she could give me some work. I said I supposed
there was some to be done among the refugees.
Work? Among the refugees? They could employ whole armies of us. There
are thousands of refugees at the Palais des Fetes. I had better go there
and see what is being done. Madame will give me an introduction to her
sister-in-law, Madame F., the Presidente of the Comite des Dames, and to
her niece, Mademoiselle F., who will take me to the Palais.
And Madame adds that there will soon be work for all of us in the
Hospital. Yes: even for the untrained.
Life is once more bearable.
But the others won't believe it. They say there are three hundred nurses
in the hospital.
And the fact remains that we have two young surgeons cooling their heels
in the corridors, and a fully-trained nurse tearing her hair out, while
the young girl, Ursula Dearmer, takes the field.
And I think of the poor little dreamy, guileless Commandant in his
conspicuous car, and I smile at her in secret, thanking Heaven that it's
Ursula Dearmer and not Mrs. Torrence who is at his side.
The ambulance has come back from Alost with two or three wounded and
some refugees. The Commandant is visibly elated, elated out of all
proportion to the work actually done. Ursula Dearmer is not elated in
the very least, but she is wide-awake. Her docility has vanished with
her torpor. She and the Commandant both look as if something extremely
agreeable had happened to them at Alost. But they are reticent. We
gather that Ursula Dearmer has been working with the nuns in the Convent
at Alost, where the wounded were taken before the ambulance cars removed
them to Ghent. It sounded very safe.
But the Commandant dashed into my room after luncheon. His face was
radiant, almost ecstatic. He was like a child who has rushed in to tell
you how ripping the pantomime was.
"We've been _under fire_!"
But I was very angry. Coldly and quietly angry. I felt like that when I
was ten years old and piloting my mother through the thick of the
traffic between Guildhall and the Bank, and she broke from me and was
all but run over. I don't quite know what I said to him, but I think I
said he ought to be ashamed of himself. For it seems that Ursula
Dearmer was with him.
I remembered how Ursula Dearmer's mother had come to me in the
committee-room and asked me how near we proposed to go to the
firing-line, and whether her daughter would be in any danger, and how I
said, first of all, that there wasn't any use pretending that there
wouldn't be danger, and that the chances were--and how the Commandant
had intervened at that moment to assure her that danger there would be
none. With a finger on the map of France and Belgium he traced the
probable, the inevitable, course of the campaign; and in light, casual
tones which allayed all anxiety, he explained how, as the Germans
advanced upon any point, we should retire upon our base. As for the
actual field-work, with one gesture he swept the whole battle-line into
the distance, and you saw it as an infinitely receding tide that left
its wrack strewn on a place of peace where the ambulance wandered at its
will, secure from danger. The whole thing was done with such compelling
and convincing enthusiasm that Ursula Dearmer's mother adopted more and
more the humble attitude of a mere woman who has failed to grasp the
conditions of modern warfare. Ursula Dearmer herself looked more docile
than ever, though a little bored, and very sleepy.
And I remembered how when it was all over Ursula Dearmer's mother
implored me, if there _was_ any danger, to see that Ursula Dearmer was
sent home, and how I promised that whatever happened Ursula Dearmer
would be safe, clinching it with a frightfully sacred inner vow, and
saying to myself at the same time what a terrible nuisance this young
girl is going to be. I saw myself at the moment of parting, standing on
the hearthrug, stiff as a poker with resolution, and saying solemnly,
"I'll keep my word!"
And here was the Commandant informing me with glee that a shell had
fallen and burst at Ursula Dearmer's feet.
He was so pleased, and with such innocent and childlike pleasure, that I
hadn't the heart to tell him that there wasn't much resemblance between
those spaces of naked peace behind the receding battle-line and the
narrow streets of a bombarded village. I only said that I should write
to Ursula Dearmer's mother and ask her to release me from my promise. He
said I would do nothing of the kind. I said I would. And I did. And the
poor Commandant left me, somewhat dashed, and not at all pleased with
me.
It seems that the shell burst, not exactly at Ursula Dearmer's feet, but
ten yards away from her. It came romping down the street with immense
impetus and determination; and it is not said of Ursula Dearmer that she
was much less coy in the encounter. She took to shell-fire "like a duck
to water."
Dr. Bird told us this. Ursula Dearmer herself was modest, and claimed no
sort of intimacy with the shell that waked her up. She was as nice as
possible about it. But all the same, into the whole Corps (that part of
it that had been left behind) there has crept a sneaking envy of her
luck. I feel it myself. And if _I_ feel it, what must Mrs. Torrence and
Janet feel?
Mrs. Lambert, anyhow, has had nothing to complain of so far. Her husband
took her to Alost in his motor-car; I mean the motor-car which is the
property of his paper.
In the afternoon Mademoiselle F. called to take me to the Palais des
Fetes. We stopped at a shop on the way to buy the Belgian Red Cross
uniform--the white linen overall and veil--which you must wear if you
work among the refugees there.
Madame F. is very kind and very tired. She has been working here since
early morning for weeks on end. They are short of volunteers for the
service of the evening meals, and I am to work at the tables for three
hours, from six to nine P.M. This is settled, and a young Red Cross
volunteer takes me over the Palais. It is an immense building, rather
like Olympia. It stands away from the town in open grounds like the
Botanical Gardens, Regent's Park. It is where the great Annual Shows
were held and the vast civic entertainments given. Miles of country
round Ghent are given up to market-gardening. There are whole fields of
begonias out here, brilliant and vivid in the sun. They will never be
sold, never gathered, never shown in the Palais des Fetes. It is the
peasants, the men and women who tilled these fields, and their children
that are being shown here, in the splendid and wonderful place where
they never set foot before.
There are four thousand of them lying on straw in the outer hall, in a
space larger than Olympia. They are laid out in rows all round the four
walls, and on every foot of ground between; men, women and children
together, packed so tight that there is barely standing-room between any
two of them. Here and there a family huddles up close, trying to put a
few inches between it and the rest; some have hollowed out a place in
the straw or piled a barrier of straw between themselves and their
neighbours, in a piteous attempt at privacy; some have dragged their own
bedding with them and are lodged in comparative comfort. But these are
the very few. The most part are utterly destitute, and utterly
abandoned to their destitution. They are broken with fatigue. They have
stumbled and dropped no matter where, no matter beside whom. None turns
from his neighbour; none scorns or hates or loathes his fellow. The
rigidly righteous _bourgeoise_ lies in the straw breast to breast with
the harlot of the village slum, and her innocent daughter back to back
with the parish drunkard. Nothing matters. Nothing will ever matter any
more.
They tell you that when darkness comes down on all this there is hell.
But you do not believe it. You can see nothing sordid and nothing ugly
here. The scale is too vast. Your mind refuses this coupling of infamy
with transcendent sorrow. It rejects all images but the one image of
desolation which is final and supreme. It is as if these forms had no
stability and no significance of their own; as if they were locked
together in one immense body and stirred or slept as one.
Two or three figures mount guard over this litter of prostrate forms.
They are old men and old women seated on chairs. They sit upright and
immobile, with their hands folded on their knees. Some of them have
fallen asleep where they sit. They are all rigid in an attitude of
resignation. They have the dignity of figures that will endure, like
that, for ever. They are Flamands.
This place is terribly still. There is hardly any rustling of the straw.
Only here and there the cry of a child fretting for sleep or for its
mother's breast. These people do not speak to each other. Half of them
are sound asleep, fixed in the posture they took when they dropped into
the straw. The others are drowsed with weariness, stupefied with sorrow.
On all these thousands of faces there is a mortal apathy. Their ruin is
complete. They have been stripped bare of the means of life and of all
likeness to living things. They do not speak. They do not think. They do
not, for the moment, feel. In all the four thousand--except for the
child crying yonder--there is not one tear.
And you who look at them cannot speak or think or feel either, and you
have not one tear. A path has been cleared through the straw from door
to door down the middle of the immense hall, a narrower track goes all
round it in front of the litters that are ranged under the walls, and
you are taken through and round the Show. You are to see it all. The
dear little Belgian lady, your guide, will not let you miss anything.
"_Regardez, Mademoiselle, ces deux petites filles. Qu'elles sont jolies,
les pauvres petites._" "_Voici deux jeunes maries, qui dorment. Regardez
l'homme; il tient encore la main de sa femme._"
You look. Yes. They are asleep. He is really holding her hand. "_Et ces
quatre petits enfants qui ont perdu leur pere et leur mere. C'est
triste, n'est-ce pas, Mademoiselle?_"