Max has gone about all day with a scared, white face. They say he is
suffering from cold feet. But I will not believe it. He has just
appeared in the mess-room and summoned me mysteriously. He takes me
along the corridor to that room of his which he is so proud of. There is
a brand-new uniform lying on the bed, the uniform of a French soldier
of the line. Max handles it with love and holy adoration, as a priest
handles his sacred vestments. He takes it in his arms, he spreads before
me the grey-blue coat, the grey-blue trousers, and his queer eyes are in
their solemnity large and quiet as dark moons.
Max is going to rejoin his regiment.
It is sheer nervous excitement that gave him that wild, white face.
Max is confident that we shall meet again; and I have a horrid vision of
Max carried on a bloody stretcher, a brutally wounded Max.
He has given me his address in Brussels, which will not find him there
for long enough: if ever.
Jean also is to rejoin his regiment.
Marie, the _bonne_, stands at the door of the service room and watches
us with frightened eyes. She follows me into the mess-room and shuts the
door. The poor thing has been seized with panic, and her one idea is to
get away from Ghent. Can I find a place for her on one of our ambulance
cars? She will squeeze in anywhere, she will stand outside on the step.
Will I take her back to England? She will do any sort of work, no matter
what, and she won't ask for wages if only I will take her there. I tell
her we are not going to England. We are going to Bruges. We have to
follow the Belgian Army wherever it is sent.
Then will I take her to Bruges? She has a mother there.
It is ghastly. I have to tell her that it is impossible; that there will
be no place for her in the ambulance cars, that they will be crammed
with wounded, that we will have to stand on the steps ourselves, that I
do not know how many we shall have to take from the Convent, or how many
from the hospitals; that I can do nothing without the Commandant's
orders, and that the Commandant is not here. And she pleads and
implores. She cannot believe that we can be so cruel, and I find my
voice growing hard and stern with sheer, wrenching pity. At last I tell
her that if there is room I will see what can be done, but that I am
afraid that there will not be room. She stays, she clings, trying to
extort through pity a more certain promise, and I have to tell her to
go. She goes, looking at me with the dull resentment of a helpless
creature whom I have hurt. The fact that she has left me sick with pity
will not do her any good. Nothing can do her any good but that place on
the ambulance which I have no power to give her.
For Marie is not the only one.
I see all the servants in the "Flandria" coming to me before the night
is over, and clinging and pleading for a place in the ambulance cars.
And this is only the beginning. After Marie comes Janet McNeil. She,
poor child, has surrendered to the overpowering assault on her feelings
and has pledged herself to smuggle the four young children of Madame
---- into the ambulance somehow. I don't see how it was possible for her
to endure the agony of refusing this request. But what we are to do with
four young children in cars packed with wounded soldiers, through all
the stages of the Belgian Army's retreat--!
The next problem that faced me was the Commandant's packing--how to get
all the things he had brought with him into one small Gladstone bag and
a sleeping-sack. There was a blue serge suit, two sleeping-suits, a
large Burberry, a great many pocket-handkerchiefs, socks and stockings,
an assortment of neckties, a quantity of small miscellaneous objects
whose fugitive tendencies he proposed to frustrate by confinement in a
large tin biscuit-box; there was the biscuit-box itself, a tobacco tin,
a packet of Gillette razors, a pipe, a leather case containing some
electric apparatus, and a fat scarlet volume: Freud's "Psychopathology
of Everyday Life." All these things he had pointed out to me as they lay
flung on the bed or strewn about the room. He had impressed on me the
absolute necessity of packing every one of them, and by the pathetic
grouping around the Gladstone bag of the biscuit-box, the tobacco-tin,
the case of instruments and Freud, I gathered that he believed that they
would all enter the bag placably and be contained in it with ease.
The night is still young.
I pack the Gladstone bag. By alternate coaxing and coercion Freud and
the tobacco-tin and the biscuit-box occupy it amicably enough; but the
case of instruments offers an unconquerable resistance.
The night is not quite so young as it has been, and I think I must have
left off packing to run over to the Hotel Cecil and pay my bill; for I
remember going out into the _Place_ and seeing a crowd drawn up in the
middle of it before the "Flandria." An official was addressing this
crowd, ordering them to give up their revolvers and any arms they had on
them.
The fate of Ghent depends on absolute obedience to this order.
When I get back I find Mrs. Torrence downstairs in the hall of the
"Flandria." I ask her what we had better do about our refugee children.
She says we can do nothing. There must be no refugee children. How _can_
there be in an ambulance packed with wounded men? When I tell her that
the children will certainly be there if somebody doesn't do something to
stop them, she goes off to do it. I do not envy her her job. She is not
enjoying it herself. First of all she has got to break it to Janet. And
Janet will have to break it to the mother.
As to poor Marie, she is out of the question. _I_ shall have to break it
to Marie.
The night goes on. I sit with Mr. ---- for a little while. I have still
to finish the Commandant's packing; I have not yet begun my own, and it
is time that I should go round to the Convent to tell Miss Ashley-Smith
to be ready with her British before two o'clock.
I sit with him for what seems a very long time. It is appalling to me
that the time should seem long. For it is really such a little while,
and when it is over there will be nothing more that I shall ever do for
him. This thought is not prominent and vivid; it is barely discernible;
but it is there, a dull background of pain under my anxiety for the
safety of the English over there in the Couvent de Saint Pierre. It is
more than time that I should go and tell them to be ready.
He holds out his hands to be sponged "if I don't mind." I sponge them
over and over again with iced water and eau de Cologne, gently and very
slowly. I am afraid lest he should be aware that there is any hurry. The
time goes on, and my anxiety becomes acuter every minute, till with each
slow, lingering turn of my hand I think, "If I don't go soon it will be
too late."
I hear that the children will be all right. Somebody has had a _crise de
nerfs_, and Janet was the victim.
It is past midnight, and very dark. The _Place_ and the boulevards are
deserted. I cannot see the Red Cross flag hanging from the window of the
Convent. The boulevards look all the same in the blackness, and I turn
up the one to the left. I run on and on very fast, but I cannot see the
white flag with the red cross anywhere; I run back, thinking I must have
passed it, turn and go on again.
There is nobody in sight. No sound anywhere but the sound of my own feet
running faster and faster up the wrong boulevard.
At last I know I have gone too far, the houses are entirely strange. I
run back to the _Place_ to get my bearings, and start again. I run
faster than ever. I pass a solitary civilian coming down the boulevard.
The place is so empty and so still that he and I seem to be the only
things alive and awake in this quarter of the town. As I pass he turns
to look after me, wondering at the solitary lady running so fast at
this hour of the morning. I see the Red Cross flag in the distance, and
I come to a door that looks like the door of the Convent. It _is_ the
door of the Convent.