There have been changes in that Motor Field Ambulance Corps that set out
for Flanders on the 25th of September, 1914.
Its Commandant has gone from it to join the Royal Army Medical Corps. A
few of the original volunteers have dropped out and others have taken
their places, and it is larger now than it was, and better organized.
But whoever went and whoever stayed, its four field-women have remained
at the Front. Two of them are attached to the Third Division of the
Belgian Army; all four have distinguished themselves by their devotion
to that Army and by their valour, and they have all received the Order
of Leopold II., the highest Belgian honour ever given to women.
The Commandant, being a man, has the Order of Leopold I. Mr.
Ashmead-Bartlett and Mr. Philip Gibbs and Dr. Souttar have described his
heroic action at the Battle of Dixmude on the 22nd of October, 1914,
when he went into the cellars of the burning and toppling Town Hall to
rescue the wounded. And from that day to this the whole Corps--old
volunteers and new--has covered itself with glory.
On our two chauffeurs, Tom and Bert, the glory lies quite thick. "Tom"
(if I may quote from my own story of the chauffeurs) "Tom was in the
battle of Dixmude. At the order of his commandant he drove his car
straight into the thick of it, over the ruins of a shattered house that
blocked the way. He waited with his car while all the bombs that he had
ever dreamed of crashed around him, and houses flamed, and tottered and
fell. 'Pretty warm, ain't it?' was Tom's comment.
"Four days later he was waiting at Oudekappele with his car when he
heard that the Hospital of Saint-Jean at Dixmude was being shelled and
that the Belgian military man who had been sent with a motor-car to
carry off the wounded had been turned back by the fragment of a shell
that dropped in front of him. Tom thereupon drove into Dixmude to the
Hospital of Saint-Jean and removed from it two wounded soldiers and two
aged and paralysed civilians who had sheltered there, and brought them
to Furnes. The military ambulance men then followed his lead, and the
Hospital was emptied. That evening it was destroyed by a shell.
"And Bert--it was Bert who drove his ambulance into Kams-Kappele to the
barricade by the railway. It was Bert who searched in a shell-hole to
pick out three wounded from among thirteen dead; who with the help of a
Belgian priest, carried the three several yards to his car, under fire,
and who brought them in safety to Furnes."
And the others, the brave "Chaplain," and "Mr. Riley," and "Mr.
Lambert," have also proved themselves.
But when I think of the Corps it is chiefly of the four field-women that
I think--the two "women of Pervyse," and the other two who joined them
at their dangerous _poste_.
Both at Furnes and Pervyse they worked all night, looking after their
wounded; sometimes sleeping on straw in a room shared by the Belgian
troops, when there was no other shelter for them in the bombarded town.
One of them has driven a heavy ambulance car--in a pitch-black night,
along a road raked by shell-fire, and broken here and there into great
pits--to fetch a load of wounded, a performance that would have racked
the nerves of any male chauffeur ever born. She has driven the same car,
_alone_, with five German prisoners for her passengers. The four women
served at Pervyse (the town nearest to the firing-line) in "Mrs.
Torrence's" dressing-station--a cellar only twenty yards behind the
Belgian trenches. In that cellar, eight feet square and lighted and
ventilated only by a slit in the wall, two lived for three weeks,
sleeping on straw, eating what they could get, drinking water that had
passed through a cemetery where nine hundred Germans are buried. They
had to burn candles night and day. Here the wounded were brought as they
fell in the trenches, and were tended until the ambulance came to take
them to the base hospital at Furnes.
Day in, day out, and all night long, with barely an interval for a wash
or a change of clothing, the women stayed on, the two always, and the
four often, till the engineers built them a little hut for a
dressing-station; they stayed till the Germans shelled them out of their
little hut.
This is only a part of what they have done. The finest part will never
be known, for it was done in solitary places and in the dark, when
special correspondents are asleep in their hotels. There was no
limelight on the road between Dixmude and Furnes, or among the blood and
straw in the cellar at Pervyse.
And Miss Ashley-Smith (who is now Mrs. McDougall)--her escape from Ghent
(when she had no more to do there) was as heroic as her return.
Since then she has gone back to the Front and done splendid service in
her own Corps, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.