Prepared report for British Red Cross. Wrote "Journal of Impressions"
from September 25th to September 26th, 11 A.M. It's slow work. Haven't
got out of Ostend yet!
Fighting at Zele.
[_Afternoon._]
Got very near the fighting this time.
Mr. L. (Heaven bless him!) took me out with him in the War
Correspondents' car to see what the Ambulance was doing at Zele, and,
incidentally, to look at the bombardment of some evacuated villages near
it (I have no desire to see the bombardment of any village that has not
been evacuated first). Mr. M. came too, and they brought a Belgian lady
with them, a charming and beautiful lady, whose name I forget.
When Mr. L. told me to get up and come with him to Zele, I did get up
with an energy and enthusiasm that amazed me; I got up like one who has
been summoned at last, after long waiting, to a sure and certain
enterprise. I can trust Mr. L. or any War Correspondent who means
business, as I cannot (after Antwerp) trust the Commandant. So far, if
the Commandant happens upon a bombardment it has been either in the way
of duty, or by sheer luck, or both, as at Alost and Termonde, when duty
took him to these places, and any bombardment or firing was, as it were,
thrown in. He did not go out deliberately to seek it, for its own sake,
and find it infallibly, which is the War Correspondent's way. So that if
Mr. L. says there is going to be a bombardment, we shall probably get
somewhere nearer to it than thirty kilometres.
We took the main road to Zele. I don't know whether it was really a
continuation of the south-east road that runs under the Hospital
windows; anyhow, we left it very soon, striking southwards to the right
to find what Mr. L. believed to be a short cut. Thus we never got to
Zele at all. We came out on a good straight road that would no doubt
have led us there in time, but that we allowed ourselves to be lured by
the smoke of the great factory at Schoonard burning away to the south.
For a long time I could not believe that it was smoke we saw and not an
enormous cloud blown by the wind across miles of sky. We seemed to run
for miles with that terrible banner streaming on our right to the south,
apparently in the same place, as far off as ever. East of it, on the
sky-line, was a whole fleet of little clouds that hung low over the
earth; that rose from it; rose and were never lifted, but as they were
shredded away, scattered and vanished, were perpetually renewed. This
movement of their death and re-birth had a horrible sinister pulse in
it.
Each cloud of this fleet of clouds was the smoke from a burning village.
At last, after an endless flanking pursuit of the great cloud that
continued steadily on our right, piling itself on itself and mounting
incessantly, we struck into a side lane that seemed to lead straight to
the factory on fire. But in this direct advance the cloud eluded us at
every turn of the lane. Now it was rising straight in front of us in the
south, now it was streaming away somewhere to the west of our track.
When we went west it went east. When we went east it went west. And
wherever we went we met refugees from the burning villages. They were
trudging along slowly, very tired, very miserable, but with no panic and
no violent grief. We passed through villages and hamlets, untouched
still, but waiting quietly, and a little breathlessly, on the edge of
their doom.
At the end of one lane, where it turned straight to the east round the
square of a field we came upon a great lake ringed with trees and set in
a green place of the most serene and vivid beauty. It seemed incredible
that the same hour should bring us to this magic stillness and peace and
within sight of the smoke of war and within sound of the guns.
At the next turn we heard them.
We still thought that we could get to Schoonard, to the burning factory,
and work back to Zele by a slight round. But at this turn we had lost
sight of Schoonard and the great cloud altogether, and found ourselves
in a little hamlet Heaven knows where. Only, straight ahead of us, as we
looked westwards, we heard the guns. The sound came from somewhere over
there and from two quarters; German guns booming away on the south,
Belgian [? French] guns answering from the north.
Judging by these sounds and those we heard afterwards, we must have been
now on the outer edge of a line of fire stretching west and east and
following the course of the Scheldt. The Germans were entrenched behind
the river.
In the little hamlet we asked our way of a peasant. As far as we could
make out from his mixed French and Flemish, he told us to turn back and
take the road we had left where it goes south to the village of
Baerlaere. This we did. We gathered that we could get a road through
Baerlaere to Schoonard. Failing Schoonard, our way to Zele lay through
Baerlaere in the opposite direction.
We set off along a very bad road to Baerlaere.
Coming into Baerlaere, we saw a house with a remarkable roof, a
steep-pitched roof of black and white tiles arranged in a sort of
chequer-board pattern. I asked Mr. L. if he had ever seen a roof like
that in his life and he replied promptly, "Yes; in China." And that
roof--if it was coming into Baerlaere that we saw it--is all that I can
remember of Baerlaere. There was, I suppose, the usual church with its
steeple where the streets forked and the usual town hall near it, with a
flight of steps before the door and a three-cornered classic pediment;
and the usual double line of flat-fronted, grey-shuttered houses; I do
seem to remember these things as if they had really been there, but you
couldn't see the bottom half of the houses for the troops that were
crowded in front of them, or the top half for the shells you tried to
see and didn't. They were sweeping high up over the roofs, making for
the entrenchments and the batteries beyond the village.
We had come bang into the middle of an artillery duel. It was going on
at a range of about a mile and a half, but all over our heads, so that
though we heard it with great intensity, we saw nothing.
There were intervals of a few seconds between the firing. The Belgian [?
French] batteries were pounding away on the left quite near (the booming
seemed to come from behind the houses at our backs), and the German on
the right, farther away.
Now, you may have hated and dreaded the sound of guns all your life, as
you hate and dread any immense and violent noise, but there is something
about the sound of the first near gun of your first battle that, so far
from being hateful or dreadful, or in any way abhorrent to you, will
make you smile in spite of yourself with a kind of quiet exultation
mixed very oddly with reminiscence[16] so that, though your first
impression (by no means disagreeable) is of being "in for it," your
next, after the second and the third gun, is that of having been in for
it many times before. The effect on your nerves is now like that of
being in a very small sailing-boat in a very big-running sea. You climb
wave after high wave, and are not swallowed up as you expected. You
wait, between guns, for the boom and the shock of the next, with a
passionate anticipation, as you wait for the next wave. And the sound of
the gun when it comes is like the exhilarating smack of the wave that
you and your boat mean to resist and do resist when it gets you.
You do not think, as you used to think when you sat safe in your little
box-like house in St. John's Wood, how terrible it is that shells should
be hurtling through the air and killing men by whole regiments. You do
not think at all. Nobody anywhere near you is thinking that sort of
thing, or thinking very much at all.
At the sound of the first near gun I found myself looking across the
road at a French soldier. We were smiling at each other.
When we tried to get to Schoonard from the west end of the town we were
stopped and turned back by the General in command. Not in the least
abashed by this _contretemps_, Mr. L., after some parley with various
officers, decided not to go back in ignominious safety by the way we
came, but to push on from the east end of the village into the open
country through the line of fire that stretched between us and the road
to Zele. On our way, while we were about it, he said, we might as well
stop and have a look at the Belgian batteries at work--as if he had said
we might as well stop at Olympia and have a look at the Motor Show on
our way to Richmond.
At this point the unhappy chauffeur, who had not found himself by any
means at home in Baerlaere, remarked that he had a wife and family
dependent on him.
Mr. L. replied with dignity that he had a wife and family too, and that
we all had somebody or something; and that War Correspondents cannot
afford to think of their wives and families at these moments.
Mr. M.'s face backed up Mr. L. with an expression of extreme
determination.
The little Belgian lady smiled placidly and imperturbably, with an air
of being ready to go anywhere where these intrepid Englishmen should see
fit to take her.
I felt a little sorry for the chauffeur. He had been out with the War
Correspondents several times already, and I hadn't.
We left him and his car behind us in the village, squeezed very tight
against a stable wall that stood between them and the German fire. We
four went on a little way beyond the village and turned into a bridle
path across the open fields. At the bottom of a field to our left was a
small slump of willows; we had heard the Belgian guns firing from that
direction a few minutes before. We concluded that the battery was
concealed behind the willows. We strolled on like one half of a picnic
party that has been divided and is looking innocently for the other half
in a likely place.[17] But as we came nearer to the willows we lost our
clue. The battery had evidently made up its mind not to fire as long as
we were in sight. Like the cloud of smoke from the Schoonard factory, it
eluded us successfully. And indeed it is hardly the way of batteries to
choose positions where interested War Correspondents can come out and
find them.[18]
So we went back to the village, where we found the infantry being drawn
up in order and doing something to its rifles. For one thrilling moment
I imagined that the Germans were about to leap out of their trenches and
rush the village, and that the Belgians [? French] were preparing for a
bayonet charge.
"In that case," I thought, "we shall be very useful in picking up the
wounded and carrying them away in that car."
I never thought of the ugly rush and the horrors after it. It is
extraordinary how your mind can put away from it any thought that would
make life insupportable.
But no, they were not fixing bayonets. They were not doing anything to
their rifles; they were only stacking them.
It was then that you thought of the ugly rush and were glad that, after
all, it wouldn't happen.
You were glad--and yet in spite of that same gladness, there was a
little sense of disappointment, unaccountable, unpardonable, and not
quite sane.
One of the men showed us a burst shrapnel shell. We examined it with
great interest as the kind of thing that would be most likely to hit us
on our way from Baerlaere to Zele.
We had been barely half an hour hanging about Baerlaere, but it seemed
as if we had wasted a whole afternoon there. At last we started. We were
told to drive fast, as the fire might open on us at any minute. We drove
very fast. Our road lay through open country flat to the river, with no
sort of cover anywhere from the German fire, if it chose to come. About
half a mile ahead of us was a small hamlet that had been shelled. Mr. L.
told us to duck when we heard the guns. I remember thinking that I
particularly didn't want to be wounded in my right arm, and that as I
sat with my right arm resting on the ledge of the car it was somewhat
exposed to the German batteries, so I wriggled low down in my seat and
tucked my arm well under cover for quite five minutes. But you couldn't
see anything that way, so I popped up again and presently forgot all
about my valuable arm in the sheer excitement of the rush through the
danger zone. Our car was low on the ground; still, it was high enough
and big enough to serve as a mark for the German guns and it fairly gave
them the range of the road.
But though the guns had been pounding away before we started, they
ceased firing as we went through.
That, however, was sheer luck. And presently it was brought home to me
that we were not the only persons involved in the risk of this joyous
adventure. Just outside the bombarded hamlet ahead of us we were stopped
by some Belgian [? French] soldiers hidden in the cover of a ditch by
the roadside, which if it was not a trench might very easily have been
one. They were talking in whispers for fear of being overheard by the
Germans, who must have been at least a mile off, across the fields on
the other side of the river. A mile seemed a pretty safe distance; but
Mr. L. said it wouldn't help us much, considering that the range of
their guns was twenty-four miles. The soldiers told us we couldn't
possibly get through to Zele. That was true. The road was blocked--by
the ruins of the hamlet--not twenty yards from where we were pulled up.
We got out of the car; and while Mr. L. and the Belgian lady conversed
with the soldiers, Mr. M. and I walked on to investigate the road.
At the abrupt end of a short row of houses it stopped where it should
have turned suddenly, and became a rubbish-heap lying in a waste place.
Just at first I thought we must have gone out of our course somehow and
missed the road to Zele. It was difficult to realize that this
rubbish-heap lying in a waste place ever _had_ been a road. But for the
shell of a house that stood next to it, the last of the row, and the
piles of lath and plaster, and the shattered glass on the sidewalk and
the blown dust everywhere, it might have passed for the ordinary
no-thoroughfare of an abandoned brick-field.
Mr. M. made me keep close under the wall of a barn or something on the
other side of the street, the only thing that stood between us and the
German batteries. Beyond the barn were the green fields bare to the guns
that had shelled this end of the village. At first we hugged our shelter
tight, only looking out now and then round the corner of the barn into
the open country.
A flat field, a low line of willows at the bottom, and somewhere behind
the willows the German batteries. Grey puffs were still curling about
the stems and clinging to the tops of the willows. They might have been
mist from the river or smoke from the guns we had heard. I hadn't time
to watch them, for suddenly Mr. M. darted from his cover and made an
alarming sally into the open field.
He said he wanted to find some pieces of nice hot shell for me.
So I had to run out after Mr. M. and tell him I didn't want any pieces
of hot shell, and pull him back into safety.
All for nothing. Not a gun fired.
We strolled across what was left of the narrow street and looked through
the window-frames of a shattered house. It had been a little inn. The
roof and walls of the parlour had been wrecked, so had most of the
furniture. But on a table against the inner wall a row of clean glasses
still stood in their order as the landlord had left them; and not one of
them was broken.
I suppose it must have been about time for the guns to begin firing
again, for Mr. L. called to us to come back and to look sharp too. So we
ran for it. And as we leaped into the car Mr. L. reproved Mr. M. gravely
and virtuously for "taking a lady into danger."
The car rushed back into Baerlaere if anything faster than it had rushed
out, Mr. L. sitting bolt upright with an air of great majesty and
integrity. I remember thinking that it would never, never do to duck if
the shells came, for if we did Mr. L.'s head would stand out like a
noble monument and he would be hit as infallibly as any cathedral in
Belgium.
It seems that the soldiers were not particularly pleased at our
blundering up against their trench in our noisy car, which, they said,
might draw down the German fire at any minute on the Belgian lines.
We got into Ghent after dark by the way we came.
[_Evening._]
Called at the "Flandria." Ursula Dearmer and two Belgian nurses have
been sent to the convent at Zele to work there to-night.
Mr. ---- is here. But you wouldn't know him. I have just been introduced
to him without knowing him. Before the War he was a Quaker,[19] a
teetotaller, and a pacifist at any price. And I suppose he wore clothes
that conformed more or less to his principles. Now he is wearing
the uniform of a British naval officer. He is drinking long
whiskies-and-sodas in the restaurant, in the society of Major R. And the
Major's khaki doesn't give a point to the Quaker's uniform. As for the
Quaker, they say he could give points to any able seaman when it comes
to swear words (but this may be sheer affectionate exaggeration). His
face and his high, hatchet nose, whatever colour they used to be, are
now the colour of copper--not an ordinary, Dutch kettle and
coal-scuttle, pacifist, arts-and-crafts copper, but a fine old,
truculent, damn-disarmament, Krupp-&-Co., bloody, ammunition copper, and
battered by the wars of all the world. He is the commander and the
owner of an armoured car, one of the unit of five volunteer armoured
cars. I do not know whether he was happy or unhappy when there wasn't a
war. No man, and certainly no Quaker, could possibly be happier than
this Quaker is now. He and the Major have been out potting Germans all
the afternoon. (They have accounted for nine.) A schoolboy who has hit
the mark nine times running with his first toy rifle is not merrier
than, if as merry as, these more than mature men with their armoured
car. They do not say much, but you gather that it is more fun being a
volunteer than a regular; it is to enjoy delight with liberty, the
maximum of risk with the minimum of responsibility.
And their armoured car--if it is the one I saw standing to-day in the
Place d'Armes--it is, as far as you can make out through its disguises,
an ordinary open touring car, with a wooden hoarding (mere matchboard)
stuck all round it, the whole painted grey to simulate, armoured
painting. Through four holes, fore and aft and on either side of her,
their machine-guns rake the horizon. The Major and Mr. ---- sit inside,
hidden behind the matchboard plating. They scour the country. When they
see any Germans they fire and bring them down. It is quite simple. When
you inquire how they can regard that old wooden rabbit-hutch as an
armoured cover, they reply that their car isn't for defence, it's for
attack. The Germans have only to see their guns and they're off. And
really it looks like it, since the two are actually here before your
eyes, drinking whiskies-and-sodas, and the rest of the armoured car
corps are alive somewhere in Ghent.
Dear Major R. and Mr. ---- (whom I never met before), unless they read
this Journal, which isn't likely, they will never know how my heart
warmed towards them, nor how happy I count myself in being allowed to
see them. They showed me how good it is to be alive; how excellent,
above all things, to be a man and to be young for ever, and to go out
into the most gigantic war in history, sitting in an armoured car which
is as a rabbit-hutch for safety, and to have been a pacifist, that is to
say a sinner, like Mr. ----, so that on the top of it you feel the whole
glamour and glory of conversion. Others may have known the agony and the
fear and sordid filth and horror and the waste, but they know nothing
but the clean and fiery passion and the contagious ecstasy of war.
If you were to tell Mr. ---- about the mystic fascination of the
south-east road, the road that leads eventually to Waterloo, he would
most certainly understand you, but it is very doubtful whether he would
let you venture very far down it. Whereas the Commandant, sooner or
later, will.
[_Thursday, 8th._]
Had breakfast with Mr. L.
Went down to the "Flandria." They say Zele has been taken. There has
been terrific anxiety here for Ursula Dearmer and the two Belgian nurses
(Madame F.'s daughter and niece), who were left there all night in the
convent, which may very well be in the hands of the Germans by now. An
Ambulance car went off very early this morning to their rescue and has
brought them back safe.
We are told that the Germans are really advancing on Ghent. We have
orders to prepare to leave it at a minute's notice. This time it looks
as if there might be something in it.
I attend to the Commandant's correspondence. Wired Mr. Hastings. Wired
Miss F. definitely accepting the Field Ambulance Corps and nurses she
has raised in Glasgow. Her idea is that her Ambulance should be an
independent unit attached to our corps but bearing her name. (Seems
rather a pity to bring the poor lady out just now when things are
beginning to be risky and our habitations uncertain.)
The British troops are pouring into Ghent. There is a whole crowd of
them in the _Place_ in front of the Station. And some British wounded
from Antwerp are in our Hospital.
Heavy fighting at Lokeren, between Ghent and Saint Nicolas. Car 1 has
been sent there with the Commandant, Ursula Dearmer, Janet McNeil and
the Chaplain (Mr. Foster has been hurt in lifting a stretcher; he is out
of it, poor man). Mrs. Torrence, Dr. Wilson and Mr. Riley have been sent
to Nazareth. Mrs. Lambert has gone to Lokeren with her husband in his
car.
I was sent for this morning by somebody who desired to see the English
Field Ambulance. Drawn up before the Hospital I found all that was left
of a Hendon bus, in the charge of two British Red Cross volunteers in
khaki and a British tar. The three were smiling in full enjoyment of the
high comedy of disaster. They said they were looking for a job, and they
wanted to know if our Ambulance would take them on. They were keen. They
had every qualification under the sun.
"Only," they said, "there's one thing we bar. And that's the
firing-line. We've been under shell-fire for fifteen hours--and look at
our bus!"
The bus was a thing of heroism and gorgeous ruin. The nose of its engine
looked as if it had nuzzled its way through a thousand _debacles_; its
dark-blue sides were coated with dust and mud to the colour of an
armoured car. The letters M. E. T. were barely discernible through the
grey. Its windows were shattered to mere jags and spikes and splinters
of glass that adhered marvellously to their frames.
I don't know how I managed to convey to the three volunteers that such a
bus would be about as much use to our Field Ambulance as an old
greenhouse that had come through an earthquake. It was one of the
saddest things I ever had to do.
Unperturbed, and still credulous of adventure, they climbed on to their
bus, turned her nose round, and went, smiling, away.
Who they were, and what corps they belonged to, and how they acquired
that Metropolitan bus I shall never know, and do not want to know. I
would far rather think of them as the heroes of some fantastic
enterprise, careering in gladness and in mystery from one besieged city
to another.
Saw Madame F., who looks worried. She suggested that I should come back
to the Hospital. She says it must be inconvenient for the Commandant not
to have his secretary always at hand. At the same time, we are told
that the Hospital is filling up so fast that our rooms will be wanted.
And anyhow, Dr. ---- has got mine.
I have found an absurd little hotel, the Hotel Cecil in the _Place_,
opposite the Hospital, where I can have a room. Then I can be on duty
all day.
Went down to the "Poste." Gave up my room, packed and took leave of the
nice fat _proprietaire_ and his wife.
Driving through the town, I meet French troops pouring through the
streets. There was very little cheering.
Settled into the Hotel Cecil; if it could be called settling when my
things have to stay packed, in case the Germans come before the evening.
The Hotel Cecil is a thin slice of a house with three rooms on each
little floor, and a staircase like a ladder. There is something very
sinister about this smallness and narrowness and steepness. You say to
yourself: Supposing the Germans really do come into Ghent; there will be
some Uhlans among them; and the Uhlans will certainly come into the
Hotel Cecil, and they will get very drunk in the restaurant below; and
you might as well be in a trap as in this den at the top of the slice up
all these abominable little steep stairs. And you are very glad that
your room has a balcony.
But though your room has a balcony it hasn't got a table, or any space
where a table could stand. There is hardly anything in it but a big
double bed and a tall hat-stand. I have never seen a room more
inappropriate to a secretary and reporter.
The proprietor and his wife are very amiable. He is a Red Cross man; and
they have taken two refugee women into their house. They have promised
faithfully that by noon there shall be a table.
Noon has come; and there is no table.
The cars have come back from Lokeren and Nazareth, full of wounded.
Mrs. Lambert and her husband have come back from Lokeren. They drove
right into the German lines to fetch two wounded. They were promptly
arrested and as promptly released when their passports had shown them to
be good American citizens. They brought back their two wounded.
Altogether, ten or fifteen wounded have been brought back from Lokeren
this morning.
[_Afternoon._]
The Commandant has taken me out with the Ambulance for the first time.
We were to go to Lokeren.
On the way we came up with the Lamberts in their scouting-car. They
asked me to get out of the Ambulance car and come with them. On the
whole, after this morning, it looked as if the scouting-car promised
better incident. So I threw in my lot with the Lamberts.
It was a little disappointing, for no sooner had the Ambulance car got
clean away than the scouting-car broke down. Also Mr. Lambert stated
that it was not his intention to take Mrs. Lambert into the German lines
again to-day if he could possibly help it.
We waited for an exasperating twenty minutes while the car got righted.
From our street, in a blue transparent sky, so high up that it seemed
part of the transparency, we saw a Taube hanging over Ghent. People came
out of their houses and watched it with interest and a kind of amiable
toleration.
At last we got off; and the scouting-car made such good running that we
came up with our Ambulance in a small town half-way between Ghent and
Lokeren. We stopped here to confer with the Belgian Army Medical
officers. They told us it was impossible to go on to Lokeren. Lokeren
was now in the hands of the Germans. The wounded had been brought into a
small village about two miles away.
When we got into the village we were told to go back at once, for the
Germans were coming in. The Commandant answered that we had come to
fetch the wounded and were certainly not going back without them. It
seemed that there were only four wounded, and they had been taken into
houses in the village.
We were given five minutes to get them out and go.