You cannot look any more.
At the canteen the men are pouring out coffee from enormous enamelled
jugs into the small jugs that the waitresses bring. This wastes your
time and cools the coffee. So you take a big jug from the men. It seems
to you no heavier than an ordinary teapot. And you run with it. To carry
the largest possible jug at the swiftest possible pace is your only
chance of keeping sane. (It isn't till it is all over that you hear the
whisper of "_Anglaise!_" and realize how very far from sane you must
have looked running round with your enormous jug.) You can fill up the
coffee bowls again--the little bowls full, the big bowls only half full;
there is more than enough coffee to go round. But there is no milk
except for the babies. And when they ask you for more bread there is not
enough to go twice round. The ration is now two slices of dry bread and
a bowl of black coffee three times a day. Till yesterday there was an
allowance of meat for soup at the mid-day meal; to-day the army has
commandeered all the meat.
But you needn't stand still any more. After the first service the bowls
have to be cleared from the tables and washed and laid ready for the
next. Round the great wooden tubs there is a frightful competition. It
is who can wash and dry and carry back the quickest. You contend with
brawny Flemish women for the first dip into the tub and the driest
towel. Then you race round the tables with your pile of crockery, and
then with your jug, and so on over and over again for three hours, till
the last relay is fed and the tables are deserted. You wash up again and
it is all over for you till six o'clock to-morrow evening.
You go back to your mess-room and a ten-o'clock supper of cold coffee
and sandwiches and Belgian current loaf eaten with butter. And in a
nightmare afterwards Belgian refugees gather round you and pluck at your
sleeve and cry to you for more bread: "_Une petite tranche de pain, s'il
vous plait, mademoiselle!_"
[_Wednesday, 30th._]
No Germans, nor sign of Germans yet.
Fighting is reported at Saint Nicolas, between Antwerp and Ghent. The
Commandant has an idea. He says that if the Belgian Army has to meet the
Germans at Saint Nicolas, so as to cut off their advance on Antwerp, the
base hospital must be removed from Ghent to some centre or point which
will bring the Ambulance behind the Belgian lines. He thinks that
working from Ghent would necessarily bring it behind the German lines.
This is assuming that the Germans coming up from the south-east will cut
in between Saint Nicolas and Ghent.
He consults the President, who apparently thinks that the base hospital
will do very well where it is.
[_2.30._]
Mrs. Torrence brought her Colonel in to lunch. He is battered and
grizzled, but still a fine figure in the dark-green uniform of the Motor
Cyclist Corps. He is very polite and gallant _a la belge_ and vows that
he has taken on Mrs. Torrence _pour toujours, pour la vie_! She diverts
the flow of urbanity adroitly.
Except the Colonel nothing noteworthy seems to have occurred to-day. The
three hours at the Palais des Fetes were like the three hours last
night.
[_Thursday, October 1st._]
It really isn't safe for the Commandant to go out with Ursula Dearmer.
For her luck in the matter of bombardments continues. (He might just as
well be with Mrs. Torrence.) They have been at Termonde. What is more,
it was Ursula Dearmer who got them through, in spite of the medical
military officer whose vigorous efforts stopped them at the barrier. He
seems at one point to have shown weakness and given them leave to go on
a little way up the road; and the little way seems to have carried them
out of his sight and onward till they encountered the Colonel (or it may
have been a General) in command. The Colonel (or the General) seems to
have broken down very badly, for the car and Ursula Dearmer and the
Commandant went on towards Termonde. Young Haynes was with them this
time, and on the way they had picked up Mr. G. L----, War Correspondent
to the _Daily Mail_ and _Westminster_. They left the car behind
somewhere in a safe place where the fire from the machine-guns couldn't
reach it. There is a street or a road--I can't make out whether it is
inside or outside the town; it leads straight to the bridge over the
river, which is about as wide there as the Thames at Westminster. The
bridge is the key to the position; it has been blown up and built again
several times in the course of the War, and the Germans are now
entrenched beyond it. The road had been raked by their _mitrailleuses_
the day before.
It seems to have struck the four simultaneously that it would be quite a
good thing to walk down this road on the off-chance of the machine-guns
opening fire again. The tale told by the Commandant evokes an awful
vision of them walking down it, four abreast, the Commandant and Mr. G.
L---- on the outside, fairly under shelter, and Ursula Dearmer and young
Haynes a little in front of them down the middle, where the fire comes,
when it does come. This spectacle seems to have shaken the Commandant in
his view of bombarded towns as suitable places of amusement for young
girls. Young Haynes ought to have known better. You tell him that as
long as the world endures young Haynes will be young Haynes, and if
there is danger in the middle of the road, it is there that he will walk
by preference. And as no young woman of modern times is going to let
herself be outdone by young Haynes, you must expect to find Ursula
Dearmer in the middle of the road too. You cannot suppress this
competitive heroism of young people. The roots strike too deep down in
human nature. In the modern young man and woman competitive heroism has
completely forgotten its origin and is now an end in itself.
And if it comes to that--how about Alost?
At the mention of Alost the Commandant's face becomes childlike again in
its utter simplicity and innocence and candour. Alost was a very
different thing. Looking for shells at Alost, you understand, was like
looking for shells on the seashore. At Alost Ursula Dearmer was in no
sort of danger. For at Alost she was under the Commandant's wing (young
Haynes hasn't got any wings, only legs to walk into the line of fire
on). He explains very carefully that he took her under his wing
_because_ she is a young girl and he feels responsible for her to her
mother.
(Which, oddly enough, is just how _I_ feel!)
As for young Haynes, I suppose he would plead that when he and Ursula
Dearmer walked down the middle of the road there was no firing.
That seems to have been young Haynes's particular good fortune. I have
now a perfect obsession of responsibility. I see, in one dreadful vision
after another, the things that must happen to Ursula Dearmer under the
Commandant's wing, and to young Haynes and the Commandant under Ursula
Dearmer's.
No wounded were found, this time, at Termonde.
This little _contretemps_ with the Commandant has made me forget to
record a far more notable event. Mrs. Torrence brought young Lieutenant
G---- in to luncheon. He is the hero of the Belgian Motor Cyclist Corps.
He is said to have accounted for nine Germans with his own rifle in one
morning. The Corps has already intimated that this is the first
well-defined specimen of a man it has yet seen in Belgium. His
dark-green uniform fits him exceedingly well. He is tall and handsome.
Drenched in the glamour of the greatest possible danger, he gives it off
like a subtle essence. As he was led in he had rather the air, the
slightly awkward, puzzled and embarrassed air, of being on show as a
fine specimen of a man. But it very soon wore off. In the absence of the
Commandant he sat in the Commandant's place, so magnificent a figure
that our mess, with gaps at every table, looked like a banquet given in
his honour, a banquet whose guests had been decimated by some
catastrophe.
Suddenly--whether it was the presence of the Lieutenant or the absence
of the Commandant, or merely reaction from the strain of inactivity, I
don't know, but suddenly madness came upon our mess. The mess-room was
no longer a mess-room in a Military Hospital, but a British school-room.
Mrs. Torrence had changed her woollen cap for a grey felt wide-awake.
She was no longer an Arctic explorer, but the wild-western cowboy of
British melodrama. She was the first to go mad. One moment she was
seated decorously at the Lieutenant's right hand; the next she was
strolling round the tables with an air of innocent abstraction, having
armed herself in secret with the little hard round rolls supplied by
order of the Commandant. Each little roll became a deadly _obus_ in her
hand. She turned. Her innocent abstraction was intense as she poised
herself to aim.
With a shout of laughter Dr. Bird ducked behind the cover of his
table-napkin.
I had a sudden memory of Mrs. Torrence in command of the party at
Ostend, a figure of austere duty, of inexorable propriety, rigid with
the discipline of the ---- Hospital, restraining the criminal levity of
the Red Cross volunteer who would look or dream of looking at Ostend
Cathedral. Mrs. Torrence, like a seven-year-old child meditating
mischief, like a baby panther at play, like a very young and very
engaging demon let loose, is looking at Dr. Bird. He is not a Cathedral,
but he suffered bombardment all the same. She got his range with a roll.
She landed her shell in the very centre of his waistcoat.
Her madness entered into Dr. Bird. He replied with a spirited fire which
fell wide of her and battered the mess-room door. The orderlies
retreated for shelter into the vestibule beyond. Jean was the first to
penetrate the line of fire. Max followed him.
Madness entered into Max. He ceased to be a hospital orderly. He became
Prosper Panne again, the very young _collegien_, as he put down his
dishes and glided unobtrusively into the affair.
And then the young Belgian Lieutenant went mad. But he gave way by
degrees. At first he sat up straight and stiff with polite astonishment
before the spectacle of a British "rag." He paid the dubious tribute of
a weak giggle to the bombardment of Dr. Bird. He was convulsed at the
first performance of Prosper Panne. In his final collapse he was rocking
to and fro and crowing with helpless, hysterical laughter.
For with the entrance of Prosper Panne the mess-room became a scene at
the _Folies Bergeres_. There was Mrs. Torrence, _premiere comedienne_,
in the costume of a wild-western cowboy; there was the young Lieutenant
himself, looking like a stage-lieutenant in the dark-green uniform of
the Belgian Motor Cyclist Corps; and there was Prosper Panne. He began
by picking up Mrs. Torrence's brown leather motor glove with its huge
gauntlet, and examining it with the deliciously foolish bewilderment of
the accomplished clown. After one or two failures, brilliantly
improvised, he fixed it firmly on his head. The huge gauntlet, with its
limp five fingers dangling over his left ear, became a rakish kepi with
a five-pointed flap. Max--I mean Prosper Panne--wore it with an "_air
impayable_." Out of his round, soft, putty-coloured face he made
fifteen other faces in rapid succession, all incomparably absurd. He lit
a cigarette and held it between his lower lip and his chin. The effect
was of a miraculous transformation of those features, in which his upper
lip disappeared altogether, his lower lip took on its functions, while
his chin ceased to be a chin and became a lower lip. With this
achievement Prosper Panne had his audience in the hollow of his hands.
He could do what he liked with it. He did. He caused his motor-glove cap
to fall from his head as if by some mysterious movement of its own. Then
he went round the stalls and gravely and earnestly removed all our hats.
With an air more and more "_impayable_" he wore each one of them in
turn--the grey felt wide-awake of the wild-western cowboy, the knitted
Jaeger head-gear of the little Arctic explorer, the dark-blue military
cap with the red tassel assumed by Dr. Bird, even the green cap with the
winged symbol of the young Belgian officer. By this time the young
Belgian officer was so entirely the thrall of Prosper Panne that he
didn't turn a hair.
Flushed with success, Max rose to his top-notch. Moving slowly towards
the open door (centre) with his back to his audience and his head turned
towards it over his left shoulder, by some extraordinary dislocation of
his hip-joints, he achieved the immemorial salutation of the _Folies
Bergeres_--the last faint survival of the Old Athenian Comedy.
Up till now Jean had affected to ignore the performance of his
colleague. But under this supreme provocation he yielded to the
Aristophanic impulse, and--_exit_ Max in the approved manner of the
_Folies Bergeres_.
* * * * *
It is all over. The young Belgian officer has flown away on his motor
cycle to pot Germans; Mrs. Torrence has gone off to the field with the
Colonel on the quest of the greatest possible danger. The Ambulance has
followed them there.
I am in the mess-room, sitting at the disordered table and gazing at the
ruins of our mess. I hear again the wild laughter of the mess-mates; it
mingles with the cry of the refugees in the Palais des Fetes: "_Une
petite tranche de pain, s'il vous plait, mademoiselle!_"
_C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?_
In the chair by the window Max lies back with his loose boyish legs
extended limply in front of him; his round, close-cropped head droops to
his shoulder, his round face (the face of a very young _collegien_) is
white, the features are blurred and inert. Max is asleep with his
dish-cloth in his hand, in the sudden, pathetic sleep of exhaustion.
After his brief, funny madness, he is asleep. Jean comes and looks at
him and shakes his head. You understand from Jean that Max goes mad like
that now and then on purpose, so that he may forget in what manner his
mother went mad.
We go quietly so as not to wake him a minute too soon, lest when he
wakes he should remember.
There is a Taube hovering over Ghent.
Up there, in the clear blue sky it looks innocent, like an enormous
greyish blond dragon-fly hovering over a pond. You stare at it,
fascinated, as you stare at a hawk that hangs in mid-air, steadied by
the vibration of its wings, watching its prey.
You are not in the least disturbed by the watching Taube. An aeroplane,
dropping a few bombs, is nothing to what goes on down there where the
ambulances are.
The ambulances have come back. I go out into the yard to look at them.
They are not always nice to look at; the floors and steps would make you
shudder if you were not past shuddering.
I have found something to do. Not much, but still something. I am to
look after the linen for the ambulances, to take away the blood-stained
pillow-slips and blankets, and deliver them at the laundry and get clean
ones from the linen-room. It's odd, but I'm almost foolishly elated at
being allowed to do this. We are still more or less weighed down by the
sense of our uselessness. Even the Chaplain, though his services as a
stretcher-bearer have been definitely recognized--even the Chaplain
continues to suffer in this way. He has just come to me to tell me with
pride that he is making a good job of the stretchers he has got to mend.
Then, just as I am beginning to lift up my head, the blow falls. Not one
member of the Field Ambulance Corps is to be allowed to work at the
Palais des Fetes, for fear of bringing fever into the Military Hospital.
And here we are, exactly where we were at the beginning of the week,
Mrs. Lambert, Janet McNeil and I, three women out of five, with nothing
to do and two convalescent orderlies waiting on us. If I could please
myself I would tuck Max up in bed and wait on _him_.
In spite of the ambulance linen, this is the worst day of all for the
wretched Secretary and Reporter. Five days in Ghent and not a thing
done; not a line written of those brilliant articles (from the Front)
which were to bring in money for the Corps. To have nothing to do but
hang about the Hospital on the off-chance of the Commandant coming back
unexpectedly and wanting a letter written; to pass the man with the
bullet wound in his mouth a dozen times a day (he is getting very slowly
better; his poor face was a little more human this morning); to see the
maimed and crippled men trailing and hobbling about the hall, and the
wounded carried in on their stretchers--dripping stretchers, agonized
bodies, limbs rolled in bandages, blood oozing through the bandages,
heads bound with bandages, bandages glued tight to the bone with
blood--to see all this and be utterly powerless to help; to endure, day
after day, the blank, blond horror of the empty mess-room; to sit before
a marble-topped table with a bad pen, never enough paper and hardly any
ink, and nothing at all to write about, while all the time the names of
places, places you have not seen and never will see--Termonde, Alost,
Quatrecht and Courtrai--go on sounding in your brain with a maddening,
luring reiteration; to sit in a hateful inactivity, and a disgusting, an
intolerable safety, and to be haunted by a vision of two figures,
intensely clear on a somewhat vague background--Mrs. Torrence following
her star of the greatest possible danger, and Ursula Dearmer wandering
in youth and innocence among the shells; to be obliged to think of
Ursula Dearmer's mother when you would much rather not think of her; to
be profoundly and irrevocably angry with the guileless Commandant, whom
at the moment you regard (it may be perversely) as the prime agent in
this fatuous sacrifice of women's lives; to want to stop it and to be
unable to stop it, and at the same time to feel a brute because you want
to stop it--when _they_ are enjoying the adventure--I can only say of
the experience that I hope there is no depth of futility deeper than
this to come. You might as well be taken prisoner by the
Germans--better, since that would, at least, give you something to write
about afterwards.
What's more, I'm bored.
When I told the Commandant all this he looked very straight at me and
said, "Then you'd better come with us to Termonde." So straight he
looked that the suggestion struck me less as a _bona fide_ offer than an
ironic reference to my five weeks' funk.
I don't tell him that that is precisely what I want to do. That his
wretched Reporter nourishes an insane ambition--not to become a Special
Correspondent; not to career under massive headlines in the columns of
the _Daily Mail_; not to steal a march on other War Correspondents and
secure the one glorious "scoop" of the campaign. Not any of these sickly
and insignificant things. But--in defiance of Tom, the chauffeur--to go
out with the Field Ambulance as an _ambulanciere_, and hunt for wounded
men, and in the intervals of hunting to observe the orbit of a shell and
the manner of shrapnel in descending. To be left behind, every day, in
an empty mess-room, with a bad pen, utterly deprived of copy or of any
substitute for copy, and to have to construct war articles out of your
inner consciousness, would be purgatory for a journalist. But to have a
mad dream in your soul and a pair of breeches in your hold-all, and to
see no possibility of "sporting" either, is the very refinement of hell.
And your tortures will be unbearable if, at the same time, you have to
hold your tongue about them and pretend that you are a genuine reporter
and that all you want is copy and your utmost aim the business of the
"scoop."
After a week of it you will not be likely to look with crystal clarity
on other people's lapses from precaution.
But it would be absurd to tell him this. Ten to one he wouldn't believe
it. He thinks I am funking all the time.
* * * * *
I am still very angry with him. He must know that I am very angry. I
think that somewhere inside him he is rather angry too.
* * * * *
All the same he has come to me and asked me to give him my soap. He says
Max has taken his.