Chapter 10

None of the men we were helping out of the train were seriously hurt. I had to choose between my one badly wounded man, whom we hadn't found, and about a dozen who could stumble somehow into safety. But my two stretcher-bearers were wavering badly, and it was all I could do to keep them firmly to their job.

Then three women came out of a little house half hidden by the plantation. They spoke low, for fear the Germans should overhear them.

"He is here," they said; "he is here."

The stretcher-bearers hurried off with their stretcher. The train unloaded itself somehow.

The man, horribly hurt, with a wound like a red pit below his shoulder-blades, was brought out and laid on the stretcher. He lay there, quietly, on his side, in a posture of utter resignation to anguish.

He was a Flamand, clumsily built; he had a broad, rather ugly face, narrowing suddenly as the fringe of his whiskers became a little straggling beard. But to me he was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. And I loved him. I do not think it is possible to love, to adore any creature more than I loved and adored that clumsy, ugly Flamand.

He was my first wounded man.

For I tried, I still try, to persuade myself that if I hadn't bullied my two bearers and repulsed the attack on my stretcher, he would have been left behind in the little house in the plantation.

We got him out of the plantation all right and on to the paved road. Ursula Dearmer at Termonde with her Belgian officer, and at Zele with all her wounded, couldn't have been happier than I was with my one Flamand.

We got him a few yards down the road all right.

Then, to my horror, the bearers dumped him down on the paving-stones. They said he was much too heavy. They couldn't possibly carry him any more unless they rested.

I didn't think it was exactly the moment for resting, and I told them so. The Germans hadn't come round the turn, and probably never would come; still, you never know; and the general impression seemed to be that they were about due.

But the bearers stood stolidly in the middle of the road and mopped their faces and puffed. The situation began to feel as absurd and as terrible as a nightmare.

So I grabbed one end of the stretcher and said I'd carry it myself. I said I wasn't very strong, and perhaps I couldn't carry it, but anyhow I'd try.

They picked it up at once then, and went off at a good swinging trot over the paving-stones that jolted my poor Flamand most horribly. I told them to go on the smooth track at the side. They hailed this suggestion as a most brilliant and original idea.

As the Flamand was brought into the village, the Ambulance had got its wounded in, and was ready to go. But he had to have his wound dressed.

He lay there on his stretcher in the middle of the village street, my beloved Flamand, stripped to the waist, with the great red pit of his wound yawning in his white flesh. I had to look on while the Commandant stuffed it with antiseptic gauze.

I had always supposed that the dressing of a wound was a cautious and delicate process. But it isn't. There is a certain casual audacity about it. The Commandant's hands worked rapidly as he rammed cyanide gauze into the red pit. It looked as if he were stuffing an old crate with straw. And it was all over in a moment. There seemed something indecent in the haste with which my Flamand was disposed of.

When the Commandant observed that my Flamand's wound looked much worse than it was, I felt hurt, as if this beloved person had been slighted; also as if there was some subtle disparagement to my "find."

I rather hoped that we were going to wait till the men I had left behind in the plantation had come up. But the car was fairly full, and Ursula Dearmer and Janet and Mrs. Lambert were told off to take it in to Z----, leave the wounded there and come back for the rest. I was to walk to Z---- and wait there for the returning car.

Nothing would have pleased me better, but the distance was farther than the Commandant realized, farther, perhaps, than was desirable in the circumstances, so I was ordered to get on the car and come back with it.

(Tom the chauffeur is perfectly right. There are too many of us.)

We got away long before the Germans turned the corner, if they ever did turn it. In Z----, which is half-way between Lokeren and Ghent, we came upon six or seven fine military ambulances, all huddled together as if they sought safety in companionship (why none of them had been sent up to our village I can't imagine). Ursula Dearmer, with admirable presence of mind, commandeered one of these and went back with it to the village, so that we could take our load of wounded into Ghent. We did this, and went back at once.

The return journey was a tame affair. Before we got to Z---- we met the Commandant and the Chaplain and two refugees, in Mr. Lambert's scouting-car, towed by a motor-wagon. It had broken down on the way from Lokeren. We took them on board and turned back to Ghent.

The wounded came on in Ursula Dearmer's military car.

Twenty-three wounded in all were taken from Lokeren or near it to-day. Hundreds had to be left behind in the German lines.

* * * * *

We have heard that Antwerp is burning; that the Government is removed to Ostend; that all the English have left.

There are a great many British wounded, with nurses and Army doctors, in Ghent. Three or four British have been brought into the "Flandria."

One of them is a young British officer, Mr. ----. He is said to be mortally wounded.

Dr. Haynes and Dr. Bird have not gone. They and Dr. ---- have joined the surgical staff of the Hospital, and are working in the operating theatre all day. They have got enough to do now in all conscience.

All night there has been a sound of the firing of machine guns [?]. At first it was like the barking, of all the dogs in Belgium. I thought it _was_ the dogs of Belgium, till I discovered a deadly rhythm and precision in the barking.[21]

[_Friday, 9th._]

The Hospital is so full that beds have been put in the entrance hall, along the walls by the big ward and the secretarial bureau. In the recess by the ward there are three British soldiers.

There are some men standing about there whose heads and faces are covered with a thick white mask of cotton-wool like a diver's helmet. There are three small holes in each white mask, for mouth and eyes. The effect is appalling.

These are the men whose faces have been burned by shell-fire at Antwerp.

The Commandant asked me to come with him through the wards and find all the British wounded who are well enough to be sent home. I am to take their names and dress them and get them ready to go by the morning train.

There are none in the upper wards. Mr. ---- cannot be moved. He is very ill. They do not think he will live.

There are three downstairs in the hall. One is well enough to look after himself (I have forgotten his name). One, Russell, is wounded in the knee. The third, Cameron, a big Highlander, is wounded in the head. He wears a high headdress of bandages wound round and round many times like an Indian turban, and secured by more bandages round his jaw and chin. It is glued tight to one side of his head with clotted blood. Between the bandages his sharp, Highland face looks piteous.

I am to dress these two and have them ready by eleven. Dr. ---- of the British Field Hospital, who is to take them over, comes round to enter their names on his list.

They are to be dressed in civilian clothes supplied by the Hospital.

It all sounded very simple until you tried to get the clothes. First you had to see the President, who referred you to the Matron, who referred you to the clerk in charge of the clothing department. An _infirmier_ (one of the mysterious officials who hang about the hall wearing peaked caps; the problem of their existence was now solved for the first time)--an _infirmier_ was despatched to find the clerk. The clothing department must have been hidden in the remotest recesses of the Hospital, for it was ages before he came back to ask me all over again what clothes would be wanted. He was a little fat man with bright, curly hair, very eager, and very cheerful and very kind. He scuttled off again like a rabbit, and I had to call him back to measure Russell. And when he had measured Russell, with his gay and amiable alacrity, Russell and I had to wait until he came back with the clothes.

I had made up my mind very soon that it would be no use measuring Cameron for any clothes, or getting him ready for any train. He was moving his head from side to side and making queer moaning sounds of agitation and dismay. He had asked for a cigarette, which somebody had brought him. It dropped from his fingers. Somebody picked it up and lit it and stuck it in his mouth; it dropped again. Then I noticed something odd about his left arm; he was holding it up with his right hand and feeling it. It dropped, too, like a dead weight, on the counterpane. Cameron watched its behaviour with anguish. He complained that his left arm was all numb and too heavy to hold up. Also he said he was afraid to be moved and taken away.

It struck me that Cameron's head must be smashed in on the right side and that some pressure on his brain was causing paralysis. It was quite clear that he couldn't be moved. So I sent for one of the Belgian doctors to come and look at him, and keep him in the Hospital.

The Belgian doctor found that Cameron's head _was_ smashed in on the right side, and that there was pressure on his brain, causing paralysis in his left arm.

He is to be kept in the Hospital and operated on this morning. They may save him if they can remove the pressure.

It seemed ages before the merry little _infirmier_ came back with Russell's clothes. And when he did come he brought socks that were too tight, and went back and brought socks that were too large, and a shirt that was too tight and trousers that were too long. Then he went back, eager as ever, and brought drawers that were too tight, and more trousers that were too short. He brought boots that were too large and boots that were too tight; and he had to be sent back again for slippers. Last of all he brought a shirt which made Russell smile and mutter something about being dressed in all the colours of the rainbow; and a black cutaway morning coat, and a variety of hats, all too small for Russell.

Then when you had made a selection, you began to try to get Russell into all these things that were too tight or too loose for him. The socks were the worst. The right-hand one had to be put on very carefully, by quarter inches at a time; the least tug on the sock would give Russell an excruciating pain in his wounded knee; and Russell was all for violence and haste; he was so afraid of being left behind.

Though he called me "Sister," I felt certain that Russell must know that I wasn't a trained nurse and that he was the first wounded man I had ever dressed in my life. However, I did get him dressed, somehow, with the help of the little _infirmier_, and a wonderful sight he was, in the costume of a Belgian civilian.

What tried him most were the hats. He refused a peaked cap which the _infirmier_ pressed on him, and compromised finally on a sort of checked cricket cap that just covered the extreme top of his head. We got him off in time, after all.

Then two _infirmiers_ came with a stretcher and carried Cameron upstairs to the operating theatre, and I went up and waited with him in the corridor till the surgeons were ready for him. He had grown drowsy and indifferent by now.

I have missed the Ambulance going out to Lokeren, and have had to stay behind.

Two ladies called to see Mr. ----. One of them was Miss Ashley-Smith, who had him in her ward at Antwerp. I took them over the Hospital to find his room, which is on the second story. His name--his names--in thick Gothic letters, were on a white card by the door.

He was asleep and the nurse could not let them see him.

Miss Ashley-Smith and her friend are staying in the Couvent de Saint Pierre, where the British Field Hospital has taken some of its wounded.

Towards one o'clock news came of heavy fighting. The battle is creeping nearer to us; it has stretched from Zele and Quatrecht to Melle, four and a half miles from Ghent. They are saying that the Germans may enter Ghent to-day, in an hour--half an hour! It will be very awkward for us and for our wounded if they do, as both our ambulance cars are out.

Later news of more fighting at Quatrecht.

[_Afternoon._]

The Commandant has come back. They were at Quatrecht, not Lokeren.

Mr. ---- is awake now. The Commandant has taken me to see him.

He is lying in one of the officers' wards, a small room, with bare walls and a blond light, looking south. There are two beds in this room, set side by side. In the one next the door there is a young French officer. He is very young: a boy with sleek black hair and smooth rose-leaf skin, shining and fresh as if he had never been near the smoke and dirt of battle. He is sitting up reading a French magazine. He is wounded in the leg. His crutches are propped up against the wall.

Stretched on his back in the further bed there is a very tall young Englishman. The sheet is drawn very tight over his chest; his face is flushed and he is breathing rapidly, in short jerks. At first you do not see that he, too, is not more than a boy, for he is so big and tall, and a little brown feathery beard has begun to curl about his jaw and chin.

When I came to him and the Commandant told him my name, he opened his eyes wide with a look of startled recognition. He said he knew me; he had seen me somewhere in England. He was so certain about it that he persuaded me that I had seen him somewhere. But we can neither of us remember where or when. They say he is not perfectly conscious all the time.

We stayed with him for a few minutes till he went off to sleep again.

None of the doctors think that he can live. He was wounded in front with mitrailleuse; eight bullets in his body. He has been operated on. How he survived the operation and the journey on the top of it I can't imagine. And now general peritonitis has set in. It doesn't look as if he had a chance.

* * * * *

We have heard that all the War Correspondents have been sent out of Ghent.

Numbers of British troops came in to-day.

Went up to see Mr. Foster, who is in his room, ill. It is hard lines that he should have had this accident when he has been working so splendidly. And it wasn't his fault, either. One of the Belgian bearers slipped with his end of a stretcher when they were carrying a heavy man, and Mr. Foster got hurt in trying to right the balance and save his wounded man. He is very much distressed at having to lie up and be waited on.

* * * * *

Impossible to write a Journal or any articles while I am in the Hospital, and there is no table yet in my room at the Hotel Cecil.

The first ambulance car, with the chauffeur Bert and Mr. Riley, has come back from Melle, where they left Mrs. Torrence and Janet and Dr. Wilson. They went back again in the afternoon.

They are all out now except poor Mr. Foster and Mrs. Lambert, who is somewhere with her husband.

I am the only available member of the Corps left in the Hospital!

[_3.30._]

No Germans have appeared yet.

* * * * *

I was sitting up in the mess-room, making entries in the Day-Book, when I was sent for. Somebody or something had arrived, and was waiting below.

On the steps of the Hospital I found two brand-new British chauffeurs in brand-new suits of khaki. Behind them, drawn up in the entry, were two brand-new Daimler motor-ambulance cars.

I thought it was a Field Ambulance that had lost itself on the way to France. The chauffeurs (they had beautiful manners, and were very spick and span, and one pleased me by his remarkable resemblance to the editor of the _English Review_)--the chauffeurs wanted to know whether they had come to the right place. And of course they hardly had, if all the British Red Cross ambulance cars were going into France.

Then they explained.

They were certainly making for Ghent. The British Red Cross Society had sent them there. They were only anxious to know whether they had come to the right Hospital, the Hospital where the English Field Ambulance was quartered.

Yes: that was right. They had been sent for us.

They had just come up from Ostend, and they had not been ten minutes in Ghent before orders came through for an ambulance to be sent at once to Melle.

The only available member of the Corps was its Secretary and Reporter. To that utterly untrained and supremely inappropriate person Heaven sent this incredible luck.

When I think how easily I might have missed it! If I'd gone for a stroll in the town. If I'd sat five minutes longer with Mr. Foster. If the landlord of the Hotel Cecil had kept his word and given me a table, when I should, to a dead certainty, have been writing this wretched Journal at the ineffable moment when the chauffeurs arrived.

I am glad to think that I had just enough morality left to play fair with Mrs. Lambert. I did try to find her, so that she shouldn't miss it. Somebody said she was in one of the restaurants on the _Place_ with her husband. I looked in all the restaurants and she wasn't in one of them. The finger of Heaven pointed unmistakably to the Secretary and Reporter.

There was a delay of ten minutes, no more, while I got some cake and sandwiches for the hungry chauffeurs and took them to the bureau to have their brassards stamped. And in every minute of the ten I suffered tortures while we waited. I thought something _must_ happen to prevent my taking that ambulance car out. I thought my heart would leave off beating and I should die before we started (I believe people feel like this sometimes before their wedding night). I thought the Commandant would come back and send out Ursula Dearmer instead. I thought the Military Power would come down from its secret hiding-place and stop me. But none of these things happened. At the last moment, I thought that M. C----

M. C---- was the Belgian Red Cross guide who took us into Antwerp. To M. C---- I said simply and firmly that I was going. The functions of the Secretary and Reporter had never been very clearly defined, and this was certainly not the moment to define them. M. C----, in his innocence, accepted me with confidence and a chivalrous gravity that left nothing to be desired.

The chauffeur Newlands (the leaner and darker one) declared himself ready for anything. All he wanted was to get to work. Poor Ascot, who was so like my friend the editor, had to be content with his vigil in the back yard.

At last we got off. I might have trusted Heaven. The getting off was a foregone conclusion, for we went along the south-east road, which had not worked its mysterious fascination for nothing.

At a fork where two roads go into Ghent we saw one of our old ambulance cars dashing into Ghent down the other road on our left. It was beyond hail. Heaven _meant_ us to go on uninterrupted and unchallenged.

I had not allowed for trouble at the barrier. There always is a barrier, which may be anything from a mile to four miles from the field or village where the wounded are. Yesterday on the way to Lokeren the barrier was at Z----. To-day it was somewhere half-way between Ghent and Melle.

None of us had ever quite got to the bottom of the trouble at the barrier. We know that the Belgian authorities wisely refused all responsibility. Properly speaking, our ambulances were not supposed to go nearer than a certain safe distance from the enemy's firing-line. For two reasons. First, it stood the chance of being shelled or taken prisoner. Second, there was a very natural fear that it might draw down the enemy's fire on the Belgians. Our huge, lumbering cars, with their brand-new khaki hoods and flaming red crosses on a white ground, were an admirable mark for German guns. But as the Corps in this case went into the firing-line on foot, I do not think that the risk was to the Belgians. So, though in theory we stopped outside the barriers, in practice we invariably got through.

The new car was stopped at the barrier now by the usual Belgian Army Medical Officer. We were not to go on to Melle.

I said that we had orders to go on to Melle; and I meant to go on to Melle. The Medical Officer said again that we were not to go, and I said again that we were going.

Then that Belgian Army Medical Officer began to tell us what I imagine is the usual barrier tale.

There were any amount of ambulances at Melle.

There were no wounded at Melle.

And in any case this ambulance wouldn't be allowed to go there. And then the usual battle of the barrier had place.

It was one against three. For M. C---- went over to the enemy, and the chauffeur Newlands, confronted by two official adversaries in uniform, became deafer and deafer to my voice in his right ear.

First, the noble and chivalrous Belgian Red Cross guide, with an appalling treachery, gave the order to turn the car round to Ghent. I gave the counter order. Newlands wavered for one heroic moment; then he turned the car round.

I jumped out and went up to the Army Medical Officer and delivered a frontal attack, discharging execrable French.

"No wounded? You tell us that tale every day, and there are always wounded. Do you want any more of them to die? I mean to go on and I shall go on."

I didn't ask him how he thought he could stop one whom Heaven had predestined to go on to Melle.

M. C---- had got out now to see the fight.

The Army Medical Officer looked the Secretary and Reporter up and down, taking in that vision of inappropriateness and disproportion. There was a faint, a very faint smile under the ferocity of his moustache, the first sign of relenting. The Secretary and Reporter saw the advantage and followed, as you might follow a bend in the enemy's line of defence.

"I _want_ to go on" (placably, almost pathetically). "_Je veux continuer._ Do you by any chance imagine we're _afraid_?"

At this, M. C----, the Belgian guide, smiled too, under a moustache not quite so ferocious as the Army Medical Officer's. They shrugged their shoulders. They had done their duty. Anyhow, they had lost the battle.

The guide and the reporter jumped back into the car; I didn't hear anybody give the order, but the chauffeur Newlands turned her round in no time, and we dashed past the barrier and into Melle.

The village street, that had been raked by mitrailleuses from the field beyond it, was quiet when we came in, and almost deserted. Up a side street, propped against the wall of a stable, four wounded Frenchmen waited for the ambulance. A fifth, shot through the back of his head by a dum-dum bullet, lay in front of them on a stretcher that dripped blood.

I found Mr. Grierson in the village, left behind by the last ambulance. He was immensely astonished at my arrival with the new car. He had with him an eager little Englishman, one of the sort that tracks an ambulance everywhere on the off-chance of being useful.

And the Cure of the village was there. He wore the Red Cross brassard on the sleeve of his cassock and he carried the Host in a little bag of purple silk.

They told me that the village had been fired on by shrapnel a few minutes before we came into it. They said we were only a hundred [?] yards from the German trenches. We could see the edge of the field from the village street. The trenches [?] were at the bottom of it.

It was Baerlaere all over again. The firing stopped as soon as I came within range of it, and didn't begin again until we had got away.