And I think of the poor little dreamy, guilelessCommandant in his conspicuous car, and I smile at her in secret, thanking Heaven that it's Ursula Dearmer and not Mrs. Torrence who is at his side.
The ambulance has come back from Alost with two or three wounded and some refugees. The Commandant is visibly elated, elated out of all proportion to the work actually done. Ursula Dearmer is not elated in the very least, but she is wide-awake. Her docility has vanished with her torpor. She and the Commandant both look as if something extremely agreeable had happened to them at Alost. But they are reticent. We gather that Ursula Dearmer has been working with the nuns in the Convent at Alost, where the wounded were taken before the ambulance cars removed them to Ghent. It sounded very safe.
But the Commandant dashed into my room after luncheon. His face was radiant, almost ecstatic. He was like a child who has rushed in to tell you how ripping the pantomime was.
"We've beenunder fire!"
But I was very angry. Coldly and quietly angry. I felt like that when I was ten years old and piloting my mother through the thick of the traffic between Guildhall and the Bank, and she broke from me and was all but run over. I don't quite know what I said to him, but I think I saidhe ought to be ashamed of himself. For it seems that Ursula Dearmer was with him.
I remembered how Ursula Dearmer's mother had come to me in the committee-room and asked me how near we proposed to go to the firing-line, and whether her daughter would be in any danger, and how I said, first of all, that there wasn't any use pretending that there wouldn't be danger, and that the chances were—and how the Commandant had intervened at that moment to assure her that danger there would be none. With a finger on the map of France and Belgium he traced the probable, the inevitable, course of the campaign; and in light, casual tones which allayed all anxiety, he explained how, as the Germans advanced upon any point, we should retire upon our base. As for the actual field-work, with one gesture he swept the whole battle-line into the distance, and you saw it as an infinitely receding tide that left its wrack strewn on a place of peace where the ambulance wandered at its will, secure from danger. The whole thing was done with such compelling and convincing enthusiasm that Ursula Dearmer's mother adopted more and more the humble attitude of a mere woman who has failed to grasp the conditions of modern warfare. Ursula Dearmer herself looked more docile than ever, though a little bored, and very sleepy.
And I remembered how when it was all over Ursula Dearmer's mother implored me, if therewasany danger, to see that Ursula Dearmer was sent home, and how I promised that whatever happened Ursula Dearmer would be safe, clinching it with a frightfully sacred inner vow, and saying to myself at the same time what a terrible nuisance this young girl is going to be. I saw myself at the moment of parting, standing on the hearthrug, stiff as a poker with resolution, and saying solemnly, "I'll keep my word!"
And here was the Commandant informing me with glee that a shell had fallen and burst at Ursula Dearmer's feet.
He was so pleased, and with such innocent and childlike pleasure, that I hadn't the heart to tell him that there wasn't much resemblance between those spaces of naked peace behind the receding battle-line and the narrow streets of a bombarded village. I only said that I should write to Ursula Dearmer's mother and ask her to release me from my promise. He said I would do nothing of the kind. I said I would. And I did. And the poor Commandant left me, somewhat dashed, and not at all pleased with me.
It seems that the shell burst, not exactly at Ursula Dearmer's feet, but ten yards away from her. Itcame romping down the street with immense impetus and determination; and it is not said of Ursula Dearmer that she was much less coy in the encounter. She took to shell-fire "like a duck to water."
Dr. Bird told us this. Ursula Dearmer herself was modest, and claimed no sort of intimacy with the shell that waked her up. She was as nice as possible about it. But all the same, into the whole Corps (that part of it that had been left behind) there has crept a sneaking envy of her luck. I feel it myself. And ifIfeel it, what must Mrs. Torrence and Janet feel?
Mrs. Lambert, anyhow, has had nothing to complain of so far. Her husband took her to Alost in his motor-car; I mean the motor-car which is the property of his paper.
In the afternoon Mademoiselle F. called to take me to the Palais des Fêtes. We stopped at a shop on the way to buy the Belgian Red Cross uniform—the white linen overall and veil—which you must wear if you work among the refugees there.
Madame F. is very kind and very tired. She has been working here since early morning for weeks on end. They are short of volunteers for the service of the evening meals, and I am to work at the tables for three hours, from six to nineP.M.This is settled, and a young Red Cross volunteer takes meover the Palais. It is an immense building, rather like Olympia. It stands away from the town in open grounds like the Botanical Gardens, Regent's Park. It is where the great Annual Shows were held and the vast civic entertainments given. Miles of country round Ghent are given up to market-gardening. There are whole fields of begonias out here, brilliant and vivid in the sun. They will never be sold, never gathered, never shown in the Palais des Fêtes. It is the peasants, the men and women who tilled these fields, and their children that are being shown here, in the splendid and wonderful place where they never set foot before.
There are four thousand of them lying on straw in the outer hall, in a space larger than Olympia. They are laid out in rows all round the four walls, and on every foot of ground between; men, women and children together, packed so tight that there is barely standing-room between any two of them. Here and there a family huddles up close, trying to put a few inches between it and the rest; some have hollowed out a place in the straw or piled a barrier of straw between themselves and their neighbours, in a piteous attempt at privacy; some have dragged their own bedding with them and are lodged in comparative comfort. But these are the very few. The most part are utterly destitute, and utterly abandoned to their destitution. They are broken with fatigue. They have stumbled and dropped no matter where, no matter beside whom. None turns from his neighbour; none scorns or hates or loathes his fellow. The rigidly righteousbourgeoiselies in the straw breast to breast with the harlot of the village slum, and her innocent daughter back to back with the parish drunkard. Nothing matters. Nothing will ever matter any more.
They tell you that when darkness comes down on all this there is hell. But you do not believe it. You can see nothing sordid and nothing ugly here. The scale is too vast. Your mind refuses this coupling of infamy with transcendent sorrow. It rejects all images but the one image of desolation which is final and supreme. It is as if these forms had no stability and no significance of their own; as if they were locked together in one immense body and stirred or slept as one.
Two or three figures mount guard over this litter of prostrate forms. They are old men and old women seated on chairs. They sit upright and immobile, with their hands folded on their knees. Some of them have fallen asleep where they sit. They are all rigid in an attitude of resignation. They have the dignity of figures that will endure, like that, for ever. They are Flamands.
This place is terribly still. There is hardly any rustling of the straw. Only here and there the cry of a child fretting for sleep or for its mother's breast. These people do not speak to each other. Half of them are sound asleep, fixed in the posture they took when they dropped into the straw. The others are drowsed with weariness, stupefied with sorrow. On all these thousands of faces there is a mortal apathy. Their ruin is complete. They have been stripped bare of the means of life and of all likeness to living things. They do not speak. They do not think. They do not, for the moment, feel. In all the four thousand—except for the child crying yonder—there is not one tear.
And you who look at them cannot speak or think or feel either, and you have not one tear. A path has been cleared through the straw from door to door down the middle of the immense hall, a narrower track goes all round it in front of the litters that are ranged under the walls, and you are taken through and round the Show. You are to see it all. The dear little Belgian lady, your guide, will not let you miss anything. "Regardez, Mademoiselle, ces deux petites filles. Qu'elles sont jolies, les pauvres petites." "Voici deux jeunes mariés, qui dorment. Regardez l'homme; il tient encore la main de sa femme."
You look. Yes. They are asleep. He is really holding her hand. "Et ces quatre petits enfants qui ont perdu leur père et leur mère. C'est triste, n'est-ce pas, Mademoiselle?"
And you say, "Oui, Mademoiselle. C'est bien triste."
But you don't mean it. You don't feel it. You don't know whether it is "triste" or not. You are not sure that "triste" is the word for it. There are no words for it, because there are no ideas for it. It is a sorrow that transcends all sorrow that you have ever known. You have a sort of idea that perhaps, if you can ever feel again, this sight will be worse to remember than it is to see. You can't believe what you see; you are stunned, stupefied, as if you yourself had been crushed and numbed in the same catastrophe. Only now and then a face upturned (a face that your guide hasn't pointed out to you) surging out of this incredible welter of faces and forms, smites you with pity, and you feel as if you had received a lacerating wound in sleep.
Little things strike you, though. Already you are forgetting the faces of the two little girls and of the young husband and wife holding each other's hands, and of the four little children who have lost their father and mother, but you notice the little dog,the yellow-brown mongrel terrier, that absurd little dog which belongs to all nations and all countries. He has obtained possession of the warm centre of a pile of straw and is curled up on it fast asleep. And the Flemish family who brought him, who carried him in turn for miles rather than leave him to the Germans, they cannot stretch themselves on the straw because of him. They have propped themselves up as best they may all round him, and they cannot sleep, they are too uncomfortable.
More thousands than there is room for in the straw are fed three times a day in the inner hall, leading out of this dreadful dormitory. All round the inner hall and on the upper story off the gallery are rooms for washing and dressing the children and for bandaging sore feet and attending to the wounded. For there are many wounded among the refugees. This part of the Palais is also a hospital, with separate wards for men, for women and children and for special cases.
Late in the evening M. P—— took the whole Corps to see the Palais des Fêtes, and I went again. By night I suppose it is even more "triste" than it was by day. In the darkness the gardens have taken on some malign mystery and have given it to the multitudes that move there, that turn in the winding paths among ghostly flowers and bushes,that approach and recede and approach in the darkness of the lawns. Blurred by the darkness and diminished to the barest indications of humanity, their forms are more piteous and forlorn than ever; their faces, thrown up by the darkness, more awful in their blankness and their pallor. The scene, drenched in darkness, is unearthly and unintelligible. You cannot account for it in saying to yourself that these are the refugees, and everybody knows what a refugee is; that there is War—and everybody knows what war is—in Belgium; and that these people have been shelled out of their homes and are here at the Palais des Fêtes, because there is no other place for them, and the kind citizens of Ghent have undertaken to house and feed them here. That doesn't make it one bit more credible or bring you nearer to the secret of these forms. You who are compelled to move with them in the sinister darkness are more than ever under the spell that forbids you and them to feel. You are deadened now to the touch of the incarnate.
On the edge of the lawn, near the door of the Palais, some ghostly roses are growing on a ghostly tree. Your guide, M. P——, pauses to tell you their names and kind. It seems that they are rare.
Several hundred more refugees have come intothe Palais since the afternoon. They have had to pack them a little closer in the straw. Eight thousand were fed this evening in the inner hall.
In the crush I get separated from M. P—— and from the Corps. I see some of them in the distance, the Commandant and Ursula Dearmer and Mrs. Lambert and M. P——. I do not feel as if I belonged to them any more. I belong so much to the stunned sleepers in the straw who cannot feel.
Nice Dr. Wilson comes across to me and we go round together, looking at the sleepers. He says that nothing he has seen of the War has moved him so much as this sight. He wishes that the Kaiser could be brought here to see what he has done. And I find myself clenching my hands tight till it hurts, not to suppress my feelings—for I feel nothing—but because I am afraid that kind Dr. Wilson is going to talk. At the same time, I would rather he didn't leave me just yet. There is a sort of comfort and protection in being with somebody who isn't callous, who can really feel.
But Dr. Wilson isn't very fluent, and presently he leaves off talking, too.
Near the door we pass the family with the little yellow-brown dog. All day the little dog slept in their place. And now that they are trying to sleep he will not let them. The little dog is wide awakeand walking all over them. And when you think what it must have cost to bring him—
C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?
As we left the gardens M. P—— gathered two ghostly roses, the last left on their tree, and gave one to Mrs. Lambert and one to me. I felt something rather like a pang then. Heaven knows why, for such a little thing.
Conference in our mess-room. M. ——, the Belgian Red Cross guide who goes out with our ambulances, is there. He is very serious and important. The Commandant calls us to come and hear what he has to say. It seems it had been arranged that one of our cars should be sent to-morrow morning to Termonde to bring back refugees. But M. —— does not think that car will ever start. He says that the Germans are now within a few miles of Ghent, and may be expected to occupy it to-morrow morning, and that instead of going to Termonde to-morrow we had very much better pack up and retreat to Bruges to-night. There are ten thousand Germans ready to march into Ghent.
M. —— is weighed down by the thought of his ten thousand Germans. But the Commandant is not weighed down a bit. On the contrary, a pleasant exaltation comes upon him. It comes upon the whole Corps, it comes even upon me. We refuse tobelieve in his ten thousand Germans. M. —— himself cannot swear to them. We refuse to pack up. We refuse to retreat to Bruges to-night. Time enough for agitation in the morning. We prefer to go to bed. M. —— shrugs his shoulders, as much as to say that he has done his duty and if we are all murdered in our beds it isn't his fault.
Does M. —— really believe in the advance of the ten thousand? His face is inscrutable.
[Tuesday, 29th.]
NoGermans in Ghent. No Germans reported near Ghent.
Madame F. and her daughter smile at the idea of the Germans coming into Ghent. They will never come, and if they do come they will only take a little food and go out again. They will never do any harm to Ghent. Namur and Liége and Brussels, if you like, and Malines, and Louvain, and Termonde and Antwerp (perhaps); but Ghent—why should they? It is Antwerp they are making for, not Ghent.
And Madame represents the mind of the average Gantois. It is placid, incredulous, stolidly at ease, superbly inhospitable to disagreeable ideas. No Gantois can conceive that what has been done to thecitizens of Termonde would be done to him.C'est triste—what has been done to the citizens of Termonde, but it doesn't shake his belief in the immunity of Ghent.
Which makes M. ——'s behaviour all the more mysterious.Whydid he try to scare us so? Five theories are tenable:
(1.) M. —— did honestly believe that ten thousand Germans would come in the morning and take our ambulance prisoner. That is to say, he believed what nobody else believed.
(2.) M. —— was scared himself. He had no desire to be taken quite so near the firing-line as the English Ambulance seemed likely to take him; so that the departure of the English Ambulance would not be wholly disagreeable to M. ——. (This theory is too far-fetched.)
(3.) M. —— was the agent of the Military Power, commissioned to test the nerve of the English Ambulance. ("Stood fire, have they? Give 'em arealscare, and see how they behave.")
(4.) M. —— is a psychologist and made this little experiment on the English Ambulance himself.
(5.) He is a humorist and was simply "pulling its leg."
The three last theories are plausible, but all five collapse before the inscrutability of Monsieur's face.
Germans or no Germans, one ambulance car started at five in the morning for Quatrecht, somewhere between Ghent and Brussels, to fetch wounded and refugees. The other went, later, to Zele. I am not very clear as to who has gone with them, but Mrs. Torrence, Mrs. Lambert, Janet McNeil and Dr. Haynes and Mr. Riley have been left behind.
It is their third day of inactivity, and three months of it could not have devastated them more. They have touched the very bottom of suicidal gloom. Three months hence their state of mind will no doubt appear in all its absurdity, but at the moment it is too piteous for words. When you think what they were yesterday and the day before, there is no language to express the crescendo of their despair. I came upon Mr. Riley this morning, standing by the window of the mess-room, and contemplating the façade of the railway station. (It is making a pattern on our brains.) I tried to soothe him. I said it was hard lines—beastly hard lines—and told him to cheer up—there'd be heaps for him to do presently. And he turned from me like a man who has just buried his first-born.
Janet McNeil is even more heart-rending, sunk in a chair with her hands stuck into the immense pockets of her overcoat, her flawless and impassiveface tilted forward as her head droops forlornly to her breast. She is such a child that she can see nothing beyond to-day, and yesterday and the day before that. She is going back to-morrow. Her valour and energy are frustrated and she is wounded in her honour. She is conscious of the rottenness of putting on a khaki tunic, and winding khaki putties round and round her legs to hang about the Hospital doing nothing. And she had to sell her motor bicycle in order to come out. Not that that matters in the least. What matters is that we are here, eating Belgian food and quartered in a Belgian Military Hospital, and "swanking" about with Belgian Red Cross brassards (stamped) on our sleeves, and doing nothing for the Belgians, doing nothing for anybody. We are not justifying our existence. We are frauds.
I tell the poor child that she cannot possibly feel as big a fraud as I do; that there was no earthly reason why I should have come, and none whatever why I should remain.
And then, to my amazement, I learn that I am envied. It's all right for me. My job is clearly defined, and nobody can take it from me. I haven't got to wind khaki putties round my legs for nothing.
I should have thought that the child was makingjokes at my expense but for the extreme purity and candour of her gaze. Incredible that there should exist an abasement profounder than my own. I have hidden my tunic and breeches in my hold-all. I dare not own to having brought them.
Down in the vestibule I encounter Mrs. Torrence in khaki. Mrs. Torrence yearning for her wounded. Mrs. Torrence determined to get to her wounded at any cost. She is not abased or dejected, but exalted, rather. She is ready to go to the President or to the Military Power itself, and demand her wounded from them. Her beautiful eyes demand them from Heaven itself.
I cannot say there are not enough wounded to go round, but I point out for the fifteenth time that the trouble is there are not enough ambulance cars to go round.
But it is no use. It does not explain why Heaven should have chosen Ursula Dearmer and caused shells to bound in her direction, and have rejected Mrs. Torrence. The Military Power that should have ordered these things has abandoned us to the caprice of Heaven.
Of course if Mrs. Torrence was a saint she would fold her hands and bow her superb little head before the decrees of Heaven; but she is only a mortal woman, born with the genius of succour and trainedto the last point of efficiency; so she rages. The tigress, robbed of her young, is not more furiously inconsolable than Mrs. Torrence.
It is not Ursula Dearmer's fault. She is innocent of supplanting Mrs. Torrence. The thing simply happened. More docile than determined, unhurrying and uneager, and only half-awake, she seems to have rolled into Car No. 1 with Heaven's impetus behind her. Like the shell at Alost, it is her luck.
And on the rest of us our futility and frustration weigh like lead. The good Belgian food has become bitter in our mouths. When we took our miserable walk through Ghent this morning we felt thatl'Ambulance Anglaisemust be a mark for public hatred and derision because of us. I declare I hardly dare go into the shops with the Red Cross brassard on my arm. I imagine sardonic raillery in the eyes of every Belgian that I meet. We do not think the authorities will stand it much longer; they will fire us out of theHôpital MilitaireNo. II.
But no, the authorities do not fire us out. Impassive in wisdom and foreknowledge, they smile benignly on our agitation. They compliment the English Ambulance on the work it has done already. They convey the impression that but for the English Ambulance the Belgian Army would be in abad way. Mademoiselle F. insists that the Hospital will soon be overflowing with the wounded from Antwerp and that she can find work even for me. It is untrue that there are three hundred nurses in the Hospital. There are only three hundred nurses in all Belgium. They pile it on so that we are more depressed than ever.
Janet McNeil is convinced that they think we are no good and that they are just being angels to us because they are sorry for us.
I break it to them very gently that I've volunteered to serve at the tables at the Palais des Fêtes. I feel as if I had sneaked into a remunerative job while my comrades are starving.
The Commandant is not quite as pleased as I thought he would be to hear of my engagement at the Palais des Fêtes. He says, "It is not your work." I insist that my work is to do anything I can do; and that if I cannot dress wounds I can at least hand round bread and pour out coffee and wash up dishes. It is true that I am Secretary and Reporter and (for the time being) Treasurer to the Ambulance, and that I carry its funds in a leather purse belt round my body. Because I am the smallest and weakest member of the Corps that is the most unlikely place for the funds to be. It was imprudent, to say the least of it, for the Chaplain inhis khaki, to carry them, as he did, into the firing-line. The belt, which fitted the Chaplain, hangs about half a yard below my waist and is extremely uncomfortable, but that is neither here nor there. Keeping the Corps' accounts only takes two hours and a half, even with Belgian and English money mixed, and when I've added the same column of figures ten times up and ten times down, to make certain it's all right (I am no good at accounts, but I know my weakness and guard against it, giving the Corps the benefit of every doubt and making good every deficit out of my private purse). Writing the Day-Book—perhaps half an hour. The Commandant's correspondence, when he has any, and reporting to the British Red Cross Society, when there is anything to report, another half-hour at the outside; and there you have only three and a half hours employed out of the twenty-four, even if I balanced my accounts every day, and I don't.
True thatThe Daily Chroniclepromised to take any articles that I might send them from the front, but I haven't written any. You cannot write articles forThe Daily Chronicleout of nothing; at least I can't.
The Commandant finally yields to argument and entreaty.
········
I do not tell him that what I really want to do is to go out with the Field Ambulance, and get beyond the turn of that road.
I know I haven't the ghost of a chance; I know that if I had—as things stand at present—not being a surgeon or a trained nurse, I wouldn't take it, even to get there. And at the same time I know, with a superior certainty, that this unlikely thing will happen. This sense of certainty is not at all uncommon, but it is, or seems, unintelligible. You can only conceive it as a premonition of some unavoidable event. It is as if something had been looking for you, waiting for you, from all eternity out here; something that you have been looking for; and, when you are getting near, it begins calling to you; it draws your heart out to it all day long. You can give no account of it. All that you know about it is that it is unique. It has nothing to do with your ordinary curiosities and interests and loves; nothing to do with the thirst for experience, or for adventure, or for glory, or for the thrill. You can't "get" anything out of it. It is something hidden and secret and supremely urgent. Its urgency, indeed, is so great that if you miss it you will have missed reality itself.
For me this uncanny anticipation is somehow connected with the turn of the south-east road. I donot see how I am ever going to get there or anywhere near there. But I am not uneasy or impatient any more. There is no hurry. The thing, whatever it is, will be irresistible, and if I don't go out to find it, it will find me.
········
Mrs. Torrence has gone, Heaven knows where. She has not been with the others at the Palais des Fêtes. Janet McNeil and Mrs. Lambert have been working there for five hours, serving meals to the refugees. Ursula Dearmer with extreme docility has been working all the afternoon with the nurses.
It looks as if we were beginning to settle down.
Mrs. Torrence has come back. The red German pom-pom has gone from her cap and she wears the badge of the Belgian Motor Cyclist Corps, black wings on a white ground. Providence has rehabilitated himself. He has abased our trained nurse and expert motorist in order to exalt her. He fairly flung her in the path of the Colonel of (I think) the Belgian Motor Cyclist Corps at a moment when the Colonel found himself in a jibbing motor-car without a chauffeur. We gather that the Colonel was becoming hectic with blasphemy when she appeared and settled the little difficulty between him and his car. She seems to have followed it up bydriving him then and there straight up to the firing-line to look for wounded.
End of the adventure—she volunteered her services as chauffeur to the Colonel and was accepted.
The Commandant has received the news with imperturbable optimism.
As for her, she is appeased. She will realize her valorous dream of "the greatest possible danger;" and she will get to her wounded.
The others have come back too. They have toiled for five hours among the refugees.
[5.30.]
Itis my turn now at the Palais des Fêtes.
It took ages to get in. The dining-hall is narrower than the sleeping-hall, but it extends beyond it on one side where there is a large door opening on the garden. But this door is closed to the public. You can only reach the dining-hall by going through the straw among the sleepers. And at this point the Commandant's optimism has broken down. He won't let you go in through the straw, and the clerk who controls the entry won't let you go in through the other door. You explain to the clerk that the English Ambulance being quartered in a Military Hospital, its rules are inviolable; it is not allowed toexpose itself to the horrors of the straw. The clerk is not interested in the English Ambulance, he is not impressed by the fact that it has volunteered its priceless services to the Refugee Committee, and he is contemptuous of the orders of its Commandant. His business is to see that you go into the Palais throughhisdoor and not through any other door. And when you tell him that if he will not withdraw his regulations the Ambulance will be compelled to withdraw its services, he replies with delicious sarcasm, "Nous n'avons pas prévu ça." In the end you are referred to the Secretary in his bureau. He grasps the situation and is urbanity itself. Provided with a special permit bearing his sacred signature, you are admitted by the other door.
Your passage to theVestiairetakes you through the infants' room and along the galleries past the wards. The crowd of refugees is so great that beds have been put up in the galleries. You take off your outer garments and put on the Belgian Red Cross uniform (you have realized by this time that your charming white overall and veil are sanitary precautions).
Coming down the wide wooden stairways you have a full view of the Inner Hall. This enormous oblong space below the galleries is the heart, thefervid centralfoyerof the Palais des Fêtes. At either end of it is an immense auditorium, tier above tier of seats, rising towards the gallery floors. All down each side of it, standards with triumphal devices are tilted from the balustrade. Banners hang from the rafters.
And under them, down the whole length of the hall from auditorium to auditorium, the tables are set out. Bare wooden tables, one after another, more tables than you can count.
From the door of the sleeping-hall to each auditorium, and from each auditorium down the line of the tables a gangway is roped off for the passage of the refugees.
They say there are ten thousand five hundred here to-night. Beyond the rope-line, along the inner hall, more straw has been laid down to bed the overflow from the outer hall. They come on in relays to be fed. They are marshalled first into the seats of each auditorium, where they sit like the spectators of some monstrous festival and wait for their turn at the tables.
This, the long procession of people streaming in without haste, in perfect order and submission, is heart-rending if you like. The immensity of the crowd no longer overpowers you. The barriers make it a steady procession, a credible spectacle.You can take it in. It is the thin end of the wedge in your heart. They come on so slowly that you can count them as they come. They have sorted themselves out. The fathers and the mothers are together, they lead their little children by the hand or push them gently before them. There is no anticipation in their eyes; no eagerness and no impatience in their bearing. They do not hustle each other or scramble for their places. It is their silence and submission that you cannot stand.
For you have a moment of dreadful inactivity after the setting of the tables for thepremier service. You have filled your bowls with black coffee; somebody else has laid the slices of white bread on the bare tables. You have nothing to do but stand still and see them file in to the banquet. On the banners and standards from the roof and balustrades the Lion of Flanders ramps over their heads. And somewhere in the back of your brain a song sings itself to a tune that something in your brain wakes up:
Ils ne vont pas dompterLe vieux lion de Flandres,Tant que le lion a des dents,Tant que le lion peut griffer.
It is the song the Belgian soldiers sang as they marched to battle in the first week of August. It is only the end of September now.
And somebody standing beside you says: "C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?"
You cannot look any more.
At the canteen the men are pouring out coffee from enormous enamelled jugs into the small jugs that the waitresses bring. This wastes your time and cools the coffee. So you take a big jug from the men. It seems to you no heavier than an ordinary teapot. And you run with it. To carry the largest possible jug at the swiftest possible pace is your only chance of keeping sane. (It isn't till it is all over that you hear the whisper of "Anglaise!" and realize how very far from sane you must have looked running round with your enormous jug.) You can fill up the coffee bowls again—the little bowls full, the big bowls only half full; there is more than enough coffee to go round. But there is no milk except for the babies. And when they ask you for more bread there is not enough to go twice round. The ration is now two slices of dry bread and a bowl of black coffee three times a day. Till yesterday there was an allowance of meat for soup at the mid-day meal; to-day the army has commandeered all the meat.
But you needn't stand still any more. After the first service the bowls have to be cleared from the tables and washed and laid ready for the next.Round the great wooden tubs there is a frightful competition. It is who can wash and dry and carry back the quickest. You contend with brawny Flemish women for the first dip into the tub and the driest towel. Then you race round the tables with your pile of crockery, and then with your jug, and so on over and over again for three hours, till the last relay is fed and the tables are deserted. You wash up again and it is all over for you till six o'clock to-morrow evening.
You go back to your mess-room and a ten-o'clock supper of cold coffee and sandwiches and Belgian current loaf eaten with butter. And in a nightmare afterwards Belgian refugees gather round you and pluck at your sleeve and cry to you for more bread: "Une petite tranche de pain, s'il vous plaît, mademoiselle!"
[Wednesday, 30th.]
NoGermans, nor sign of Germans yet.
Fighting is reported at Saint Nicolas, between Antwerp and Ghent. The Commandant has an idea. He says that if the Belgian Army has to meet the Germans at Saint Nicolas, so as to cut off their advance on Antwerp, the base hospital must be removed from Ghent to some centre or point which will bring the Ambulance behind the Belgian lines.He thinks that working from Ghent would necessarily bring it behind the German lines. This is assuming that the Germans coming up from the south-east will cut in between Saint Nicolas and Ghent.
He consults the President, who apparently thinks that the base hospital will do very well where it is.
[2.30.]
Mrs. Torrencebrought her Colonel in to lunch. He is battered and grizzled, but still a fine figure in the dark-green uniform of the Motor Cyclist Corps. He is very polite and gallantà la belgeand vows that he has taken on Mrs. Torrencepour toujours, pour la vie! She diverts the flow of urbanity adroitly.
Except the Colonel nothing noteworthy seems to have occurred to-day. The three hours at the Palais des Fêtes were like the three hours last night.
[Thursday, October 1st.]
Itreally isn't safe for the Commandant to go out with Ursula Dearmer. For her luck in the matter of bombardments continues. (He might just as well be with Mrs. Torrence.) They have been at Termonde. What is more, it was Ursula Dearmerwho got them through, in spite of the medical military officer whose vigorous efforts stopped them at the barrier. He seems at one point to have shown weakness and given them leave to go on a little way up the road; and the little way seems to have carried them out of his sight and onward till they encountered the Colonel (or it may have been a General) in command. The Colonel (or the General) seems to have broken down very badly, for the car and Ursula Dearmer and the Commandant went on towards Termonde. Young Haynes was with them this time, and on the way they had picked up Mr. G. L——, War Correspondent to theDaily MailandWestminster. They left the car behind somewhere in a safe place where the fire from the machine-guns couldn't reach it. There is a street or a road—I can't make out whether it is inside or outside the town; it leads straight to the bridge over the river, which is about as wide there as the Thames at Westminster. The bridge is the key to the position; it has been blown up and built again several times in the course of the War, and the Germans are now entrenched beyond it. The road had been raked by theirmitrailleusesthe day before.
It seems to have struck the four simultaneously that it would be quite a good thing to walk down this road on the off-chance of the machine-guns opening fire again. The tale told by the Commandant evokes an awful vision of them walking down it, four abreast, the Commandant and Mr. G. L—— on the outside, fairly under shelter, and Ursula Dearmer and young Haynes a little in front of them down the middle, where the fire comes, when it does come. This spectacle seems to have shaken the Commandant in his view of bombarded towns as suitable places of amusement for young girls. Young Haynes ought to have known better. You tell him that as long as the world endures young Haynes will be young Haynes, and if there is danger in the middle of the road, it is there that he will walk by preference. And as no young woman of modern times is going to let herself be outdone by young Haynes, you must expect to find Ursula Dearmer in the middle of the road too. You cannot suppress this competitive heroism of young people. The roots strike too deep down in human nature. In the modern young man and woman competitive heroism has completely forgotten its origin and is now an end in itself.
And if it comes to that—how about Alost?
At the mention of Alost the Commandant's face becomes childlike again in its utter simplicity and innocence and candour. Alost was a very different thing. Looking for shells at Alost, you understand,was like looking for shells on the seashore. At Alost Ursula Dearmer was in no sort of danger. For at Alost she was under the Commandant's wing (young Haynes hasn't got any wings, only legs to walk into the line of fire on). He explains very carefully that he took her under his wingbecauseshe is a young girl and he feels responsible for her to her mother.
(Which, oddly enough, is just howIfeel!)
As for young Haynes, I suppose he would plead that when he and Ursula Dearmer walked down the middle of the road there was no firing.
That seems to have been young Haynes's particular good fortune. I have now a perfect obsession of responsibility. I see, in one dreadful vision after another, the things that must happen to Ursula Dearmer under the Commandant's wing, and to young Haynes and the Commandant under Ursula Dearmer's.
No wounded were found, this time, at Termonde.
This littlecontretempswith the Commandant has made me forget to record a far more notable event. Mrs. Torrence brought young Lieutenant G—— in to luncheon. He is the hero of the Belgian Motor Cyclist Corps. He is said to have accounted for nine Germans with his own rifle in one morning. The Corps has already intimated that this is the firstwell-defined specimen of a man it has yet seen in Belgium. His dark-green uniform fits him exceedingly well. He is tall and handsome. Drenched in the glamour of the greatest possible danger, he gives it off like a subtle essence. As he was led in he had rather the air, the slightly awkward, puzzled and embarrassed air, of being on show as a fine specimen of a man. But it very soon wore off. In the absence of the Commandant he sat in the Commandant's place, so magnificent a figure that our mess, with gaps at every table, looked like a banquet given in his honour, a banquet whose guests had been decimated by some catastrophe.
Suddenly—whether it was the presence of the Lieutenant or the absence of the Commandant, or merely reaction from the strain of inactivity, I don't know, but suddenly madness came upon our mess. The mess-room was no longer a mess-room in a Military Hospital, but a British school-room. Mrs. Torrence had changed her woollen cap for a grey felt wide-awake. She was no longer an Arctic explorer, but the wild-western cowboy of British melodrama. She was the first to go mad. One moment she was seated decorously at the Lieutenant's right hand; the next she was strolling round the tables with an air of innocent abstraction, having armed herself in secret with the little hard round rolls supplied by order of the Commandant. Each little roll became a deadlyobusin her hand. She turned. Her innocent abstraction was intense as she poised herself to aim.
With a shout of laughter Dr. Bird ducked behind the cover of his table-napkin.
I had a sudden memory of Mrs. Torrence in command of the party at Ostend, a figure of austere duty, of inexorable propriety, rigid with the discipline of the —— Hospital, restraining the criminal levity of the Red Cross volunteer who would look or dream of looking at Ostend Cathedral. Mrs. Torrence, like a seven-year-old child meditating mischief, like a baby panther at play, like a very young and very engaging demon let loose, is looking at Dr. Bird. He is not a Cathedral, but he suffered bombardment all the same. She got his range with a roll. She landed her shell in the very centre of his waistcoat.
Her madness entered into Dr. Bird. He replied with a spirited fire which fell wide of her and battered the mess-room door. The orderlies retreated for shelter into the vestibule beyond. Jean was the first to penetrate the line of fire. Max followed him.
Madness entered into Max. He ceased to be a hospital orderly. He became Prosper Panne again,the very youngcollégien, as he put down his dishes and glided unobtrusively into the affair.
And then the young Belgian Lieutenant went mad. But he gave way by degrees. At first he sat up straight and stiff with polite astonishment before the spectacle of a British "rag." He paid the dubious tribute of a weak giggle to the bombardment of Dr. Bird. He was convulsed at the first performance of Prosper Panne. In his final collapse he was rocking to and fro and crowing with helpless, hysterical laughter.
For with the entrance of Prosper Panne the mess-room became a scene at theFolies Bergères. There was Mrs. Torrence,première comédienne, in the costume of a wild-western cowboy; there was the young Lieutenant himself, looking like a stage-lieutenant in the dark-green uniform of the Belgian Motor Cyclist Corps; and there was Prosper Panne. He began by picking up Mrs. Torrence's brown leather motor glove with its huge gauntlet, and examining it with the deliciously foolish bewilderment of the accomplished clown. After one or two failures, brilliantly improvised, he fixed it firmly on his head. The huge gauntlet, with its limp five fingers dangling over his left ear, became a rakish képi with a five-pointed flap. Max—I mean Prosper Panne—wore it with an "air impayable." Out of his round, soft,putty-coloured face he made fifteen other faces in rapid succession, all incomparably absurd. He lit a cigarette and held it between his lower lip and his chin. The effect was of a miraculous transformation of those features, in which his upper lip disappeared altogether, his lower lip took on its functions, while his chin ceased to be a chin and became a lower lip. With this achievement Prosper Panne had his audience in the hollow of his hands. He could do what he liked with it. He did. He caused his motor-glove cap to fall from his head as if by some mysterious movement of its own. Then he went round the stalls and gravely and earnestly removed all our hats. With an air more and more "impayable" he wore each one of them in turn—the grey felt wide-awake of the wild-western cowboy, the knitted Jaeger head-gear of the little Arctic explorer, the dark-blue military cap with the red tassel assumed by Dr. Bird, even the green cap with the winged symbol of the young Belgian officer. By this time the young Belgian officer was so entirely the thrall of Prosper Panne that he didn't turn a hair.
Flushed with success, Max rose to his top-notch. Moving slowly towards the open door (centre) with his back to his audience and his head turned towards it over his left shoulder, by some extraordinary dislocation of his hip-joints, he achieved the immemorial salutation of theFolies Bergères—the last faint survival of the Old Athenian Comedy.
Up till now Jean had affected to ignore the performance of his colleague. But under this supreme provocation he yielded to the Aristophanic impulse, and—exitMax in the approved manner of theFolies Bergères.
········
It is all over. The young Belgian officer has flown away on his motor cycle to pot Germans; Mrs. Torrence has gone off to the field with the Colonel on the quest of the greatest possible danger. The Ambulance has followed them there.
I am in the mess-room, sitting at the disordered table and gazing at the ruins of our mess. I hear again the wild laughter of the mess-mates; it mingles with the cry of the refugees in the Palais des Fêtes: "Une petite tranche de pain, s'il vous plaît, mademoiselle!"
C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?
In the chair by the window Max lies back with his loose boyish legs extended limply in front of him; his round, close-cropped head droops to his shoulder, his round face (the face of a very youngcollégien) is white, the features are blurred and inert. Max is asleep with his dish-cloth in his hand,in the sudden, pathetic sleep of exhaustion. After his brief, funny madness, he is asleep. Jean comes and looks at him and shakes his head. You understand from Jean that Max goes mad like that now and then on purpose, so that he may forget in what manner his mother went mad.
We go quietly so as not to wake him a minute too soon, lest when he wakes he should remember.
There is a Taube hovering over Ghent.
Up there, in the clear blue sky it looks innocent, like an enormous greyish blond dragon-fly hovering over a pond. You stare at it, fascinated, as you stare at a hawk that hangs in mid-air, steadied by the vibration of its wings, watching its prey.
You are not in the least disturbed by the watching Taube. An aeroplane, dropping a few bombs, is nothing to what goes on down there where the ambulances are.
The ambulances have come back. I go out into the yard to look at them. They are not always nice to look at; the floors and steps would make you shudder if you were not past shuddering.
I have found something to do. Not much, but still something. I am to look after the linen for the ambulances, to take away the blood-stained pillow-slips and blankets, and deliver them at the laundry and get clean ones from the linen-room.It's odd, but I'm almost foolishly elated at being allowed to do this. We are still more or less weighed down by the sense of our uselessness. Even the Chaplain, though his services as a stretcher-bearer have been definitely recognized—even the Chaplain continues to suffer in this way. He has just come to me to tell me with pride that he is making a good job of the stretchers he has got to mend.
Then, just as I am beginning to lift up my head, the blow falls. Not one member of the Field Ambulance Corps is to be allowed to work at the Palais des Fêtes, for fear of bringing fever into the Military Hospital. And here we are, exactly where we were at the beginning of the week, Mrs. Lambert, Janet McNeil and I, three women out of five, with nothing to do and two convalescent orderlies waiting on us. If I could please myself I would tuck Max up in bed and wait onhim.
In spite of the ambulance linen, this is the worst day of all for the wretched Secretary and Reporter. Five days in Ghent and not a thing done; not a line written of those brilliant articles (from the Front) which were to bring in money for the Corps. To have nothing to do but hang about the Hospital on the off-chance of the Commandant coming back unexpectedly and wanting a letter written; to passthe man with the bullet wound in his mouth a dozen times a day (he is getting very slowly better; his poor face was a little more human this morning); to see the maimed and crippled men trailing and hobbling about the hall, and the wounded carried in on their stretchers—dripping stretchers, agonized bodies, limbs rolled in bandages, blood oozing through the bandages, heads bound with bandages, bandages glued tight to the bone with blood—to see all this and be utterly powerless to help; to endure, day after day, the blank, blond horror of the empty mess-room; to sit before a marble-topped table with a bad pen, never enough paper and hardly any ink, and nothing at all to write about, while all the time the names of places, places you have not seen and never will see—Termonde, Alost, Quatrecht and Courtrai—go on sounding in your brain with a maddening, luring reiteration; to sit in a hateful inactivity, and a disgusting, an intolerable safety, and to be haunted by a vision of two figures, intensely clear on a somewhat vague background—Mrs. Torrence following her star of the greatest possible danger, and Ursula Dearmer wandering in youth and innocence among the shells; to be obliged to think of Ursula Dearmer's mother when you would much rather not think of her; to be profoundly and irrevocably angry with the guileless Commandant, whom at the moment you regard (it may be perversely) as the prime agent in this fatuous sacrifice of women's lives; to want to stop it and to be unable to stop it, and at the same time to feel a brute because you want to stop it—whentheyare enjoying the adventure—I can only say of the experience that I hope there is no depth of futility deeper than this to come. You might as well be taken prisoner by the Germans—better, since that would, at least, give you something to write about afterwards.
What's more, I'm bored.
When I told the Commandant all this he looked very straight at me and said, "Then you'd better come with us to Termonde." So straight he looked that the suggestion struck me less as abona fideoffer than an ironic reference to my five weeks' funk.
I don't tell him that that is precisely what I want to do. That his wretched Reporter nourishes an insane ambition—not to become a Special Correspondent; not to career under massive headlines in the columns of theDaily Mail; not to steal a march on other War Correspondents and secure the one glorious "scoop" of the campaign. Not any of these sickly and insignificant things. But—in defiance of Tom, the chauffeur—to go out with theField Ambulance as anambulancière, and hunt for wounded men, and in the intervals of hunting to observe the orbit of a shell and the manner of shrapnel in descending. To be left behind, every day, in an empty mess-room, with a bad pen, utterly deprived of copy or of any substitute for copy, and to have to construct war articles out of your inner consciousness, would be purgatory for a journalist. But to have a mad dream in your soul and a pair of breeches in your hold-all, and to see no possibility of "sporting" either, is the very refinement of hell. And your tortures will be unbearable if, at the same time, you have to hold your tongue about them and pretend that you are a genuine reporter and that all you want is copy and your utmost aim the business of the "scoop."
After a week of it you will not be likely to look with crystal clarity on other people's lapses from precaution.
But it would be absurd to tell him this. Ten to one he wouldn't believe it. He thinks I am funking all the time.
········
I am still very angry with him. He must know that I am very angry. I think that somewhere inside him he is rather angry too.
········
All the same he has come to me and asked me to give him my soap. He says Max has taken his.
I give him my soap, but—
These oppressions and obsessions, the deadly anxiety, the futile responsibility and the boredom are too much for me. I am thinking seriously of going home.
········
In the evening we—the Commandant and Janet McNeil and I—went down to the Hôtel de la Poste, to see the War Correspondents and hear the War news. Mr. G. L. and Mr. M. and Mr. P. were there. And there among them, to my astonishment, I found Mr. Davidson, the American sculptor.
The last time I saw Mr. Davidson it was in Mr. Joseph Simpson's studio, the one under mine in Edwardes Square. He was making a bust of Rabindranath Tagore; and as the great mystic poet disconcerted him by continually lapsing into meditation under this process, thereby emptying his beautiful face of all expression whatever, I had been called down from my studio to talk to him, so as to lure him, if possible, from meditation and keep his features in play. Mr. Davidson made a very fine bust of Rabindranath Tagore. And here he is, imperfectly disguised by the shortest of shortbeards, drawing caricatures of G. L.—G. L. explaining the plan of campaign to the Belgian General Staff; G. L. very straight and tall, the Belgian General Staff looking up to him with innocent, deferential faces, earnestly anxious to be taught. I am not more surprised at seeing Mr. Davidson here than he is at seeing me. In the world that makes war we have both entirely forgotten the world where people make busts and pictures and books. But we accept each other's presence. It is only a small part of the fantastic dislocation of war.
Nothing could be more different from the Flandria Palace Hotel, our Military Hospital, than the Hôtel de la Poste. It is packed with War Correspondents and Belgian officers. After the surgeons and the Red Cross nurses and their wounded, and the mysterious officials hanging about the porch and the hall, apparently doing nothing, after the English Ambulance and the melancholy inactivity of half its Corps, this place seems alive with a rich and virile life. It is full of live, exultant fighters, and of men who have their business not with the wounded and the dying but with live men and live things, and they have live words to tell about them. At least so it seems.
You listen with all your ears, and presently Termonde and Alost and Quatrecht and Courtrai ceaseto be mere names for you and become realities. It is as if you had been taken from your prison and had been let loose into the world again.
They are saying that there is no fighting at Saint Nicolas (the Commandant has been feeling about again for his visionary base hospital), but that the French troops are at Courtrai in great force. They have turned their left [?] wing round to the north-east and will probably sweep towards Brussels to cut off the German advance on Antwerp. The siege of Antwerp will then be raised. And a great battle will be fought outside Brussels, probably at Waterloo.
Waterloo!
Mr. L. looks at you as much as to say that is what he has had up his sleeve all the time. The word comes from him as casually as if he spoke of the London and South-Western terminus. But he is alive to the power of its evocation, to the unsurpassable thrill. So are you. It starts the current in that wireless system of vibrations that travel unperishing, undiminished, from the dead to the living. There are not many kilometres between Ghent and Waterloo; you are not only within the radius of the psychic shock, you are close to the central batteries, and ninety-nine years are no more than one pulse of their vibration. Through I don'tknow how many kilometres and ninety-nine years it has tracked you down and found you in your one moment of response.
It has a sudden steadying effect. Your brain clears. The things that loomed so large, the "Flandria," and the English Field Ambulance and its miseries, and the terrifying recklessness of its Commandant, are reduced suddenly to invisibility. You can see nothing but the second Waterloo. You forget that you have ever been a prisoner in an Hotel-Hospital. You understand the mystic fascination of the road under your windows, going south-east from Ghent to Brussels, somewhere towards Waterloo. You are reconciled to the incomprehensible lassitude of events. That is what we have all been waiting for—the second Waterloo. And we have only waited five days.
I am certainly not going back to England.
The French troops are being massed at Courtrai.
Suddenly it strikes me that I have done an injustice to the Commandant. It is all very well to say that he brought me out here against my will. But did he? He said it would interest me to see the siege of Antwerp, and I said it wouldn't. I said with the most perfect sincerity that I'd die rather than go anywhere near the siege of Antwerp, or of any other place. And now the siege-gunsfrom Namur are battering the forts of Antwerp, and down there the armies are gathering towards the second Waterloo, and the Commandant was right. I am extremely interested. I would die rather than go back to England.
Is it possible that he knew me better than I knew myself?
When I think that it is possible I feel a slight revulsion of justice towards the Commandant. After all, he brought me here. We may disagree about the present state of Alost and Termonde, considered as health-resorts for English girls, but it is pretty certain that without him we would none of us have got here. Where, indeed, should we have been and how should we have got our motor ambulances, but for his intrepid handling of Providence and of the Belgian Red Cross and the Belgian Legation? There is genius in a man who can go out without one car, or the least little nut or cog of achâssisto his name, and impose himself upon a Government as the Commandant of a Motor Field Ambulance.
Still, though I am not going back to England as a protest, Iamgoing to leave the Hospital Hotel for a little while. That bright idea has come to me just now while we are waiting for the Commandant to tear himself from the War Correspondents andcome away. I shall get a room here in the Hôtel de la Poste for a week, and, while we wait for Waterloo, I shall write some articles. The War Correspondents will tell me what is being done, and what has been overdone and what remains to do. I shall at least hear things if I can't see them. And I shall cut the obsession of responsibility. It'll be worse than ever if there really is going to be a second Waterloo.
Waterloo with Ursula Dearmer and Janet in the thick of it, and Mrs. Torrence driving the Colonel's scouting-car!
There are moments of bitterness and distortion when I see the Commandant as a curious psychic monster bringing up his women with him to the siege-guns because of some uncanny satisfaction he finds in their presence there. There are moods, only less perverted, when I see him pursuing his course because it is his course, through sheer Highland Celtic obstinacy; lucid flashes when he appears, blinded by the glamour of his dream, and innocently regardless of actuality. Is it uncanniness? Is it obstinacy? Is it dreamy innocence? Or is it some gorgeous streak of Feminism? Is it the New Chivalry, that refuses to keep women back, even from the firing-line? The New Romance, thatgives them their share of divine danger? Or, since nothing can be more absurd than to suppose that any person acts at all times and in all circumstances on one ground, or necessarily on any grounds, is it a little bit of all these things? I am not sure that Feminism, or at any rate the New Chivalry, doesn't presuppose them all.
The New Chivalry sees the point of its reporter's retirement to the Hôtel de la Poste, since it has decided that journalism is my work, and journalism cannot flourish at the "Flandria." So we interview the nice fatpropriétaire, and thepropriétaire'snice fat wife, and between them they find a room for me, a back room on the fourth floor, the only one vacant in the hotel; it looks out on the white-tiled walls and the windows of the enclosing wings. The space shut in is deep and narrow as a well. The view from that room is more like a prison than any view from the "Flandria," but I take it. I am not deceived by appearances, and I recognize that the peace of God is there.
It is a relief to think that poor Max will have one less to work for.
At the "Flandria" we find that the Military Power has put its foot down. The General—he cannot have a spark of the New Chivalry in hisbrutal breast—has ordered Mrs. Torrence off her chauffeur's job. You see the grizzled Colonel as the image of protest and desolation, helpless in the hands of the implacable Power. You are sorry for Mrs. Torrence (she has seen practically no service with the ambulance as yet), but she, at any rate, has had her fling. No power can take from her the memory of those two days.
Still, something is going to be done to-morrow, and this time, even the miserable Reporter is to have a look in. The Commandant has another scheme for a temporary hospital or a dressing-station or something, and to-morrow he is going with Car 1 to Courtrai to reconnoitre for a position and incidentally to see the French troops. A God-sent opportunity for the Reporter; and Janet McNeil is going, too. We are to get up at six o'clock in the morning and start before seven.
[Friday, October 2nd.]
Weget up at six.
We hang about till eight-thirty or nine. A fine rain begins to fall. An ominous rain. Car 1 and Car 2 are drawn up at the far end of the Hospital yard. The rain falls ominously over the yellow-brown, trodden clay of the yard. There is an ominous look of preparation about the cars. There is also an ominous light in the blue eyes of the chauffeur Tom.
The chauffeur Tom appears as one inspired by hatred of the whole human race. You would say that he was also hostile to the entire female sex. For Woman in her right place he may, he probably does, feel tenderness and reverence. Woman in a field ambulance he despises and abhors. I really think it was the sight of us that accounted for his depression at Ostend. I have gathered from Mrs. Torrence that the chauffeur Tom has none of the New Chivalry about him. He is the mean and brutal male, the crass obstructionist who grudges women their laurels in the equal field.
I know the dreadful, blasphemous and abominable things that Tom is probably thinking about me as I climb on to his car. He is visibly disgusted with his orders. That he, a Red Cross Field Ambulance chauffeur, should be told to drive four—or is it all five?—women to look at the massing of the French troops at Courtrai! He is not deceived by the specious pretext of the temporary hospital. Hospitals be blowed. It's a bloomin' joy-ride, with about as much Red Cross in it as there is in my hat. He is glad that it is raining.
Yes, I know what Tom is thinking. And allthe time I have a sneaking sympathy with Tom. I want to go to Courtrai more than I ever wanted anything in my life, but I see the expedition plainly from Tom's point of view. A field ambulance is a field ambulance and not a motor touring car.
And to-day Tom is justified. We have hardly got upon his car than we were told to get off it. We are not going to Courtrai. We are not going anywhere. From somewhere in those mysterious regions where it abides, the Military Power has come down.
Even as I get off the car and return to the Hospital-prison, in melancholy retreat over the yellow-brown clay of the yard, through the rain, I acknowledge the essential righteousness of the point of view. And, to the everlasting honour of the Old Chivalry, it should be stated that the chauffeur Tom repressed all open and visible expression of his joy.
The morning passes, as the other mornings passed, in unspeakable inactivity. Except that I make up the accounts and hand them over to Mr. Grierson. It seems incredible, but I have balanced them to the last franc.
I pack. Am surprised in packing by Max and Jean. They both want to know the reason why. This is the terrible part of the business—leaving Max and Jean.
I try to explain. Prosper Panne, who "writes for the Paris papers," understands me. He can see that the Hôtel de la Poste may be a better base for an attack upon the London papers. But Max does not understand. He perceives that I have a scruple about occupying my room. And he takes me intohisroom to show me how nice it is—every bit as good as mine. The implication being that if the Hospital can afford to lodge one of its orderlies so well, it can perfectly well afford to lodge me. (This is one of the prettiest things that Max has done yet! As long as I live I shall see him standing in his room and showing me how nice it is.)
Still you can always appeal from Max to Prosper Panne. He understands these journalistic tempers and caprices. He knows on how thin a thread an article can hang. We have a brief discussion on the comparative difficulties of theromanand theconte, and he promises me to cherish and protect the hat I must leave behind me as if it were his bride.
But Jean—Jean does not understand at all. He thinks that I am not satisfied with the service of our incomparable mess; that I prefer the flesh-pots of the "Poste" and the manners of its waiters. He has no other thought but this, and it is abominable; it is the worst of all. The explanationthickens. I struggle gloriously with the French language; one moment it has me by the throat and I am strangled; the next I writhe forth triumphant. Strange gestures are given to me; I plunge into the darkest pits of memory for the words that have escaped me; I find them (or others just as good); it is really quite easy to say that I am coming back again in a week.
Interview with Madame F. and M. G., the President.
Interview with the Commandant. Final assault on the defences of the New Chivalry (the Commandant's mind is an impregnable fortress).
And, by way of afterthought, I inquire whether, in the event of a sudden scoot before the Germans, a reporter quartered at the Hôtel de la Poste will be cut off from the base of communications and left to his or her ingenuity in flight?
The Commandant, vague and imperturbable, replies that in all probability it will be so.
And I (if possible more imperturbable than he) observe that the War Correspondents will make quite a nice flying-party.