Tom had not said anything for some considerable time.
We found the British lines in a little village just outside of Ghent.
No place there for a base hospital.
We hung about here for twenty minutes, and the women and children came
out to stare at us with innocent, pathetic faces.
Somebody had stowed away one of the trophies--the spiked German
helmet--in the ambulance car, and the chauffeur Tom stuck it on a stick
and held it up before the British lines. It was greeted with cheers and
a great shout of laughter from the troops; and the villagers came
running out of their houses to look; they uttered little sharp and
guttural cries of satisfaction. The whole thing was a bit savage and
barbaric and horribly impressive.
Finally we left the British lines and set out towards Melle by a
cross-road.
We got through all right. A thousand accidents may delay his going, but
once off, no barriers exist for the Commandant. Seated in the front of
the car, utterly unperturbed by the chauffeur Tom's sarcastic comments
on men, things and women, wrapped (apparently) in a beautiful dream, he
looks straight ahead with eyes whose vagueness veils a deadly simplicity
of purpose. I marvel at the transfiguration of the Commandant. Before
the War he was a fairly complex personality. Now he has ceased to exist
as a separate individual. He is merged, vaguely and vastly, in his
adventure. He is the Motor Ambulance Field Corps; he is the ambulance
car; he is the electric spark and the continuous explosion that drives
the thing along. It is useless to talk to him about anything that
happened before the War or about anything that exists outside it. He
would not admit that anything did exist outside it. He is capable of
forgetting the day of the week and the precise number of female units in
his company and the amount standing to his credit at his banker's, but,
once off, he is cock-sure of the shortest cut to the firing-line within
a radius of fifty kilometres.
Some of us who have never seen a human phenomenon of this sort are ready
to deny him an identity. They complain of his inveterate and deplorable
lack of any sense of detail. This is absurd. You might as well insist on
a faithful representation of the household furniture of the burgomaster
of Zoetenaeg, which is the smallest village in Belgium, in drawing the
map of Europe to scale. At the critical moment this more than
continental vastness gathers to a wedge-like determination that goes
home. He means to get through.
We ran into Melle about an hour before sunset.
There had been a great slaughter of Germans on the field outside the
village where the Germans were still firing when the Corps left it. We
found two of our cars drawn up by the side of the village street, close
under the houses. The Chaplain, Ursula Dearmer and Mrs. Lambert were
waiting in one of them, the new Daimler, with the chauffeur Newlands.
Dr. Wilson was in Bert's car with three wounded Germans. He was sitting
in front with one of them beside him. They say that the enemy's wounded
sometimes fire on our surgeons and Red Cross men, and Dr. Wilson had a
revolver about him when he went on the battle-field yesterday. He said
he wasn't taking any risks. The man he had got beside him to-day was
only wounded in the foot, and had his hands entirely free to do what he
liked with. He looked rather a low type, and at the first sight of him I
thought I shouldn't have cared to be alone with him anywhere on a dark
night.
And then I saw the look on his face. He was purely pathetic. He didn't
look at you. He stared in front of him down the road towards Ghent, in a
dull, helpless misery. These unhappy German Tommies are afraid of us.
They are told that we shall treat them badly, and some of them believe
it. I wanted Dr. Wilson to let me get up and go with the poor fellow,
but he wouldn't. He was sorry for him and very gentle. He is always
sorry for people and very gentle. So I knew that the German would be all
right with him. But I should have liked to have gone.
We found Mrs. Torrence and Janet with M. ---- on the other side of the
street, left behind by Dr. Wilson. They have been working all day
yesterday and half the night and all this morning and afternoon on that
hideous turnip-field. They have seen things and combinations of things
that no forewarning imagination could have devised. Last night the car
was fired on where it stood waiting for them in the village, and they
had to race back to it under a shower of bullets.
They were as fresh as paint and very cheerful. Mrs. Torrence was wearing
a large silver order on a broad blue ribbon pinned to her khaki
overcoat. It was given to her to-day as the reward of valour by the
Belgian General in command here. Somebody took it from the breast of a
Prussian officer. She had covered it up with her khaki scarf so that she
might not seem to swank.
Little Janet was with her. She always is with her. She looked younger
than ever, more impassive than ever, more adorable than ever. I have got
used to Mrs. Torrence and to Ursula Dearmer; but I cannot get used to
Janet. It always seems appalling to me that she should be here,
strolling about the seat of War with her hands in her pockets, as if a
battle were a cricket-match at which you looked on between your innings.
And yet there isn't a man in the Corps who does his work better, and
with more courage and endurance, than this eighteen-year-old child.
They told us that there were no French or Belgian wounded left, but that
two wounded Germans were still lying over there among the turnips. They
were waiting for our car to come out and take these men up. The car was
now drawn up close under some building that looked like a town hall, on
the other side of the street. We were in the middle of the village. The
village itself was the extreme fringe of the danger zone. Where the
houses ended, a stretch of white road ran up for about [?] a hundred
yards to the turnip-field. Standing in the village street, we could see
the turnip-field, but not all of it. The road goes straight up to the
edge of it and turns there with a sweep to the left and runs alongside
for about a mile and a half.
On the other side of the turnip-field were the German lines. The first
that had raked the village street also raked the fields and the mile and
a half of road alongside.
It was along that road that the car would have to go.
M. ---- told our Ambulance that it might as well go back. There were no
more wounded. Only two Germans lying in a turnip-field. The three of
us--Mrs. Torrence and Janet and I--tried to bring pressure to bear on M.
----. We meant to go and get those Germans.
But M. ---- was impervious to pressure. He refused either to go with the
car himself or to let us go. He said we were too late and it was too far
and there wouldn't be light enough. He said that for two Belgians, or
two French, or two British, it would be worth while taking risks. But
for two Germans under German fire it wasn't good enough.
But Mrs. Torrence and Janet and I didn't agree with him. Wounded were
wounded. We said we were going if he wasn't.
Then the chauffeur Tom joined in. He refused to offer his car as a
target for the enemy.[24] Our firm Belgian was equally determined. The
Commandant, as if roused from his beautiful dream to a sudden
realization of the horrors of war, absolutely forbade the expedition.
It took place all the same.
Tom's car, planted there on our side of the street, hugging the wall,
with its hood over its eyes, preserved its attitude of obstinate
immobility. Newlands' car, hugging the wall on the other side of the
street, stood discreetly apart from the discussion. But a Belgian
military ambulance car ran up, smaller and more alert than ours. And a
Belgian Army Medical Officer strolled up to see what was happening.
We three advanced on that Army Medical Officer, Mrs. Torrence and Janet
on his left and I on his right.
I shall always be grateful to that righteous man. He gave Mrs. Torrence
and Janet leave to go, and he gave me leave to go with them; he gave us
the military ambulance to go in and a Belgian soldier with a rifle to
protect us. And he didn't waste a second over it. He just looked at us,
and smiled, and let us go.
Mrs. Torrence got on to the ambulance beside the driver, Janet jumped on
to one step and I on to the other, while the Commandant came up, trying
to look stern, and told me to get down.