These oppressions and obsessions, the deadly anxiety, the futile
responsibility and the boredom are too much for me. I am thinking
seriously of going home.
* * * * *
In the evening we--the Commandant and Janet McNeil and I--went down to
the Hotel de la Poste, to see the War Correspondents and hear the War
news. Mr. G. L. and Mr. M. and Mr. P. were there. And there among them,
to my astonishment, I found Mr. Davidson, the American sculptor.
The last time I saw Mr. Davidson it was in Mr. Joseph Simpson's studio,
the one under mine in Edwardes Square. He was making a bust of
Rabindranath Tagore; and as the great mystic poet disconcerted him by
continually lapsing into meditation under this process, thereby emptying
his beautiful face of all expression whatever, I had been called down
from my studio to talk to him, so as to lure him, if possible, from
meditation and keep his features in play. Mr. Davidson made a very fine
bust of Rabindranath Tagore. And here he is, imperfectly disguised by
the shortest of short beards, drawing caricatures of G. L.--G. L.
explaining the plan of campaign to the Belgian General Staff; G. L. very
straight and tall, the Belgian General Staff looking up to him with
innocent, deferential faces, earnestly anxious to be taught. I am not
more surprised at seeing Mr. Davidson here than he is at seeing me. In
the world that makes war we have both entirely forgotten the world where
people make busts and pictures and books. But we accept each other's
presence. It is only a small part of the fantastic dislocation of war.
Nothing could be more different from the Flandria Palace Hotel, our
Military Hospital, than the Hotel de la Poste. It is packed with War
Correspondents and Belgian officers. After the surgeons and the Red
Cross nurses and their wounded, and the mysterious officials hanging
about the porch and the hall, apparently doing nothing, after the
English Ambulance and the melancholy inactivity of half its Corps, this
place seems alive with a rich and virile life. It is full of live,
exultant fighters, and of men who have their business not with the
wounded and the dying but with live men and live things, and they have
live words to tell about them. At least so it seems.
You listen with all your ears, and presently Termonde and Alost and
Quatrecht and Courtrai cease to be mere names for you and become
realities. It is as if you had been taken from your prison and had been
let loose into the world again.
They are saying that there is no fighting at Saint Nicolas (the
Commandant has been feeling about again for his visionary base
hospital), but that the French troops are at Courtrai in great force.
They have turned their left [?] wing round to the north-east and will
probably sweep towards Brussels to cut off the German advance on
Antwerp. The siege of Antwerp will then be raised. And a great battle
will be fought outside Brussels, probably at Waterloo.