Chapter VII: The Last Stand Of The Belgians (3)

Men who have been in the trenches under heavy shell-fire, sometimes for as long as three days, come out of their torment like men who have been buried alive. They have the brownish, ashen colour of death. They tremble as through anguish. They are dazed and stupid for a time. But they go back. That is the marvel of it. They go back day after day, as the Belgians went day after day. There is no fun in it, no sport, none of that heroic adventure which used perhaps--gods know--to belong to warfare when men were matched against men, and not against unapproachable artillery. This is their courage, stronger than all their fear. There is something in us, even divine pride of manhood, a dogged disregard of death, though it comes from an unseen enemy out of a smoke-wracked sky, like the thunderbolts of the gods, which makes us go back, though we know the terror of it. For honour's sake men face again the music of that infernal orchestra, and listen with a deadly sickness in their hearts to the song of the shell screaming the French word for kill, which is tue! tue!

It was at night that I used to see the full splendour of the war's infernal beauty. After a long day in the fields travelling back in the repeated journeys to the station of Fortem, where the lightly wounded men used to be put on a steam tramway for transport to the Belgian hospitals, the ambulances would gather their last load and go homeward to Furnes. It was quite dark then, and towards nine o'clock the enemy's artillery would slacken fire, only the heavy guns sending out long-range shots. But five towns or more were blazing fiercely in the girdle of fire, and the sky throbbed with the crimson glare of their furnaces, and tall trees to which the autumn foliage clung would be touched with light, so that their straight trunks along a distant highway stood like ghostly sentinels. Now and again, above one of the burning towns a shell would burst as though the enemy were not content with their fires and would smash them into smaller fuel.

As I watched the flames, I knew that each one of those poor burning towns was the ruin of something more than bricks and mortar. It was the ruin of a people's ideals, fulfilled throughout centuries of quiet progress in arts and crafts. It was the shattering of all those things for which they praised God in their churches--the good gifts of home-life, the security of the family, the impregnable stronghold, as it seemed, of prosperity built by labour and thrift now utterly destroyed.

15

I motored over to Nieuport-les-Bains, the seaside resort of the town of Nieuport itself, which is a little way from the coast. It was one of those Belgian watering-places much beloved by the Germans before their guns knocked it to bits--a row of red-brick villas with a few pretentious hotels utterly uncharacteristic of the Flemish style of architecture, lining a promenade and built upon the edge of dreary and monotonous sand-dunes. On this day the place and its neighbourhood were utterly and terribly desolate. The only human beings I passed on my car were two seamen of the British Navy, who were fixing up a wireless apparatus on the edge of the sand. They stared at our ambulances curiously, and one of them gave me a prolonged and strenuous wink, as though to say, "A fine old game, mate, this bloody war!" Beyond, the sea was very calm, like liquid lead, and a slight haze hung over it, putting a gauzy veil about a line of British and French monitors which lay close to the coast. Not a soul could be seen along the promenade of Nieuport-les-Bains, but the body of a man--a French marine--whose soul had gone in flight upon the great adventure of eternity, lay at the end of it with his sightless eyes staring up to the grey sky. Presently I was surprised to see an elderly civilian and a small boy come out of one of the houses. The man told me he was the proprietor of the Grand Hotel, "but," he added, with a gloomy smile, "I have no guests at this moment In a little while, perhaps my hotel will have gone also." He pointed to a deep hole ploughed up an hour ago by a German "Jack Johnson." It was deep enough to bury a taxicab.

For some time, as I paced up and down the promenade, there was no answer to the mighty voices of the naval guns firing from some British warships lying along the coast. Nor did any answer come for some time to a French battery snugly placed in a hollow of the dunes, screened by a few trees. I listened to the overwhelming concussion of each shot from the ships, wondering at the mighty flight of the shell, which travelled through the air with the noise of an express train rushing through a tunnel. It was curious that no answer came! Surely the German batteries beyond the river would reply to that deadly cannonade.

I had not long to wait for the inevitable response. It came with a shriek, and a puff of bluish smoke, as the German shrapnel burst a hundred yards from where I stood. It was followed by several shells which dropped into the dunes, not far from the French battery of cent- vingt. Another knocked off the gable of a villa.

I had been pacing up and down under the shelter of a red-brick wall leading into the courtyard of a temporary hospital, and presently, acting upon orders from Lieutenant de Broqueville, I ran my car up the road with a Belgian medical officer to a place where some wounded men were lying. When I came back again the red-brick wall had fallen into a heap. The Belgian officer described the climate as "quite unhealthy," as I went away with two men dripping blood on the floor of the car. They had been brought across the ferry, further on, where the Belgian trenches were being strewn with shrapnel. Another little crowd of wounded men was there. Many of them had been huddled up all night, wet to the skin, with their wounds undressed, and without any kind of creature comfort. Their condition had reached the ultimate bounds of misery, and with two of these poor fellows I went away to fetch hot coffee for the others, so that at last they might get a little warmth if they had strength enough to drink... That evening, after a long day in the fields of death, and when I came back from the village where men lay waiting for rescue or the last escape, I looked across to Nieuport-les-Bains. There were quivering flames above it and shells were bursting over it with pretty little puffs of smoke which rested in the opalescent sky. I thought of the proprietor of the Grand Hotel, and wondered if he had insured his house against "Jack Johnsons."

16

Early next morning I paid a visit to the outskirts of Nieuport town, inland. It was impossible to get further than the outskirts at that time, because in the centre houses were falling and flames were licking each other across the roadways. It was even difficult for our ambulances to get so far, because we had to pass over a bridge to which the enemy's guns were paying great attention. Several of their thunderbolts fell with a hiss into the water of the canal where some Belgian soldiers were building a bridge of boats. It was just an odd chance that our ambulance could get across without being touched, but we took the chance and dodged between two shell-bursts. On the other side, on the outlying streets, there was a litter of bricks and broken glass, and a number of stricken men lay huddled in the parlour of a small house to which they had been carried. One man was holding his head to keep his brains from spilling, and the others lay tangled amidst upturned chairs and cottage furniture. There was the photograph of a family group on the mantelpiece, between cheap vases which had been the pride, perhaps, of this cottage home. On one of the walls was a picture of Christ with a bleeding heart.

I remember that at Nieuport there was a young Belgian doctor who had established himself at a dangerous post within range of the enemy's guns, and close to a stream of wounded who came pouring into the little house which he had made into his field hospital. He had collected also about twenty old men and women who had been unable to get away when the first shells fell. Without any kind of help he gave first aid to men horribly torn by the pieces of flying shell, and for three days and nights worked very calmly and fearlessly, careless of the death which menaced his own life.

Here he was found by the British column of field ambulances, who took away the old people and relieved him of the last batch of blessés. They told the story of that doctor over the supper-table that night, and hoped he would be remembered by his own people.

17

There were picnic parties on the Belgian roadsides. Looking back now upon those luncheon hours, with khaki ambulances as shelters from the shrewd wind that came across the marshes, I marvel at the contrast between their gaiety and the brooding horror in the surrounding scene. Bottles of wine were produced and no man thought of blood when he drank its redness, though the smell of blood reeked from the stretchers in the cars. There were hunks of good Flemish cheese with' fresh bread and butter, and it was extraordinary what appetites we had, though guns were booming a couple of kilometres away and the enemy was smashing the last strongholds of the Belgians. The women in their field kit, so feminine though it included breeches, gave a grace to those wayside halts, and gave to dirty men the chance of little courtesies which brought back civilization to their thoughts, even though life had gone back to primitive things with just life and death, hunger and thirst, love and courage, as the laws of existence. The man who had a corkscrew could command respect. A lady with gold-spun hair could gnaw a chicken bone without any loss of beauty. The chauffeurs munched solidly, making cockney jokes out of full mouths and abolishing all distinctions of caste by their comradeship in great adventures when their courage, their cool nerve, their fine endurance at the wheel, and their skill in taking heavy ambulances down muddy roads with skidding wheels, saved many men's lives and won a heartfelt praise. Little groups of Belgian soldiers came up wistfully and lingered round us as though liking the sight of us, and the sound of our English speech, and the gallantry of those girls who went into the firing-lines to rescue their wounded.

"They are wonderful, your English ladies," said a bearded man. He hesitated a moment and then asked timidly: "Do you think I might shake hands with one of them?"

I arranged the little matter, and he trudged off with a flush on his cheeks as though he had been in the presence of a queen, and graciously received.

The Belgian officers were eager to be presented to these ladies and paid them handsome compliments. I think the presence of these young women with their hypodermic syringes and first-aid bandages, and their skill in driving heavy motor-cars, and their spiritual disregard of danger, gave a sense of comfort and tenderness to those men who had been long absent from their women-folk and long-suffering in the bleak and ugly cruelty of war. There was no false sentiment, no disguised gallantry, in the homage of the Belgians to those ladies. It was the simple, chivalrous respect of soldiers to dauntless women who had come to help them when they were struck down and needed pity.

Women, with whom for a little while I could call myself comrade, I think of you now and marvel at you! The call of the wild had brought some of you out to those fields of death. The need of more excitement than modern life gives in time of peace, even the chance to forget, had been the motives with which two or three of you, I think, came upon these scenes of history, taking all risks recklessly, playing a man's part with a feminine pluck, glad of this liberty, far from the conventions of the civilized code, yet giving no hint of scandal to sharp-eared gossip. But most of you had no other thought than that of pity and helpfulness, and with a little flame of faith in your hearts you bore the weight of bleeding men, and eased their pain when it was too intolerable. No soldiers in the armies of the Allies have better right to wear the decorations which a king of sorrow gave you for your gallantry in action.

18

The Germans were still trying to smash their way through the lines held by the Belgians, with French support. They were making tremendous attacks at different places, searching for the breaking- point by which they could force their way to Furnes and on to Dunkirk. It was difficult to know whether they were succeeding or failing. It is difficult to know anything on a modern battlefield where men holding one village are ignorant of what is happening in the next, and where all the sections of an army seem involved in a bewildering chaos, out of touch with each other, waiting for orders which do not seem to come, moving forward for no apparent reason, retiring for other reasons hard to find, or resting, without firing a shot, in places searched by the enemy's fire.

The enemy had built eight pontoon bridges over the Yser canal, but all of them had been destroyed. This was a good piece of news. But against it was the heavy loss of a Belgian company holding another bridge further down the river. At Dixmude the Belgians held the outer streets. Outside there had been heavy trench fighting. The enemy had charged several times with the bayonet, but had been raked back by the mitrailleuses.

Things were going on rather well at most parts of the line.

The French batteries were getting the range every time, and their gunners were guessing at heaps of German dead. The Belgian infantry was holding firm. Their cavalry was out of action for the time, trying to keep warm on the roadsides.

That was all the truth that I could get out of a tangle of confused details. All through another day I watched the business of battle--a strange, mysterious thing in which one fails to find any controlling brain. Regiments came out of the trenches and wandered back, caked with clay, haggard for lack of sleep, with a glint of hunger in their eyes. Guns passed along the roads with ammunition wagons, whose axles shrieked over the stones. For an hour a Belgian battery kept plugging shots towards the enemy's lines. The artillerymen were leisurely at their work, handling their shells with interludes of conversation. At luncheon time they lay about behind the guns smoking cigarettes, and I was glad, for each of their shots seemed to wreck my own brain. At a neighbouring village things were more lively. The enemy was turning his fire this way. A captive balloon had signalled the position, and shrapnels were bursting close. One shell tore up a great hole near the railway line.

Shell after shell fell upon one dung-heap--mistaken perhaps for a company of men. Shrapnel bullets pattered into the roadway, a piece of jagged shell fell with a clatter.

My own chauffeur--a young man of very cool nerve and the best driver I have known--picked it up with a grin, and then dropped it, with a sharp cry. It was almost red-hot. The flames of the enemy's batteries could be seen stabbing through a fringe of trees, perhaps two kilometres away, by Pervyse. Their shells were making puff-balls of smoke over neighbouring farms, and for miles round I could see the clouds stretching out into long, thin wisps. The air throbbed with horrible concussions, the dull full boom of big guns, the sharp staccato of the smaller shell, and the high singing note of it as it came soaring overhead. Gradually one began to realize the boredom of battle, to acquire some of that fantastic indifference to the chance of death which enables the soldiers to stir their soup without an upward glance at a skyful of jagged steel. Only now and then the old question came to one, "This--or the next?"

It was only the adventure of searching out the wounded that broke the monotony for the Belgian ambulance men. At first they were not hard to find--they were crowded upon the straw in cottage parlours, cleared of all but the cheap vases on the mantelshelf and family photographs tacked upon walls that had not been built for the bloody mess of tragedy which they now enclosed. On their bodies they bore the signs of the tremendous accuracy of the enemy's artillery, and by their number, increasing during the day, one could guess at the tragic endurance of the Belgian infantry in the ring of iron which was closing upon them; drawing just a little nearer by half a village or half a road as the hours passed. The ambulances carried them away to the station of Fortem, where those who could still sit up were packed into a steam tram, and where the stretcher-cases were taken to the civil hospital at Furnes by motor transport. But in outlying farmsteads in the zone of fire, and in isolated cottages which had been struck by a chance shot, were other wounded men difficult to get. It was work for scouting cars, and too dangerous for ambulances.

Some volunteers made several journeys down the open roads to places not exactly suitable for dalliance. Lieutenant de Broqueville called upon me for this purpose several times because I had a fast little car. I was glad of the honour, though when he pointed to a distant roof where a wounded man was reported to be lying, it looked to me a long, long way in the zone of fire. Two houses blown to pieces by the side of a ditch showed that the enemy's shells were dropping close, and it was a test of nerves to drive deliberately through the flat fields with sharp, stabbing flashes on their frontiers, and right into the middle of an infernal tumult of guns.

It was in the darkness that I went back to Furnes again, with the last of the wounded--a French corporal, who groaned in anguish at every jolt in the road, and then was silent with his head flopping sideways in a way that frightened me. Several times I called back to him, "Courage, mon vieux! ... Comment allez vous?" But he made no answer and there were times when I thought I had a dead man behind me. A biting wind was blowing, and I leaned over his seat to put a blanket over him. But it always blew off that dead-grey face and blood-stained body. Once he groaned, and I was glad to hear the sound and to know that he was still alive. Another man trudging along the highway, using his rifle as a crutch, called out. He spoke the word blessé, and I stopped to take him up and sped on again, glancing to right and left at the villages on fire, at the quick flashes of Belgian and German artillery signalling death to each other in the night. The straight trees rushed by like tall, hurrying ghosts. For most of the way we drove without our head-lights through tunnels of darkness. "Queer, isn't it?" said my driver, and it was his only comment on this adventure in the strangest drama of his life.

19

That night the wind came howling across the flat fields into Furnes and a rain-storm broke in fierce gusts upon the convent walls. In this old building with many corridors and innumerable windows, panes of glass rattled and window-sashes creaked and doors banged like thunderclaps. It was impossible to keep a candle alight down any of the passages unless it were protected in a lantern, and a cold mist crept into the house, stealthily striking one with a clammy chill. I stayed up most of the night in the kitchen, having volunteered to stoke the fires and fill hot-water bottles for the wounded. Most of the nurses had gone to bed utterly exhausted. Only two or three of them remained in the wards with one of the doctors. Every now and then the outer bell would jangle, and I would hear the wheels of an ambulance crunching into the courtyard.

"Blessés!" said a woman who was watching the fires with me.

But we could not take in another blessé as there were no more beds or bed-spaces, and after despairing conversations Belgian ambulance officers at the front door of the convent went elsewhere. The house became very quiet except for the noise of the wind and the rain. In the scullery where I sat by the stoves which were in my charge, I could only hear one voice speaking. It was speaking two rooms away, in a long, incessant monologue of madness. Now and again a white-faced nurse came out for newly-filled water-bottles, and while I scalded my fingers with screws which would not fit and with boiling water poured into narrow necks, she told me about a French officer who was dying.

"He wants his wife so badly. He would die quite happily if he could only see her for a minute. But she is in Paris, and he will be dead before the morning comes... I have written a letter for him, and he kissed it before I wrote his wife's address. He keeps calling out her name."

The scullery was warm and cosy, in spite of all the draughts. Sitting back in a wooden chair, I nearly fell asleep, because I had had a long day in the fields and fatigue threatened to overwhelm me. But I wakened with a start when a door opened, letting in a sudden blast of cold air and the noise of the beating rain, and then banged with violence. I seemed to hear footsteps coming across the kitchen floor, and, with an eerie feeling of some new presence in the convent, I strode out of the scullery. A queer little figure startled me. It was a girl in man's clothes, except for a white cap on her head, tight-fitting above her eyes. She was dripping wet and caked in slimy mud, and she faltered forward a little and spoke in French.

"I am very wet. And so tired and hungry! If I could sleep here, on the floor, and dry myself a little-----"

"Who are you?" I asked. There seemed something uncanny in this little figure coming out of the wild night.

It appeared that she was one of two Belgian girls who since the beginning of the war had acted as infirmières with the Belgian troops, giving the first aid in the trenches, carrying hot soup to them, and living with them under fire. She seemed hardly more than a child, and spoke childishly in a pitiful way, while she twisted the corner of her jacket so that water came out and made a pool about her on the boards. She dried herself in front of the fire and ate--ravenously-- some food which had been left on a side-table, and then lay down in a corner of the refectory, falling into the deepest sleep as soon as her head had touched the mattress. She did not wake next morning, though fifty-five people made a clatter at the breakfast-table, and at four in the afternoon she was still sleeping, like a sick child, with her head drooping over the mattress.

20

That day, owing to the heavy rain in the night, the roads were slimy with mud, so that the cars skidded almost over the brim of the dykes. There was more movement among the troops, less sitting about for orders. Officers were riding up and down the roads, and wheeling into little groups for quick discussion. Something was happening-- something more than the ding-dong slam of the guns. A regiment of Belgian infantry came plodding through the mud, covered with whitish clay even to their top-hats. They were earth-men, with the blanched look of creatures who live below ground. The news was whispered about that the enemy was breaking through along one of the roads between Nieuport and Fumes. Then the report came through that they had smashed their way to Wulpen.

"We hope to hold them," said an officer, "but Fumes is in danger. It will be necessary to clear out."

In consequence of this report, it was necessary to be quick in the search for the wounded who had been struck down in the night. The medical men were resolute not to go until they had taken in all that could be removed in time. A little crowd of them were in a small villa along the road. They were wet to the skin and quite famished, without food or drink. A car went back for hot coffee and bread. There was another group of wounded in the church of Oudecapelle.

They were bad cases, and lay still upon the straw. I shall never forget the picture of that church with its painted statues huddled together and toppled down. St. Antony of Padua and St. Sebastian were there in the straw, and crude pictures of saints on the walls stared down upon those bodies lying so quiet on the floor. It was the house of God, but it was filled with the cruelty of life, and those statues seemed to mock at men's faith.

In Furnes the news of the danger seemed to have been scented by the people. They had packed a few things into bundles and made ready to leave their homes. In the convent where I had helped to wash up and to fill the part of odd-job man when I was not out with the "flying column," the doctors and nurses were already loading the ambulances with all their cases. The last of the wounded was sent away to a place of safety. He was a man with a sabre-cut on his head, who for four days had lain quite still, with a grave Oriental face, which seemed in the tranquillity of death.

A group of nuns pleaded to be taken with the doctors and nurses. They could help in the wards or in the kitchen--if only they might go and escape the peril of the German soldiery.

I went across the square to my own room in the Hôtel de la Couronne, and put a few things together. A friend of mine who helped me told the story of a life--the mistakes that had nearly ruined it, the adventures of a heart. A queer conversation at a time when the enemy was coming down the road. The guns were very loud over Wulpen way. They seemed to be coming closer. Yet there was no panic. There was even laughter in the courtyard of the hospital, where the doctors tossed blankets, mattresses, food stores and stoves into the motor ambulances. They were in no hurry to go. It was not the first or the second time they had to evacuate a house menaced by the enemy. They had made a habit of it, and were not to be flurried. I helped the blue-eyed boy to lift the great stoves. They were "some" weight, as an American would say, and both the blue-eyed boy and myself were plastered with soot, so that we looked like sweeps calling round for orders. I lifted packing-cases which would have paralysed me in times of peace and scouted round for some of the thousand and one things which could not be left behind without a tragedy. But at last the order was given to start, and the procession of motor-cars started out for Poperinghe, twenty-five kilometres to the south. Little by little the sound of the guns died away, and the cars passed through quiet fields where French troops bivouacked round their camp fires. I remember that we passed a regiment of Moroccans half- way to Poperinghe, and I looked back from the car to watch them pacing up and down between their fires, which glowed upon their red cloaks and white robes and their grave, bearded Arab faces. They looked miserably cold as the wind flapped their loose garments, but about these men in the muddy field there was a sombre dignity which took one's imagination back to the day when the Saracens held European soil.

21

It was dark when we reached Poperinghe and halted our cars in the square outside the Town Hall, among a crowd of other motor-cars, naval lorries, mitrailleuses, and wagons. Groups of British soldiers stood about smoking cigarettes and staring at us curiously through the gloom as though not quite sure what to make of us. And indeed we must have looked an odd party, for some of us were in khaki and some of us in civilian clothes with Belgian caps, and among the crowd of nurses was a carriage-load of nuns, huddled up in their black cloaks. Warning of our arrival in Poperinghe should have been notified to the municipal authorities, so that they might find lodgings for us; and the Queen of the Belgians had indeed sent through a message to that effect, But there seemed to be some trouble about finding a roof under which to lay our heads, and an hour went by in the square while the lady in charge of the domesticity department interviewed the mayor, cajoled the corporation, and inspected convents down side streets. She came back at last with a little hopelessness in her eyes.

"Goodness knows where we can go! There doesn't seem room for a mouse in Poperinghe, and meanwhile the poor nurses are dying of hunger. We must get into some kind of shelter."

I was commissioned to find at least a temporary abode and to search around for food; not at all an easy task in a dark town where I had never been before and crowded with the troops of three nations. I was also made the shepherd of all these sheep, who were commanded to keep their eyes upon me and not to go astray but to follow where I led. It was a most ridiculous position for a London journalist of a shy and retiring nature, especially as some of the nurses were getting out of hand and indulging in private adventures. One of them, a most buxom and jolly soul, who, as she confided to me, "didn't care a damn," had established friendly relations with a naval lieutenant, and I had great trouble in dragging her away from his engaging conversation. Others had discovered a shop where hot coffee was being served to British soldiers who were willing to share it with attractive ladies. A pretty shepherd I looked when half my flock had gone astray!

Then one of the chauffeurs had something like an apoplectic stroke in the street--the effect of a nervous crisis after a day under shell-fire-- and with two friendly "Tommies" I helped to drag him into the Town Hall. He was a very stout young man, with well-developed muscles, and having lain for some time in a state of coma, he suddenly became delirious and tried to fight me. I disposed of him in a backyard, where he gradually recovered, and then I set out again in search of my sheep. After scouting about Poperinghe in the darkness, I discovered a beer tavern with a fair-sized room in which the party might be packed with care, and then, like a pocket patriarch with the children of Israel, I led my ladies on foot to the place of sanctuary and disposed the nuns round the bar, with the reverend mother in the centre of them, having a little aureole round her head from the glamour of the pewter pots. The others crowded in anyhow and said in a dreadful chorus, like Katherine in "The Taming of the Shrew," "We want our supper!"

A brilliant inspiration came to me. As there were British troops in Poperinghe, there must also be British rations, and I had glorious visions of Maconochie and army biscuits. Out into the dark streets again I went with my little car, and after wayside conversations with British soldiers who knew nothing but their own job, found at last the officer in charge of the commissariat. He was a tall fellow and rather haughty in the style of a British officer confronted abruptly with an unusual request. He wanted to know who the devil I was, not liking my civilian clothes and suspecting a German spy. But he became sympathetic when I told him, quite dishonestly, that I was in charge of a British field ambulance under the Belgian Government, which had been forced to evacuate Fumes as the enemy had broken through the Belgian lines. I expressed my gratitude for his kindness, which I was sure he would show, in providing fifty-five army rations for fifty- five doctors and nurses devilishly hungry and utterly destitute. After some hesitation he consented to give me a "chit," and turning to a sergeant who had been my guide down a dark street, said: "Take this officer to the depot and see that he gets everything he wants." It was a little triumph not to be appreciated by readers who do not know the humiliations experienced by correspondents in time of war.

A few minutes later the officer came padding down the street after me, and I expected instant arrest and solitary confinement to the end of the war. But he was out for information.

"I beg your pardon, sir," he said, very politely, "but would you mind giving me a sketch of the military situation round your part?"

I gave him an outline of the affair which had caused the Belgian headquarters staff to shift from Furnes, and though it was, I fancy, slightly over-coloured, he was very much obliged... So, gloriously, I drove back to the beer-tavern with the fifty-five army rations which were enough to feed fifty-five starving people for a week, and was received with cheers. That night, conscious of good deeds, I laid down in the straw of a school-house which had been turned into a barracks, and by the light of several candle-ends, scribbled a long dispatch, which became a very short one when the British censor had worked his will with it.

22

After all, the ambulance column did not have to stay in Poperinghe, but went back to their old quarters, with doctors, nurses and nuns, and all their properties. The enemy had not followed up its advantages, and the Belgian troops, aided by French marines and other French troops who now arrived in greater numbers, thrust them back and barred the way to Dunkirk. The waters of the Yser had helped to turn the tide of war. The sluice-gates were opened and flooded the surrounding fields, so that the enemy's artillery was bogged and could not move.

For a little while the air in all that region between Furnes and Nieuport, Dixmude and Pervyse, was cleansed of the odour and fume of battle. But there were other causes of the German withdrawal after one day, at least, when it seemed that nothing short of miraculous aid could hold them from a swift advance along the coast. The chief cause was to be found at Ypres, where the British army sustained repeated and most desperate onslaughts. Ypres was now the storm centre in a ten- days' battle of guns, which was beyond all doubt the most ferocious and bloody episode in the first year of war on the Western side of operations. Repeatedly, after being checked in their attacks by a slaughter which almost annihilated entire regiments, the Germans endeavoured to repair their shattered strength by bringing up every available man and gun for another bout of blood. We know now that it was one of the most awful conflicts in which humanity has ever agonized. Heroism shone through it on both sides. The resistance and nerve strength of the British troops were almost superhuman; and in spite of losses which might have demoralized any army, however splendid in valour, they fought on with that dogged spirit which filled the trenches at Badajoz and held the lines of Torres Vedras, a hundred years before, when the British race seemed to be stronger than its modern generation.

There were hours when all seemed lost, when it was impossible to bring up reserves to fill the gaps in our bleeding battalions, when so many dead and wounded lay about and so few remained to serve the guns and hold the trenches that another attack pushed home would have swept through our lines and broken us to bits. The cooks and the commissariat men took their places in the trenches, and every man who could hold a rifle fired that day for England's sake, though England did not know her peril.

But the German losses were enormous also, and during those ten days they sacrificed themselves with a kind of Oriental valour, such as heaped the fields of Omdurman with Soudanese. The Kaiser was the new Mahdi for whom men died in masses, going with fatalistic resignation to inevitable death. After a lull for burning and burial, for the refilling of great gaps in regiments and divisions, the enemy moved against us with new masses, but again death awaited them, in spite of all their guns, and the British held their ground.

They held their ground with superb and dauntless valour, and out of the general horror of it all there emerges the fine, bright chivalry of young officers and men who did amazing deeds, which read like fairy tales, even when they are told soberly in official dispatches. In this slaughter field the individual still found a chance now and then of personal prowess, and not all his human qualities had been annihilated or stupefied by the overwhelming power of artillery.

23

The town of Ypres was added to the list of other Belgian towns like those in which I saw the ruin of a nation.

It existed no longer as a place of ancient beauty in which men and women made their homes, trustful of fate. Many of its houses had fallen into the roadways and heaped them high with broken bricks and shattered glass. Others burned with a fine, fierce glow inside the outer walls. The roofs had crashed down into the cellars. All between, furniture and panelling and household treasures, had been burnt out into black ash or mouldered in glowing embers.

The great Cloth Hall, which had been one of the most magnificent treasures of ancient architecture in Europe, was smashed and battered by incessant shells, so that it became one vast ruin of broken walls and fallen pillars framed about a scrapheap of twisted iron and calcined statues, when one day later in the war I wandered for an hour or more, groping for some little relic which would tell the tale of this tragedy.

On my desk now at home there are a few long, rusty nails, an old lock of fifteenth-century workmanship, and a little broken window with leaded panes, which serve as mementoes of this destruction.

The inhabitants of Ypres had gone, unless some of them were hiding, or buried in their cellars. A few dogs roamed about, barking or whining at the soldiers who passed through the outskirts staring at all this destruction with curious eyes, and storing up images for which they will never find the right words.

Two young naval officers who went into Ypres one day tried to coax one of the dogs to come with them. "Might have brought us luck," they said, hiding their pity for a poor beast. But it slunk back into the ruin of its master's house, distrustful of men who did things not belonging to the code of beasts.

24

Human qualities were not annihilated, I have said. Yet in a general way that was the effect of modern weapons, and at Ypres masses of men did not fight so much as stand until they died.

"We just wait for death," said a Belgian officer one night, "and wonder if it doesn't reach us out of all this storm of shells. It is a war without soul or adventure. In the early days, when I scoured the country with a party of motor scouts there was some sport in it. Any audacity we had, or any cunning, could get some kind of payment. The individual counted."

"But now, in the business round Ypres, what can men do--infantry, cavalry, scouts? It is the gun that does all the business heaving out shells, delivering death in a merciless way. It is guns, with men as targets, helpless as the leaves that are torn from these autumn trees around us by a storm of hail. Our men are falling like the leaves, and the ground is heaped with them, and there is no decisive victory on either side. One week of death is followed by another week of death. The position changes a little, that is all, and the business goes on again. It is appalling."

The same words were used to me on the same night by a surgeon who had just come from the station of Dunkirk, where the latest batch of wounded--a thousand of them--were lying on the straw. "It is appalling," he said. "The destruction of this shell-fire is making a shambles of human bodies. How can we cope with it? What can we do with such a butchery?"

Round about Furnes there was a fog in the war zone. In the early dawn until the morning had passed, and then again as the dusk fell and the mists crept along the canals and floated over the flat fields, men groped about it like ghosts, with ghostly guns.

Shells came hurtling out of the veil of the mist and burst in places which seemed hidden behind cotton-wool. An unseen enemy was killing unseen men, and other guns replied into this grim, grey mystery, not knowing what destruction was being done.

It was like the war itself, which was utterly shrouded in these parts by a fog of mystery. Watching it close at hand (when things are more difficult to sort into any order of logic) my view was clouded and perplexed by the general confusion. A few days previously, it seemed that the enemy had abandoned his attack upon the coast-line and the country between Dixmude and Nieuport. There was a strange silence behind the mists, but our aeroplanes, reconnoitring the enemy's lines, were able to see movements of troops drifting southwards towards the region round Ypres.

Now there was an awakening of guns in places from which they seemed to be withdrawn. Dixmude, quiet in its ruins, trembled again, and crumbled a little more, under the vibration of the enemy's shells, firing at long range towards the Franco-Belgian troops.

Here and there, near Pervyse and Ramscapelle, guns, not yet located, fired "pot shots" on the chance of killing something--soldiers or civilians, or the wounded on their stretchers.

Several of them came into Furnes, bursting quite close to the convent, and one smashed into the Hôtel de la Noble Rose, going straight down a long corridor and then making a great hole in a bedroom wall. Some of the officers of the Belgian staff were in the room downstairs, but not a soul was hurt.

French and Belgian patrols thrusting forward cautiously found themselves under rifle-fire from the enemy's trenches which had previously appeared abandoned. Something like an offensive developed again, and it was an unpleasant surprise when Dixmude was retaken by the Germans.

As a town its possession was not of priceless value to the enemy. They had retaken a pitiful ruin, many streets of skeleton houses filled with burnt-out ashes, a Town Hall with gaping holes in its roof, an archway which thrust up from a wreck of pillars like a gaunt rib, and a litter of broken glass, bricks and decomposed bodies.

If they had any pride in the capture it was the completeness of their destruction of this fine old Flemish town.

But it was a disagreeable thing that the enemy, who had been thrust back from this place and the surrounding neighbourhood, and who had abandoned their attack for a time in this region, should have made such a sudden hark-back in sufficient strength to regain ground which was won by the Belgian and French at the cost of many thousands of dead and wounded.

The renewed attack was to call off some of the allied troops from the lines round Ypres, and was a part of the general shock of the offensive all along the German line in order to test once more the weakest point of the Allies' strength through which to force a way.

25

The character of the fighting in this part of Flanders entered into the monotone of the winter campaign and, though the censorship was blamed for scarcity of news, there was really nothing to conceal in the way of heroic charges by cavalry, dashing bayonet attacks, or rapid counter-movements by infantry in mass. Such things for which public imagination craved were not happening.

What did happen was a howling gale shrieking across the dunes, and swirling up the sands into blinding clouds, and tearing across the flat marshlands as though all the invisible gods of the old ghost world were racing in their chariots.

In the trenches along the Yser men crouched down close to the moist mud to shelter themselves from a wind which was harder to dodge than shrapnel shells. It lashed them with a fierce cruelty. In spite of all the woollen comforters and knitted vests made by women's hands at home, the wind found its way through to the bones and marrow of the soldiers so that they were numbed. At night it was an agony of cold, preventing sleep, even if men could sleep while shells were searching for them with a cry of death.

The gunners dug pits for themselves, and when they ceased fire for a time crawled to shelter, smoking through little outlets in the damp blankets in which they had wrapped their heads and shoulders. They tied bundles of straw round their legs to keep out the cold and packed old newspapers inside their chests as breast-plates, and tried to keep themselves warm, at least in imagination.

There was no battlefield in the old idea of the world. How often must one say this to people at home who think that a modern army is encamped in the fields with bivouac fires and bell tents? The battle was spread over a wide area of villages and broken towns and shattered farmhouses, and neat little homesteads yet untouched by fire or shell. The open roads were merely highways between these points of shelter, in which great bodies of troops were huddled--the internal lines of communication connecting various parts of the fighting machine.

It was rather hot, as well as cold, at Oudecapelle and Nieucapelle, and along the line to Styvekenskerke and Lom-bardtzyde. The enemy's batteries were hard at work again belching out an inexhaustible supply of shells. Over there, the darkness was stabbed by red flashes, and the sky was zigzagged by waves of vivid splendour, which shone for a moment upon the blanched faces of men who waited for death.

Through the darkness, along the roads, infantry tramped towards the lines of trenches, to relieve other regiments who had endured a spell in them. They bent their heads low, thrusting forward into the heart of the gale, which tore at the blue coats of these Frenchmen and plucked at their red trousers, and slashed in their faces with cruel whips. Their side-arms jingled against the teeth of the wind, which tried to snatch at their bayonets and to drag the rifles out of their grip. They never raised their heads to glance at the Red Cross carts coming back.

Some of the French officers, tramping by the side of their men, shouted through the swish of the gale:

"Courage, mes petits!"

"II fait mauvais temps pour les sales Boches!"

In cottage parlours near the fighting lines--that is to say in the zone of fire, which covered many villages and farmsteads, French doctors, buttoned up to the chin in leather coats, bent over the newest batches of wounded.

"Shut that door! Sacred name of a dog; keep the door shut! Do you want the gale to blow us up the chimney?"

But it was necessary to open the door to bring in another stretcher where a man lay still.

"Pardon, mon capitaine," said one of the stretcher-bearers, as the door banged to, with a frightful clap.

Yesterday the enemy reoccupied Dixmude.

So said the official bulletin, with its incomparable brevity of eloquence.

26

For a time, during this last month in the first year of the war, I made my headquarters at Dunkirk, where without stirring from the town there was always a little excitement to be had. Almost every day, for instance, a German aeroplane--one of the famous Taube flock-- would come and drop bombs by the Town Hall or the harbour, killing a woman or two and a child, or breaking many panes of glass, but never destroying anything of military importance (for women and children are of no importance in time of war), although down by the docks there were rich stores of ammunition, petrol, and material of every kind. These birds of death came so regularly in the afternoon that the Dunquerquoises, who love a jest, even though it is a bloody one, instead of saying "Trois heures et demie," used to say, "Taube et demie" and know the time.

There was a window in Dunkirk which looked upon the chief square. In the centre of the square is the statue of Jean-Bart, the famous captain and pirate of the seventeenth century, standing in his sea- boots (as he once strode into the presence of the Sun-King) and with his sword raised above his great plumed hat. I stood in the balcony of the window looking down at the colour and movement of the life below, and thinking at odd moments--the thought always thrust beneath the surface of one's musings--of the unceasing slaughter of the war not very far away across the Belgian frontier. All these people here in the square were in some way busy with the business of death. They were crossing these flagged stones on the way to the shambles, or coming back from the shell-stricken towns, là bas, as the place of blood is called, or taking out new loads of food for guns and men, or bringing in reports to admirals and the staff, or going to churches to pray for men who have done these jobs before, and now, perhaps, lie still, out of it.

This square in Dunkirk contained many of the elements which go to make up the actions and reactions of this war. It seemed to me that a clever stage manager desiring to present to his audience the typical characters of this military drama--leaving out the beastliness, of course--would probably select the very people and groups upon whom I was now looking down from the window. Motor-cars came whirling up with French staff officers in dandy uniforms (the stains of blood and mud would only be omitted by Mr. Willie Clarkson). In the centre, just below the statue of Jean-Bart, was an armoured-car which a Belgian soldier, with a white rag round his head, was explaining to a French cuirassier whose long horse-hair queue fell almost to his waist from his linen-covered helm. Small boys mounted the step and peered into the wonder-box, into the mysteries of this neat death-machine, and poked grubby fingers into bullet-holes which had scored the armour-plates. Other soldiers--Chasseurs Alpins in sky-blue coats, French artillery men in their dark-blue jackets, Belgian soldiers wearing shiny top-hats with eye-shades, or dinky caps with gold or scarlet tassels, and English Tommies in mud-coloured khaki-- strolled about the car, and nodded their heads towards it as though to say, "That has killed off a few Germans, by the look of it. Better sport than trench digging."

The noise of men's voices and laughter--they laugh a good deal in war time, outside the range of shells--came up to the open window; overpowered now and then by the gurgles and squawks of motor- horns, like beasts giving their death-cries. With a long disintegrating screech there came up a slate-grey box on wheels. It made a semicircular sweep, scattering a group of people, and two young gentlemen of the Royal Naval Air Service sprang down and shouted "What-ho!" very cheerily to two other young gentlemen in naval uniforms who shouted back "Cheer-o!" from the table under my balcony.