KINGS, QUEENS AND PAWNS
_An American Woman at the Front_
BY
MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
AUTHOR OF
"K"
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
1915
CONTENTS
FOR KING AND COUNTRY
I. TAKING A CHANCE
II. "SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE"
III. LA PANNE
IV. "'TWAS A FAMOUS VICTORY"
V. A TALK WITH THE KING OF THE BELGIANS
VI. THE CAUSE
VII. THE STORY WITH AN END
VIII. THE NIGHT RAID ON DUNKIRK
IX. NO MAN'S LAND
X. THE IRON DIVISION
XI. AT THE HOUSE OF THE BARRIER
XII. NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES
XIII. "WIPERS"
XIV. LADY DECIES' STORY
XV. RUNNING THE BLOCKADE
XVI. THE MAN OF YPRES
XVII. IN THE LINE OF THE "MITRAILLEUSE"
XVIII. FRENCH GUNS IN ACTION
XIX. "I NIBBLE THEM"
XX. DUNKIRK: FROM MY JOURNAL
XXI. TEA WITH THE AIR-FIGHTERS
XXII. THE WOMEN AT THE FRONT
XXIII. THE LITTLE "SICK AND SORRY" HOUSE
XXIV. FLIGHT
XXV. VOLUNTEERS AND PATRIOTS
XXVI. A LUNCHEON AT BRITISH HEADQUARTERS
XXVII. A STRANGE PARTY
XXVIII. SIR JOHN FRENCH
XXIX. ALONG THE GREAT BETHUNE ROAD
XXX. THE MILITARY SECRET
XXXI. QUEEN MARY OF ENGLAND
XXXII. THE QUEEN OF THE BELGIANS
XXXIII. THE RED BADGE OF MERCY
XXXIV. IN TERMS OF LIFE AND DEATH
XXXV. THE LOSING GAME
XXXVI. HOW AMERICANS CAN HELP
XXXVII. AN ARMY OF CHILDREN
KINGS, QUEENS AND PAWNS
KINGS, QUEENS AND PAWNS
FOR KING AND COUNTRY
March in England is spring. Early in the month masses of snowdrops
lined the paths in Hyde Park. The grass was green, the roads hard and
dry under the eager feet of Kitchener's great army. For months they
had been drilling, struggling with the intricacies of a new career,
working and waiting. And now it was spring, and soon they would be
off. Some had already gone.
"Lucky beggars!" said the ones who remained, and counted the days.
And waiting, they drilled. Everywhere there were squads: Scots in
plaid kilts with khaki tunics; less picturesque but equally imposing
regiments in the field uniform, with officers hardly distinguishable
from their men. Everywhere the same grim but cheerful determination to
get over and help the boys across the Channel to assist in holding
that more than four hundred miles of battle line against the invading
hosts of Germany.
Here in Hyde Park that spring day was all the panoply of war: bands
playing, the steady tramp of numberless feet, the muffled clatter of
accoutrements, the homage of the waiting crowd. And they deserved
homage, those fine, upstanding men, many of them hardly more than
boys, marching along with a fine, full swing. There is something
magnificent, a contagion of enthusiasm, in the sight of a great
volunteer army. The North and the South knew the thrill during our own
great war. Conscription may form a great and admirable machine, but it
differs from the trained army of volunteers as a body differs from a
soul. But it costs a country heavy in griefs, does a volunteer army;
for the flower of the country goes. That, too, America knows, and
England is learning.
They marched by gaily. The drums beat. The passers-by stopped. Here
and there an open carriage or an automobile drew up, and pale men,
some of them still in bandages, sat and watched. In their eyes was the
same flaming eagerness, the same impatience to get back, to be loosed
against the old lion's foes.
For King and Country!
All through England, all through France, all through that tragic
corner of Belgium which remains to her, are similar armies, drilling
and waiting, equally young, equally eager, equally resolute. And the
thing they were going to I knew. I had seen it in that mysterious
region which had swallowed up those who had gone before; in the
trenches, in the operating, rooms of field hospitals, at outposts
between the confronting armies where the sentries walked hand in hand
with death. I had seen it in its dirt and horror and sordidness, this
thing they were going to.
War is not two great armies meeting in a clash and frenzy of battle.
It is much more than that. War is a boy carried on a stretcher,
looking up at God's blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to
close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been wounded by a
shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting
for death; war is the flower of a race, torn, battered, hungry,
bleeding, up to its knees in icy water; war is an old woman burning a
candle before the Mater Dolorosa for the son she has given. For King
and Country!
CHAPTER I
TAKING A CHANCE
I started for the Continent on a bright day early in January. I was
searched by a woman from Scotland Yard before being allowed on the
platform. The pockets of my fur coat were examined; my one piece of
baggage, a suitcase, was inspected; my letters of introduction were
opened and read.
"Now, Mrs. Rinehart," she said, straightening, "just why are you
going?"
I told her exactly half of why I was going. I had a shrewd idea that
the question in itself meant nothing. But it gave her a good chance to
look at me. She was a very clever woman.
And so, having been discovered to be carrying neither weapons nor
seditious documents, and having an open and honest eye, I was allowed
to go through the straight and narrow way that led to possible
destruction. Once or twice, later on, I blamed that woman for letting
me through. I blamed myself for telling only half of my reasons for
going. Had I told her all she would have detained me safely in
England, where automobiles sometimes go less than eighty miles an
hour, and where a sharp bang means a door slamming in the wind and not
a shell exploding, where hostile aeroplanes overhead with bombs and
unpleasant little steel darts, were not always between one's eyes and
heaven. She let me through, and I went out on the platform.
The leaving of the one-o'clock train from Victoria Station, London, is
an event and a tragedy. Wounded who have recovered are going back;
soldiers who have been having their week at home are returning to that
mysterious region across the Channel, the front.
Not the least of the British achievements had been to transport,
during the deadlock of the first winter of the war, almost the entire
army, in relays, back to England for a week's rest. It had been done
without the loss of a man, across a channel swarming with hostile
submarines. They came in thousands, covered with mud weary, eager,
their eyes searching the waiting crowd for some beloved face. And
those who waited and watched as the cars emptied sometimes wept with
joy and sometimes turned and went away alone.
Their week over, rested, tidy, eyes still eager but now turned toward
France, the station platform beside the one-o'clock train was filled
with soldiers going back. There were few to see them off; there were
not many tears. Nothing is more typical of the courage and patriotism
of the British women than that platform beside the one-o'clock train
at Victoria. The crowd was shut out by ropes and Scotland Yard men
stood guard. And out on the platform, saying little because words are
so feeble, pacing back and forth slowly, went these silent couples.
They did not even touch hands. One felt that all the unselfish
stoicism and restraint would crumble under the familiar touch.
The platform filled. Sir Purtab Singh, an Indian prince, with his
suite, was going back to the English lines. I had been a neighbour of
his at Claridge's Hotel in London. I caught his eye. It was filled
with cold suspicion. It said quite plainly that I could put nothing
over on him. But whether he suspected me of being a newspaper writer
or a spy I do not know.
Somehow, considering that the train was carrying a suspicious and
turbaned Indian prince, any number of impatient officers and soldiers,
and an American woman who was carefully avoiding the war office and
trying to look like a buyer crossing the Channel for hats, the whistle
for starting sounded rather inadequate. It was not martial. It was
thin, effeminate, absurd. And so we were off, moving slowly past that
line on the platform, where no one smiled; where grief and tragedy, in
that one revealing moment, were written deep. I shall never forget the
faces of the women as the train crept by.
And now the train was well under way. The car was very quiet. The
memory of those faces on the platform was too fresh. There was a brown
and weary officer across from me. He sat very still, looking straight
ahead. Long after the train had left London, and was moving smoothly
through the English fields, so green even in winter, he still sat in
the same attitude.
I drew a long breath, and ordered luncheon. I was off to the war. I
might be turned back at Folkstone. There was more than a chance that I
might not get beyond Calais, which was under military law. But at
least I had made a start.
This is a narrative of personal experience. It makes no pretensions,
except to truth. It is pure reporting, a series of pictures, many of
them disconnected, but all authentic. It will take a hundred years to
paint this war on one canvas. A thousand observers, ten thousand, must
record what they have seen. To the reports of trained men must be
added a bit here and there from these untrained observers, who without
military knowledge, ignorant of the real meaning of much that they
saw, have been able to grasp only a part of the human significance of
the great tragedy of Europe.
I was such an observer.
My errand was primarily humane, to visit the hospitals at or near the
front, and to be able to form an opinion of what supplies were needed,
of conditions generally. Rumour in America had it that the medical and
surgical situation was chaotic. Bands of earnest and well-intentioned
people were working quite in the dark as to the conditions they hoped
to relieve. And over the hospital situation, as over the military,
brooded the impenetrable silence that has been decreed by the Allies
since the beginning of the war. I had met everywhere in America tales
from both the German and the Allies' lines that had astounded me. It
seemed incredible that such conditions could exist in an age of
surgical enlightenment; that, even in an unexpected and unprepared-for
war, modern organisation and efficiency should have utterly failed.
On the steamer crossing the Atlantic, with the ship speeding on her
swift and rather precarious journey windows and ports carefully closed
and darkened, one heard the same hideous stories: of tetanus in
uncounted cases, of fearful infections, of no bandages - worst of all,
of no anæsthetics.
I was a member of the American Red Cross Association, but I knew that
the great work of the American Red Cross was in sending supplies. The
comparatively few nurses they had sent to the western field of war
were not at the front or near it. The British, French, Belgian and
Dutch nursing associations were in charge of the field hospitals, so
far as I could discover.
To see these hospitals, to judge and report conditions, then, was a
part of my errand. Only a part, of course; for I had another purpose.
I knew nothing of strategy or tactics, of military movements and their
significance. I was not interested in them particularly. But I meant
to get, if it was possible, a picture of this new warfare that would
show it for the horror that it is; a picture that would give pause to
that certain percentage of the American people that is always so eager
to force a conservative government into conflict with other nations.
There were other things to learn. What was France doing? The great
sister republic had put a magnificent army into the field. Between
France and the United States were many bonds, much reciprocal good
feeling. The Statue of Liberty, as I went down the bay, bespoke the
kindly feeling between the two republics. I remembered Lafayette.
Battle-scarred France, where liberty has fought so hard for life - what
was France doing? Not saying much, certainly. Fighting, surely, as the
French have always fought. For certainly England, with her gallant but
at that time meagre army, was not fighting alone the great war.
But there were three nations fighting the allied cause in the west.
What had become of the heroic Belgian Army? Was it resting on its
laurels? Having done its part, was it holding an honorary position in
the great line-up? Was it a fragment or an army, an entity or a
memory?
The newspapers were full of details that meant nothing: names of
strange villages, movements backward and forward as the long battle
line bent and straightened again. But what was really happening beyond
the barriers that guarded the front so jealously? How did the men live
under these new and strange conditions? What did they think? Or fear?
Or hope?
Great lorries and transports went out from the French coast towns and
disappeared beyond the horizon; motor ambulances and hospital trains
came in with the grim harvest. Men came and, like those who had gone
before, they too went out and did not come back. "Somewhere in
France," the papers said. Such letters as they wrote came from
"somewhere in France." What was happening then, over there, beyond the
horizon, "somewhere in France"?
And now that I have been beyond the dead line many of these questions
have answered themselves. France is saying nothing, and fighting
magnificently, Belgium, with two-thirds of her army gone, has still
fifty thousand men, and is preparing two hundred thousand more.
Instead of merely an honorary position, she is holding tenaciously,
against repeated onslaughts and under horrible conditions, the flooded
district between Nieuport and Dixmude. England, although holding only
thirty-two miles of front, beginning immediately south of Ypres, is
holding that line against some of the most furious fighting of the
war, and is developing, at the same time, an enormous fighting machine
for the spring movement.[A]
[Footnote A: This is written of conditions in the early spring of
1915. Although the relative positions of the three armies are the
same, the British are holding a considerably longer frontage.]
The British soldier is well equipped, well fed, comfortably
transported. When it is remembered that England is also assisting to
equip all the allied armies, it will be seen that she is doing much
more than holding the high seas.
To see the wounded, then; to follow the lines of hospital trains to
that mysterious region, the front; to see the men in the trenches and
in their billets; to observe their _morale_, the conditions under
which they lived - and died. It was too late to think of the cause of
the war or of the justice or injustice of that cause. It will never be
too late for its humanities and inhumanities, its braveries and its
occasional flinchings, its tragedies and its absurdities.
It was through the assistance of the Belgian Red Cross that I got out
of England and across the Channel. I visited the Anglo-Belgian
Committee at its quarters in the Savoy Hotel, London, and told them of
my twofold errand. They saw at once the point I made. America was
sending large amounts of money and vast quantities of supplies to the
Belgians on both sides of the line. What was being done in interned
Belgium was well known. But those hospital supplies and other things
shipped to Northern France were swallowed up in the great silence. The
war would not be ended in a day or a month.
"Let me see conditions as they really are," I said. "It is no use
telling me about them. Let me see them. Then I can tell the American
people what they have already done in the war zone, and what they may
be asked to do."
Through a piece of good luck Doctor Depage, the president, had come
across the Channel to a conference, and was present. A huge man, in
the uniform of a colonel of the Belgian Army, with a great military
cape, he seemed to fill and dominate the little room.
They conferred together in rapid French.
"Where do you wish to go?" I was asked.
"Everywhere."
"Hospitals are not always cheerful to visit."
"I am a graduate of a hospital training-school. Also a member of the
American Red Cross."
They conferred again.
"Madame will not always be comfortable - over there."
"I don't want to be comfortable," I said bravely.
Another conference. The idea was a new one; it took some mental
readjustment. But their cause was just, and mingled with their desire
to let America know what they were doing was a justifiable pride. They
knew what I was to find out - that one of the finest hospitals in the
world, as to organisation, equipment and results, was situated almost
under the guns of devastated Nieuport, so close that the roar of
artillery is always in one's ears.
I had expected delays, a possible refusal. Everyone had encountered
delays of one sort and another. Instead, I found a most courteous and
agreeable permission given. I was rather dazed. And when, a day or so
later, through other channels, I found myself in possession of letters
to the Baron de Broqueville, Premier and Minister of War for Belgium,
and to General Melis, Inspector General of the Belgian Army Medical
Corps, I realised that, once in Belgian territory, my troubles would
probably be at an end.
For getting out of England I put my faith in a card given me by the
Belgian Red Cross. There are only four such cards in existence, and
mine was number four.
From Calais to La Panne! If I could get to Calais I could get to the
front, for La Panne is only four miles from Nieuport, where the
confronting lines of trenches begin. But Calais was under military
law. Would I be allowed to land?
Such writers as reached there were allowed twenty-four hours, and were
then shipped back across the Channel or to some innocuous destination
south. Yet this little card, if all went well, meant the privilege of
going fifty miles northeast to the actual front. True, it gave no
chance for deviation. A mile, a hundred feet off the straight and
tree-lined road north to La Panne, and I should be arrested. But the
time to think about that would come later on.
As a matter of fact, I have never been arrested. Except in the
hospitals, I was always practically where I had no business to be. I
had a room in the Hôtel des Arcades, in Dunkirk, for weeks, where,
just round the corner, the police had closed a house for a month as a
punishment because a room had been rented to a correspondent. The
correspondent had been sentenced to five years' imprisonment, but had
been released after five weeks. I was frankly a writer. I was almost
aggressively a writer. I wrote down carefully and openly everything I
saw. I made, but of course under proper auspices and with the
necessary permits, excursions to the trenches from Nieuport to the La
Bassée region and Béthune, along Belgian, French and English lines,
always openly, always with a notebook. And nothing happened!
As my notebook became filled with data I grew more and more anxious,
while the authorities grew more calm. Suppose I fell into the hands of
the Germans! It was a large notebook, filled with much information. I
could never swallow the thing, as officers are supposed to swallow the
password slips in case of capture. After a time the general spy alarm
got into my blood. I regarded the boy who brought my morning coffee
with suspicion, and slept with my notes under my pillow. And nothing
happened!
I had secured my passport _visé_ at the French and Belgian Consulates,
and at the latter legation was able also to secure a letter asking the
civil and military authorities to facilitate my journey. The letter
had been requested for me by Colonel Depage.
It was almost miraculously easy to get out of England. It was almost
suspiciously easy. My passport frankly gave the object of my trip as
"literary work." Perhaps the keen eyes of the inspectors who passed me
onto the little channel boat twinkled a bit as they examined it.
The general opinion as to the hopelessness of my trying to get nearer
than thirty miles to the front had so communicated itself to me that
had I been turned back there on the quay at Folkstone, I would have
been angry, but hardly surprised.
Not until the boat was out in the channel did I feel sure that I was
to achieve even this first leg of the journey.
Even then, all was not well. With Folkstone and the war office well
behind, my mind turned to submarines as a sunflower to the sun.
Afterward I found that the thing to do is not to think about
submarines. To think of politics, or shampoos, or of people one does
not like, but not of submarines. They are like ghosts in that respect.
They are perfectly safe and entirely innocuous as long as one thinks
of something else.
And something went wrong almost immediately.
It was imperative that I get to Calais. And the boat, which had
intended making Calais, had had a report of submarines and headed for
Boulogne. This in itself was upsetting. To have, as one may say, one's
teeth set for Calais, and find one is biting on Boulogne, is not
agreeable. I did not want Boulogne. My pass was from Calais. I had
visions of waiting in Boulogne, of growing old and grey waiting, or of
trying to walk to Calais and being turned back, of being locked in a
cow stable and bedded down on straw. For fear of rousing hopes that
must inevitably be disappointed, again nothing happened.
There were no other women on board: only British officers and the
turbaned and imposing Indians. The day was bright, exceedingly cold.
The boat went at top speed, her lifeboats slung over the sides and
ready for lowering. There were lookouts posted everywhere. I did not
think they attended to their business. Every now and then one lifted
his head and looked at the sky or at the passengers. I felt that I
should report him. What business had he to look away from the sea? I
went out to the bow and watched for periscopes. There were black
things floating about. I decided that they were not periscopes, but
mines. We went very close to them. They proved to be buoys marking the
Channel.
I hated to take my eyes off the sea, even for a moment. If you have
ever been driven at sixty miles an hour over a bad road, and felt that
if you looked away the car would go into the ditch, and if you will
multiply that by the exact number of German submarines and then add
the British Army, you will know how I felt.
Afterward I grew accustomed to the Channel crossing. I made it four
times. It was necessary for me to cross twice after the eighteenth of
February, when the blockade began. On board the fated Arabic, later
sunk by a German submarine, I ran the blockade again to return to
America. It was never an enjoyable thing to brave submarine attack,
but one develops a sort of philosophy. It is the same with being under
fire. The first shell makes you jump. The second you speak of,
commenting with elaborate carelessness on where it fell. This is a
gain over shell number one, when you cannot speak to save your life.
The third shell you ignore, and the fourth you forget about - if you
can.
Seeing me alone the captain asked me to the canvas shelter of the
bridge. I proceeded to voice my protest at our change of destination.
He apologised, but we continued to Boulogne.
"What does a periscope look like?" I asked. "I mean, of course, from
this boat?"
"Depends on how much of it is showing. Sometimes it's only about the
size of one of those gulls. It's hard to tell the difference."
I rather suspect that captain now. There were many gulls sitting on
the water. I had been looking for something like a hitching post
sticking up out of the water. Now my last vestige of pleasure and
confidence was gone. I went almost mad trying to watch all the gulls
at once.
"What will you do if you see a submarine?'
"Run it down," said the captain calmly. "That's the only chance we've
got. That is, if we see the boat itself. These little Channel steamers
make about twenty-six knots, and the submarine, submerged, only about
half of that. Sixteen is the best they can do on the surface. Run them
down and sink them, that's my motto."
"What about a torpedo?"
"We can see them coming. It will be hard to torpedo this boat - she
goes too fast."
Then and there he explained to me the snowy wake of the torpedo, a
white path across the water; the mechanism by which it is kept true to
its course; the detonator that explodes it. From nervousness I shifted
to enthusiasm. I wanted to see the white wake. I wanted to see the
Channel boat dodge it. My sporting blood was up. I was willing to take
a chance. I felt that if there was a difficulty this man would escape
it. I turned and looked back at the khaki-coloured figures on the deck
below.
Taking a chance! They were all taking a chance. And there was one, an
officer, with an empty right sleeve. And suddenly what for an
enthusiastic moment, in that bracing sea air, had seemed a game,
became the thing that it is, not a game, but a deadly and cruel war. I
never grew accustomed to the tragedy of the empty sleeve. And as if to
accentuate this thing toward which I was moving so swiftly, the
British Red Cross ship, from Boulogne to Folkstone, came in sight,
hurrying over with her wounded, a great white boat, garnering daily
her harvest of wounded and taking them "home."
Land now - a grey-white line that is the sand dunes at Ambleteuse,
north of Boulogne. I knew Ambleteuse. It gave a sense of strangeness
to see the old tower at the water's edge loom up out of the sea. The
sight of land was comforting, but vigilance was not relaxed. The
attacks of submarines have been mostly made not far outside the
harbours, and only a few days later that very boat was to make a
sensational escape just outside the harbour of Boulogne.
All at once it was twilight, the swift dusk of the sea. The boat
warped in slowly. I showed my passport, and at last I was on French
soil. North and east, beyond the horizon, lay the thing I had come to
see.
CHAPTER II
"SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE"
Many people have seen Boulogne and have written of what they have
seen: the great hotels that are now English hospitals; the crowding of
transport wagons; the French signs, which now have English signs added
to them; the mixture of uniforms - English khaki and French blue; the
white steamer waiting at the quay, with great Red Crosses on her snowy
funnels. Over everything, that first winter of the war, hung the damp
chill of the Continental winter, that chill that sinks in and never
leaves, that penetrates fur and wool and eats into the spirit like an
acid.
I got through the customs without much difficulty. I had a large
package of cigarettes for the soldiers, for given his choice, food or
a smoke, the soldier will choose the latter. At last after much talk I
got them in free of duty. And then I was footfree.
Here again I realise that I should have encountered great
difficulties. I should at least have had to walk to Calais, or to have
slept, as did one titled Englishwoman I know, in a bathtub. I did
neither. I took a first-class ticket to Calais, and waited round the
station until a train should go.
And then I happened on one of the pictures that will stand out always
in my mind. Perhaps it was because I was not yet inured to suffering;
certainly I was to see many similar scenes, much more of the flotsam
and jetsam of the human tide that was sweeping back and forward over
the flat fields of France and Flanders.
A hospital train had come in, a British train. The twilight had
deepened into night. Under the flickering arc lamps, in that cold and
dismal place, the train came to a quiet stop. Almost immediately it
began to unload. A door opened and a British nurse alighted. Then
slowly and painfully a man in a sitting position slid forward, pushing
himself with his hands, his two bandaged feet held in the air. He sat
at the edge of the doorway and lowered his feet carefully until they
hung free.
"Frozen feet from the trenches," said a man standing beside me.
The first man was lifted down and placed on a truck, and his place was
filled immediately by another. As fast as one man was taken another
came. The line seemed endless. One and all, their faces expressed keen
apprehension, lest some chance awkwardness should touch or jar the
tortured feet. Ten at a time they were wheeled away. And still they
came and came, until perhaps two hundred had been taken off. But now
something else was happening. Another car of badly wounded was being
unloaded. Through the windows could be seen the iron framework on
which the stretchers, three in a tier, were swung.
Halfway down the car a wide window was opened, and two tall
lieutenants, with four orderlies, took their places outside. It was
very silent. Orders were given in low tones. The muffled rumble of the
trucks carrying the soldiers with frozen feet was all that broke the
quiet, and soon they, too, were gone; and there remained only the six
men outside, receiving with hands as gentle as those of women the
stretchers so cautiously worked over the window sill to them. One by
one the stretchers came; one by one they were added to the lengthening
line that lay prone on the stone flooring beside the train. There was
not a jar, not an unnecessary motion. One great officer, very young,
took the weight of the end as it came toward him, and lowered it with
marvellous gentleness as the others took hold. He had a trick of the
wrist that enabled him to reach up, take hold and lower the stretcher,
without freeing his hands. He was marvellously strong, marvellously
tender.
The stretchers were laid out side by side. Their occupants did not
speak or move. It was as if they had reached their limit of endurance.
They lay with closed eyes, or with impassive, upturned faces, swathed
in their brown blankets against the chill. Here and there a knitted
neck scarf had been loosely wrapped about a head. All over America
women were knitting just such scarfs.
And still the line grew. The car seemed inexhaustible of horrors. And
still the young lieutenant with the tender hands and the strong wrists
took the onus of the burden, the muscles of his back swelling under
his khaki tunic. If I were asked to typify the attitude of the British
Army and of the British people toward their wounded, I should point to
that boy. Nothing that I know of in history can equal the care the
English are taking of their wounded in this, the great war. They have,
of course, the advantage of the best nursing system in Europe.
France is doing her best, but her nursing had always been in the hands
of nuns, and there are not nearly enough nuns in France to-day to cope
with the situation. Belgium, with some of the greatest surgeons in the
world, had no organised nursing system when war broke out. She is
largely dependent apparently on the notable work of her priests, and
on English and Dutch nurses.
When my train drew out, the khaki-clad lieutenant and his assistants
were still at work. One car was emptied. They moved on to a second.
Other willing hands were at work on the line that stretched along the
stone flooring, carrying the wounded to ambulances, but the line
seemed hardly to shrink. Always the workers inside the train brought
another stretcher and yet another. The rumble of the trucks had
ceased. It was very cold. I could not look any longer.
It took three hours to go the twenty miles to Calais, from six o'clock
to nine. I wrapped myself in my fur coat. Two men in my compartment
slept comfortably. One clutched a lighted cigarette. It burned down
close to his fingers. It was fascinating to watch. But just when it
should have provided a little excitement he wakened. It was
disappointing.
We drifted into conversation, the gentleman of the cigarette and I. He
was an Englishman from a London newspaper. He was counting on his luck
to get him into Calais and his wit to get him out. He told me his
name. Just before I left France I heard of a highly philanthropic and
talented gentleman of the same name who was unselfishly going through
the hospitals as near the front as he could, giving a moving-picture
entertainment to the convalescent soldiers. I wish him luck; he
deserves it. And I am sure he is giving a good entertainment. His wit
had got him out of Calais!
Calais at last, and the prospect of food. Still greater comfort, here
my little card became operative. I was no longer a refugee, fleeing
and hiding from the stern eyes of Lord Kitchener and the British War
Office. I had come into my own, even to supper.
I saw no English troops that night. The Calais station was filled with
French soldiers. The first impression, after the trim English uniform,
was not particularly good. They looked cold, dirty, unutterably weary.
Later, along the French front, I revised my early judgment. But I have
never reconciled myself to the French uniform, with its rather
slovenly cut, or to the tendency of the French private soldier to
allow his beard to grow. It seems a pity that both French and
Belgians, magnificent fighters that they are, are permitted this
slackness in appearance. There are no smarter officers anywhere than
the French and Belgian officers, but the appearance of their troops
_en masse_ is not imposing.
Later on, also, a close inspection of the old French uniform revealed
it as made of lighter cloth than the English, less durable, assuredly
less warm. The new grey-blue uniform is much heavier, but its colour
is questionable. It should be almost invisible in the early morning
mists, but against the green of spring and summer, or under the
magnesium flares - called by the English "starlights" - with which the
Germans illuminate the trenches of the Allies during the night, it
appeared to me that it would be most conspicuous.
I have before me on my writing table a German fatigue cap. Under the
glare of my electric lamp it fades, loses colour and silhouette, is
eclipsed. I have tried it in sunlight against grass. It does the same
thing. A piece of the same efficient management that has distributed
white smocks and helmet covers among the German troops fighting in the
rigours of Poland, to render them invisible against the snow!
Calais then, with food to get and an address to find. For Doctor
Depage had kindly arranged a haven for me. Food, of a sort, I got at
last. The hotel dining room was full of officers. Near me sat fourteen
members of the aviation corps, whose black leather coats bore, either
on left breast or left sleeve, the outspread wings of the flying
division. There were fifty people, perhaps, and two waiters, one a
pale and weary boy. The food was bad, but the crisp French bread was
delicious. Perhaps nowhere in the world is the bread average higher
than in France - just as in America, where fancy breads are at their
best, the ordinary wheat loaf is, taking the average, exceedingly
poor.
Calais was entirely dark. The Zeppelin attack, which took place four
or five weeks later, was anticipated, and on the night of my arrival
there was a general feeling that the birthday of the German Emperor
the next day would produce something spectacular in the way of an air
raid. That explained, possibly, the presence so far from the
front - fifty miles from the nearest point - of so many flying men.
As my French conversational powers are limited, I had some difficulty
in securing a vehicle. This was explained later by the discovery the
next day that no one is allowed on the streets of Calais after ten
o'clock. Nevertheless I secured a hack, and rode blithely and
unconsciously to the house where I was to spend the night. I have lost
the address of that house. I wish I could remember it, for I left
there a perfectly good and moderately expensive pair of field glasses.
I have been in Calais since, and have had the wild idea of driving
about the streets until I find it and my glasses. But a close scrutiny
of the map of Calais has deterred me. Age would overtake me, and I
should still be threading the maze of those streets, seeking an old
house in an old garden, both growing older all the time.
A very large house it was, large and cold. I found that I was
expected; but an air of unreality hung over everything. I met three or
four most kindly Belgian people of whom I knew nothing and who knew
nothing of me. I did not know exactly why I was there, and I am sure
the others knew less. I went up to my room in a state of bewilderment.
It was a huge room without a carpet, and the tiny fire refused to
light. There was a funeral wreath over the bed, with the picture of
the deceased woman in the centre. It was bitterly cold, and there was
a curious odor of disinfectants in the air.
By a window was a narrow black iron bed without a mattress. It looked
sinister. Where was the mattress? Had its last occupant died and the
mattress been burned? I sniffed about it; the odour of disinfectant
unmistakably clung to it. I do not yet know the story of that room or
of that bed. Perhaps there is no story. But I think there is. I put on
my fur coat and went to bed, and the lady of the wreath came in the
night and talked French to me.
I rose in the morning at seven degrees Centigrade and dressed. At
breakfast part of the mystery was cleared up. The house was being used
as a residence by the chief surgeon of the Ambulance Jeanne d'Arc, the
Belgian Red Cross hospital in Calais, and by others interested in the
Red Cross work. It was a dormitory also for the English nurses from
the ambulance. This explained, naturally, my being sent there, the
somewhat casual nature of the furnishing and the odour of
disinfectants. It does not, however, explain the lady of the wreath or
the black iron bed.
After breakfast some of the nurses came in from night duty at the
ambulance. I saw their bedroom, one directly underneath mine, with
four single beds and no pretence at comfort. It was cold, icy cold.
"You are very courageous," I said. "Surely this is not very
comfortable. I should think you might at least have a fire."
"We never think of a fire," a nurse said simply. "The best we can do
seems so little to what the men are doing, doesn't it?"
She was not young. Some one told me she had a son, a boy of nineteen,
in the trenches. She did not speak of him. But I have wondered since
what she must feel during those grisly hours of the night when the
ambulances are giving up their wounded at the hospital doors. No doubt
she is a tender nurse, for in every case she is nursing vicariously
that nineteen-year-old boy of hers in the trenches.
That morning I visited the various Calais hospitals. It was a bright
morning, sunny and cold. Lines of refugees with packs and bundles were
on their way to the quay.
The frightful congestion of the autumn of 1914 was over, but the
hospitals were all full. They were surgical hospitals, typhoid
hospitals, hospitals for injured civilians, hospital boats. One and
all they were preparing as best they could for the mighty conflict of
the spring, when each side expected to make its great onward movement.
As it turned out, the terrible fighting of the spring failed to break