But you don't mean it. You don't feel it. You don't know whether it is
"_triste_" or not. You are not sure that "_triste_" is the word for it.
There are no words for it, because there are no ideas for it. It is a
sorrow that transcends all sorrow that you have ever known. You have a
sort of idea that perhaps, if you can ever feel again, this sight will
be worse to remember than it is to see. You can't believe what you see;
you are stunned, stupefied, as if you yourself had been crushed and
numbed in the same catastrophe. Only now and then a face upturned (a
face that your guide hasn't pointed out to you) surging out of this
incredible welter of faces and forms, smites you with pity, and you feel
as if you had received a lacerating wound in sleep.
Little things strike you, though. Already you are forgetting the faces
of the two little girls and of the young husband and wife holding each
other's hands, and of the four little children who have lost their
father and mother, but you notice the little dog, the yellow-brown
mongrel terrier, that absurd little dog which belongs to all nations and
all countries. He has obtained possession of the warm centre of a pile
of straw and is curled up on it fast asleep. And the Flemish family who
brought him, who carried him in turn for miles rather than leave him to
the Germans, they cannot stretch themselves on the straw because of him.
They have propped themselves up as best they may all round him, and they
cannot sleep, they are too uncomfortable.
More thousands than there is room for in the straw are fed three times a
day in the inner hall, leading out of this dreadful dormitory. All round
the inner hall and on the upper story off the gallery are rooms for
washing and dressing the children and for bandaging sore feet and
attending to the wounded. For there are many wounded among the refugees.
This part of the Palais is also a hospital, with separate wards for men,
for women and children and for special cases.
Late in the evening M. P---- took the whole Corps to see the Palais des
Fetes, and I went again. By night I suppose it is even more "_triste_"
than it was by day. In the darkness the gardens have taken on some
malign mystery and have given it to the multitudes that move there, that
turn in the winding paths among ghostly flowers and bushes, that
approach and recede and approach in the darkness of the lawns. Blurred
by the darkness and diminished to the barest indications of humanity,
their forms are more piteous and forlorn than ever; their faces, thrown
up by the darkness, more awful in their blankness and their pallor. The
scene, drenched in darkness, is unearthly and unintelligible. You cannot
account for it in saying to yourself that these are the refugees, and
everybody knows what a refugee is; that there is War--and everybody
knows what war is--in Belgium; and that these people have been shelled
out of their homes and are here at the Palais des Fetes, because there
is no other place for them, and the kind citizens of Ghent have
undertaken to house and feed them here. That doesn't make it one bit
more credible or bring you nearer to the secret of these forms. You who
are compelled to move with them in the sinister darkness are more than
ever under the spell that forbids you and them to feel. You are deadened
now to the touch of the incarnate.
On the edge of the lawn, near the door of the Palais, some ghostly roses
are growing on a ghostly tree. Your guide, M. P----, pauses to tell you
their names and kind. It seems that they are rare.
Several hundred more refugees have come into the Palais since the
afternoon. They have had to pack them a little closer in the straw.
Eight thousand were fed this evening in the inner hall.
In the crush I get separated from M. P---- and from the Corps. I see
some of them in the distance, the Commandant and Ursula Dearmer and Mrs.
Lambert and M. P----. I do not feel as if I belonged to them any more. I
belong so much to the stunned sleepers in the straw who cannot feel.
Nice Dr. Wilson comes across to me and we go round together, looking at
the sleepers. He says that nothing he has seen of the War has moved him
so much as this sight. He wishes that the Kaiser could be brought here
to see what he has done. And I find myself clenching my hands tight till
it hurts, not to suppress my feelings--for I feel nothing--but because I
am afraid that kind Dr. Wilson is going to talk. At the same time, I
would rather he didn't leave me just yet. There is a sort of comfort and
protection in being with somebody who isn't callous, who can really
feel.
But Dr. Wilson isn't very fluent, and presently he leaves off talking,
too.
Near the door we pass the family with the little yellow-brown dog. All
day the little dog slept in their place. And now that they are trying to
sleep he will not let them. The little dog is wide awake and walking
all over them. And when you think what it must have cost to bring him--
_C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?_
As we left the gardens M. P---- gathered two ghostly roses, the last
left on their tree, and gave one to Mrs. Lambert and one to me. I felt
something rather like a pang then. Heaven knows why, for such a little
thing.
Conference in our mess-room. M. ----, the Belgian Red Cross guide who
goes out with our ambulances, is there. He is very serious and
important. The Commandant calls us to come and hear what he has to say.
It seems it had been arranged that one of our cars should be sent
to-morrow morning to Termonde to bring back refugees. But M. ---- does
not think that car will ever start. He says that the Germans are now
within a few miles of Ghent, and may be expected to occupy it to-morrow
morning, and that instead of going to Termonde to-morrow we had very
much better pack up and retreat to Bruges to-night. There are ten
thousand Germans ready to march into Ghent.
M. ---- is weighed down by the thought of his ten thousand Germans. But
the Commandant is not weighed down a bit. On the contrary, a pleasant
exaltation comes upon him. It comes upon the whole Corps, it comes even
upon me. We refuse to believe in his ten thousand Germans. M. ----
himself cannot swear to them. We refuse to pack up. We refuse to retreat
to Bruges to-night. Time enough for agitation in the morning. We prefer
to go to bed. M. ---- shrugs his shoulders, as much as to say that he
has done his duty and if we are all murdered in our beds it isn't his
fault.
Does M. ---- really believe in the advance of the ten thousand? His face
is inscrutable.
[_Tuesday, 29th._]
No Germans in Ghent. No Germans reported near Ghent.
Madame F. and her daughter smile at the idea of the Germans coming into
Ghent. They will never come, and if they do come they will only take a
little food and go out again. They will never do any harm to Ghent.
Namur and Liege and Brussels, if you like, and Malines, and Louvain, and
Termonde and Antwerp (perhaps); but Ghent--why should they? It is
Antwerp they are making for, not Ghent.
And Madame represents the mind of the average Gantois. It is placid,
incredulous, stolidly at ease, superbly inhospitable to disagreeable
ideas. No Gantois can conceive that what has been done to the citizens
of Termonde would be done to him. _C'est triste_--what has been done to
the citizens of Termonde, but it doesn't shake his belief in the
immunity of Ghent.
Which makes M. ----'s behaviour all the more mysterious. _Why_ did he
try to scare us so? Five theories are tenable:
(1.) M. ---- did honestly believe that ten thousand Germans would come
in the morning and take our ambulance prisoner. That is to say, he
believed what nobody else believed.
(2.) M. ---- was scared himself. He had no desire to be taken quite so
near the firing-line as the English Ambulance seemed likely to take him;
so that the departure of the English Ambulance would not be wholly
disagreeable to M. ----. (This theory is too far-fetched.)
(3.) M. ---- was the agent of the Military Power, commissioned to test
the nerve of the English Ambulance. ("Stood fire, have they? Give 'em a
_real_ scare, and see how they behave.")
(4.) M. ---- is a psychologist and made this little experiment on the
English Ambulance himself.
(5.) He is a humorist and was simply "pulling its leg."
The three last theories are plausible, but all five collapse before the
inscrutability of Monsieur's face.
Germans or no Germans, one ambulance car started at five in the morning
for Quatrecht, somewhere between Ghent and Brussels, to fetch wounded
and refugees. The other went, later, to Zele. I am not very clear as to
who has gone with them, but Mrs. Torrence, Mrs. Lambert, Janet McNeil
and Dr. Haynes and Mr. Riley have been left behind.
It is their third day of inactivity, and three months of it could not
have devastated them more. They have touched the very bottom of suicidal
gloom. Three months hence their state of mind will no doubt appear in
all its absurdity, but at the moment it is too piteous for words. When
you think what they were yesterday and the day before, there is no
language to express the crescendo of their despair. I came upon Mr.
Riley this morning, standing by the window of the mess-room, and
contemplating the facade of the railway station. (It is making a pattern
on our brains.) I tried to soothe him. I said it was hard lines--beastly
hard lines--and told him to cheer up--there'd be heaps for him to do
presently. And he turned from me like a man who has just buried his
first-born.
Janet McNeil is even more heart-rending, sunk in a chair with her hands
stuck into the immense pockets of her overcoat, her flawless and
impassive face tilted forward as her head droops forlornly to her
breast. She is such a child that she can see nothing beyond to-day, and
yesterday and the day before that. She is going back to-morrow. Her
valour and energy are frustrated and she is wounded in her honour. She
is conscious of the rottenness of putting on a khaki tunic, and winding
khaki putties round and round her legs to hang about the Hospital doing
nothing. And she had to sell her motor bicycle in order to come out. Not
that that matters in the least. What matters is that we are here, eating
Belgian food and quartered in a Belgian Military Hospital, and
"swanking" about with Belgian Red Cross brassards (stamped) on our
sleeves, and doing nothing for the Belgians, doing nothing for anybody.
We are not justifying our existence. We are frauds.
I tell the poor child that she cannot possibly feel as big a fraud as I
do; that there was no earthly reason why I should have come, and none
whatever why I should remain.
And then, to my amazement, I learn that I am envied. It's all right for
me. My job is clearly defined, and nobody can take it from me. I haven't
got to wind khaki putties round my legs for nothing.
I should have thought that the child was making jokes at my expense but
for the extreme purity and candour of her gaze. Incredible that there
should exist an abasement profounder than my own. I have hidden my tunic
and breeches in my hold-all. I dare not own to having brought them.
Down in the vestibule I encounter Mrs. Torrence in khaki. Mrs. Torrence
yearning for her wounded. Mrs. Torrence determined to get to her wounded
at any cost. She is not abased or dejected, but exalted, rather. She is
ready to go to the President or to the Military Power itself, and demand
her wounded from them. Her beautiful eyes demand them from Heaven
itself.
I cannot say there are not enough wounded to go round, but I point out
for the fifteenth time that the trouble is there are not enough
ambulance cars to go round.
But it is no use. It does not explain why Heaven should have chosen
Ursula Dearmer and caused shells to bound in her direction, and have
rejected Mrs. Torrence. The Military Power that should have ordered
these things has abandoned us to the caprice of Heaven.
Of course if Mrs. Torrence was a saint she would fold her hands and bow
her superb little head before the decrees of Heaven; but she is only a
mortal woman, born with the genius of succour and trained to the last
point of efficiency; so she rages. The tigress, robbed of her young, is
not more furiously inconsolable than Mrs. Torrence.
It is not Ursula Dearmer's fault. She is innocent of supplanting Mrs.
Torrence. The thing simply happened. More docile than determined,
unhurrying and uneager, and only half-awake, she seems to have rolled
into Car No. 1 with Heaven's impetus behind her. Like the shell at
Alost, it is her luck.
And on the rest of us our futility and frustration weigh like lead. The
good Belgian food has become bitter in our mouths. When we took our
miserable walk through Ghent this morning we felt that _l'Ambulance
Anglaise_ must be a mark for public hatred and derision because of us. I
declare I hardly dare go into the shops with the Red Cross brassard on
my arm. I imagine sardonic raillery in the eyes of every Belgian that I
meet. We do not think the authorities will stand it much longer; they
will fire us out of the _Hopital Militaire_ No. II.
But no, the authorities do not fire us out. Impassive in wisdom and
foreknowledge, they smile benignly on our agitation. They compliment the
English Ambulance on the work it has done already. They convey the
impression that but for the English Ambulance the Belgian Army would be
in a bad way. Mademoiselle F. insists that the Hospital will soon be
overflowing with the wounded from Antwerp and that she can find work
even for me. It is untrue that there are three hundred nurses in the
Hospital. There are only three hundred nurses in all Belgium. They pile
it on so that we are more depressed than ever.
Janet McNeil is convinced that they think we are no good and that they
are just being angels to us because they are sorry for us.
I break it to them very gently that I've volunteered to serve at the
tables at the Palais des Fetes. I feel as if I had sneaked into a
remunerative job while my comrades are starving.
The Commandant is not quite as pleased as I thought he would be to hear
of my engagement at the Palais des Fetes. He says, "It is not your
work." I insist that my work is to do anything I can do; and that if I
cannot dress wounds I can at least hand round bread and pour out coffee
and wash up dishes. It is true that I am Secretary and Reporter and (for
the time being) Treasurer to the Ambulance, and that I carry its funds
in a leather purse belt round my body. Because I am the smallest and
weakest member of the Corps that is the most unlikely place for the
funds to be. It was imprudent, to say the least of it, for the Chaplain
in his khaki, to carry them, as he did, into the firing-line. The belt,
which fitted the Chaplain, hangs about half a yard below my waist and is
extremely uncomfortable, but that is neither here nor there. Keeping the
Corps' accounts only takes two hours and a half, even with Belgian and
English money mixed, and when I've added the same column of figures ten
times up and ten times down, to make certain it's all right (I am no
good at accounts, but I know my weakness and guard against it, giving
the Corps the benefit of every doubt and making good every deficit out
of my private purse). Writing the Day-Book--perhaps half an hour. The
Commandant's correspondence, when he has any, and reporting to the
British Red Cross Society, when there is anything to report, another
half-hour at the outside; and there you have only three and a half hours
employed out of the twenty-four, even if I balanced my accounts every
day, and I don't.
True that _The Daily Chronicle_ promised to take any articles that I
might send them from the front, but I haven't written any. You cannot
write articles for _The Daily Chronicle_ out of nothing; at least I
can't.
The Commandant finally yields to argument and entreaty.
* * * * *
I do not tell him that what I really want to do is to go out with the
Field Ambulance, and get beyond the turn of that road.
I know I haven't the ghost of a chance; I know that if I had--as things
stand at present--not being a surgeon or a trained nurse, I wouldn't
take it, even to get there. And at the same time I know, with a superior
certainty, that this unlikely thing will happen. This sense of certainty
is not at all uncommon, but it is, or seems, unintelligible. You can
only conceive it as a premonition of some unavoidable event. It is as if
something had been looking for you, waiting for you, from all eternity
out here; something that you have been looking for; and, when you are
getting near, it begins calling to you; it draws your heart out to it
all day long. You can give no account of it. All that you know about it
is that it is unique. It has nothing to do with your ordinary
curiosities and interests and loves; nothing to do with the thirst for
experience, or for adventure, or for glory, or for the thrill. You can't
"get" anything out of it. It is something hidden and secret and
supremely urgent. Its urgency, indeed, is so great that if you miss it
you will have missed reality itself.
For me this uncanny anticipation is somehow connected with the turn of
the south-east road. I do not see how I am ever going to get there or
anywhere near there. But I am not uneasy or impatient any more. There is
no hurry. The thing, whatever it is, will be irresistible, and if I
don't go out to find it, it will find me.
* * * * *
Mrs. Torrence has gone, Heaven knows where. She has not been with the
others at the Palais des Fetes. Janet McNeil and Mrs. Lambert have been
working there for five hours, serving meals to the refugees. Ursula
Dearmer with extreme docility has been working all the afternoon with
the nurses.
It looks as if we were beginning to settle down.
Mrs. Torrence has come back. The red German pom-pom has gone from her
cap and she wears the badge of the Belgian Motor Cyclist Corps, black
wings on a white ground. Providence has rehabilitated himself. He has
abased our trained nurse and expert motorist in order to exalt her. He
fairly flung her in the path of the Colonel of (I think) the Belgian
Motor Cyclist Corps at a moment when the Colonel found himself in a
jibbing motor-car without a chauffeur. We gather that the Colonel was
becoming hectic with blasphemy when she appeared and settled the little
difficulty between him and his car. She seems to have followed it up by
driving him then and there straight up to the firing-line to look for
wounded.
End of the adventure--she volunteered her services as chauffeur to the
Colonel and was accepted.
The Commandant has received the news with imperturbable optimism.
As for her, she is appeased. She will realize her valorous dream of "the
greatest possible danger;" and she will get to her wounded.
The others have come back too. They have toiled for five hours among the
refugees.
[_5.30._]
It is my turn now at the Palais des Fetes.
It took ages to get in. The dining-hall is narrower than the
sleeping-hall, but it extends beyond it on one side where there is a
large door opening on the garden. But this door is closed to the public.
You can only reach the dining-hall by going through the straw among the
sleepers. And at this point the Commandant's optimism has broken down.
He won't let you go in through the straw, and the clerk who controls the
entry won't let you go in through the other door. You explain to the
clerk that the English Ambulance being quartered in a Military Hospital,
its rules are inviolable; it is not allowed to expose itself to the
horrors of the straw. The clerk is not interested in the English
Ambulance, he is not impressed by the fact that it has volunteered its
priceless services to the Refugee Committee, and he is contemptuous of
the orders of its Commandant. His business is to see that you go into
the Palais through _his_ door and not through any other door. And when
you tell him that if he will not withdraw his regulations the Ambulance
will be compelled to withdraw its services, he replies with delicious
sarcasm, "_Nous n'avons pas prevu ca_." In the end you are referred to
the Secretary in his bureau. He grasps the situation and is urbanity
itself. Provided with a special permit bearing his sacred signature, you
are admitted by the other door.
Your passage to the _Vestiaire_ takes you through the infants' room and
along the galleries past the wards. The crowd of refugees is so great
that beds have been put up in the galleries. You take off your outer
garments and put on the Belgian Red Cross uniform (you have realized by
this time that your charming white overall and veil are sanitary
precautions).
Coming down the wide wooden stairways you have a full view of the Inner
Hall. This enormous oblong space below the galleries is the heart, the
fervid central _foyer_ of the Palais des Fetes. At either end of it is
an immense auditorium, tier above tier of seats, rising towards the
gallery floors. All down each side of it, standards with triumphal
devices are tilted from the balustrade. Banners hang from the rafters.
And under them, down the whole length of the hall from auditorium to
auditorium, the tables are set out. Bare wooden tables, one after
another, more tables than you can count.
From the door of the sleeping-hall to each auditorium, and from each
auditorium down the line of the tables a gangway is roped off for the
passage of the refugees.
They say there are ten thousand five hundred here to-night. Beyond the
rope-line, along the inner hall, more straw has been laid down to bed
the overflow from the outer hall. They come on in relays to be fed. They
are marshalled first into the seats of each auditorium, where they sit
like the spectators of some monstrous festival and wait for their turn
at the tables.
This, the long procession of people streaming in without haste, in
perfect order and submission, is heart-rending if you like. The
immensity of the crowd no longer overpowers you. The barriers make it a
steady procession, a credible spectacle. You can take it in. It is the
thin end of the wedge in your heart. They come on so slowly that you can
count them as they come. They have sorted themselves out. The fathers
and the mothers are together, they lead their little children by the
hand or push them gently before them. There is no anticipation in their
eyes; no eagerness and no impatience in their bearing. They do not
hustle each other or scramble for their places. It is their silence and
submission that you cannot stand.
For you have a moment of dreadful inactivity after the setting of the
tables for the _premier service_. You have filled your bowls with black
coffee; somebody else has laid the slices of white bread on the bare
tables. You have nothing to do but stand still and see them file in to
the banquet. On the banners and standards from the roof and balustrades
the Lion of Flanders ramps over their heads. And somewhere in the back
of your brain a song sings itself to a tune that something in your brain
wakes up:
_Ils ne vont pas dompter
Le vieux lion de Flandres,
Tant que le lion a des dents,
Tant que le lion peut griffer._
It is the song the Belgian soldiers sang as they marched to battle in
the first week of August. It is only the end of September now.