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A Journal of Impressions in Belgium

by May Sinclair · English · Gutenberg #31332 · 395,610 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Journal of Impressions in Belgium

Author: May Sinclair


        
Release date: February 20, 2010 [eBook #31332]

Language: English

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Produced by Suzanne Shell, Tamise Totterdell and the Online
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A JOURNAL OF
IMPRESSIONS IN BELGIUM




THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

TORONTO




A JOURNAL OF
IMPRESSIONS IN BELGIUM

BY

MAY SINCLAIR

Author of "The Three Sisters," "The Return of
The Prodigal," etc.

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1915

_All rights reserved_




COPYRIGHT, 1915

BY MAY SINCLAIR

Set up and electrotyped. Published, September, 1915




DEDICATION

(_To a Field Ambulance in Flanders_)


    I do not call you comrades,
    You,
    Who did what I only dreamed.
    Though you have taken my dream,
    And dressed yourselves in its beauty and its glory,
    Your faces are turned aside as you pass by.
    I am nothing to you,
    For I have done no more than dream.

    Your faces are like the face of her whom you follow,
    Danger,
    The Beloved who looks backward as she runs, calling to her lovers,
    The Huntress who flies before her quarry, trailing her lure.
    She called to me from her battle-places,
    She flung before me the curved lightning of her shells for a lure;
    And when I came within sight of her,
    She turned aside,
    And hid her face from me.

    But you she loved;
    You she touched with her hand;
    For you the white flames of her feet stayed in their running;
    She kept you with her in her fields of Flanders,
    Where you go,
    Gathering your wounded from among her dead.
    Grey night falls on your going and black night on your returning.
    You go
    Under the thunder of the guns, the shrapnel's rain and the curved
        lightning of the shells,
    And where the high towers are broken,
    And houses crack like the staves of a thin crate filled with fire;
    Into the mixing smoke and dust of roof and walls torn asunder
    You go;
    And only my dream follows you.

    That is why I do not speak of you,
    Calling you by your names.
    Your names are strung with the names of ruined and immortal cities,
    Termonde and Antwerp, Dixmude and Ypres and Furnes,
    Like jewels on one chain--

    Thus,
    In the high places of Heaven,
    They shall tell all your names.

                                                       MAY SINCLAIR.

    March 8th, 1915.




INTRODUCTION


This is a "Journal of Impressions," and it is nothing more. It will not
satisfy people who want accurate and substantial information about
Belgium, or about the War, or about Field Ambulances and Hospital Work,
and do not want to see any of these things "across a temperament." For
the Solid Facts and the Great Events they must go to such books as Mr.
E. A. Powell's "Fighting in Flanders," or Mr. Frank Fox's "The Agony of
Belgium," or Dr. H. S. Souttar's "A Surgeon in Belgium," or "A Woman's
Experiences in the Great War," by Louise Mack.

For many of these impressions I can claim only a psychological accuracy;
some were insubstantial to the last degree, and very few were actually
set down there and then, on the spot, as I have set them down here. This
is only a Journal in so far as it is a record of days, as faithful as I
could make it in every detail, and as direct as circumstances allowed.
But circumstances seldom _did_ allow, and I was always behindhand with
my Journal--a week behind with the first day of the seventeen, four
months behind with the last.

This was inevitable. For in the last week of the Siege of Antwerp, when
the wounded were being brought into Ghent by hundreds, and when the
fighting came closer and closer to the city, and at the end, when the
Germans were driving you from Ghent to Bruges, and from Bruges to Ostend
and from Ostend to Dunkirk, you could not sit down to write your
impressions, even if you were cold-blooded enough to want to. It was as
much as you could do to scribble the merest note of what happened in
your Day-Book.

But when you had made fast each day with its note, your impressions were
safe, far safer than if you had tried to record them in their flux as
they came. However far behind I might be with my Journal, it was _kept_.
It is not written "up," or round and about the original notes in my
Day-Book, it is simply written _out_. Each day of the seventeen had its
own quality and was soaked in its own atmosphere; each had its own
unique and incorruptible memory, and the slight lapse of time, so far
from dulling or blurring that memory, crystallized it and made it sharp
and clean. And in writing _out_ I have been careful never to go behind
or beyond the day, never to add anything, but to leave each moment as it
was. I have set down the day's imperfect or absurd impression, in all
its imperfection or absurdity, and the day's crude emotion in all its
crudity, rather than taint its reality with the discreet reflections
that came after.

I make no apology for my many errors--where they were discoverable I
have corrected them in a footnote; to this day I do not know how wildly
wrong I may have been about kilometres and the points of the compass,
and the positions of batteries and the movements of armies; but there
were other things of which I was dead sure; and this record has at least
the value of a "human document."

       *       *       *       *       *

There is one question that I may be asked: "Why, when you had the luck
to go out with a Field Ambulance Corps distinguished by its
gallantry--why in heaven's name have you not told the story of its
heroism?"

Well--I have not told it for several excellent reasons. When I set out
to keep a Journal I pledged myself to set down only what I had seen or
felt, and to avoid as far as possible the second-hand; and it was my
misfortune that I saw very little of the field-work of the Corps.
Besides, the Corps itself was then in its infancy, and it is its
infancy--its irrepressible, half-irresponsible, whole engaging
infancy--that I have touched here. After those seventeen days at Ghent
it grew up in all conscience. It was at Furnes and Dixmude and La Panne,
after I had left it, that its most memorable deeds were done.[A]

And this story of the Corps is not mine to tell. Part of it has been
told already by Dr. Souttar, and part by Mr. Philip Gibbs, and others.
The rest is yet to come.

                                                               M. S.

    July 15th, 1915.


FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: See Postscript.]




A JOURNAL OF IMPRESSIONS IN BELGIUM




A JOURNAL OF IMPRESSIONS IN BELGIUM

[_September 25th, 1914._]


After the painful births and deaths of I don't know how many committees,
after six weeks' struggling with something we imagined to be Red Tape,
which proved to be the combined egoism of several persons all
desperately anxious to "get to the Front," and desperately afraid of
somebody else getting there too, and getting there first, we are
actually off. Impossible to describe the mysterious processes by which
we managed it. I think the War Office kicked us out twice, and the
Admiralty once, though what we were doing with the Admiralty I don't to
this day understand. The British Red Cross kicked us steadily all the
time, on general principles; the American snubbed us rather badly; what
the French said to us I don't remember, and I can't think that we
carried persistency so far as to apply to the Russian and the Japanese.
Many of our scheme perished in their own vagueness. Others, vivid and
adventurous, were checked by the first encounter with the crass
reality. At one time, I remember, we were to have sent out a detachment
of stalwart Amazons in khaki breeches who were to dash out on to the
battle-field, reconnoitre, and pick up the wounded and carry them away
slung over their saddles. The only difficulty was to get the horses. But
the author of the scheme--who had bought her breeches--had allowed for
that. The horses were to be caught on the battle-field; as the wounded
and dead dropped from their saddles the Amazons were to leap into them
and ride off. On this system "remounts" were also to be supplied.
Whenever a horse was shot dead under its rider, an Amazon was to dash up
with another whose rider had been shot dead. It was all perfectly simple
and only needed a little "organization." For four weeks the lure of the
battle-field kept our volunteers dancing round the War Office and the
Red Cross Societies, and for four weeks their progress to the Front was
frustrated by Lord Kitchener. Some dropped off disheartened, but others
came on, and a regenerated committee dealt with them. Finally the thing
crystallized into a Motor Ambulance Corps. An awful sanity came over the
committee, chastened by its sufferings, and the volunteers, under
pressure, definitely renounced the battle-field. Then somebody said,
"Let's help the Belgian refugees." From that moment our course was
clear. Everybody was perfectly willing that we should help the refugees,
provided we relinquished all claim on the wounded. The Belgian Legation
was enchanted. It gave passports to a small private commission of
inquiry under our Commandant to go out to Belgium and send in a report.
At Ostend the commission of inquiry whittled itself down to the one
energetic person who had taken it out. And before we knew where we were
our Ambulance Corps was accepted by the Belgian Red Cross.

Only we had not got the ambulances.

And though we had got some money, we had not got enough. This was really
our good luck, for it saved us from buying the wrong kind of motor
ambulance car. But at first the blow staggered us. Then, by some abrupt,
incalculable turn of destiny, the British Red Cross, which had kicked us
so persistently, came to our help and gave us all the ambulances we
wanted.

And we are off.

There are thirteen of us: The Commandant, and Dr. Haynes and Dr. Bird
under him; and Mrs. Torrence, a trained nurse and midwife, who can drive
a motor car through anything, and take it to bits and put it together
again; Janet McNeil, also an expert motorist, and Ursula Dearmer and
Mrs. Lambert, Red Cross emergency nurses; Mr. Grierson, Mr. Foster and
Mr. Riley, stretcher-bearers, and two chauffeurs and me. I don't know
where I come in. But they've called me the Secretary and Reporter, which
sounds very fine, and I am to keep the accounts (Heaven help them!) and
write the Commandant's reports, and toss off articles for the daily
papers, to make a little money for the Corps. We've got some already,
raised by the Commandant's Report and Appeal that we published in the
_Daily Telegraph_ and _Daily Chronicle_. I shall never forget how I
sprinted down Fleet Street to get it in in time, four days before we
started.

And we have landed at Ostend.

I'll confess now that I dreaded Ostend more than anything. We had been
told that there were horrors upon horrors in Ostend. Children were being
born in the streets, and the state of the bathing-machines where the
refugees lived was unspeakable. I imagined the streets of Ostend crowded
with refugee women bearing children, and the Digue covered with the
horrific bathing-machines. On the other hand, Ostend was said to be the
safest spot in Europe. No Germans there. No Zeppelins. No bombs.

And we found the bathing-machines planted out several miles from the
town, almost invisible specks on a vanishing shore-line. The refugees we
met walking about the streets of Ostend were in fairly good case and
bore themselves bravely. But the town had been bombarded the night
before and our hotel had been the object of very special attentions. We
chose it (the "Terminus") because it lay close to the landing-stage and
saved us the trouble of going into the town to look for quarters. It was
under the same roof as the railway station, where we proposed to leave
our ambulance cars and heavy luggage. And we had no difficulty whatever
in getting rooms for the whole thirteen of us. There was no sort of
competition for rooms in that hotel. I said to myself, "If Ostend ever
is bombarded, this railway station will be the first to suffer. And the
hotel and the railway station are one." And when I was shown into a
bedroom with glass windows all along its inner wall and a fine glass
front looking out on to the platforms under the immense glass roof of
the station, I said, "If this hotel is ever bombarded, what fun it will
be for the person who sleeps in this bed between these glass windows."

We were all rather tired and hungry as we met for dinner at seven
o'clock. And when we were told that all lights would be put out in the
town at eight-thirty we only thought that a municipality which was
receiving all the refugees in Belgium must practise _some_ economy, and
that, anyway, an hour and a half was enough for anybody to dine in; and
we hoped that the Commandant, who had gone to call on the English
chaplain at the Grand Hôtel Littoral, would find his way back again to
the peaceful and commodious shelter of the "Terminus."

He did find his way back, at seven-thirty, just in time to give us a
chance of clearing out, if we chose to take it. The English chaplain, it
seemed, was surprised and dismayed at our idea of a suitable hotel, and
he implored us to fly, instantly, before a bomb burst in among us (this
was the first we had heard of the bombardment of the night before). The
Commandant put it to us as we sat there: Whether would we leave that
dining-room at once and pack our baggage all over again, and bundle out,
and go hunting for rooms all through Ostend with the lights out, and
perhaps fall into the harbour; or stay where we were and risk the
off-chance of a bomb? And we were all very tired and hungry, and we had
only got to the soup, and we had seen (and smelt) the harbour, so we
said we'd stay where we were and risk it.

And we stayed. A Taube hovered over us and never dropped its bomb.


[_Saturday, 26th._]

When we compared notes the next morning we found that we had all gone
soundly to sleep, too tired to take the Taube seriously, all except our
two chauffeurs, who were downright annoyed because no bomb had entered
their bedroom. Then we all went out and looked at the little hole in the
roof of the fish market, and the big hole in the hotel garden, and
thought of bombs as curious natural phenomena that never had and never
would have any intimate connection with _us_.

And for five weeks, ever since I knew that I must certainly go out with
this expedition, I had been living in black funk; in shameful and
appalling terror. Every night before I went to sleep I saw an
interminable spectacle of horrors: trunks without heads, heads without
trunks, limbs tangled in intestines, corpses by every roadside, murders,
mutilations, my friends shot dead before my eyes. Nothing I shall ever
see will be more ghastly than the things I have seen. And yet, before a
possibly-to-be-bombarded Ostend this strange visualizing process
ceases, and I see nothing and feel nothing. Absolutely nothing; until
suddenly the Commandant announces that he is going into the town, by
himself, to _buy a hat_, and I get my first experience of real terror.

For the hats that the Commandant buys when he is by himself--there are
no words for them.

This morning the Corps begins to realize its need of discipline. First
of all, our chauffeurs have disappeared and can nowhere be found. The
motor ambulances languish in inactivity on Cockerill's Wharf. We find
one chauffeur and set him to keep guard over a tin of petrol. We _know_
the ambulances can't start till heaven knows when, and so, first Mrs.
Lambert, our emergency nurse, then, I regret to say, our Secretary and
Reporter make off and sneak into the Cathedral. We are only ten minutes,
but still we are away, and Mrs. Torrence, our trained nurse, is ready
for us when we come back. We are accused bitterly of sight-seeing. (We
had betrayed the inherent levity of our nature the day before, on the
boat, when we looked at the sunset.) Then the Secretary and Reporter,
utterly intractable, wanders forth ostensibly to look for the
Commandant, who has disappeared, but really to get a sight of the motor
ambulances on Cockerill's Wharf. And Mrs. Torrence is ready again for
the Secretary, convicted now of sight-seeing. And I have seen no
Commandant, and no motor ambulances and no wharf. (Unbearable thought,
that I may never, absolutely never, see Cockerill's Wharf!) It is really
awful this time, because the President of the Belgian Red Cross is
waiting to get the thirteen of us to the Town Hall to have our passports
_visés_. And the Commandant is rounding up his Corps, and Ursula Dearmer
is heaven knows where, and Mrs. Lambert only somewhere in the middle
distance, and Mrs. Torrence's beautiful eyes are blazing at the
slip-sloppiness of it all. Things were very different at the ----
Hospital, where she was trained.

Only the President remains imperturbable.

For, after all this fuming and fretting, the President isn't quite ready
himself, or perhaps the Town Hall isn't ready, and we all stroll about
the streets of Ostend for half an hour. And the Commandant goes off by
himself, to buy that hat.

It is a terrible half-hour. But after all, he comes back without it,
judging it better to bear the ills he has.

Very leisurely, and with an immense consumption of time, we stroll and
get photographed for our passports. Then on to the Town Hall, and then
to the Military Depôt for our _Laissez-passer_, and then to the Hôtel
Terminus for lunch. And at one-thirty we are off.

Whatever happens, whatever we see and suffer, nothing can take from us
that run from Ostend to Ghent.

We go along a straight, flat highway of grey stones, through flat, green
fields and between thin lines of trees--tall and slender and delicate
trees. There are no hedges. Only here and there a row of poplars or
pollard willows is flung out as a screen against the open sky. This
country is formed for the very expression of peace. The straight flat
roads, the straight flat fields and straight tall trees stand still in
an immense quiet and serenity. We pass low Flemish houses with white
walls and red roofs. Their green doors and shutters are tall and slender
like the trees, the colours vivid as if the paint had been laid on
yesterday. It is all unspeakably beautiful and it comes to me with the
natural, inevitable shock and ecstasy of beauty. I am going straight
into the horror of war. For all I know it may be anywhere, here, behind
this sentry; or there, beyond that line of willows. I don't know. I
don't care. I cannot realize it. All that I can see or feel at the
moment is this beauty. I look and look, so that I may remember it.

Is it possible that I am enjoying myself?

I dare not tell Mrs. Torrence. I dare not tell any of the others. They
seem to me inspired with an austere sense of duty, a terrible integrity.
They know what they are here for. To me it is incredible that I should
be here.

I am in Car 1., sitting beside Tom, the chauffeur; Mrs. Torrence is on
the other side of me. Tom disapproves of these Flemish roads. He cannot
see that they are beautiful. They will play the devil with his tyres.

I am reminded unpleasantly that our Daimler is not a touring car but a
motor ambulance and that these roads will jolt the wounded most
abominably.

There are straggling troops on the road now. At the nearest village all
the inhabitants turn out to cheer us. They cry out "_Les Anglais!_" and
laugh for joy. Perhaps they think that if the British Red Cross has come
the British Army can't be far behind. But when they hear that we are
Belgian Red Cross they are gladder than ever. They press round us. It is
wonderful to them that we should have come all the way from England
"_pour les Belges!_" Somehow the beauty of the landscape dies before
these crowding, pressing faces.

We pass through Bruges without seeing it. I have no recollection
whatever of having seen the Belfry. We see nothing but the Canal (where
we halt to take in petrol) and more villages, more faces. And more
troops.

Half-way between Bruges and Ghent an embankment thrown up on each side
of the road tells of possible patrols and casual shooting. It is the
first visible intimation that the enemy may be anywhere.

A curious excitement comes to you. I suppose it is excitement, though it
doesn't feel like it. You have been drunk, very slightly drunk with the
speed of the car. But now you are sober. Your heart beats quietly,
steadily, but with a little creeping, mounting thrill in the beat. The
sensation is distinctly pleasurable. You say to yourself, "It is coming.
Now--or the next minute--perhaps at the end of the road." You have one
moment of regret. "After all, it would be a pity if it came too soon,
before we'd even begun our job." But the thrill, mounting steadily,
overtakes the regret. It is only a little thrill, so far (for you don't
really believe that there is any danger), but you can imagine the thing
growing, growing steadily, till it becomes ecstasy. Not that you imagine
anything at the moment. At the moment you are no longer an observing,
reflecting being; you have ceased to be aware of yourself; you exist
only in that quiet, steady thrill that is so unlike any excitement that
you have ever known. Presently you get used to it. "What a fool I should
have been if I hadn't come. I wouldn't have missed this run for the
world."

I forget myself so far as to say this to Mrs. Torrence. My voice doesn't
sound at all like the stern voice of duty. It is the voice of somebody
enjoying herself. I am behaving exactly as I behaved this morning at
Ostend; and cannot possibly hope for any sympathy from Mrs. Torrence.

But Mrs. Torrence has unbent a little. She has in fact been unbending
gradually ever since we left Ostend. There is a softer light in her
beautiful eyes. For she is not only a trained nurse but an expert
motorist; and a Daimler is a Daimler even when it's an ambulance car.
From time to time remarks of a severely technical nature are exchanged
between her and Tom. Still, up till now, nothing has passed to indicate
any flagging in the relentless spirit of the ---- Hospital.

The next minute I hear that the desire of Mrs. Torrence's heart is to
get into the greatest possible danger--and to get out of it.

The greatest possible danger is to fall into the hands of the Uhlans. I
feel that I should be very glad indeed to get out of it, but that I'm
not by any means so keen on getting in. I say so. I confess frankly
that I'm afraid of Uhlans, particularly when they're drunk.

But Mrs. Torrence is not afraid of anything. There is no German living,
drunk or sober, who could break her spirit. Nothing dims for her that
shining vision of the greatest possible danger. She does not know what
fear is.

I conceive an adoration for Mrs. Torrence, and a corresponding distaste
for myself. For I do know what fear is. And in spite of the little
steadily-mounting thrill, I remember distinctly those five weeks of
frightful anticipation when I knew that I must go out to the War; the
going to bed, night after night, drugged with horror, black horror that
creeps like poison through your nerves; the falling asleep and
forgetting it; the waking, morning after morning, with an energetic and
lucid brain that throws out a dozen war pictures to the minute like a
ghastly cinema show, till horror becomes terror; the hunger for
breakfast; the queer, almost uncanny revival of courage that follows its
satisfaction; the driving will that strengthens as the day goes on and
slackens its hold at evening. I remember one evening very near the end;
the Sunday evening when the Commandant dropped in, after he had come
back from Belgium. We were stirring soup over the gas stove in the
scullery--you couldn't imagine a more peaceful scene--when he said,
"They are bringing up the heavy siege guns from Namur, and there is
going to be a terrific bombardment of Antwerp, and I think it will be
very interesting for you to see it." I remember replying with passionate
sincerity that I would rather die than see it; that if I could nurse the
wounded I would face any bombardment you please to name; but to go and
look on and make copy out of the sufferings I cannot help--I couldn't
and I wouldn't, and that was flat. And I wasn't a journalist any more
than I was a trained nurse.

I can still see the form of the Commandant rising up on the other side
of the scullery stove, and in his pained, uncomprehending gaze and in
the words he utters I imagine a challenge. It is as if he said, "Of
course, if you're _afraid_"--(haven't I told him that I _am_ afraid?).

The gage is thrown down on the scullery floor. I pick it up. And that is
why I am here on this singular adventure.

Thus, for the next three kilometres, I meditate on my cowardice. It is
all over as if it had never been, but how can I tell that it won't come
back again? I can only hope that when the Uhlans appear I shall behave
decently. And this place that we have come to is Ecloo. We are not very
far from Ghent.

A church spire, a few roofs rising above trees. Then many roofs all
together. Then the beautiful grey-white foreign city.

As we run through the streets we are followed by cyclists; cyclists
issue from every side-street and pour into our road; cyclists rise up
out of the ground to follow us. We don't realize all at once that it is
the ambulance they are following. Bowing low like racers over their
handle-bars, they shoot past us; they slacken pace and keep alongside,
they shoot ahead; the cyclists are most fearfully excited. It dawns on
us that they are escorting us; that they are racing each other; that
they are bringing the news of our arrival to the town. They behave as if
we were the vanguard of the British Army.

We pass the old Military Hospital--_Hôpital Militaire_ No. I.--and
presently arrive at the Flandria Palace Hotel, which is _Hôpital
Militaire_ No. II. The cyclists wheel off, scatter and disappear. The
crowd in the Place gathers round the porch of the hotel to look at the
English Ambulance.

We enter. We are received by various officials and presented to Madame
F., the head of the Red Cross nursing staff. There is some confusion,
and Mrs. Torrence finds herself introduced as the Secretary of the
English Committee. Successfully concealed behind the broadest back in
the Corps, which belongs to Mr. Grierson, I have time to realize how
funny we all are. Everybody in the hospital is in uniform, of course.
The nurses of the Belgian Red Cross wear white linen overalls with the
brassard on one sleeve, and the Red Cross on the breasts of their
overalls, and over their foreheads on the front of their white linen
veils. The men wear military or semi-military uniforms. We had never
agreed as to our uniform, and some of us had had no time to get it, if
we had agreed. Assembled in the vestibule, we look more like a party of
refugees, or the cast of a Barrie play, than a field ambulance corps.
Mr. Grierson, the Chaplain, alone wears complete khaki, in which he is
indistinguishable from any Tommy. The Commandant, obeying some
mysterious inspiration, has left his khaki suit behind. He wears a
Norfolk jacket and one of his hats. Mr. Foster in plain clothes, with a
satchel slung over his shoulders, has the air of an inquiring tourist.
Mrs. Torrence and Janet McNeil in short khaki tunics, khaki putties, and
round Jaeger caps, and very thick coats over all, strapped in with
leather belts, look as if they were about to sail on an Arctic
expedition; I was told to wear dark blue serge, and I wear it
accordingly; Ursula Dearmer and Mrs. Lambert are in normal clothes. But
the amiable officials and the angelic Belgian ladies behave as if there
was nothing in the least odd about our appearance. They remember only
that we are English and that it is now six o'clock and that we have had
no tea. They conceive this to be the most deplorable fate that can
overtake the English, and they hurry us into the great kitchen to a
round table, loaded with cake and bread-and-butter and enormous bowls of
tea. The angelic beings in white veils wait on us. We are hungry and we
think (a pardonable error) that this meal is hospital supper; after
which some work will surely be found for us to do.

We are shown to our quarters on the third floor. We expect two bare
dormitories with rows of hard beds, which we are prepared to make
ourselves, besides sweeping the dormitories, and we find a fine suite of
rooms--a mess-room, bedrooms, dressing-rooms, bathrooms--and hospital
orderlies for our _valets de chambre_.

We unpack, sit round the mess-room and wait for orders. Perhaps we may
all be sent down into the kitchen to wash up. Personally, I hope we
shall be, for washing up is a thing I can do both quickly and well. It
is now seven o'clock.

At half-past we are sent down into the kitchen, not to wash up, but, if
you will believe it, to dine. And more hospital orderlies wait on us at
dinner.

The desire of our hearts is to do _something_, if it is only to black
the boots of the angelic beings. But no, there is nothing for us to do.
To-morrow, perhaps, the doctors and stretcher-bearers will be busy. We
hear that only five wounded have been brought into the hospital to-day.
They have no ambulance cars, and ours will be badly needed--to-morrow.
But to-night, no.

We go out into the town, to the Hôtel de la Poste, and sit outside the
café and drink black coffee in despair. We find our chauffeurs doing the
same thing. Then we go back to our sumptuous hotel and so, dejectedly,
to bed. Aeroplanes hover above us all night.


[_Sunday, 27th._]

We hang about waiting for orders. They may come at any moment. Meanwhile
this place grows incredible and fantastic. Now it is an hotel and now it
is a military hospital; its two aspects shift and merge into each other
with a dream-like effect. It is a huge building of extravagant design,
wearing its turrets, its balconies, its very roofs, like so much
decoration. The gilded legend, "Flandria Palace Hotel," glitters across
the immense white façade. But the Red Cross flag flies from the front
and from the corners of the turrets and from the balconies of the long
flank facing south. You arrive under a fan-like porch that covers the
smooth slope of the approach. You enter your hotel through mahogany
revolving doors. A colossal Flora stands by the lift at the foot of the
big staircase. Unaware that this is no festival of flowers, the poor
stupid thing leans forward, smiling, and holds out her garland to the
wounded as they are carried past. Nobody takes any notice of her. The
great hall of the hotel has been stripped bare. All draperies and
ornaments have disappeared. The proprietor has disappeared, or goes
about disguised as a Red Cross officer. The grey mosaic of floors and
stairs is cleared of rugs and carpeting; the reading-room is now a
secretarial bureau; the billiard-room is an operating theatre; the great
dining-hall and the reception-rooms and the bedrooms are wards. The army
of waiters and valets and chambermaids has gone, and everywhere there
are surgeons, ambulance men, hospital orderlies and the Belgian nurses
with their white overalls and red crosses. And in every corridor and on
every staircase and in every room there is a mixed odour, bitter and
sweet and penetrating, of antiseptics and of ether. When the ambulance
cars come up from the railway stations and the battle-fields, the last
inappropriate detail, the mahogany revolving doors, will disappear, so
that the wounded may be carried through on their stretchers.

I confess to a slight, persistent fear of _seeing_ these wounded whom I
cannot help. It is not very active, it has left off visualizing the
horror of bloody bandages and mangled bodies. But it's there; it waits
for me in every corridor and at the turn of every stair, and it makes me
loathe myself.

We have news this morning of a battle at Alost, a town about fifteen
kilometres south-east of Ghent. The Belgians are moving forty thousand
men from Antwerp towards Ghent, and heavy fighting is expected near the
town. If we are not in the thick of it, we are on the edge of the thick.

They have just told us an awful thing. Two wounded men were left lying
out on the battle-field all night after yesterday's fighting. The
military ambulances did not fetch them. Our ambulance was not sent out.
There are all sorts of formalities to be observed before it can go. We
haven't got our military passes yet. And our English Red Cross brassards
are no use. We must have Belgian ones stamped with the Government stamp.
And these things take time.

Meanwhile we, who have still the appearance of a disorganized Cook's
tourist party, are beginning to realize each other, the first step to
realizing ourselves. We have come from heaven knows where to live
together here heaven knows for how long. The Commandant and I are
friends; Mrs. Torrence and Janet McNeil are friends; Dr. Haynes and Dr.
Bird are evidently friends; our chauffeurs, Bert and Tom, are bound to
fraternize professionally; we and they are all right; but these pairs
were only known to each other a week or two ago, and some of the
thirteen never met at all till yesterday. An unknown fourteenth is
coming to-day. We are five women and nine men. You might wonder how, for
all social purposes, we are to sort ourselves? But the idea, sternly
emphasized by Mrs. Torrence, is that we have no social purposes. We are
neither more nor less than a strictly official and absolutely impersonal
body, held together, not by the ordinary affinities of men and women,
but by a common devotion and a common aim. Differences, if any should
exist, will be sunk in the interest of the community. Probabilities that
rule all human intercourse, as we have hitherto known it, will be
temporarily suspended in our case. But we shall gain more than we lose.
Insignificant as individuals, as a corps we share the honour and
prestige of the Military Authority under which we work. We have visions
of a relentless discipline commanding and controlling us. A cold glory
hovers over the Commandant as the vehicle of this transcendent power.

When the Power has its way with us it will take no count of friendships
or affinities. It will set precedence at naught. It will say to itself,
"Here are two field ambulance cars and fourteen people. Five out of
these fourteen are women, and what the devil are they doing in a field
ambulance?" And it will appoint two surgeons, who will also serve as
stretcher-bearers, to each car; it will set our trained nurse, Mrs.
Torrence, in command of the untrained nurses in one of the wards of the
Military Hospital No. II.; the Hospital itself will find suitable
feminine tasks for Ursula Dearmer and Mrs. Lambert; while Janet McNeil
and the Secretary will be told off to work among the refugees. And until
more stretcher-bearers are wanted the rest of us will be nowhere. If
nothing can be found for our women in the Hospital they will be sent
home.

It seems inconceivable that the Power, if it is anything like Lord
Kitchener, can decide otherwise.

Odd how the War changes us. I, who abhor and resist authority, who
hardly know how I am to bring myself to obey my friend the Commandant,
am enamoured of this Power and utterly submissive. I realize with
something like a thrill that we are in a military hospital under
military orders; and that my irrelevant former self, with all that it
has desired or done, must henceforth cease (perhaps irrevocably) to
exist. I contemplate its extinction with equanimity. I remember that one
of my brothers was a Captain in the Gunners, that another of them fought
as a volunteer in the first Boer War; that my uncle, Captain Hind, of
the Bengal Fusiliers, fought in the Mutiny and in the Crimean War, and
his son at Chitral, and that I have one nephew in Kitchener's Army and
one in the West Lancashire Hussars; and that three generations of solid
sugar-planters and ship-owners cannot separate me from my forefathers,
who seem to have been fighting all the time. (At the moment I have
forgotten my five weeks' blue funk.)

Mrs. Torrence's desire for discipline is not more sincere than mine.
Meanwhile the hand that is to lick us into shape hovers over us and does
not fall. We wait expectantly in the mess-room which is to contain us.

It was once the sitting-room of a fine suite. A diminutive vestibule
divides it from the corridor. You enter through double doors with muffed
glass panes in a wooden partition opposite the wide French windows
opening on the balcony. A pale blond light from the south fills the
room. Its walls are bare except for a map of Belgium, faced by a print
from one of the illustrated papers representing the King and Queen of
the Belgians. Of its original furnishings only a few cane chairs and a
settee remain. These are set back round the walls and in the window.
Long tables with marble tops, brought up from what was once the hotel
restaurant, enclose three sides of a hollow square, like this:

      ==================================
    ||                                  ||
    ||                                  ||
    ||                                  ||
    ||                                  ||

Round these we group ourselves thus: the Commandant in the middle of the
top table in the window, between Mrs. Torrence and Ursula Dearmer; Dr.
Haynes and Dr. Bird, on the other side of Ursula Dearmer; the
chauffeurs, Tom and Bert, round the corner at the right-hand side table;
I am round the other corner at the left-hand side table, by Mrs.
Torrence, and Janet McNeil is on my right, and on hers are Mrs. Lambert
and Mr. Foster and the Chaplain. Mr. Riley sits alone on the inside
opposite Mrs. Torrence.

This rather quiet and very serious person interests me. He doesn't say
anything, and you wonder what sort of consciousness goes on under the
close-cropped, boyish, black velvet hair. Nature has left his features a
bit unfinished, the further to baffle you.

All these people are interesting, intensely interesting and baffling, as
men and women are bound to be who have come from heaven knows where to
face heaven knows what. Most of them are quite innocently unaware. They
do not know that they are interesting, or baffling either. They do not
know, and it has not occurred to them to wonder, how they are going to
affect each other or how they are going to behave. Nobody, you would
say, is going to affect the Commandant. When he is not dashing up and
down, driven by his mysterious energy, he stands apart in remote and
dreamy isolation. His eyes, when they are not darting brilliantly in
pursuit of the person or the thing he needs, stand apart too in a blank,
blue purity, undarkened by any perception of the details that may
accumulate under his innocent nose. He has called this corps into being,
gathered these strange men and women up with a sweep of his wing and
swept them almost violently together. He doesn't know how any of us are
going to behave. He has taken for granted, with his naïve and
heart-rending trust in the beauty of human nature, that we are all going
to behave beautifully. He is absorbed in his scheme. Each one of us
fits into it at some point, and if there is anything in us left over it
is not, at the moment, his concern.

Yet he himself has margins about him and a mysterious hinterland not to
be confined or accounted for by any scheme. He alone of us has the air,
buoyant, restless, and a little vague, of being in for some tremendous
but wholly visionary adventure.

When I look at him I wonder again what this particular adventure is
going to do to him, and whether he has, even now, any vivid sense of the
things that are about to happen. I remember that evening in my scullery,
and how he talked about the German siege-guns as if they were details in
some unreal scene, the most interesting part, say, of a successful
cinematograph show.

But they are really bringing up those siege-guns from Namur.

And the Commandant has brought four women with him besides me. I confess
I was appalled when I first knew that they would be brought.

Mrs. Torrence, perhaps--for she is in love with danger,[1] and she is of
the kind whom no power, military or otherwise, can keep back from their
desired destiny.

But why little Janet McNeil?[2] She is the youngest of us, an
eighteen-year-old child who has followed Mrs. Torrence, and will follow
her if she walks straight into the German trenches. She sits beside me
on my right, ready for anything, all her delicate Highland beauty
bundled up in the kit of a little Arctic explorer, utterly determined,
utterly impassive. Her small face, under the woolly cap that defies the
North Pole, is nearly always grave; but it has a sudden smile that is
adorable.

And the youngest but one, Ursula Dearmer, who can't be so much
older--Mr. Riley's gloom and the Commandant's hinterland are nothing to
the mystery of this young girl. She looks as if she were not yet
perfectly awake, as if it would take considerably more than the
siege-guns of Namur to rouse her. She moves about slowly, as if she were
in no sort of hurry for the adventure. She has slow-moving eyes, with
sleepy, drooping eyelids that blink at you. She has a rather sleepy,
rather drooping nose. Her shoulders droop; her small head droops,
slightly, half the time. If she were not so slender she would be rather
like a pretty dormouse half-recovering from its torpor. You insist on
the determination of her little thrust-out underlip, only to be
contradicted by her gentle and delicately-retreating chin.

In our committee-room, among a band of turbulent female volunteers, all
clamouring for the firing-line, Ursula Dearmer, dressed very simply,
rather like a senior school-girl, and accompanied by her mother, had a
most engaging air of submission and docility. If anybody breaks out into
bravura it will not be Ursula Dearmer.

This thought consoles me when I think of the last solemn scenes in that
committee-room and of the pledges, the frightfully sacred pledges, I
gave to Ursula Dearmer's mother. As a result of this responsibility I
see myself told off to the dreary duty of conducting Ursula Dearmer back
to Dover at the moment when things begin to be really thick and
thrilling. And I deplore the Commandant's indiscriminate hospitality to
volunteers.

Mrs. Lambert (she must surely be the next youngest) you can think of
with less agitation, in spite of her youth, her charming eyes and the
recklessly extravagant quantity of her golden hair. For she is an
American citizen, and she has a husband (also an American citizen) in
Ghent, and her husband has a high-speed motor-car, and if the Germans
should ever advance upon this city he can be relied upon to take her
out of it before they can possibly get in. Besides, even in the German
lines American citizens are safe.

We are all suffering a slight tension. The men, who can see no reason
why the ambulance should not have been sent out last night, are restless
and abstracted and impatient for the order to get up and go. No wonder.
They have been waiting five weeks for their chance.

There is Dr. Haynes, whose large dark head and heavy shoulders look as
if they sustained the whole weight of an intolerable world. His
features, designed for sensuous composure, brood in a sad and sulky
resignation to the boredom of delay.

His friend, Dr. Bird, the young man with the head of an enormous cherub
and the hair of a blond baby, hair that _will_ fall in a shining lock on
his pink forehead, Dr. Bird has an air of boisterous preparation, as if
the ambulance were a picnic party and he was responsible for the
champagne.

Mr. Foster, the inquiring tourist, looks a little anxious, as if he were
preoccupied with the train he's got to catch.

Bert, the chauffeur, sits tight with the grim assurance of a man who
knows that the expedition cannot start without him. The chauffeur Tom
has an expressive face. Every minute it becomes more vivid with
humorous, contemptuous, indignant protest. It says plainly: "Well, this
is about the rottenest show I ever was let in for. Bar none. Call
yourself a field ambulance? Garn! And if you _are_ a field ambulance,
who but a blanky fool would have hit upon this old blankety haunt of
peace. It'll be the 'Ague Conference next!"

But it is on the Chaplain, Mr. Grierson, that the strain is telling
most. It shows in his pale and prominent blue eyes, and in a slight
whiteness about his high cheek-bones. In his valiant khaki he has more
than any of us the air of being on the eve. He is visibly bracing
himself to a stupendous effort. He smokes a cigarette with ostentatious
nonchalance. We all think we know these symptoms. We turn our eyes away,
considerately, from Mr. Grierson. Which of us can say that when our turn
comes the thought of danger will not spoil our breakfast?

The poor boy squares his shoulders. He is white now round the edges of
his lips. But he is going through with it.

Suddenly he speaks.

"I shall hold Matins in this room at ten o'clock every Sunday morning.
If any of you like to attend you may."

There is a terrible silence. None of us look at each other. None of us
look at Mr. Grierson.

Presently Mrs. Torrence is heard protesting that we haven't come here
for Matins; that this is a mess-room and not a private chapel; and that
Matins are against all military discipline.

"I shall hold Matins all the same," says Mr. Grierson. His voice is
thick and jerky. "And if anybody likes to attend, they can. That's all
I've got to say."

He gets up. He faces the batteries of unholy and unsympathetic eyes. He
throws away the end of his cigarette with a gesture of superb defiance.

He has gone through with it. He has faced the fire. He has come out, not
quite victorious, but with his hero's honour unstained.

It seemed to me awful that none of us should want his Matins. I should
like, personally, to see him through with them. I could face the hostile
eyes. But what I cannot face is the ceremony itself. My _moral_ was
spoiled with too many ceremonies in my youth; ceremonies that lacked all
beauty and sincerity and dignity. And though I am convinced of the
beauty and sincerity and dignity of Mr. Grierson's soul I cannot kneel
down with him and take part in the performance of his prayer. Prayer is
either the Supreme Illusion, or the Supreme Act, the pure and naked
surrender to Reality, and attended by such sacredness and shyness that
you can accomplish it only when alone or lost in a multitude that prays.

But why is there no Victoria Cross for moral courage?

(Dr. Wilson has come. He looks clever and nice.)

Our restlessness increases.


[_11 a.m._]

I have seen one of them. As I went downstairs this morning, two men
carrying a stretcher crossed the landing below. I saw the outline of the
wounded body under the blanket, and the head laid back on the pillow.

It is impossible, it is inconceivable, that I should have been afraid of
seeing this. It is as if the wounded man himself absolved me from the
memory and the reproach of fear.

I stood by the stair-rail to let them pass. There was some difficulty
about turning at the stair-head. Mr. Riley was there. He came forward
and took one end of the stretcher and turned it. He was very quiet and
very gentle. You could see that he did the right thing by instinct. And
I saw his face, and knew what had brought him here.

And here on the first landing is another wounded. His face is deformed
by an abscess from a bullet in his mouth. It gives him a terrible look,
half savage, wholly suffering. He sits there and cannot speak.

Mr. Riley is the only one of us who has found anything to do. So
presently we go out to get our military passes. We stroll miserably
about the town, oppressed with a sense of our futility. We buy
cigarettes for the convalescents.

And at noon no orders have come for us.

They come just as we are sitting down to lunch. Our ambulance car is to
go to Alost at once. The Commandant is arrested in the act of cutting
bread. Dr. Bird is arrested in the act of eating it. We are all arrested
in our several acts. As if they had been criminal acts, we desist
suddenly. The men get up and look at each other. It is clear that they
cannot all go. Mr. Grierson looks at the Commandant. His face is a
little white and strained, as it was this morning when he announced
Matins for ten o'clock.

The Commandant looks at Dr. Bird and tells him that he may go if he
likes. His tone is admirably casual; it conveys no sense of the
magnificence of his renunciation. He looks also at Mr. Grierson and Mr.
Foster. The lot of honour falls upon these three.

They set out, still with their air of a youthful picnic party. Dr. Bird
is more than ever the boisterous young man in charge of the champagne.

I am contented so long as Ursula Dearmer and Mrs. Lambert and Mrs.
Torrence and Janet McNeil and the Commandant do not go yet. To anybody
who knows the Commandant he is bound to be a prominent figure in the
terrible moving pictures made by fear. Smitten by some great idea, he
dashes out of cover as the shrapnel is falling. He wanders, wrapped in a
happy dream, into the enemies' trenches. He mingles with their lines of
communication as I have seen him mingle with the traffic at the junction
of Chandos Street and the Strand. If you were to inform him of a patrol
of Uhlans coming down the road, he would only say, "I see no Uhlans,"
and continue in their direction. It is inconceivable to his optimism
that he should encounter Uhlans in a world so obviously made for peace
and righteousness.

So that it is a relief to see somebody else (whom I do not know quite so
well) going first. Time enough to be jumpy when the Commandant and the
women go forth on the perilous adventure.

That is all very well. But I am jumpy all the same. By the mere fact
that they are going out first Mr. Grierson and Mr. Foster have suddenly
become dear and sacred. Their lives, their persons, their very
clothes--Dr. Bird's cheerful face, which is so like an overgrown
cherub's, his blond, gold lock of infantile hair, Mr. Grierson's pale
eyes that foresee danger, his not too well fitting khaki coat--have
acquired suddenly a priceless value, the value of things long seen and
long admired. It is as if I had known them all my life; as if life will
be unendurable if they do not come back safe.

It is not very endurable now. Of all the things that can happen to a
woman on a field ambulance, the worst is to stay behind. To stay behind
with nothing in the world to do but to devise a variety of dreadful
deaths for Tom, the chauffeur, and Dr. Bird and Mr. Grierson and Mr.
Foster. To know nothing except that Alost is being bombarded and that it
is to Alost that they are going.

And the others who have been left behind are hanging about in gloom,
disgusted with their fate. Mrs. Torrence and Janet McNeil are beginning
to ask themselves what they are here for. To go through the wards is
only to be in the way of the angelic beings with red crosses on their
breasts and foreheads who are already somewhat in each other's way.
Mrs. Torrence and the others do, however, go into the wards and talk to
the wounded and cheer them up. I sit in the deserted mess-room, and look
at the lunch that Tom and Dr. Bird and Mr. Grierson should have eaten
and were obliged to leave behind. I would give anything to be able to go
round the wards and cheer the wounded up. I wonder whether there is
anything I could conceivably do for the wounded that would not bore them
inexpressibly if I were to do it. I frame sentence after sentence in
strange and abominable French, and each, apart from its own inherent
absurdity, seems a mockery of the wounded. You cannot go to an immortal
hero and grin at him and say _Comment allez-vous?_ and expect him to be
cheered up, especially when you know yourself to be one of a long
procession of women who have done the same.

I abandon myself to my malady of self-distrust.

It is at its worst when Jean and Max, the convalescent orderlies, come
in to remove the ruins of our mess. They are pathetic and adorable with
their close-cropped heads in the pallor of their convalescence (Jean is
attired in a suit of yellowish linen and Max in striped flannels).
Jean's pallor is decorated (there is no other word for it) with
blue-grey eyes, black eyebrows, black eyelashes and a little black
moustache. He is martial and ardent and alert. But the pallor of Max is
unredeemed; it is morbid and profound. It has invaded his whole being.
His eyelids and his small sensitive mouth are involved; and his round
dark eyes have the queer grey look of some lamentable wonder and
amazement. But neither horror nor discipline have spoiled his engaging
air--the air of a very young _collégien_ who has broken loose and got
into this Military Hospital by mistake.

I do not know whether intuition is a French or Belgian gift. Jean and
Max are not Belgian but French, and they have it to a marvellous degree.
They seemed to know in an instant what was the matter with the English
lady; and they set about curing the malady. I have seldom seen such
perfect tact and gentleness as was then displayed by those two hospital
orderlies, Max and Jean. They had been wounded not so very long ago. But
they think nothing of that. They intimate that if I insist on helping
them with their plates and dishes they will be wounded, and more
severely, in their honour.

We converse.

It is in conversation that they are most adorable. They gaze at you with
candid, innocent eyes; not a quiver of a lip or an eyelash betrays to
you the outrageous quality of your French. The behaviour of your
sentences would cause a scandal in a private boarding school for young
ladies, it is so fantastically incorrect. But Max and Jean receive each
phrase with an imperturbable and charming gravity. By the subtlest
suggestion of manner they assure you that you speak with fluency and
distinction, that yours is a very perfect French. Only their severe
attentiveness warns you of the strain you are putting on them.

Max lingered long after Jean had departed to his kitchen. And presently
he gave up his secret. He is a student, and they took him from his
College (his course unfinished) to fight for his country. When the War
broke out his mother went mad with the horror of it. He told me this
quite simply, as if he were relating a common incident of war-time.
Then, with a little air of mystery, he signed to me to follow him along
the corridor. He stopped at a closed door and showed me a name inscribed
in thick ornamental Gothic characters on a card tacked to the panel:

    Prosper Panne.

Max is not his real name. It is the name that Prosper Panne has taken to
disguise himself while he is a servant. Prosper Panne--_il est écrivain,
journaliste_. He writes for the Paris papers. He looked at me with his
amazed, pathetic eyes, and pointed with a finger to his breast to
assure me that he is he, Prosper Panne.

And in the end I asked him whether it would bore the wounded frightfully
if I took them some cigarettes? (I laid in cigarettes this morning as a
provision for this desolate afternoon.)

And--dear Prosper Panne--so thoroughly did he understand my malady, that
he himself escorted me. It is as if he knew the _peur sacré_ that
restrains me from flinging myself into the presence of the wounded.
Soft-footed and graceful, turning now and then with his instinct of
protection, the orderly glides before me, smoothing the way between my
shyness and this dreaded majesty of suffering.

I followed him (with my cigarettes in my hand and my heart in my mouth)
into the big ward on the ground floor.

I don't want to describe that ward, or the effect of those rows upon
rows of beds, those rows upon rows of bound and bandaged bodies, the
intensity of physical anguish suggested by sheer force of
multiplication, by the diminishing perspective of the beds, by the clear
light and nakedness of the great hall that sets these repeated units of
torture in a world apart, a world of insufferable space and agonizing
time, ruled by some inhuman mathematics and given over to pure
transcendent pain. A sufficiently large ward full of wounded really
does leave an impression very like that. But the one true thing about
this impression is its transcendence. It is utterly removed from and
unlike anything that you have experienced before. From the moment that
the doors have closed behind you, you are in another world, and under
its strange impact you are given new senses and a new soul. If there is
horror here you are not aware of it as horror. Before these multiplied
forms of anguish what you feel--if there be anything of _you_ left to
feel--is not pity, because it is so near to adoration.

If you are tired of the burden and malady of self, go into one of these
great wards and you will find instant release. You and the sum of your
little consciousness are not things that matter any more. The lowest and
the least of these wounded Belgians is of supreme importance and
infinite significance. You, who were once afraid of them and of their
wounds, may think that you would suffer for them now, gladly; but you
are not allowed to suffer; you are marvellously and mercilessly let off.
In this sudden deliverance from yourself you have received the ultimate
absolution, and their torment is your peace.

In the big ward very few of the men were well enough to smoke. So we
went to the little wards where the convalescents are, Max leading.

I do not think that Max has received absolution yet. It is quite evident
that he is proud of his _entrée_ into this place and of his intimacy
with the wounded, of his rôle of interpreter.

But how perfectly he does it! He has no Flemish, but through his subtle
gestures even the poor Flamand, who has no French, understands what I
want to say to him and can't. He turns this modest presentation of
cigarettes into a high social function, a trifle ambitious, perhaps, but
triumphantly achieved.

All that was over by about three o'clock, when the sanctuary cast us
out, and Max went back to his empty kitchen and became Prosper Panne
again, and remembered that his mother was mad; and I went to the empty
mess-room and became my miserable self and remembered that the Field
Ambulance was still out, God knows where.

The mess-room windows look south over the railway lines towards the
country where the fighting is. From the balcony you can see the lines
where the troop trains run, going north-west and south-east. The
Station, the Post Office, the Telegraph and Telephone Offices are here,
all in one long red-brick building that bounds one side of the _Place_.
It stands at right angles to the Flandria and stretches along opposite
its flank. It has a flat roof with a crenelated parapet. Grass grows on
the roof. No guns are mounted there, for Ghent is an open city. But in
German tactics bombardment by aeroplane doesn't seem to count, and our
situation is more provocative now than the Terminus Hotel at Ostend.

Beyond the straight black railway lines are miles upon miles of flat
open country, green fields and rows of poplars, and little woods, and
here and there a low rise dark with trees. Under our windows the white
street runs south-eastward, and along it scouting cars and cycling corps
rush to the fighting lines, and military motor-cars hurry impatiently,
carrying Belgian staff officers; the ammunition wagons lumber along, and
the troops march in a long file, to disappear round the turn of the
road. That is where the others have gone, and I'd give everything I
possess to go with them.

They have come back, incredibly safe, and have brought in four wounded.

There was a large crowd gathered in the _Place_ to see them come, a
crowd that has nothing to do and that lives from hour to hour on this
spectacle of the wounded. Intense excitement this time, for one of the
four wounded is a German. He was lying on a stretcher. No sooner had
they drawn him out of the ambulance than they put him back again. (No
Germans are taken in at our Hospital; they are all sent to the old
_Hôpital Militaire_ No. I.) He thrust up his poor hand and grabbed the
hanging strap to raise himself a little in his stretcher, and I saw him.
He was ruddy and handsome. His thick blond hair stood up stiff from his
forehead. His little blond moustache was turned up and twisted fiercely
like the Kaiser's. The crowd booed at him as he lay there. His was a
terrible pathos, unlike any other. He was so defiant and so helpless.
And there's another emotion gone by the board. You simply could not hate
him.

Later in the evening both cars were sent out, Car No. 1 with the
Commandant and, if you will believe it, Ursula Dearmer. Heavens! What
can the Military Power be thinking of? Car No. 2 took Dr. Wilson and
Mrs. Torrence. The Military Power, I suppose, has ordained this too. And
when I think of Mrs. Torrence's dream of getting into the greatest
possible danger, I am glad that the Commandant is with Ursula Dearmer.
We pledged our words, he and I, that danger and Ursula Dearmer should
never meet.

They all come back, impossibly safe. They are rather like children after
the party, too excited to give a lucid and coherent tale of what they've
done. My ambulance Day-Book stores the stuff from which reports and
newspaper articles are to be made. I note that Car No. 1 has brought
three wounded to Hospital I., and that Car No. 2 has brought four
wounded to Hospital II., also that a dum-dum bullet has been found in
the hand of one of the three. There is a considerable stir among the
surgeons over this bullet. They are vaguely gratified at its being found
in our hospital and not the other.

Little Janet McNeil and Mr. Riley and all the others who were left
behind have gone to bed in hopeless gloom. Even the bullet hasn't roused
them beyond the first tense moment.

I ask for ink, and dear Max has given me all his in his own ink-pot.


[_Monday, 28th._]

We have been here a hundred years.

Car No. 1 went out at eight-thirty this morning, with the Commandant and
Dr. Bird and Ursula Dearmer and Mr. Grierson and a Belgian Red Cross
guide. With Tom, the chauffeur, that makes six. Tom's face, as he sees
this party swarming on his car, is expressive of tumultuous passions.
Disgust predominates.

Their clothes seem stranger than ever by contrast with the severe
military khaki of the car. Dr. Bird has added to his civilian costume a
Belgian forage cap with a red tassel that hangs over his forehead. It
was given to him yesterday by way of homage to his courage and his
personal charm. But it makes him horribly vulnerable. The Chaplain,
standing out from the rest of the Corps in complete khaki, is an even
more inevitable mark for bullets. Tom stares at everybody with eyes of
violent inquiry. He still evidently wants to know whether we call
ourselves a field ambulance. He starts his car with movements of
exasperation and despair. We are to judge what his sense of discipline
must be since he consents to drive the thing at all.

The Commandant affects not to see Tom. Perhaps he really doesn't see
him.

It is just as well that he can't see Mrs. Torrence, or Janet McNeil or
Mr. Riley or Dr. Haynes. They are overpowered by this tragedy of being
left behind. Under it the discipline of the ---- Hospital breaks down.
The eighteen-year-old child is threatening to commit suicide or else go
home. She regards the two acts as equivalent. Mr. Riley's gloom is now
so awful that he will not speak when he is spoken to. He looks at me
with dumb hostility, as if he thought that I had something to do with
it. Dr. Haynes's melancholy is even more heart-rending, because it is
gentle and unexpressed.

I try to console them. I point out that it is a question of arithmetic.
There are only two cars and there are fourteen of us. Fourteen into two
won't go, even if you don't count the wounded. And, after all, we
haven't been here two days. But it is no good. We have been here a
hundred years, and we have done nothing. There isn't anything to do.
There are not enough wounded to go round. We turn our eyes with longing
towards Antwerp, so soon to be battered by the siege-guns from Namur.

And Bert, poor Bert! he has crawled into Ambulance Car No. 2 where it
stands outside in the hospital yard, and he has hidden himself under the
hood.

Mrs. Lambert is a little sad, too. But we are none of us very sorry for
Mrs. Lambert. We have gathered that her husband is a journalist, and
that he is special correspondent at the front for some American paper.
He has a motor-car which we assume rashly to be the property of his
paper. He is always dashing off to the firing-line in it, and Mrs.
Lambert is always at liberty to go with him. She is mistaken if she
thinks that her sorrow is in any way comparable with ours.

But if there are not enough wounded to go round in Ghent, there are
more refugees than Ghent can deal with. They are pouring in by all the
roads from Alost and Termonde. Every train disgorges multitudes of them
into the _Place_.

This morning I went to the Matron, Madame F., and told her I wasn't much
good, but I'd be glad if she could give me some work. I said I supposed
there was some to be done among the refugees.

Work? Among the refugees? They could employ whole armies of us. There
are thousands of refugees at the Palais des Fêtes. I had better go there
and see what is being done. Madame will give me an introduction to her
sister-in-law, Madame F., the Présidente of the Comité des Dames, and to
her niece, Mademoiselle F., who will take me to the Palais.

And Madame adds that there will soon be work for all of us in the
Hospital. Yes: even for the untrained.

Life is once more bearable.

But the others won't believe it. They say there are three hundred nurses
in the hospital.

And the fact remains that we have two young surgeons cooling their heels
in the corridors, and a fully-trained nurse tearing her hair out, while
the young girl, Ursula Dearmer, takes the field.

And I think of the poor little dreamy, guileless Commandant 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 been _under 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
said he 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 there _was_ any 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. It came 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 if _I_ feel 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 nine P.M. This is settled, and a young Red Cross
volunteer takes me over 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 righteous _bourgeoise_ lies 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 into the 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 awake and 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 to believe 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._]

No Germans 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 the citizens
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. _Why_ did 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 a
_real_ scare, 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
impassive face 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 making jokes 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 trained to 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 that _l'Ambulance
Anglaise_ must 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 the _Hôpital Militaire_ No. 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 a bad 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
in his 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 that _The Daily Chronicle_ promised to take any articles that I
might send them from the front, but I haven't written any. You cannot
write articles for _The Daily Chronicle_ out 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 do not 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 by
driving 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._]

It is 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 to expose 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 through _his_ door 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 the _Vestiaire_ takes 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, the
fervid central _foyer_ of 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 the _premier 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 dompter
    Le 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._]

No Germans, 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. Torrence brought 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 gallant _à la belge_ and vows that
he has taken on Mrs. Torrence _pour 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._]

It really 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 Dearmer who 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 the _Daily Mail_ and _Westminster_. 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 their _mitrailleuses_
the 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 wing
_because_ she is a young girl and he feels responsible for her to her
mother.

(Which, oddly enough, is just how _I_ feel!)

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 little _contretemps_ with 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 first
well-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 deadly _obus_ in 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 young _collégien_, 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
the _Folies 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 the _Folies
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--_exit_ Max in the approved manner of the
_Folies 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 young _collégien_) 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 on _him_.

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 pass the 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--when _they_ are 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 a _bona fide_ offer 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
the _Daily 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 the Field Ambulance as an _ambulancière_, 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 short beards, 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 cease to 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't
know 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-guns from 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 a _châssis_ to 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, I _am_ going
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 and come 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, that gives 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
fat _propriétaire_, and the _propriétaire's_ nice 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 his brutal
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._]

We get 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 all the 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 into _his_ room 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 the _roman_ and the _conte_, 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 explanation thickens. 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.

In a little open carriage--the taxis have long ago all gone to the
War--in an absurd little open carriage, exactly like a Cheltenham "rat,"
I depart like a lady of Cheltenham, for the Hôtel de la Poste. The
appearance and the odour of this little carriage give you an odd sense
of security and peace. The Germans may be advancing on Ghent at this
moment, but for all the taste of war there is in it, you might be that
lady, going from one hotel to the other, down the Cheltenham Promenade.

The further you go from the Military Hospital and the Railway Station
the more it is so. The War does not seem yet to have shaken the
essential peace of the _bourgeois_ city. The Hôtel de la Poste is in the
old quarter of the town, where the Cathedrals are. Instead of the long,
black railway lines and the red-brick façade of the Station and Post
Office; instead of the wooded fields beyond and the white street that
leads to the battle-places south and east; instead of the great Square
with its mustering troops and swarms of refugees, you have the quiet
Place d'Armes, shut in by trees, and all round it are the hotels and
cafés where the officers and the War Correspondents come and go. Through
all that coming and going you get the sense of the old foreign town that
was dreaming yesterday. People are sitting outside the restaurants all
round the Place, drinking coffee and liqueurs as if nothing had
happened, as if Antwerp were far-off in another country, and as if it
were still yesterday. Mosquitoes come up from the drowsy canal water
and swarm into the hotels and bite you. I found any number of mosquitoes
clinging drowsily to my bedroom walls.

But there are very few women among those crowds outside the restaurants.
There are not many women except refugees in the streets, and fewer still
in the shops.

I have blundered across a little café with an affectionately smiling and
reassuringly fat proprietress, where they give you _brioches_ and China
tea, which, as it were in sheer affection, they call English. It is not
as happy a find as you might think. It is not, in the circumstances,
happy at all. In fact, if you have never known what melancholy is and
would like to know it, I can recommend two courses. Go down the Grand
Canal in Venice in the grey spring of the year, in a gondola, all by
yourself. Or get mixed up with a field ambulance which is not only doing
noble work but running thrilling risks, in neither of which you have a
share, or the ghost of a chance of a share; cut yourself off from your
comrades, if it is only for a week, and go into a Belgian café in
war-time and try to eat _brioches_ and drink English tea all by yourself.
This is the more successful course. You may see hope beyond the gondola
and the Grand Canal. But you will see no hope beyond the _brioche_ and
the English tea.

I walk about again till it is time to go back to the Hotel. So far, my
emancipation has not been agreeable.


[_Evening. Hôtel de la Poste._]

I dined in the crowded restaurant, avoiding the War Correspondents,
choosing a table where I hoped I might be unobserved. Somewhere through
a glass screen I caught a sight of Mr. L.'s head. I was careful to avoid
the glass screen and Mr. L.'s head. He shall not say, if I can possibly
help it, that I am an infernal nuisance. For I know I haven't any
business to be here, and if Belgium had a Kitchener I shouldn't be here.
However you look at me, I am here on false pretences. In the eyes of Mr.
L. I would have no more right to be a War Correspondent (if I were one)
than I have to be on a field ambulance. It is with the game of war as it
was with the game of football I used to play with my big brothers in the
garden. The women may play it if they're fit enough, up to a certain
point, very much as I played football in the garden. The big brothers
let their little sister kick off; they let her run away with the ball;
they stood back and let her make goal after goal; but when it came to
the scrimmage they took hold of her and gently but firmly moved her to
one side. If she persisted she became an infernal nuisance. And if those
big brothers over there only knew what I was after they would make
arrangements for my immediate removal from the seat of war.

The Commandant has turned up with Ursula Dearmer. He is drawn to these
War Correspondents who appear to know more than he does. On the other
hand, an ambulance that can get into the firing-line has an irresistible
attraction for a War Correspondent. It may at any moment constitute his
only means of getting there himself.

One of our cars has been sent out to Antwerp with dispatches and
surgical appliances.

The sight of the Commandant reminds me that I have got all the funds of
the Ambulance upstairs in my suit-case in that leather purse-belt--and
if the Ambulance does fly from Ghent without me, and without that belt,
it will find itself in considerable embarrassment before it has
retreated very far.

It is quite certain that I shall have to take my chance. I have asked
the Commandant again (either this evening or earlier) so that there may
be no possible doubt about it: "If we do have to scoot from Ghent in a
hurry I shall have nothing but my wits to trust to?"

And he says, "True for you."

And he looks as if he meant it.[3]

These remarkable words have a remarkable effect on the new War
Correspondent. It is as if the coolness and the courage and the strength
of a hundred War Correspondents and of fifty Red Cross Ambulances had
been suddenly discharged into my soul. This absurd accession of power
and valour[4] is accompanied by a sudden immense lucidity. It is as if
my soul had never really belonged to me until now, as if it had been
either drugged or drunk and had never known what it was to be sober
until now. The sensation is distinctly agreeable. And on the top of it
all there is a peace which I distinctly recognize as the peace of God.

So, while the Commandant talks to the War Correspondents as if nothing
had happened, I go upstairs and unlock my suit-case and take from it the
leather purse-belt with the Ambulance funds in it, and I bring it to the
Commandant and lay it before him and compel him to put it on. As I do
this I feel considerable compunction, as if I were launching a
three-year-old child in a cockle-shell on the perilous ocean of finance.
I remind him that fifteen pounds of the money in the belt is his (he
would be as likely as not to forget it). As for the accounts, they are
so clear that a three-year-old child could understand them. I notice
with a diabolical satisfaction which persists through the all-pervading
peace by no means as incongruously as you might imagine--I notice
particularly that the Commandant doesn't like this part of it a bit.
There is not anybody in the Corps who wants to be responsible for its
funds or enjoys wearing that belt. But it is obvious that if the Ambulance
can bear to be separated from its Treasurer-Secretary-Reporter, in the
flight from Ghent, it cannot possibly bear to be separated from its funds.

I am alone with the Commandant while this happens, standing by one of
the writing-tables in the lounge. Ursula Dearmer (she grows more mature
every day) and the War Correspondents and a few Generals have melted
somewhere into the background. The long, lithe pigskin belt lies between
us on the table--between my friend and me--like a pale snake. It exerts
some malign and poisonous influence. It makes me say things, things
that I should not have thought it possible to say. And it is all about
the shells at Alost.

He is astonished.

And I do not care.

I am sustained, exalted by that sense of righteousness you feel when you
are insanely pounding somebody who thinks that in perfect sanity and
integrity he has pounded you.


[_Saturday, 3rd._]

Mr. L. asked me to breakfast. He has told me more about the Corps in
five minutes than the Corps has been able to tell me in as many days. He
has seen it at Alost and Termonde. You gather that he has seen other
heroic enterprises also and that he would perjure himself if he swore
that they were indispensable. Every Correspondent is besieged by the
leaders of heroic enterprises, and I imagine that Mr. L. has been "had"
before now by amateurs of the Red Cross, and his heart must have sunk
when he heard of an English Field Ambulance in Ghent. And he owns to
positive terror when he saw it, with its girls in breeches, its
Commandant in Norfolk jacket, grey knickerbockers, heather-mixture
stockings and deer-stalker; its Chaplain in khaki, and its Surgeon a
mark for bullets in his Belgian officer's cap. I suggest that this
absence of uniform only proves our passionate eagerness to be off and
get to work. But it is right. Our ambulance is the real thing, and Mr.
L. is going to be an angel and help it all he can. He will write about
it in the _Illustrated London News_ and the _Westminster_. When he hears
that I came out here to write about the War and make a little money for
the Field Ambulance, and that I haven't seen anything of the War and
that my invasion of his hotel is simply a last despairing effort to at
least hear something, he is more angelic than ever. He causes a whole
cinema of war-scenes to pass before my eyes. When I ask if there is
anything left for me to "do," he evokes a long procession of
articles--pure, virgin copy on which no journalist has ever laid his
hands--and assures me that it is mine, that the things that have been
done are nothing to the things that are left to do. I tell him that I
have no business on his pitch, and that I am horribly afraid of getting
in the regular Correspondents' way and spoiling their game; as I am
likely to play it, there isn't any pitch. Of course, I suppose, there is
the "scoop," but that's another matter. It is the War Correspondent's
crown of cunning and of valour, and nobody can take from him that
crown. But in the psychology of the thing, every Correspondent is his
own pitch. He has told me very nearly all the things I want to know,
among them what the Belgian General said to the Commandant when he saw
Ursula Dearmer at Alost:

"What the devil is the lady doing there?"

I gather that Mr. L. shares the General's wonder and my own anxiety. I
am not far wrong in regarding Alost and Termonde as no fit place for
Ursula Dearmer or any other woman.

Answered the Commandant's letters for him. Wrote to Ezra Pound. Wrote
out the report for the last three days' ambulance work and sent it to
the British Red Cross; also a letter to Mr. Rogers about a light
scouting-car. The British Red Cross has written that it cannot spare any
more motor ambulances, but it may possibly send out a small car. (The
Commandant has cabled to Mr. Gould, of Gould Bros., Exeter, accepting
his offer of his own car and services.)

Went down to the "Flandria" for news of the Ambulance. The car that was
sent out yesterday evening got through all right to Antwerp and returned
safely. It has brought very bad news. Two of the outer forts are said to
have fallen. The position is critical, and grave anxiety is felt for
the safety of the English in Antwerp. Mrs. St. Clair Stobart has asked
us for one of our ambulances. But even if we could spare it we cannot
give it up without an order from the military authority at Ghent. We
hear that Dr. ----, one of Mrs. Stobart's women, is to leave Antwerp and
work at our hospital. She is engaged to be married to Dr. ----, and the
poor boy is somewhat concerned for her safety. I'm very glad I have left
the "Flandria," for she can have my room.

I wish they would make Miss ---- come away too.

Yes: Miss ----, that clever novelist, who passes for a woman of the
world because she uses mundane appearances to hide herself from the
world's importunity--Miss ---- is here. The War caught her. Some people
were surprised. I wasn't.[5]

       *       *       *       *       *

Walked through the town again--old quarter. Walked and walked and
walked, thinking about Antwerp all the time. Through streets of
grey-white and lavender-tinted houses, with very fragile balconies. Saw
the two Cathedrals[6] and the Town Hall--refugees swarming round it--and
the Rab--I can't remember its name: see Baedeker--with its turrets and
its moat. Any amount of time to see cathedrals in and no Mrs. Torrence
to protest. I wonder how much of all this will be left by next month, or
even by next week? Two of the Antwerp forts have fallen. They say the
occupation of Ghent will be peaceful; while of Antwerp I suppose they
would say, "_C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?_" They say the Germans will
just march into Ghent and march out again, commandeering a few things
here and there. But nobody knows, and by the stolid faces of these
civilians you might imagine that nobody cares. Certainly none of them
think that the fate of Antwerp can be the fate of Ghent.

And the faces of the soldiers, of the men who know? They are the faces
of important people, cheerful people, pleasantly preoccupied with the
business in hand. Only here and there a grave face, a fixed, drawn face,
a face twisted with the irritation of the strain.

Why, the very refugees have the look of a rather tired tourist-party,
wandering about, seeing Ghent, seeing the Cathedral.

Only they aren't looking at the Cathedral. They are looking straight
ahead, across the _Place_, up the street; they do not see or hear the
trams swinging down on them, or the tearing, snorting motors; they
stroll abstractedly into the line of the motors and stand there; they
start and scatter, wild-eyed, with a sudden recrudescence of the terror
that has driven them here from their villages in the fields.

       *       *       *       *       *

It seems incredible that I should be free to walk about like this. It is
as if I had cut the rope that tied me to a soaring air-balloon and found
myself, with firm feet, safe on the solid earth. Any bit of earth, even
surrounded by Germans, seems safe compared with the asphyxiation of that
ascent. And when the air-balloon wasn't going up it was as if I had lain
stifling under a soft feather-bed for more than a year. Now I've waked
up suddenly and flung the feather-bed off with a vigorous kick.


[_[7]Sunday, 4th._]

(I have no clear recollection of Sunday morning, because in the
afternoon we went to Antwerp; and Antwerp has blotted out everything
that went near before it.)

The Ambulance has been ordered to take two Belgian professors (or else
they are doctors) into Antwerp. There isn't any question this time of
carrying wounded. It seems incredible, but I am going too. I shall see
the siege of Antwerp and hear the guns that were brought up from Namur.

Somewhere, on the north-west horizon, a vision, heavenly, but
impalpable, aerial, indistinct, of the Greatest Possible Danger.

I am glad I am going. But the odd thing is that there is no excitement
about it. It seems an entirely fit and natural thing that the vision
should materialize, that I should see the shells battering the forts of
Antwerp and hear the big siege-guns from Namur. For all its
incredibility, the adventure lacks every element of surprise. It is
simply what I came out for. For here in Belgium the really incredible
things are the things that existed and happened before the War. They
existed and happened a hundred years ago and the memory of them is
indistinct; the feeling of them is gone. You have ceased to have any
personal interest in them; if they happened at all they happened to
somebody else. What is happening now has been happening always. All your
past is soaking in the vivid dye of these days, and what you are now you
have been always. I have been a War Correspondent all my life--_blasée_
with battles. The Commandant orders me into the front seat beside the
chauffeur Tom, so that I may see things. Even Tom's face cannot shake me
in my conviction that I am merely setting out once more on my usual,
legitimate, daily job.

It is all so natural that you do not wonder in the least at this really
very singular extension of your personality. You are not aware of your
personality at all. If you could be you would see it undergoing
shrinkage. It is, anyhow, one of the things that ceased to matter a
hundred years ago. If you could examine its contents at this moment you
would find nothing there but that shining vision of danger, the siege of
Antwerp, indistinct, impalpable, aerial.

Presently the vision itself shrinks and disappears on the north-west
horizon. The car has shot beyond the streets into the open road, the
great paved highway to Antwerp, and I am absorbed in other matters: in
Car 1 and in the chauffeur Tom, who is letting her rip more and more
into her top speed with every mile; in M. C----, the Belgian Red Cross
guide, beside me on my left, and in the Belgian soldier sitting on the
floor at his feet. The soldier is confiding some fearful secret to
M. C---- about somebody called Achille. M. C---- bends very low to catch
the name, as if he were trying to intercept and conceal it, and when he
_has_ caught it he assumes an air of superb mystery and gravity and
importance. With one gesture he buries the name of Achille in his breast
under his uniform. You know that he would die rather than betray the
secret of Achille. You decide that Achille is the heroic bearer of
dispatches, and that we have secret orders to pick him up somewhere and
convey him in safety to Antwerp. You do not grasp the meaning of this
pantomime until the third sentry has approached us, and M. C---- has
stopped for the third time to whisper "Ach-ille!" behind the cover of
his hand, and the third sentry is instantly appeased.

(Concerning sentries, you learn that the Belgian kind is amiable, but
that the French sentry is a terrible fellow, who will think nothing of
shooting you if your car doesn't stop dead the instant he levels his
rifle.)

Except for sentries and straggling troops and the long trains of
refugees, the country is as peaceful between Ghent and Saint Nicolas as
it was last week between Ostend and Ghent. It is the same adorable
Flemish country, the same flat fields, the same paved causeway and the
same tall, slender avenues of trees. But if anything could make the
desolation of Belgium more desolate it is this intolerable beauty of
slender trees and infinite flat land, the beauty of a country formed for
the very expression of peace. In the vivid gold and green of its autumn
it has become a stage dressed with ironic splendour for the spectacle of
a people in flight. Half the population of Antwerp and the country round
it is pouring into Ghent.[8] First the automobiles, Belgian officers in
uniform packed tight between women and children and their bundles,
convoying the train. Then the carriages secured by the _bourgeois_ (they
are very few); then men and boys on bicycles; then the carts, and with
the coming on of the carts the spectacle grows incredible, fantastic.
You see a thing advancing like a house on wheels. It is a tall
hay-wagon--the tallest wagon you have ever seen in your life--piled with
household furniture and mattresses on the top of the furniture, and on
top of the mattresses, on the roof, as it were, a family of women and
children and young girls. Some of them seem conscious of the stupendous
absurdity of this appearance; they smile at you or laugh as the
structure goes towering and toppling by.

Next, low on the ground, enormous and grotesque bundles, endowed with
movement and with legs. Only when you come up to them do you see that
they are borne on the bowed backs of men and women and children. The
children--when there are no bundles to be borne these carry a bird in a
cage, or a dog, a dog that sits in their arms like a baby and is pressed
tight to their breasts. Here and there men and women driving their
cattle before them, driving them gently, without haste, with a great
dignity and patience.

These, for all the panic and ruin in their bearing, might be pilgrims or
suppliants, or the servants of some religious rite, bringing the votive
offerings and the sacrificial beasts. The infinite land and the avenues
of slender trees persuade you that it is so.

And wherever the ambulance cars go they meet endless processions of
refugees; endless, for the straight, flat Flemish roads are endless, and
as far as your eye can see the stream of people is unbroken; endless,
because the misery of Belgium is endless; the mind cannot grasp it or
take it in. You cannot meet it with grief, hardly with conscious pity;
you have no tears for it; it is a sorrow that transcends everything you
have known of sorrow. These people have been left "only their eyes to
weep with." But they do not weep any more than you do. They have no
tears for themselves or for each other.[9] This is the terrible thing,
this and the manner of their flight. It is not flight, it is the vast,
unhasting and unending movement of a people crushed down by grief and
weariness, pushed on by its own weight, by the ceaseless impact of its
ruin.

This stream is the main stream from Antwerp, swollen by its tributaries.
It doesn't seem to matter where it comes from, its strength and volume
always seem the same. After the siege of Antwerp it will thicken and
flow from some other direction, that is all. And all the streams seem to
flow into Ghent and to meet in the Palais des Fêtes.[10]

I forget whether it was near Lokeren or Saint Nicolas that we saw the
first sign of fighting, in houses levelled to the ground to make way for
the artillery fire; levelled, and raked into neat plots without the
semblance of a site.

After the refugees, the troops. Village streets crowded with military
automobiles and trains of baggage wagons and regiments of infantry.
Little villas with desolate, surprised and innocent faces, standing back
in their gardens; soldiers sitting in their porches and verandahs,
soldiers' faces looking out of their windows; soldiers are quartered in
every room, and the grass grows high in their gardens. Soldiers run down
the garden paths to look at our ambulance as it goes by.

There is excitement in the village streets.

At Saint Nicolas we overtake Dr. Wilson and Mr. Davidson walking into
Antwerp. They tell us the news.

The British troops have come. At last. They have been through before us
on their way to Antwerp. Dr. Wilson and Mr. Davidson have seen the
British troops. They have talked to them.

Mr. Davidson cannot conceal his glee at getting in before the War
Correspondents. Pure luck has given into his hands _the_ great
journalistic scoop of the War in Belgium. And he is not a journalist. He
is a sculptor out for the busts of warriors, and for actuality in those
tragic and splendid figures that are grouped round memorial columns, for
the living attitude and gesture.

We take up Mr. Davidson and Dr. Wilson, and leave one of our professors
(if he is a professor) at Saint Nicolas, for the poor man has come
without his passport. He will have to hang about at Saint Nicolas, doing
nothing, until such time as it pleases Heaven to send us back from
Antwerp. He resigns himself, and we abandon him, a piteous figure
wrapped in a brown shawl.

After Saint Nicolas more troops, a few batteries of artillery, some
infantry, long, long regiments of Belgian cavalry, coming to the defence
of the country outside Antwerp. Cavalry halting at a fork of the road by
a little fir-wood. A road that is rather like the road just outside
Wareham as you go towards Poole. More troops. And after the troops an
interminable procession of labourers trudging on foot. At a distance you
take them for refugees, until you see that they are carrying poles and
spades. Presently the road cuts through the circle of stakes and barbed
wire entanglements set for the German cavalry. And somewhere on our left
(whether before or after Saint Nicolas I cannot remember), across a
field, the rail embankment ran parallel with our field, and we saw the
long ambulance train, flying the Red Cross and loaded with wounded, on
its way from Antwerp to Ghent. At this point the line is exposed
conspicuously, and we must have been well within range of the German
fire, for the next ambulance train--but we didn't know about the next
ambulance train till afterwards.

After the circle of the stakes and wire entanglements you begin to think
of the bombardment. You strain your ears for the sound of the siege-guns
from Namur. Somewhere ahead of us on the horizon there is Antwerp.
Towers and tall chimneys in a very grey distance. Every minute you look
for the flight of the shells across the grey and the fall of a tower or
a chimney. But the grey is utterly peaceful and the towers and the tall
chimneys remain. And at last you turn in a righteous indignation and
say: "Where is the bombardment?"

The bombardment is at the outer forts.

And where are the forts, then? (You see no forts.)

The outer forts? Oh, the outer forts are thirty kilometres away.

No. Not there. To your right.

And you, who thought you would have died rather than see the siege of
Antwerp, are dumb with disgust. Your heart swells with a holy and
incorruptible resentment of the sheer levity of the Commandant.

A pretty thing--to bring a War Correspondent out to see a bombardment
when there isn't any bombardment, or when all there ever was is a
hundred--well then, _thirty_ kilometres away.[11]

It was twilight as we came into Antwerp. We approached it by the west,
by the way of the sea, by the great bridge of boats over the Scheldt.
The sea and the dykes are the defence of Antwerp on this side. Whole
regiments of troops are crossing the bridge of boats. Our car crawls by
inches at a time. It is jammed tight among some baggage wagons. It
disentangles itself with difficulty from the baggage wagons, and is
wedged tighter still among the troops. But the troops are moving, though
by inches at a time. We get our front wheels on to the bridge. Packed in
among the troops, but moving steadily as they move, we cross the
Scheldt. On our right the sharp bows and on our left the blunt sterns of
the boats. Boat after boat pressed close, gunwale to gunwale, our
roadway goes across their breasts. Their breasts are taut as the breasts
of gymnasts under the tramping of the regiments. They vibrate like the
breasts of living things as they bear us up.

No heaving of any beautiful and beloved ship, no crossing of any sea, no
sight of any city that has the sea at her feet, not New York City nor
Venice, no coming into any foreign land, ever thrilled me as that
coming into Antwerp with the Belgian army over that bridge of boats.

At twilight, from the river, with its lamps lit and all its waters
shining, Antwerp looked beautiful as Venice and as safe and still. For
the dykes are her defences on this side. But for the trudging regiments
you would not have guessed that on the land side the outer ramparts were
being shelled incessantly.

It was a struggle up the slope from the river bank to the quay, a
struggle in which we engaged with commissariat and ammunition wagons and
troops and refugees in carts, all trying to get away from the city over
the bridge of boats. The ascent was so steep and slippery that you felt
as though at any moment the car might hurl itself down backwards on the
top of the processions struggling behind it.

At last we landed. I have no vivid recollection[12] of our passage
through the town. Except that I know we actually were in Antwerp I could
not say whether I really saw certain winding streets and old houses with
steep gables or whether I dreamed them. There was one great street of
white houses and gilded signs that stood shimmering somewhere in the
twilight; but I cannot tell you what street it was. And there were some
modern boulevards, and the whole place was very silent. It had the
silence and half darkness of dreams, and the beauty and magic and
sinister sadness of dreams. And in that silence and sadness our car,
with its backings and turnings and its snorts, and our own voices as we
asked our way (for we were more or less lost in Antwerp) seemed to be
making an appalling and inappropriate and impious noise.

Antwerp seems to me to have been all hospitals, though I only saw two,
or perhaps three. One was in an ordinary house in a street, and I think
this must have been the British Field Hospital; for Mrs. Winterbottom
was there. And of all the women I met thus casually "at the front" she
was, by a long way, the most attractive. We went into one or two of the
wards; in others, where the cases were very serious, we were only
allowed to stand for a second in the doorway; there were others again
which we could not see at all.

I think, unless I am rolling two hospitals into one, that we saw a
second--the English Hospital. It was for the English Hospital that we
heard the Commandant inquire perpetually as we made our way through the
strange streets and the boulevards beyond them, following at his own
furious pace, losing him in byways and finding him by some miracle
again. Talk of dreams! Our progress through Antwerp was like one of
those nightmares which have no form or substance but are made up of
ghastly twilight and hopeless quest and ever-accelerating speed. It was
not till it was all over that we knew the reason for his excessive
haste.

When we got to Mrs. St. Clair Stobart's Hospital--in a garden, planted
somewhere away beyond the boulevards in an open place--we had hardly any
time to look at it. All the same, I shall never forget that Hospital as
long as I live. It had been a concert-hall[13] and was built principally
of glass and iron; at any rate, if it was not really the greenhouse that
it seemed to be there was a great deal of glass about it, and it had
been shelled by aeroplane the night before. No great damage had been
done, but the sound and the shock had terrified the wounded in their
beds. This hospital, as everybody knows, is run entirely by women, with
women doctors, women surgeons, women orderlies. Mrs. St. Clair Stobart
and some of her gallant staff came out to meet us on a big verandah in
front of this fantastic building, she and her orderlies in the uniform
of the British Red Cross, her surgeons in long white linen coats over
their skirts. Dr. ---- whom we are to take back with us to Ghent, was
there.

We asked for Miss ----, and she came to us finally in a small room
adjoining what must have been the restaurant of the concert-hall.

I was shocked at her appearance. She was quieter than ever and her face
was grey and worn with watching. She looked as if she could not have
held out another night.

She told us about last night's bombardment. The effect of it on this
absurd greenhouse must have been terrific. Every day they are expecting
the bombardment of the town.

No, none of them are leaving except two. Every woman will stick to her
post[14] till the order comes to evacuate the hospital, and then not one
will quit till the last wounded man is carried to the transport.

It seems that Miss ---- is a hospital orderly, and that her duty is to
stand at the gate of the garden with a lantern as the ambulances come in
and to light them to the door of the hospital, and then to see that each
man has the number of his cot pinned to the breast of his
sleeping-jacket.

Mrs. Stobart, very properly, will have none but trained women in her
hospital. But even an untrained woman is equal to holding a lantern and
pinning on tickets, so I implored Miss ---- to let me take her place
while she went back to rest in my room at Ghent, if it was only for one
night. I used every argument I could think of, and for one second I
thought the best argument had prevailed. But it was only for a second.
Probably not even for a second. Miss ---- may drop to pieces at her
post, but it is there that she will drop.

Outside on the verandah the Commandant was fairly ramping to be off.
No--I can't see the Hospital. There isn't any time to see the Hospital.
But Miss ---- could not bear me not to see it, and together we made a
surreptitious bolt for it, and I did see the Hospital.

It was not like any hospital you had ever seen before. Except that the
wounded were all comfortably bedded, it was more like the sleeping-hall
of the Palais des Fêtes. The floor of the great concert-hall was covered
with mattresses and beds, where the wounded lay about in every attitude
of suffering. No doubt everything was in the most perfect order, and the
nurses and doctors knew how to thread their way through it all, but to
the hurried spectator in the doorway the effect was one of the most
_macabre_ confusion. Only one object stood out--the large naked back of
a Belgian soldier, who sat on the edge of his bed waiting to be washed.
He must have been really the most cheerful and (comparatively) uninjured
figure in the whole crowd, but he seemed the most pitiful, because of
the sheer human insistence of his pathetic back.

Over this back and over all that prostrate agony the enormous floriated
bronze rings that carried the lights of the concert-hall hung from the
ceiling in frightful, festive decoration.

Miss ---- whispered: "One of them is dying. We can't save him."

She seemed to regard this one as a positive slur on their record. I
thought: "Only one--among all that crowd!"

Mrs. Stobart came after us in some alarm as we ran down the garden.

"What are you doing with Miss ----? You're not going to carry her off?"

"No," I said, "we're not. She won't come."

But we have got off with Dr. ----.

Mrs. Stobart has refused the Commandant's offer of one of our best
surgeons in exchange. He is a man. And this hospital is a Feminist Show.

We dined in a great hurry in a big restaurant in one of the main
streets. The restaurant was nearly empty and funereal black cloths were
hung over the windows to obscure the lights.

Mr. Davidson (this cheerful presence was with us in our dream-like
career through Antwerp)--Mr. Davidson and I amused ourselves by planning
how we will behave when we are taken prisoner by the Germans. He is
safe, because he is an American citizen. The unfortunate thing about me
is my passport, otherwise, by means of a well-simulated nasal twang I
might get through as an American novelist. I've been mistaken for one
often enough in my own country. But, as I don't mean to be taken
prisoner, and perhaps murdered or have my hands chopped off, without a
struggle, my plan is to deliver a speech in German, as follows: "_Ich
bin eine berühmte Schriftstellerin_" (on these occasions you stick at
nothing), "_berühmt in England, aber viel berühmter in den Vereinigten
Staaten, und mein Schicksal will den Presidenten Wilson nicht
gleichgültig sein_." I added by way of rhetorical flourish as the
language went to my head: "_Er will mein Tod zu vertheidigen gut
wissen_;" but I was aware that this was overdoing it.

Mr. Davidson thought it would be better on the whole if he were to pass
me off as his wife. Perhaps it would, but it seems a pity that so much
good German should be wasted.

We got up from that dinner with even more haste than we had sat down.
All lights in the town were put out at eight-thirty, and we didn't want
to go crawling and blundering about in the dark with our ambulance car.
There was a general feeling that the faster we ran back to Ghent the
better.

We left Mr. Davidson and Dr. Wilson in Antwerp. They were staying
over-night for the fun of the thing.

Another awful struggle on the downward slope from the quay to the bridge
of boats. A bad jam at the turn. A sudden loosening and letting go of
the traffic, and we were over.

We ran back to Ghent so fast that at Saint Nicolas (where we stopped to
pick up our poor little Belgian professor) we took the wrong turn at the
fork of the road and dashed with considerable _élan_ over the Dutch
frontier. We only realized it when a sentry in an unfamiliar uniform
raised his rifle and prepared to fire, not with the cheerful,
perfunctory vigilance of our Belgians, but in a determined,
business-like manner, and the word "Achille," imparted in a burst of
confidence, produced no sympathy whatever. On the contrary, this absurd
sentry (who had come out of a straw sentry-box that was like an enormous
beehive) went on pointing his rifle at us with most unnecessary
persistence. I was so interested in seeing what he would do next that I
missed the very pleasing behaviour of the little Belgian professor, who
sat next to me, wrapped in his brown shawl. He still imagined himself
to be on the road to Ghent, and when he saw that sentry continuing to
prepare to fire in spite of our password, he concluded that we and the
road to Ghent were in the hands of the Germans. So he instantly ducked
behind me for cover and collapsed on the floor of the ambulance in his
shawl.

Then somebody said "We're in Holland!" and there were shouts of laughter
from everybody in the car except the little Belgian. Then shouts of
laughter from the Dutch sentries and Customs officers, who enjoyed this
excellent joke as much as we did.

We were now out of our course by I don't know how many miles and short
of petrol. But one of the Customs officers gave us all we wanted.

It's heart-breaking the way these dear Belgians take the British. They
have waited so long for our army, believing that it would come, till
they could believe no more. In Ghent, in Antwerp, you wouldn't know that
Belgium had any allies; you never see the British flag, or the French
either, hanging from the windows. The black, yellow and red standard
flies everywhere alone. Now that we _have_ come, their belief in us is
almost unbearable. They really think we are going to save Antwerp.
Somewhere between Antwerp and Saint Nicolas the population of a whole
village turned out to meet us with cries of "_Les Anglais! Les
Anglaises!_" and laughed for joy. Terrible for us, who had heard
Belgians say reproachfully: "We thought that the British would come to
our help. But they never came!" They said it more in sorrow than in
anger; but you couldn't persuade them that the British fought for
Belgium at Mons.

We got into Ghent about midnight.

Dr. ---- is to stay at the Hôtel de la Poste to-night.


[_Monday, 5th._]

The mosquitoes from the canal have come up and bitten me. I was ill all
night with something that felt like malarial fever, if it isn't
influenza. Couldn't get up--too drowsy.

Mr. L. came in to see me first thing in the morning. He also came to
hear at first hand the story of our run into Antwerp. He was extremely
kind. He sat and looked at me sorrowfully, as if he had been the family
doctor, and gave me some of his very own China tea (in Belgium in
war-time this is one of the most devoted things that man can do for his
brother). He was so gentle and so sympathetic that my heart went out to
him, and I forgot all about poor Mr. Davidson, and gave up to him the
whole splendid "scoop" of the British troops at Saint Nicolas.

I couldn't tell him much about the run into Antwerp. No doubt it was a
thrilling performance--through all the languor of malaria it thrills me
now when I think of it--but it wasn't much to offer a War Correspondent,
since it took us nowhere near the bombardment. It had nothing for the
psychologist or for the amateur of strange sensations, and nothing for
the pure and ardent Spirit of Adventure, and nothing for that insatiable
and implacable Self, that drives you to the abhorred experiment,
determined to know how you will come out of it. For there was no more
danger in the excursion than in a run down to Brighton and back; and I
know no more of fear or courage than I did before I started.

But now that I realize what the insatiable and implacable Self is after,
how it worked in me against all decency and all pity, how it actually
made me feel as if I wanted to see Antwerp under siege, and how the
spirit of adventure backed it up, I can forgive the Commandant. I still
think that he sinned when he took Ursula Dearmer to Termonde and to
Alost. But the temptation that assailed him at Alost and Termonde was
not to be measured by anybody who was not there.

It must have been irresistible.

Besides, it is not certain that he did take Ursula Dearmer into danger;
it is every bit as likely that she took him; more likely still that they
were both victims of _force majeure_, fascinated by the lure of the
greatest possible danger. And, oh, how I did pitch into him!

I am ashamed of the things I said in that access of insulting and
indignant virtue.

Can it be that I was jealous of Ursula Dearmer, that innocent girl,
because she saw a shell burst and I didn't? I know this is what was the
matter with Mrs. Torrence the other day. She even seemed to imply that
there was some feminine perfidy in Ursula Dearmer's power of drawing
shells to her. (She, poor dear, can't attract even a bullet within a
mile of her.)[15]

Lying there, in that mosquito-haunted room, I dissolved into a blessed
state, a beautiful, drowsy tenderness to everybody, a drowsy, beautiful
forgiveness of the Commandant. I forgot that he intimated, sternly, that
no ambulance would be at my disposal in the flight from Ghent--I
remember only that he took me into Antwerp yesterday, and that he
couldn't help it if the outer forts _were_ thirty kilometres away, and
I forgive him, beautifully and drowsily.

But when he came running up in great haste to see me, and rushed down
into the kitchens of the Hotel to order soup for me, and into the
chemist's shop in the Place d'Armes to get my medicine, and ran back
again to give it me, before I knew where I was (such is the debilitating
influence of malaria), instead of forgiving him, I found myself, in
abject contrition, actually asking him to forgive _me_.

It was all wrong, of course; but the mosquitoes had bitten me rather
badly.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Torrence and Janet McNeil have got to work at last. All afternoon
and all night yesterday they were busy between the Station and the
hospitals removing the wounded from the Antwerp trains.

And Car 1 had no sooner got into the yard of the "Flandria" to rest
after its trip to Antwerp and back than it was ordered out again with
the Commandant and Ursula Dearmer and Mrs. Torrence to meet the last
ambulance train. The chauffeur Tom was nowhere to be seen when the order
came. He was, however, found after much search, in the Park, in the
company of the Cricklewood bus and a whole regiment of Tommies.

One of these ambulance trains had been shelled by the Germans (they
couldn't have been very far from us in our run from Antwerp--it was
their nearness, in fact, that accounted for our prodigious haste!), and
many of the men came in worse wounded than they went out.

We are all tremendously excited over the arrival of the Tommies and the
Cricklewood bus. We can think of nothing else but the relief of Antwerp.

Ursula Dearmer came to see me. She understands that I have forgiven her
that shell--and why. She wore the clothes--the rather heart-rending
school-girl clothes--she wore when she came to see the Committee. But
oh, how the youngest but one has grown up since then!

Mrs. Torrence came to see me also, and Janet McNeil. Mrs. Torrence,
though that shell still rankles, is greatly appeased by the labours of
last night. So is Janet.

They told rather a nice story.

A train full of British troops from Ostend came into the station
yesterday at the same time as the ambulance train from Antwerp. The two
were drawn up one on each side of the same platform. When the wounded
Belgians saw the British they struggled to their feet. At every window
of the ambulance train bandaged heads were thrust out and bandaged hands
waved. And the Belgians shouted.

But the British stood dumb, stolid and impassive before their
enthusiasm.

Mrs. Torrence called out, "Give them a cheer, boys. They're the bravest
little soldiers in the world."

Then the Tommies let themselves go, and the Station roof nearly flew off
with the explosion.

The Corps worked till four in the morning clearing out those ambulance
trains. The wards are nearly full. And this is only the beginning.


[_Tuesday, 6th._]

Malaria gone.

The Commandant called to give his report of the ambulance work. He, Mrs.
Torrence, Janet McNeil, Ursula Dearmer and the men were working all
yesterday afternoon and evening till long past dark at Termonde. It's
the finest thing they've done yet. The men and the women crawled on
their hands and knees in the trenches [? under the river bank] under
fire. Ursula Dearmer (that girl's luck is simply staggering!)--Ursula
Dearmer, wandering adventurously apart, after dark, on the battle-field,
found a young Belgian officer, badly wounded, lying out under a tree.
She couldn't carry him, but she went for two stretchers and three men;
and they put the young officer on one stretcher, and she trotted off
with his sword, his cap and the rest of his accoutrements on the other.
He owes his life to this manifestation of her luck.

Dr. Wilson has come back from Antwerp.

It looks as if Dr. Haynes and Dr. Bird would go. At any rate, I think
they will give up working on the Field Ambulance. There aren't enough
cars for four surgeons _and_ four field-women, and they have seen hardly
any service. This is rather hard luck on them, as they gave up their
practice to come out with us. Naturally, they don't want to waste any
more time.

I managed to get some work done to-day. Wrote a paragraph about the
Ambulance for Mr. L., who will publish it in the _Westminster_ under his
name, to raise funds for us. He is more than ever certain that it (the
Ambulance) is the real thing.

Also wrote an article ("L'Hôpital Militaire, No. 2") for the _Daily
Chronicle_; the first bit of journalism I've had time or material for.

Shopped. Very _triste_ affair.

Went to mass in the Cathedral. Sat far back among the refugees.

If you want to know what Religion really is, go into a Catholic church
in a Catholic country under invasion. You only feel the tenderness, the
naïveté of Catholicism in peace-time. In war-time you realize its power.


[_Evening._]

Saw Mr. P., who has been at Termonde. He spoke with great praise of the
gallantry of our Corps.

It's odd--either I'm getting used to it, or it's the effect of that run
into Antwerp--but I'm no longer torn by fear and anxiety for their
safety.

[?] Dined with Mr. L. in a restaurant in the town. It proved to be more
expensive than either of us cared for. Our fried sole left us hungry and
yet conscience-stricken, as if after an orgy, suffering in a dreadful
communion of guilt.


[_Wednesday, 7th._]

7 A.M. Got up early and went to Mass in the Cathedral.

Prepared report for British Red Cross. Wrote "Journal of Impressions"
from September 25th to September 26th, 11 A.M. It's slow work. Haven't
got out of Ostend yet!

Fighting at Zele.


[_Afternoon._]

Got very near the fighting this time.

Mr. L. (Heaven bless him!) took me out with him in the War
Correspondents' car to see what the Ambulance was doing at Zele, and,
incidentally, to look at the bombardment of some evacuated villages near
it (I have no desire to see the bombardment of any village that has not
been evacuated first). Mr. M. came too, and they brought a Belgian lady
with them, a charming and beautiful lady, whose name I forget.

When Mr. L. told me to get up and come with him to Zele, I did get up
with an energy and enthusiasm that amazed me; I got up like one who has
been summoned at last, after long waiting, to a sure and certain
enterprise. I can trust Mr. L. or any War Correspondent who means
business, as I cannot (after Antwerp) trust the Commandant. So far, if
the Commandant happens upon a bombardment it has been either in the way
of duty, or by sheer luck, or both, as at Alost and Termonde, when duty
took him to these places, and any bombardment or firing was, as it were,
thrown in. He did not go out deliberately to seek it, for its own sake,
and find it infallibly, which is the War Correspondent's way. So that if
Mr. L. says there is going to be a bombardment, we shall probably get
somewhere nearer to it than thirty kilometres.

We took the main road to Zele. I don't know whether it was really a
continuation of the south-east road that runs under the Hospital
windows; anyhow, we left it very soon, striking southwards to the right
to find what Mr. L. believed to be a short cut. Thus we never got to
Zele at all. We came out on a good straight road that would no doubt
have led us there in time, but that we allowed ourselves to be lured by
the smoke of the great factory at Schoonard burning away to the south.

For a long time I could not believe that it was smoke we saw and not an
enormous cloud blown by the wind across miles of sky. We seemed to run
for miles with that terrible banner streaming on our right to the south,
apparently in the same place, as far off as ever. East of it, on the
sky-line, was a whole fleet of little clouds that hung low over the
earth; that rose from it; rose and were never lifted, but as they were
shredded away, scattered and vanished, were perpetually renewed. This
movement of their death and re-birth had a horrible sinister pulse in
it.

Each cloud of this fleet of clouds was the smoke from a burning village.

At last, after an endless flanking pursuit of the great cloud that
continued steadily on our right, piling itself on itself and mounting
incessantly, we struck into a side lane that seemed to lead straight to
the factory on fire. But in this direct advance the cloud eluded us at
every turn of the lane. Now it was rising straight in front of us in the
south, now it was streaming away somewhere to the west of our track.
When we went west it went east. When we went east it went west. And
wherever we went we met refugees from the burning villages. They were
trudging along slowly, very tired, very miserable, but with no panic and
no violent grief. We passed through villages and hamlets, untouched
still, but waiting quietly, and a little breathlessly, on the edge of
their doom.

At the end of one lane, where it turned straight to the east round the
square of a field we came upon a great lake ringed with trees and set in
a green place of the most serene and vivid beauty. It seemed incredible
that the same hour should bring us to this magic stillness and peace and
within sight of the smoke of war and within sound of the guns.

At the next turn we heard them.

We still thought that we could get to Schoonard, to the burning factory,
and work back to Zele by a slight round. But at this turn we had lost
sight of Schoonard and the great cloud altogether, and found ourselves
in a little hamlet Heaven knows where. Only, straight ahead of us, as we
looked westwards, we heard the guns. The sound came from somewhere over
there and from two quarters; German guns booming away on the south,
Belgian [? French] guns answering from the north.

Judging by these sounds and those we heard afterwards, we must have been
now on the outer edge of a line of fire stretching west and east and
following the course of the Scheldt. The Germans were entrenched behind
the river.

In the little hamlet we asked our way of a peasant. As far as we could
make out from his mixed French and Flemish, he told us to turn back and
take the road we had left where it goes south to the village of
Baerlaere. This we did. We gathered that we could get a road through
Baerlaere to Schoonard. Failing Schoonard, our way to Zele lay through
Baerlaere in the opposite direction.

We set off along a very bad road to Baerlaere.

Coming into Baerlaere, we saw a house with a remarkable roof, a
steep-pitched roof of black and white tiles arranged in a sort of
chequer-board pattern. I asked Mr. L. if he had ever seen a roof like
that in his life and he replied promptly, "Yes; in China." And that
roof--if it was coming into Baerlaere that we saw it--is all that I can
remember of Baerlaere. There was, I suppose, the usual church with its
steeple where the streets forked and the usual town hall near it, with a
flight of steps before the door and a three-cornered classic pediment;
and the usual double line of flat-fronted, grey-shuttered houses; I do
seem to remember these things as if they had really been there, but you
couldn't see the bottom half of the houses for the troops that were
crowded in front of them, or the top half for the shells you tried to
see and didn't. They were sweeping high up over the roofs, making for
the entrenchments and the batteries beyond the village.

We had come bang into the middle of an artillery duel. It was going on
at a range of about a mile and a half, but all over our heads, so that
though we heard it with great intensity, we saw nothing.

There were intervals of a few seconds between the firing. The Belgian [?
French] batteries were pounding away on the left quite near (the booming
seemed to come from behind the houses at our backs), and the German on
the right, farther away.

Now, you may have hated and dreaded the sound of guns all your life, as
you hate and dread any immense and violent noise, but there is something
about the sound of the first near gun of your first battle that, so far
from being hateful or dreadful, or in any way abhorrent to you, will
make you smile in spite of yourself with a kind of quiet exultation
mixed very oddly with reminiscence[16] so that, though your first
impression (by no means disagreeable) is of being "in for it," your
next, after the second and the third gun, is that of having been in for
it many times before. The effect on your nerves is now like that of
being in a very small sailing-boat in a very big-running sea. You climb
wave after high wave, and are not swallowed up as you expected. You
wait, between guns, for the boom and the shock of the next, with a
passionate anticipation, as you wait for the next wave. And the sound of
the gun when it comes is like the exhilarating smack of the wave that
you and your boat mean to resist and do resist when it gets you.

You do not think, as you used to think when you sat safe in your little
box-like house in St. John's Wood, how terrible it is that shells should
be hurtling through the air and killing men by whole regiments. You do
not think at all. Nobody anywhere near you is thinking that sort of
thing, or thinking very much at all.

At the sound of the first near gun I found myself looking across the
road at a French soldier. We were smiling at each other.

When we tried to get to Schoonard from the west end of the town we were
stopped and turned back by the General in command. Not in the least
abashed by this _contretemps_, Mr. L., after some parley with various
officers, decided not to go back in ignominious safety by the way we
came, but to push on from the east end of the village into the open
country through the line of fire that stretched between us and the road
to Zele. On our way, while we were about it, he said, we might as well
stop and have a look at the Belgian batteries at work--as if he had said
we might as well stop at Olympia and have a look at the Motor Show on
our way to Richmond.

At this point the unhappy chauffeur, who had not found himself by any
means at home in Baerlaere, remarked that he had a wife and family
dependent on him.

Mr. L. replied with dignity that he had a wife and family too, and that
we all had somebody or something; and that War Correspondents cannot
afford to think of their wives and families at these moments.

Mr. M.'s face backed up Mr. L. with an expression of extreme
determination.

The little Belgian lady smiled placidly and imperturbably, with an air
of being ready to go anywhere where these intrepid Englishmen should see
fit to take her.

I felt a little sorry for the chauffeur. He had been out with the War
Correspondents several times already, and I hadn't.

We left him and his car behind us in the village, squeezed very tight
against a stable wall that stood between them and the German fire. We
four went on a little way beyond the village and turned into a bridle
path across the open fields. At the bottom of a field to our left was a
small slump of willows; we had heard the Belgian guns firing from that
direction a few minutes before. We concluded that the battery was
concealed behind the willows. We strolled on like one half of a picnic
party that has been divided and is looking innocently for the other half
in a likely place.[17] But as we came nearer to the willows we lost our
clue. The battery had evidently made up its mind not to fire as long as
we were in sight. Like the cloud of smoke from the Schoonard factory, it
eluded us successfully. And indeed it is hardly the way of batteries to
choose positions where interested War Correspondents can come out and
find them.[18]

So we went back to the village, where we found the infantry being drawn
up in order and doing something to its rifles. For one thrilling moment
I imagined that the Germans were about to leap out of their trenches and
rush the village, and that the Belgians [? French] were preparing for a
bayonet charge.

"In that case," I thought, "we shall be very useful in picking up the
wounded and carrying them away in that car."

I never thought of the ugly rush and the horrors after it. It is
extraordinary how your mind can put away from it any thought that would
make life insupportable.

But no, they were not fixing bayonets. They were not doing anything to
their rifles; they were only stacking them.

It was then that you thought of the ugly rush and were glad that, after
all, it wouldn't happen.

You were glad--and yet in spite of that same gladness, there was a
little sense of disappointment, unaccountable, unpardonable, and not
quite sane.

One of the men showed us a burst shrapnel shell. We examined it with
great interest as the kind of thing that would be most likely to hit us
on our way from Baerlaere to Zele.

We had been barely half an hour hanging about Baerlaere, but it seemed
as if we had wasted a whole afternoon there. At last we started. We were
told to drive fast, as the fire might open on us at any minute. We drove
very fast. Our road lay through open country flat to the river, with no
sort of cover anywhere from the German fire, if it chose to come. About
half a mile ahead of us was a small hamlet that had been shelled. Mr. L.
told us to duck when we heard the guns. I remember thinking that I
particularly didn't want to be wounded in my right arm, and that as I
sat with my right arm resting on the ledge of the car it was somewhat
exposed to the German batteries, so I wriggled low down in my seat and
tucked my arm well under cover for quite five minutes. But you couldn't
see anything that way, so I popped up again and presently forgot all
about my valuable arm in the sheer excitement of the rush through the
danger zone. Our car was low on the ground; still, it was high enough
and big enough to serve as a mark for the German guns and it fairly gave
them the range of the road.

But though the guns had been pounding away before we started, they
ceased firing as we went through.

That, however, was sheer luck. And presently it was brought home to me
that we were not the only persons involved in the risk of this joyous
adventure. Just outside the bombarded hamlet ahead of us we were stopped
by some Belgian [? French] soldiers hidden in the cover of a ditch by
the roadside, which if it was not a trench might very easily have been
one. They were talking in whispers for fear of being overheard by the
Germans, who must have been at least a mile off, across the fields on
the other side of the river. A mile seemed a pretty safe distance; but
Mr. L. said it wouldn't help us much, considering that the range of
their guns was twenty-four miles. The soldiers told us we couldn't
possibly get through to Zele. That was true. The road was blocked--by
the ruins of the hamlet--not twenty yards from where we were pulled up.
We got out of the car; and while Mr. L. and the Belgian lady conversed
with the soldiers, Mr. M. and I walked on to investigate the road.

At the abrupt end of a short row of houses it stopped where it should
have turned suddenly, and became a rubbish-heap lying in a waste place.

Just at first I thought we must have gone out of our course somehow and
missed the road to Zele. It was difficult to realize that this
rubbish-heap lying in a waste place ever _had_ been a road. But for the
shell of a house that stood next to it, the last of the row, and the
piles of lath and plaster, and the shattered glass on the sidewalk and
the blown dust everywhere, it might have passed for the ordinary
no-thoroughfare of an abandoned brick-field.

Mr. M. made me keep close under the wall of a barn or something on the
other side of the street, the only thing that stood between us and the
German batteries. Beyond the barn were the green fields bare to the guns
that had shelled this end of the village. At first we hugged our shelter
tight, only looking out now and then round the corner of the barn into
the open country.

A flat field, a low line of willows at the bottom, and somewhere behind
the willows the German batteries. Grey puffs were still curling about
the stems and clinging to the tops of the willows. They might have been
mist from the river or smoke from the guns we had heard. I hadn't time
to watch them, for suddenly Mr. M. darted from his cover and made an
alarming sally into the open field.

He said he wanted to find some pieces of nice hot shell for me.

So I had to run out after Mr. M. and tell him I didn't want any pieces
of hot shell, and pull him back into safety.

All for nothing. Not a gun fired.

We strolled across what was left of the narrow street and looked through
the window-frames of a shattered house. It had been a little inn. The
roof and walls of the parlour had been wrecked, so had most of the
furniture. But on a table against the inner wall a row of clean glasses
still stood in their order as the landlord had left them; and not one of
them was broken.

I suppose it must have been about time for the guns to begin firing
again, for Mr. L. called to us to come back and to look sharp too. So we
ran for it. And as we leaped into the car Mr. L. reproved Mr. M. gravely
and virtuously for "taking a lady into danger."

The car rushed back into Baerlaere if anything faster than it had rushed
out, Mr. L. sitting bolt upright with an air of great majesty and
integrity. I remember thinking that it would never, never do to duck if
the shells came, for if we did Mr. L.'s head would stand out like a
noble monument and he would be hit as infallibly as any cathedral in
Belgium.

It seems that the soldiers were not particularly pleased at our
blundering up against their trench in our noisy car, which, they said,
might draw down the German fire at any minute on the Belgian lines.

We got into Ghent after dark by the way we came.


[_Evening._]

Called at the "Flandria." Ursula Dearmer and two Belgian nurses have
been sent to the convent at Zele to work there to-night.

Mr. ---- is here. But you wouldn't know him. I have just been introduced
to him without knowing him. Before the War he was a Quaker,[19] a
teetotaller, and a pacifist at any price. And I suppose he wore clothes
that conformed more or less to his principles. Now he is wearing
the uniform of a British naval officer. He is drinking long
whiskies-and-sodas in the restaurant, in the society of Major R. And the
Major's khaki doesn't give a point to the Quaker's uniform. As for the
Quaker, they say he could give points to any able seaman when it comes
to swear words (but this may be sheer affectionate exaggeration). His
face and his high, hatchet nose, whatever colour they used to be, are
now the colour of copper--not an ordinary, Dutch kettle and
coal-scuttle, pacifist, arts-and-crafts copper, but a fine old,
truculent, damn-disarmament, Krupp-&-Co., bloody, ammunition copper, and
battered by the wars of all the world. He is the commander and the
owner of an armoured car, one of the unit of five volunteer armoured
cars. I do not know whether he was happy or unhappy when there wasn't a
war. No man, and certainly no Quaker, could possibly be happier than
this Quaker is now. He and the Major have been out potting Germans all
the afternoon. (They have accounted for nine.) A schoolboy who has hit
the mark nine times running with his first toy rifle is not merrier
than, if as merry as, these more than mature men with their armoured
car. They do not say much, but you gather that it is more fun being a
volunteer than a regular; it is to enjoy delight with liberty, the
maximum of risk with the minimum of responsibility.

And their armoured car--if it is the one I saw standing to-day in the
Place d'Armes--it is, as far as you can make out through its disguises,
an ordinary open touring car, with a wooden hoarding (mere matchboard)
stuck all round it, the whole painted grey to simulate, armoured
painting. Through four holes, fore and aft and on either side of her,
their machine-guns rake the horizon. The Major and Mr. ---- sit inside,
hidden behind the matchboard plating. They scour the country. When they
see any Germans they fire and bring them down. It is quite simple. When
you inquire how they can regard that old wooden rabbit-hutch as an
armoured cover, they reply that their car isn't for defence, it's for
attack. The Germans have only to see their guns and they're off. And
really it looks like it, since the two are actually here before your
eyes, drinking whiskies-and-sodas, and the rest of the armoured car
corps are alive somewhere in Ghent.

Dear Major R. and Mr. ---- (whom I never met before), unless they read
this Journal, which isn't likely, they will never know how my heart
warmed towards them, nor how happy I count myself in being allowed to
see them. They 

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