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, strollingabout 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.
I hung on all the tighter.
And then——
What happened then was so ignominious, so sickening, that, if I were not sworn to the utmost possible realism in this record, I should suppress it in the interests of human dignity.
Mrs. Torrence, having the advantage of me in weight, height, muscle and position, got up and tried to push me off the step. As she did this she said: "You can't come. You'll take up the place of a wounded man."
And I found myself standing in the village street, while the car rushed out of it, with Janet clinging on to the hood, like a little sailor to his shrouds. She was on the side next the German guns.
It was the most revolting thing that had happened to me yet, in a life filled with incidents that I have no desire to repeat. And it made me turn on the Commandant in a way that I do not like to think of. I believe I asked him how he could bear to let that kid go into the German lines, which was exactly what the poor man hadn't done.[25]
Then we waited, Mrs. Lambert and I in Tom's car; and the Commandant in the car with Ursula Dearmer and the Chaplain on the other side of the street.
We were dreadfully silent now. We stared at objects that had no earthly interest for us as if ourlives depended on mastering their detail. We were thus aware of a beautiful little Belgian house standing back from the village street down a short turning, a cream-coloured house with green shutters and a roof of rose-red tiles, and a very small poplar tree mounting guard beside it. This house and its tree were vivid and very still. They stood back in an atmosphere of their own, an atmosphere of perfect but utterly unreal peace. And as long as our memories endure, that house which we never saw before, and shall probably never see again, is bound up with the fate of Mrs. Torrence and Janet McNeil.
We thought we should have an hour to wait before they came back, if they ever did come. We waited for them during a whole dreadful lifetime.
········
In something less than half an hour the military ambulance came swinging round the turn of the road, with Mrs. Torrence and the Kid, and the two German wounded with them on the stretchers.
Those Germans never thought that they were going to be saved. They couldn't get over it—that two Englishwomen should have gone through their fire, for them! As they were being carried through the fire they said: "We shall never forget what you've done for us. God will bless you for it."
Mrs. Torrence asked them, "What will you do for us if we are taken prisoner?"
And they said: "We will do all we can to save you."
········
Antwerp is said to have fallen.
Antwerp is said to be holding its own well.[26]
All evening the watching Taube has been hanging over Ghent.
Mrs. Torrence and Janet have gone back with the ambulance to Melle.
[Night.]
Satup all night with Mr. ——.
There is one night nurse for all the wards on this floor, and she has a serious case to watch in another room. But I can call her if I want help. And there is the chemist who sleeps in the room next door, who will come if I go in and wake him up. And there are our own four doctors upstairs. And theinfirmiers. It ought to be all right.
As a matter of fact it was the most terrible night I have ever spent in my life; and I have lived through a good many terrible nights in sick-rooms. But no amount of amateur nursing can take theplace of training or of the self-confidence of knowing you are trained. And even if youaretrained, no amount of medical nursing will prepare you for a bad surgical case. To begin with, I had never nursed a patient so tall and heavy that I couldn't lift him by sheer strength and a sort of amateur knack.
And though in theory it was reassuring to know that you could call the night nurse and the chemist and the four doctors and theinfirmiers, in practice it didn't work out quite so easily as it sounded. When the night nurse came she couldn't lift any more than I could; and she had a greater command of discouraging criticism than of useful, practical suggestion. And the chemist knew no more about lifting than the night nurse. (Luckily none of us pretended for an instant that we knew!) When I had called up two of our hard-worked surgeons each once out of his bed, I had some scruples about waking them again. And it took four Belgianinfirmiersto do in five minutes what one surgeon could do in as many seconds. And when the chemist went to look for theinfirmiershe was gone for ages—he must have had to round them up from every floor in the Hospital. Whenever any of them went to look for anything, it took them ages. It was as if for every article needed in thewards of that Hospital there was a separate and inaccessible central depôt.[27]
At one moment a small pillow had to be placed in the hollow of my patient's back if he was to be kept in that position on which I had been told his life depended. When I sent the night nurse to look for something that would serve, she was gone a quarter of an hour, in which I realized that my case was not the only case in the Hospital. For a quarter of an hour I had to kneel by his bed with my two arms thrust together under the hollow of his back, supporting it. I had nothing at hand that was small enough or firm enough but my arms.
That night I would have given everything I possess, and everything I have ever done, to have been a trained nurse.
To make matters worse, I had an atrocious cough, acquired at the Hôtel de la Poste. The chemist had made up some medicine for it, but the poor busy dispensary clerk had forgotten to send it to my room. I had to stop it by an expenditure of will when I wanted every atom of will to keep my patient quiet and send him to sleep, if possible, without his morphiapiqûres. He is only to have one if he is restless or in pain.
And to-night he wanted more than ever to talkwhen he woke. And his conversation in the night is even more lacerating than his conversation in the day. For all the time, often in pain, always in extreme discomfort, he is thinking of other people.
First of all he asked me if I had any books, and I thought that he wanted me to read to him. I told him I was afraid he mustn't be read to, he must go to sleep. And he said: "I mean for you to read yourself—to pass the time."
He is afraid that I shall be bored by sitting up with him, that I shall tire myself, that I shall make my cough worse. He asks me if I think he will ever be well enough to play games. That is what he has always wanted to do most.
And then he begins to tell me about his mother.
He tells me things that I have no right to put down here.
There is nothing that I can do for him but to will. And I will hard, or I pray—I don't know which it is; your acutest willing and your intensest prayer are indistinguishable. And it seems to work. I will—or I pray—that he shall lie still without morphia, and that he shall have no pain. And he lies still, without pain. I will—or I pray—that he shall sleep without morphia. And he sleeps (I think that in spite of his extreme discomfort, he must have slept the best part of the night). Andbecause it seems to work, I will—or I pray—that he shall get well.
There are many things that obstruct this process as fast as it is begun: your sensation of sight and touch; the swarms and streams of images that your brain throws out; and the crushing obsession of your fear. This last is like a dead weight that you hold off you with your arms stretched out. Your arms sink and drop under it perpetually and have to be raised again. At last the weight goes. And the sensations go, and the swarms and streams of images go, and there is nothing before you and around you but a clear blank darkness where your will vibrates.
Only one avenue of sense is left open. You are lost to the very memories of touch and sight, but you are intensely conscious of every sound from the bed, every movement of the sleeper. And while one half of you only lives in that pure and effortless vibration, the other half is aware of the least change in the rhythm of his breathing.
It is by this rhythm that I can tell whether he is asleep or awake. This rhythm of his breathing, and the rhythm of his sleeping and his waking measure out the night for me. It goes like one hour.
And yet I have spent months of nights watching in this room. Its blond walls are as familiar to meas the walls of rooms where I have lived a long time; I know with a profound and intimate knowledge every crinkle in the red shade of the electric bulb that hangs on the inner wall between the two beds, the shape and position of every object on the night table in the little white-tiled dressing-room; I know every trick of the inner and outer doors leading to the corridor, and the long grey lane of the corridor, and the room that I must go through to find ice, and the face of the little ward-maid who sleeps there, who wants to get up and break the ice for me every time. I have known the little ward-maid all my life; I have known the night nurse all my life, with her white face and sharp black eyes, and all my life I have not cared for her. All my life I have known and cared only for the wounded man on the bed.
I have known every sound of his voice and every line of his face and hands (the face and hands that he asks me to wash, over and over again, if I don't mind), and the strong springing of his dark hair from his forehead and every little feathery tuft of beard on his chin. And I have known no other measure of time than the rhythm of his breathing, no mark or sign of time than the black crescent of his eyelashes when the lids are closed, and the curling blue of his eyes when they open. His eyes always smile as they open, as if he apologized for waking when he knows that I want him to sleep. And I have known these things so long that each one of them is already like a separate wound in my memory.[28]He sums up for me all the heroism and the agony and waste of the defence of Antwerp, all the heroism and agony and waste of war.
About midnight [?] he wakes and tells me he has had a jolly dream. He dreamed that he was running in a field in England, running in a big race, that he led the race and won it.
[Sunday, 11th.]
Onebad symptom is disappearing. Towards dawn it has almost gone. He really does seem stronger.
[5 a.m.]
Hehas had no return of pain or restlessness. But he was to have a morphiapiqûreat five o'clock, and they have given it to him to make sure.
[8 a.m.]
Thenight has not been so terrible, after all. It has gone like an hour and I have left him sleeping.
I am not in the least bit tired; I never felt drowsy once, and my cough has nearly gone.
········
Antwerp has fallen.
Taube over Ghent in the night.
Six doctors have seen Mr. ——. They all say he is ever so much better. They even say he may live—that he has a good chance.
Dr. Wilson is taking Mr. Foster to England this morning.
Went back to the Hôtel Cecil to sleep for an hour or two. An enormous oval table-top is leaning flat against the wall; but by no possibility can it be set up. Still, the landlord said he would find a table, and he has found one.
Went back to the "Flandria" for lunch. In the mess-room Janet tells me that Mr. ——'s case has been taken out of my hands. I am not to try to do any more nursing.
Little Janet looks as if she were trying to soften a blow. But it isn't a blow. Far from it. It is the end of an intolerable responsibility.
The Commandant and the Chaplain started about nine or ten this morning for Melle, and are not back yet.
We expect that we may have to clear out of Ghent before to-morrow.
Mr. Riley, Mrs. Lambert and Janet have gone in the second car to Melle.
I waited in all afternoon on the chance of being taken when the Commandant comes and goes out again.
[4.45.]
Heis not back yet. I am very anxious. The Germans may be in Melle by now.
One of the old officials in peaked caps has called on me solemnly this afternoon. He is the most mysterious of them all, an old man with a white moustache, who never seems to do anything but hang about. He is certainly not aninfirmier. He called ostensibly to ask some question and remained to talk. I think he thought he would pump me. He began by asking if we women enjoyed going out with the Field Ambulance; he supposed we felt very daring and looked on the whole thing as an adventure. I detected some sinister intention, and replied that that was not exactly the idea; that our womenwent out to help to save the lives of the wounded soldiers, and that they had succeeded in this object over and over again; and that I didn't imagine they thought of anything much except their duty. We certainly were not out for amusement.
Then he took another line. He told me that the reason why our Ambulance is to be put under the charge of the British General here (we had heard that the whole of the Belgian Army was shortly to be under the control of the British, and the whole of the Belgian Red Cross with it)—the reason is that its behaviour in going into the firing-line has been criticized. And when I ask him on what grounds, it turns out that somebody thinks there is a risk of our Ambulance drawing down the fire on the lines it serves. I told him that in all the time I had been with the Ambulance it had never placed itself in any position that could possibly have drawn down fire on the Belgians, and that I had never heard of any single instance of this danger; and I made him confess that there was no proof or even rumour of any single instance when it had occurred. I further told the old gentleman very plainly that these things ought not to be said or repeated, and that every man and woman in the English Ambulance would rather lose their own life than risk that of one Belgian soldier.
The old gentleman was somewhat flattened out before he left me; having "parfaitement compris."
It is a delicious idea that Kitchener and Joffre should be reorganizing the Allied Armies because of the behaviour of our Ambulance.
There are Gordon Highlanders in Ghent.[29]
········
Went over to the Couvent de Saint Pierre, where Miss Ashley-Smith is with her British wounded. I had to warn her that the Germans may come in to-night. I had told the Commandant about her yesterday, and arranged with him that we should take her and her British away in our Ambulance if we have to go. I had to find out how many there would be to take.
The Convent is a little way beyond thePlaceon the boulevard. I knew it by the Red Cross hanging from the upper windows. Everything is as happy and peaceful here as if Ghent were not on the eve of an invasion. The nuns took me to Miss Ashley-Smith in her ward. I hardly knew her, for she had changed the uniform of the British Field Hospital[30]for the white linen of the Belgian Red Cross. I found her in charge of the ward. Absolutely unperturbed by the news, she went on superintending the disposal of a table of surgical instruments. She would not consent to come with us at first. But the nuns persuaded her that she would do no good by remaining.
I am to come again and tell her what time to be ready with her wounded, when we know whether we are going and when.
Came back to the "Flandria" and finished entries in my Day-Book.
[Evening.]
TheCommandant has come back from Melle; but he is going there again almost directly. He has been to the British lines, and heard for certain that the Germans will be in Ghent before morning. We have orders to clear out before two in the morning. I am to have all his things packed by midnight.
The British Consul has left Ghent.
The news spread through the "Flandria."
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, thebonne, 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" comingto 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 strewnabout 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 Hôtel Cecil and pay my bill; for I remember going out into thePlaceand 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. Howcanthere be in an ambulancepacked 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.Ishall 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 withiced 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 acrise de nerfs, and Janet was the victim.
It is past midnight, and very dark. ThePlaceand 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 thePlaceto 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 afterme, 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. Itisthe door of the Convent.
I ring the bell. I ring it many times. Nobody comes.
I ring a little louder. A tired lay sister puts her head out of an upper window and asks me what I want. I tell her. She is rather cross and says I've come to the wrong door. I must go to the second door; and she puts her head in and shuts the window with a clang that expresses her just resentment.
I go to the second door, and ring many times again. And another lay sister puts her head out of an upper window.
She is gentle but sleepy and very slow. She cannot take it in all at once. She says they are all asleep in the Convent, and she does not like to wake them. She says this several times, so that I may understand.
I am exasperated.
"Mais, Madame—de grâce! C'est peut-être la vie ou la mort!"
The minute I've said it it sounds to me melodramatic and absurd.Iam melodramatic and absurd, with my running feet, and my small figure and earnest, upturned face, standing under a Convent wall at midnight, and talking aboutla vie et la mort. It is too improbable.Iam too improbable. I feel that I am making a fuss out of all proportion to the occasion. And I am sorry for frightening the poor lay sister all for nothing.
Very soon, down the south-east road, the Germans will be marching upon Ghent.
And I cannot realize it. The whole thing is too improbable.
But the lay sister has understood this time. She will go and wake the porteress. She is not at all frightened.
I wait a little longer, and presently the porteress opens the door. When she hears my message she goes away, and returns after a little while with one of the nuns.
They are very quiet, very kind, and absolutely unafraid. They say that Miss Ashley-Smith and her British wounded shall be ready before [?] two o'clock.
I go back to the "Flandria."
The Commandant, who went out to Melle in Tom's car, has not come back yet.
I think Ursula Dearmer and Mrs. Lambert have gone to bed. They are not taking the Germans very seriously.
There is nobody in the mess-room but the other three chauffeurs, Bert, Tom and Newlands. Newlands has just come back from Ostend. They have had no supper. We bustle about to find some.
We all know the Germans are coming into Ghent. But we do not speak of it. We are all very polite, almost supernaturally gentle, and very kind to each other. The beautiful manners of Newlands are conspicuous in this hour, the tragedy of which we are affecting to ignore. I behave as if there was nothing so important in the world as cutting bread for Newlands. Newlands behaves as if there were nothing so important as fetching a bottle of formamint, which he has with him, to cure my cough. (It has burst out again worse than ever after the unnatural repression of last night.)
When the chauffeurs are provided with supper I go into the Commandant's room and finish his packing. The ties, the pocket-handkerchiefs and the collars are all safe in the Gladstone bag. Only the underclothing and the suits remain and there is any amount of room for them in the hold-all.
I roll up the blue serge coat, and the trousers, andthe waistcoat very smooth and tight, also the underclothes. It seems very simple. I have only got to put them in the hold-all and then roll it up, smooth and tight, too—
It would have been simple, if the hold-all had been a simple hold-all and if it had been nothing more. But it was also a sleeping-bag and a field-tent. As sleeping-bag, it was provided with a thick blanket which took up most of the room inside, and a waterproof sheet which was part of itself. As field-tent, it had large protruding flanges, shaped like jib-sails, and a complicated system of ropes.
First of all I tucked in the jib-sails and ropes and laid them as flat as might be on the bottom of the sleeping-bag, with the blanket on the top of them. Then I packed the clothes on the top of the blanket and turned it over them to make all snug; I buttoned up the waterproof sheet over everything, rolled up the hold-all and secured it with its straps. This was only done by much stratagem and strength, by desperate tugging and pushing, and by lying flat on my waist on the rolled-up half to keep it quiet while I brought the loose half over. No sooner had I secured the hold-all by its straps than I realized that it was no more a hold-all than it was a sleeping-bag and a field tent, and that its contents were exposed to the weather down one side, where they bulgedthrough the spaces that yawned between the buttons, strained almost to bursting.
I still believed in the genius that had devised this trinity. Clearly the jib-sails which made it a field-tent were intended to serve also as the pockets of the hold-all. I had done wrong to flatten them out and tuck them in, frustrating the fulfilment of their function. It was not acting fairly by the inventor.
I unpacked the hold-all, I mean the field-tent.
Then, with the Commandant's clothes again lying round me on the floor, I grappled with the mystery of the jib-sails and their cords. The jib-sails and their cords were, so to speak, the heart of this infernal triple entity.
They were treacherous. They had all the appearance of pockets, but owing to the intricate and malign relations of their cords, it was impossible to deal faithfully with them on this footing. When the contents had been packed inside them, the field-tent asserted itself as against the hold-all and refused to roll up. And I am sure that if the field-tent had had to be set up in a field in a hurry, the hold-all and the sleeping-bag would have arisen and insisted on their consubstantial rights.
I unpacked the field-tent and packed it all over again exactly as I had packed it before, but more carefully, swearing gently and continuously, as Itugged with my arms and pushed with my knees, and pressed hard on it with my waist to keep it still. I cursed the day when I had first heard of it; I cursed myself for giving it to the Commandant; more than all I cursed the combined ingenuity and levity of its creator, who had indulged his fantasy at our expense, without a thought to the actual conditions of the retreat of armies and of ambulances.
And in the middle of it all Janet came in, and curled herself up in a corner, and forecast luridly and inconsolably the possible fate of her friends, the nurses in the "Flandria." For the moment her coolness and her wise impassivity had gone. Her behaviour was lacerating.
This was the very worst moment we had come to yet.[31]
And it seemed that Ursula Dearmer and Mrs. Lambert had gone to bed, regardless of the retreat from Ghent.
Somewhere in the small hours of the morning the Commandant came back from Melle.[32]
········
It is nearly two o'clock. Downstairs, in the great silent hall two British wounded are waiting for some ambulance to take them to the Station. They are sitting bolt upright on chairs near the doorway, their heads nodding with drowsiness. One or two Belgian Red Cross men wait beside them. Opposite them, on three other chairs, the three doctors, Dr. Haynes, Dr. Bird and Dr. —— sit waiting for our own ambulance to take them. They have been up all night and are utterly exhausted. They sit, fast asleep, with their heads bowed on their breasts.
Outside, the darkness has mist and a raw cold sting in it.
A wretched ambulance wagon drawn by two horses is driven up to the door. It had a hood once, but the hood has disappeared and only the naked hoops remain. The British wounded from two [?] other hospitals are packed in it in two rows. They sit bolt upright under the hoops, exposed to mist and to the raw cold sting of the night; some of them wear their blankets like shawls over their shoulders as they were taken from their beds. The shawls and the head bandages give these British a strange, foreign look, infinitely helpless, infinitely pitiful.
Nobody seems to be out there but Mrs. Torrence and one or two Belgian Red Cross men. She and I help to get our two men taken gently out of the halland stowed away in the ambulance wagon. There are not enough blankets. We try to find some.
At the last minute two bearers come forward, carrying a third. He is tall and thin; he is wrapped in a coat flung loosely over his sleeping-jacket; he wears a turban of bandages; his long bare feet stick out as he is carried along. It is Cameron, my poor Highlander, who was shot through the brain.
They lift him, very gently, into the wagon.
Then, very gently, they lift him out again.
This attempt to save him is desperate. He is dying.
They carry him up the steps and stand him there with his naked feet on the stone. It is anguish to see those thin white feet on the stone; I take off my coat and put it under them.
It is all I can do for him.
Presently they carry him back into the Hospital.
They can't find any blankets. I run over to the Hôtel Cecil for my thick, warm travelling-rug to wrap round the knees of the wounded, shivering in the wagon.
It is all I can do for them.
And presently the wagon is turned round, slowly, almost solemnly, and driven off into the darkness and the cold mist, with its load of weird and piteous figures, wrapped in blankets like shawls. Theirbandages show blurred white spots in the mist, and they are gone.
It is horrible.
········
I am reminded that I have not packed yet, nor dressed for the journey. I go over and pack and dress. I leave behind what I don't need and it takes seven minutes. There is something sad and terrible about the little hotel, and its proprietors and their daughter, who has waited on me. They have so much the air of waiting, of being on the eve. They hang about doing nothing. They sit mournfully in a corner of the half-darkened restaurant. As I come and go they smile at me with the patient Belgian smile that says, "C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?" and no more.
The landlord puts on his soft brown felt hat and carries my luggage over to the "Flandria." He stays there, hanging about the porch, fascinated by these preparations for departure. There is the same terrible half-darkness here, the same expectant stillness. Now and then the servants of the hospital look at each other and there are whisperings, mutterings. They sound sinister somehow and inimical. Or perhaps I imagine this because I do not take kindly to retreating. Anyhow I am only aware of them afterwards. For now it is time to go andfetch Miss Ashley-Smith and her three wounded men from the Convent.
Tom has come up with his first ambulance car. He is waiting for orders in the porch. His enormous motor goggles are pushed up over the peak of his cap. They make it look like some formidable helmet. They give an air of mastership to Tom's face. At this last hour it wears its expression of righteous protest, of volcanic patience, of exasperated discipline.
The Commandant is nowhere to be seen. And every minute of his delay increases Tom's sense of tortured integrity.
I tell Tom that he is to drive me at once to the Couvent de Saint Pierre. He wants to know what for.
I tell him it is to fetch Miss Ashley-Smith and three British wounded.
He shrugs his shoulders. He knows nothing about the Couvent de Saint Pierre and Miss Ashley-Smith and three British wounded, and his shrug implies that he cares less.
And he says he has no orders to go and fetch them.
I perceive that in this supreme moment I am up against Tom's superstition. He won't move anywhere without orders. It is his one means of putting himself in the right and everybody else in the wrong.
And the worst of it is heisright.
I am also up against Tom's sex prejudices. I remember that he is said to have sworn with an oath that he wasn't going to take orders from any woman.
And the Commandant is nowhere to be seen.
Tom sticks to the ledge of the porch and stares at me defiantly. The servants of the Hospital come out and look at us. They are so many reinforcements to Tom's position.
I tell him that the arrangement has been made with the Commandant's consent, and I repeat firmly that he is to get into his car this minute and drive to the Couvent de Saint Pierre.
He says he does not know where the Convent is. It may be anywhere.
I tell him where it is, and he says again he hasn't got orders.
I stand over him and with savage and violent determination I say: "You've got themnow!"
And, actually, Tom obeys. He says, "Allright, all right, all right," very fast, and humps his shoulders and slouches off to his car. He cranks it up with less vehemence than I have yet known him bring to the starting of any car.
We get in. Then, and not till then, I am placable. I say: "You see, Tom, it wouldn't do to leave that lady and three British wounded behind, would it?"
What he says about orders then is purely by way of apology.
Regardless of my instructions, he does what I did and dashes up the wrong boulevard as if the Germans were even now marching into thePlacebehind him. But he works round somehow and we arrive.
They are all there, ready and waiting. And the Mother Superior and two of her nuns are in the corridor. They bring out glasses of hot milk for everybody. They are so gentle and so kind that I recall with agony my impatience when I rang at their gate. Even familiar French words desert me in this crisis, and I implore Miss Ashley-Smith to convey my regrets for my rudeness. Their only answer is to smile and press hot milk on me. I am glad of it, for I have been so absorbed in the drama of preparation that I have entirely forgotten to eat anything since lunch.
The wounded are brought along the passage. We help them into the ambulance. Two, Williams and ——, are only slightly wounded; they can sit up all the way. But the third, Fisher, is woundedin the head. Sometimes he is delirious and must be looked after. A fourth man is dying and must be left behind.
Then we say good-bye to the nuns.
The other ambulance cars are drawn up in thePlacebefore the "Flandria," waiting. For the first time I hate the sight of them. This feeling is inexplicable but profound.
We arrange for the final disposal of the wounded in one of the new Daimlers, where they can all lie down. Mrs. Torrence comes out and helps us. The Commandant is not there yet. Dr. Haynes and Dr. Bird pack Dr. —— away well inside the car. They are very quiet and very firm and refuse to travel otherwise than together. Mrs. Torrence goes with the wounded.
I go into the Hospital and upstairs to our quarters to see if anything has been left behind. If I can find Marie we must take her. There is room, after all.
But Marie is nowhere to be seen.
Nobody is to be seen but the Belgian night nurses on duty, watching, one on each landing at the entrance to her corridor. They smile at me gravely and sadly as they say good-bye.
I have left many places, many houses, many people behind me, knowing that I shall never see themagain. But of all leave-takings this seems to me the worst. For those others I have been something, done something that absolves me. But for these and for this place I have not done anything, and now there is not anything to be done.
I go slowly downstairs. Each flight is a more abominable descent. At each flight I stand still and pull myself together to face the next nurse on the next landing. At the second story I go past without looking. I know every stain on the floor of the corridor there as you turn to the right. The number of the door and the names on the card beside it have made a pattern on my brain.
········
It is quarter to three.
They are all ready now. The Commandant is there giving the final orders and stowing away the nine wounded he has brought from Melle. The hall of the Hospital is utterly deserted. So is thePlaceoutside it. And in the stillness and desolation our going has an air of intolerable secrecy, of furtive avoidance of fate. This Field Ambulance of ours abhors retreat.
It is dark with the black darkness before dawn.
And the Belgian Red Cross guides have all gone. There is nobody to show us the roads.
At the last minute we find a Belgian soldier who will take us as far as Ecloo.
The Commandant has arranged to stay at Ecloo for a few hours. Some friends there have offered him their house. The wounded are to be put up at the Convent. Ecloo is about half-way between Ghent and Bruges.
We start. Tom's car goes first with the Belgian soldier in front. Ursula Dearmer, Mrs. Lambert, Miss Ashley-Smith and Mr. Riley and I are inside. The Commandant sits, silent, wrapped in meditation, on the step.
We are not going so very fast, not faster than the three cars behind us, and the slowest of the three (the Fiat with the hard tyres, carrying the baggage) sets the pace. We must keep within their sight or they may lose their way. But though we are not really going fast, the speed seems intolerable, especially the speed that swings us out of sight of the "Flandria." You think that is the worst. But it isn't. The speed with its steady acceleration grows more intolerable with every mile. Your sense of safety grows intolerable.
You never knew that safety could hurt like this.
Somewhere on this road the Belgian Army has gone before us. We have got to go with it. We have had our orders.
That thought consoles you, but not for long. You may call it following the Belgian Army. But the Belgian Army is retreating, and you are retreating with it. There is nothing else you can do; but that does not make it any better. And this speed of the motor over the flat roads, this speed that cuts the air, driving its furrow so fast that the wind rushes by you like strong water, this speed that so inspired and exalted you when it brought you into Flanders, when it took you to Antwerp and Baerlaere and Lokeren and Melle, this vehement and frightful and relentless speed is the thing that beats you down and tortures you. For several hours, ever since you had your orders to pack up and go, you have been working with no other purpose than this going; you have contemplated it many times with equanimity, with indifference; you knew all along that it was not possible to stay in Ghent for ever; and when you were helping to get the wounded into the ambulances you thought it would be the easiest thing in the world to get in yourself and go with them; when you had time to think about it you were even aware of looking forward with pleasure to the thrill of a clean run before the Germans. You never thought, and nobody could possibly have told you, that it would be like this.
I never thought, and nobody could possibly have told me, that I was going to behave as I did then.
The thing began with the first turn of the road that hid the "Flandria." Up till that moment, whatever I may have felt about the people we had to leave behind us, as long as none of our field-women were left behind, I had not the smallest objection to being saved myself. And if it had occurred to me to stay behind for the sake of one man who couldn't be moved and who had the best surgeon in the Hospital and the pick of the nursing-staff to look after him, I think I should have disposed of the idea as sheer sentimentalism. When I was with him to-night I could think of nothing but the wounded in the Couvent de Saint Pierre. And afterwards there had been so much to do.
And now that there was nothing more to do, I couldn't think of anything but that one man.
The night before came back to me in a vision, or rather an obsession, infinitely more present, more visible and palpable than this night that we were living in. The light with the red shade hung just over my head on my right hand; the blond walls were round me; they shut me in alone with the wounded man who lay stretched before me on the bed. And the moments were measured by therhythm of his breathing, and by the closing and opening of his eyes.
I thought, he will open his eyes to-night and look for me and I shall not be there. He will know that he has been left to the Belgians, who cannot understand him, whom he cannot understand. And he will think that I have betrayed him.
I felt as if Ihadbetrayed him.
I am sitting between Mr. Riley and Miss Ashley-Smith. Mr. Riley is ill; he has got blood-poisoning through a cut in his hand. Every now and then I remember him, and draw the rug over his knees as it slips. Miss Ashley-Smith, tired with her night watching, has gone to sleep with her head on my shoulder, where it must be horribly jolted and shaken by my cough, which of course chooses this moment to break out again. I try to get into a position that will rest her better; and between her and Mr. Riley I forget for a second.
Then the obsession begins again, and I am shut in between the blond walls with the wounded man.
I feel his hand and arm lying heavily on my shoulder in the attempt to support me as I kneel by his bed with my arms stretched out together under the hollow of his back, as we wait for the pillow that never comes.
It is quite certain that I have betrayed him.
It seems to me then that nothing that could happen to me in Ghent could be more infernal than leaving it. And I think that when the ambulance stops to put down the Belgian soldier I will get out and walk back with him to Ghent.
Every half-mile I think that the ambulance will stop to put down the Belgian soldier.
But the ambulance does not stop. It goes on and on, and we have got to Ecloo before we seem to have put three miles between us and Ghent.
Still, though I'm dead tired when we get there, I can walk three miles easily. I do not feel at all insane with my obsession. On the contrary, these moments are moments of exceptional lucidity.[33]While the Commandant goes to look for the Convent I get out and look for the Belgian soldier. Other Belgian soldiers have joined him in the village street.
I tell him I want to go back to Ghent. I ask him how far it is to walk, and if he will take me. And he says it is twenty kilometres. The other soldiers say, too, it is twenty kilometres. I had thought it couldn't possibly be more than four or five at the outside. And I am just sane enough toknow that I can't walk as far as that if I'm to be any good when I get there.
We wait in the village while they find the Convent and take the wounded men there; we wait while the Commandant goes off in the dark to find his friend's house.
The house stands in a garden somewhere beyond the railway station, up a rough village street and a stretch of country road. It is about four in the morning when we get there. A thin ooze of light is beginning to leak through the mist. The mist holds it as a dark cloth holds a fluid that bleaches it.
There is something queer about this light. There is something queer, something almost inimical, about the garden, as if it tried to protect itself by enchantment from the fifteen who are invading it. The mist stands straight up from the earth like a high wall drawn close about the house; it blocks with dense grey stuff every inch of space between the bushes and trees; they are thrust forward rank upon rank, closing in upon the house; they loom enormous and near. A few paces further back they appear as without substance in the dense grey stuff that invests them; their tops are tangled and lost in a web of grey. In this strange garden it is as if space itself had solidified in masses, and solid objects had become spaces between.
When your eyes get used to this curious inversion it is as if the mist was no longer a wall but a growth; the garden is the heart of a jungle bleached by enchantment and struck with stillness and cold; a tangle of grey; a muffled, huddled and stifled bower, all grey, and webbed and laced with grey.
The door of the house opens and the effect of queerness, of inimical magic disappears.
Mr. E., our kind Dutch host, and Mrs. E., our kind English hostess, have got up out of their beds to receive us. This hospitality of theirs is not a little thing when you think that their house is to be invaded by Germans, perhaps to-day.[34]
They do not allow you to think of it. For all you are to see of the tragedy they and their house might be remaining at Ecloo in leisure and perfect hospitality and peace. Only, as they see us pouring in over their threshold a hovering twinkle in their kind eyes shows that they are not blind to the comic aspect of retreats.
They have only one spare bedroom, which they offer; but they have filled their drawing-room with blankets; piles and piles of white fleecy blankets on chairs and sofas and on the floor. And they have built up a roaring fire. It is as if they were succouring fifteen survivors of shipwreck or of earthquake, or the remnants of a forlorn hope. To be sure, we are flying from Ghent, but we have only flown twenty kilometres as yet.
However, most of the Corps have been up all night for several nights, and the mist outside is a clinging and a biting mist, and everybody is grateful.
I shall never forget the look of the E.s' drawing-room, smothered in blankets and littered with the members of the Corps, who lay about it in every pathetic posture of fatigue. A group of seven or eight snuggled down among the blankets on the floor in front of the hearth like a camp before a campfire. Janet McNeil, curled up on one window-seat, and Ursula Dearmer, rolled in a blanket on the other, had the heart-rending beauty of furry animals under torpor. The chauffeurs Tom and Bert made themselves entirely lovable by going to sleep bolt upright on dining-room chairs on the outer ring of the camp. The E.s' furniture came in where it could with fantastic and incongruous effect.
I don't know how I got through the next three hours, for my obsession came back on me again and again, and as soon as I shut my eyes I saw the face and eyes of the wounded man. I remember sitting part of the time beside Miss Ashley-Smith, wide-awake, in a corner of the room behind Bert's chair. I remember wandering about the E.s' house. I must have got out of it, for I also remember finding myself in their garden, at sunrise.
And I remember the garden, though I was not perfectly aware of it at the time. It had a divine beauty, a serenity that refused to enter into, to ally itself in any way with an experience tainted by the sadness of the retreat from Ghent.
But because of its supernatural detachment and tranquillity and its no less supernatural illumination I recalled it the more vividly afterwards.
It was full of tall bushes and little slender trees standing in a delicate light. The mist had cleared to the transparency of still water, so still that under it the bushes and the trees stood in a cold, quiet radiance without a shimmer. The light itself was intensely still. What you saw was not the approach of light, but its mysterious arrest. It was held suspended in crystalline vapour, in thin shafts of violet and gold, clear as panes; it was caught and lifted upwards by the high bushes and the slender trees; it was veiled in the silver-green masses of their tops. Every green leaf and every blade of grass was a vessel charged. It was not so much that the light revealed these things as that thesethings revealed the light. There was no kindling touch, no tremor of dawn in that garden. It was as if it had removed the walls and put off the lacing webs and the thick cloths of grey stuff by some mystic impulse of its own, as if it maintained itself in stillness by an inner flame. Only the very finest tissues yet clung to it, to show that it was the same garden that disclosed itself in this clarity and beauty.
The next thing I remember is the Chaplain coming to me and our going together into the E.s' dining-room, and Miss Ashley-Smith's joining us there. My malady was contagious and she had caught it, but with no damage to her self-control.
She says very simply and quietly that she is going back to Ghent. And the infection spreads to the Chaplain. He says that neither of us is going back to Ghent, but that he is going. The poor boy tries to arrange with us how he may best do it, in secrecy, without poisoning the Commandant[35]and the whole Ambulance with the spirit of return. With difficulty we convince him that it would be useless for any man to go. He would be taken prisoner the minute he showed his nose in the"Flandria" and set to dig trenches till the end of the War.
Then he says, if only he had his cassock with him. They would respectthat(which is open to doubt).
We are there a long time discussing which of us is going back to Ghent. Miss Ashley-Smith is fertile and ingenious in argument. She is a nurse, and I and the Chaplain are not. She has friends in Ghent who have not been warned, whom she must go back to. In any case, she says, it was a toss-up whether she went or stayed.
And while we are still arguing, we go out on the road that leads to the village, to find the ambulances and see if any of the chauffeurs will take us back to Ghent. I am not very hopeful about the means of transport. I do not think that Tom or any of the chauffeurs will move, this time, without orders from the Commandant. I do not think that the Commandant will let any of us go except himself.
And Miss Ashley-Smith says if only she had a horse.
If she had a horse she would be in Ghent in no time. Perhaps, if none of the chauffeurs will take her back, she can find a horse in the village.
She keeps on saying very quietly and simplythat she is going, and explaining the reasons why she should go rather than anybody else. And I bring forward every reason I can think of why she should do nothing of the sort.
I abhor the possibility of her going back instead of me; but I am not yet afraid of it. I do not yet think seriously that she will do it. I do not see how she is going to, if the chauffeurs refuse to take her. (I do not see how, in this case, I am to go myself.) And I do not imagine for one moment that she will find a horse. Still, I am vaguely uneasy. And the Chaplain doesn't make it any better by backing her up and declaring that as she will be more good than either of us when she gets there, her going is the best thing that in the circumstances can be done.
And in the end, with an extreme quietness and simplicity, she went.
We had not yet found the ambulance cars, and it seemed pretty certain that Miss Ashley-Smith would not get her horse any more than the Chaplain could get his cassock.
And then, just when we thought the difficulties of transport were insuperable, we came straight on the railway lines and the station, where a train had pulled up on its way to Ghent. Miss Ashley-Smith got on to the train. I got on too, to gowith her, and the Chaplain, who is abominably strong, put his arms round my waist and pulled me off.
I have never ceased to wish that I had hung on to that train.
On our way back to the E.s' house we met the Commandant and told him what had happened. I said I thought it was the worst thing that had happened yet. It wasn't the smallest consolation when he said it was the most sensible solution.
And when Mrs. —— for fifteen consecutive seconds took the view that I had decoyed Miss Ashley-Smith out on to that accursed road in order to send her to Ghent, and deliberately persuaded her to go back to the "Flandria" instead of me, for fifteen consecutive seconds I believed that this diabolical thing was what I had actually done.
Mrs. ——'s indignation never blazes away for more than fifteen seconds; but while the conflagration lasts it is terrific. And on circumstantial evidence the case was black against me. When last seen, Miss Ashley-Smith was entirely willing to be saved. She goes out for a walk with me along a quiet country road, and the next thing you hear is that she has gone back to Ghent. And since, actually and really, it was my obsession that had passed into her, I felt that if I had taken MissAshley-Smith down that road and murdered her in a dyke my responsibility wouldn't have been a bit worse, if as bad.
And it seemed to me that all the people scattered among the blankets in that strange room, those that still lay snuggling down amiably in the warmth, and those that had started to their feet in dismay, and those that sat on chairs upright and apart, were hostile with a just and righteous hostility, that they had an intimate knowledge of my crime, and had risen up in abhorrence of the thing I was.
And somewhere, as if they were far off in some blessed place on the other side of this nightmare, I was aware of the merciful and pitiful faces of Mrs. Lambert and Janet McNeil.
Then, close beside me, there was a sudden heaving of the Chaplain's broad shoulders as he faced the room.
And I heard him saying, in the same voice in which he had declared that he was going to hold Matins, that it wasn't my fault at all—that it washewho had persuaded Miss Ashley-Smith to go back to Ghent.[36]
The Chaplain has a moral nerve that never fails him.
Then Mrs. Torrence says that she is going back to protect Miss Ashley-Smith, and Ursula Dearmer says that she is going back to protect Mrs. Torrence, and somebody down in the blankets remarks that the thing was settled last night, and that all this going back is simply rotten.
I can only repeat that it is all my fault, and that therefore, if Mrs. Torrence goes back, nobody is going back with her but me.
And there can be no doubt that three motor ambulances, with possibly the entire Corps inside them, certainly with the five women and the Chaplain and the Commandant, would presently have been seen tearing along the road to Ghent, one in violent pursuit of the other, if we had not telephoned and received news of Miss Ashley-Smith's safe arrival at the "Flandria," and orders that no more women were to return to Ghent.
Among all the variously assorted anguish of that halt at Ecloo the figures and the behaviour of Mrs. E. and her husband and their children are beautiful to remember—their courtesy, their serenity, their gentle and absolving wonder that anybody should see anything in the least frightful or distressing,or even disconcerting and unusual, in the situation; the little girl who sat beside me, showing me her picture-book of animals, accepting gravely and earnestly all that you had to tell her about the ways of squirrels, of kangaroos and opossums, while we waited for the ambulance cars to take us to Bruges; the boy who ran after us as we went, and stood looking after us and waving to us in the lane; the aspect of that Flemish house and garden as we left them—there is no word that embraces all these things but beauty.