The outer forts? Oh, the outer forts are thirty kilometres away.
No. Not there. To your right.
And you, who thought you would have died rather than see the siege of
Antwerp, are dumb with disgust. Your heart swells with a holy and
incorruptible resentment of the sheer levity of the Commandant.
A pretty thing--to bring a War Correspondent out to see a bombardment
when there isn't any bombardment, or when all there ever was is a
hundred--well then, _thirty_ kilometres away.[11]
It was twilight as we came into Antwerp. We approached it by the west,
by the way of the sea, by the great bridge of boats over the Scheldt.
The sea and the dykes are the defence of Antwerp on this side. Whole
regiments of troops are crossing the bridge of boats. Our car crawls by
inches at a time. It is jammed tight among some baggage wagons. It
disentangles itself with difficulty from the baggage wagons, and is
wedged tighter still among the troops. But the troops are moving, though
by inches at a time. We get our front wheels on to the bridge. Packed in
among the troops, but moving steadily as they move, we cross the
Scheldt. On our right the sharp bows and on our left the blunt sterns of
the boats. Boat after boat pressed close, gunwale to gunwale, our
roadway goes across their breasts. Their breasts are taut as the breasts
of gymnasts under the tramping of the regiments. They vibrate like the
breasts of living things as they bear us up.
No heaving of any beautiful and beloved ship, no crossing of any sea, no
sight of any city that has the sea at her feet, not New York City nor
Venice, no coming into any foreign land, ever thrilled me as that
coming into Antwerp with the Belgian army over that bridge of boats.
At twilight, from the river, with its lamps lit and all its waters
shining, Antwerp looked beautiful as Venice and as safe and still. For
the dykes are her defences on this side. But for the trudging regiments
you would not have guessed that on the land side the outer ramparts were
being shelled incessantly.
It was a struggle up the slope from the river bank to the quay, a
struggle in which we engaged with commissariat and ammunition wagons and
troops and refugees in carts, all trying to get away from the city over
the bridge of boats. The ascent was so steep and slippery that you felt
as though at any moment the car might hurl itself down backwards on the
top of the processions struggling behind it.
At last we landed. I have no vivid recollection[12] of our passage
through the town. Except that I know we actually were in Antwerp I could
not say whether I really saw certain winding streets and old houses with
steep gables or whether I dreamed them. There was one great street of
white houses and gilded signs that stood shimmering somewhere in the
twilight; but I cannot tell you what street it was. And there were some
modern boulevards, and the whole place was very silent. It had the
silence and half darkness of dreams, and the beauty and magic and
sinister sadness of dreams. And in that silence and sadness our car,
with its backings and turnings and its snorts, and our own voices as we
asked our way (for we were more or less lost in Antwerp) seemed to be
making an appalling and inappropriate and impious noise.
Antwerp seems to me to have been all hospitals, though I only saw two,
or perhaps three. One was in an ordinary house in a street, and I think
this must have been the British Field Hospital; for Mrs. Winterbottom
was there. And of all the women I met thus casually "at the front" she
was, by a long way, the most attractive. We went into one or two of the
wards; in others, where the cases were very serious, we were only
allowed to stand for a second in the doorway; there were others again
which we could not see at all.
I think, unless I am rolling two hospitals into one, that we saw a
second--the English Hospital. It was for the English Hospital that we
heard the Commandant inquire perpetually as we made our way through the
strange streets and the boulevards beyond them, following at his own
furious pace, losing him in byways and finding him by some miracle
again. Talk of dreams! Our progress through Antwerp was like one of
those nightmares which have no form or substance but are made up of
ghastly twilight and hopeless quest and ever-accelerating speed. It was
not till it was all over that we knew the reason for his excessive
haste.
When we got to Mrs. St. Clair Stobart's Hospital--in a garden, planted
somewhere away beyond the boulevards in an open place--we had hardly any
time to look at it. All the same, I shall never forget that Hospital as
long as I live. It had been a concert-hall[13] and was built principally
of glass and iron; at any rate, if it was not really the greenhouse that
it seemed to be there was a great deal of glass about it, and it had
been shelled by aeroplane the night before. No great damage had been
done, but the sound and the shock had terrified the wounded in their
beds. This hospital, as everybody knows, is run entirely by women, with
women doctors, women surgeons, women orderlies. Mrs. St. Clair Stobart
and some of her gallant staff came out to meet us on a big verandah in
front of this fantastic building, she and her orderlies in the uniform
of the British Red Cross, her surgeons in long white linen coats over
their skirts. Dr. ---- whom we are to take back with us to Ghent, was
there.
We asked for Miss ----, and she came to us finally in a small room
adjoining what must have been the restaurant of the concert-hall.
I was shocked at her appearance. She was quieter than ever and her face
was grey and worn with watching. She looked as if she could not have
held out another night.
She told us about last night's bombardment. The effect of it on this
absurd greenhouse must have been terrific. Every day they are expecting
the bombardment of the town.
No, none of them are leaving except two. Every woman will stick to her
post[14] till the order comes to evacuate the hospital, and then not one
will quit till the last wounded man is carried to the transport.
It seems that Miss ---- is a hospital orderly, and that her duty is to
stand at the gate of the garden with a lantern as the ambulances come in
and to light them to the door of the hospital, and then to see that each
man has the number of his cot pinned to the breast of his
sleeping-jacket.
Mrs. Stobart, very properly, will have none but trained women in her
hospital. But even an untrained woman is equal to holding a lantern and
pinning on tickets, so I implored Miss ---- to let me take her place
while she went back to rest in my room at Ghent, if it was only for one
night. I used every argument I could think of, and for one second I
thought the best argument had prevailed. But it was only for a second.
Probably not even for a second. Miss ---- may drop to pieces at her
post, but it is there that she will drop.
Outside on the verandah the Commandant was fairly ramping to be off.
No--I can't see the Hospital. There isn't any time to see the Hospital.
But Miss ---- could not bear me not to see it, and together we made a
surreptitious bolt for it, and I did see the Hospital.
It was not like any hospital you had ever seen before. Except that the
wounded were all comfortably bedded, it was more like the sleeping-hall
of the Palais des Fetes. The floor of the great concert-hall was covered
with mattresses and beds, where the wounded lay about in every attitude
of suffering. No doubt everything was in the most perfect order, and the
nurses and doctors knew how to thread their way through it all, but to
the hurried spectator in the doorway the effect was one of the most
_macabre_ confusion. Only one object stood out--the large naked back of
a Belgian soldier, who sat on the edge of his bed waiting to be washed.
He must have been really the most cheerful and (comparatively) uninjured
figure in the whole crowd, but he seemed the most pitiful, because of
the sheer human insistence of his pathetic back.
Over this back and over all that prostrate agony the enormous floriated
bronze rings that carried the lights of the concert-hall hung from the
ceiling in frightful, festive decoration.