Chapter 16

On our two chauffeurs, Tom and Bert, the glory lies quite thick. "Tom" (if I may quote from my own story of the chauffeurs) "Tom was in the battle of Dixmude. At the order of his commandant he drove his car straight into the thick of it, over the ruins of a shattered house that blocked the way. He waited with his car while all the bombs that he had ever dreamed of crashed around him, and houses flamed, and tottered and fell. 'Pretty warm, ain't it?' was Tom's comment.

"Four days later he was waiting at Oudekappele with his car when he heard that the Hospital of Saint-Jean at Dixmude was being shelled and that the Belgian military man who had been sent with a motor-car to carry off the wounded had been turned back by the fragment of a shell that dropped in front of him. Tom thereupon drove into Dixmude to the Hospital of Saint-Jean and removed from it two wounded soldiers and two aged and paralysed civilians who had sheltered there, and brought them to Furnes. The military ambulance men then followed his lead, and the Hospital was emptied. That evening it was destroyed by a shell.

"And Bert--it was Bert who drove his ambulance into Kams-Kappele to the barricade by the railway. It was Bert who searched in a shell-hole to pick out three wounded from among thirteen dead; who with the help of a Belgian priest, carried the three several yards to his car, under fire, and who brought them in safety to Furnes."

And the others, the brave "Chaplain," and "Mr. Riley," and "Mr. Lambert," have also proved themselves.

But when I think of the Corps it is chiefly of the four field-women that I think--the two "women of Pervyse," and the other two who joined them at their dangerous _poste_.

Both at Furnes and Pervyse they worked all night, looking after their wounded; sometimes sleeping on straw in a room shared by the Belgian troops, when there was no other shelter for them in the bombarded town. One of them has driven a heavy ambulance car--in a pitch-black night, along a road raked by shell-fire, and broken here and there into great pits--to fetch a load of wounded, a performance that would have racked the nerves of any male chauffeur ever born. She has driven the same car, _alone_, with five German prisoners for her passengers. The four women served at Pervyse (the town nearest to the firing-line) in "Mrs. Torrence's" dressing-station--a cellar only twenty yards behind the Belgian trenches. In that cellar, eight feet square and lighted and ventilated only by a slit in the wall, two lived for three weeks, sleeping on straw, eating what they could get, drinking water that had passed through a cemetery where nine hundred Germans are buried. They had to burn candles night and day. Here the wounded were brought as they fell in the trenches, and were tended until the ambulance came to take them to the base hospital at Furnes.

Day in, day out, and all night long, with barely an interval for a wash or a change of clothing, the women stayed on, the two always, and the four often, till the engineers built them a little hut for a dressing-station; they stayed till the Germans shelled them out of their little hut.

This is only a part of what they have done. The finest part will never be known, for it was done in solitary places and in the dark, when special correspondents are asleep in their hotels. There was no limelight on the road between Dixmude and Furnes, or among the blood and straw in the cellar at Pervyse.

And Miss Ashley-Smith (who is now Mrs. McDougall)--her escape from Ghent (when she had no more to do there) was as heroic as her return.

Since then she has gone back to the Front and done splendid service in her own Corps, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.

M. S.

July 15th, 1915.

THE END

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: It would be truer to say she was in love with duty which was often dangerous.]

[Footnote 2: She very soon let us know why. "Followed" is the wrong word.]

[Footnote 3: He didn't. People never do mean these things.]

[Footnote 4: This only means that, whether you attended to it or not (you generally didn't), as long as you were in Belgium, your sub-consciousness was never entirely free from the fear of Uhlans--of Uhlans in the flesh. The illusion of valour is the natural, healthy reaction of your psyche against its fear and your indifference to its fear.]

[Footnote 5: Nobody need have been surprised. She had distinguished herself in other wars.]

[Footnote 6: One is a church and not a cathedral.]

[Footnote 7: I am puzzled about this date. It stands in my ambulance Day-Book as Saturday, 3rd, with a note that the British came into Ghent on their way to Antwerp on the evening of that day. Now I believe there were no British in Antwerp before the evening of Sunday, the 4th, yet "Dr. Wilson" and Mr. Davidson, going into Saint Nicolas before us, saw the British there, and "Mrs. Torrence" and "Janet McNeil" saw more British come into Ghent in the evening. I was ill with fever the day after the run into Antwerp, and got behindhand with my Day-Book. So it seems safest to assume that I made a wrong entry and that we went into Antwerp on Sunday, and to record Saturday's events as spreading over the whole day. Similarly the events that the Day-Book attributes to Monday must have belonged to Tuesday. And if Tuesday's events were really Wednesday's, that clears up a painful doubt I had as to Wednesday, which came into my Day-Book as an empty extra which I couldn't account for in any way. There I was with a day left over and nothing to put into it. And yet Wednesday, the 7th, was the first day of the real siege of Antwerp. On Thursday, the 8th, I started clear.]

[Footnote 8: It wasn't. This was only the first slender trickling. The flood came three days later with the bombardment of the city.]

[Footnote 9: Of all the thousands and thousands of refugees whom I have seen I have only seen three weep, and they were three out of six hundred who had just disembarked at the Prince of Wales's Pier at Dover. But in Belgium not one tear.]

[Footnote 10: This is all wrong. The main stream went as straight as it could for the sea-coast--Holland or Ostend.]

[Footnote 11: The outer forts were twelve miles away.]

[Footnote 12: At the time of writing--February 19th, 1915. My Day-Book gives no record of anything but the hospitals we visited.]

[Footnote 13: There must be something wrong here, for the place was, I believe, a convent.]

[Footnote 14: Every woman did.]

[Footnote 15: This was made up to her afterwards! Her cup fairly ran over.]

[Footnote 16: I have heard a distinguished alienist say that this reminiscent sensation is a symptom of approaching insanity. As it is not at all uncommon, there must be a great many lunatics going about.]

[Footnote 17: Except that nobody had any time to attend to us, I can't think why we weren't all four of us arrested for spies. We hadn't any business to be looking for the position of the Belgian batteries.]

[Footnote 18: More than likely our appearance there stopped the firing.]

[Footnote 19: I have since been told that he was not. And I think in any case I am wrong about his "matchboard" car. It must have been somebody else's. In fact, I'm very much afraid that "he" was somebody else--that I hadn't the luck really to meet him.]

[Footnote 20: He did. She was not a lady whom it was possible to leave behind on such an expedition.]

[Footnote 21: I'm inclined to think it may have been the dogs of Belgium, after all. I can't think where the guns could have been. Antwerp had fallen. It might have been the bombardment of Melle, though.]

[Footnote 22: The fate of "Mr. Lambert" and the scouting-car was one of those things that ought never to have happened. It turned out that the car was not the property of his paper, but his own car, hired and maintained by him at great expense; that this brave and devoted young American had joined our Corps before it left England and gone out to the front to wait for us. And he was kept waiting long after we got there.

But if he didn't see as much service at Ghent as he undertook to see (though he did some fine things on his own even there), it was made up to him in Flanders afterwards, when, with the Commandant and other members of the Corps, he distinguished himself by his gallantry at Furnes and in the Battle of Dixmude.

(For an account of his wife's services see Postscript.)]

[Footnote 23: I record these details (March 11th, 1915) because the Commandant accused me subsequently of a total lack of "balance" upon this occasion.]

[Footnote 24: This is no reflection on Tom's courage. His chief objection was to driving three women so near the German lines. The same consideration probably weighed with the Commandant and M. ----.]

[Footnote 25: The whole thing was a piece of rank insubordination. The Commandant was entirely right to forbid the expedition, and we were entirely wrong in disobeying him. But it was one of those wrong things that I would do again to-morrow.]

[Footnote 26: Antwerp had surrendered on Friday, the 9th.]

[Footnote 27: All the same it was splendidly equipped and managed.]

[Footnote 28: Even now, when I am asked if I did any nursing when I was in Belgium I have to think before I answer: "Only for one morning and one night"--it would still be much truer to say, "I was nursing all the time."]

[Footnote 29: My Day-Book ends abruptly here; and I have no note of the events that followed.]

[Footnote 30: Incorrect. It was, I believe, the uniform of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps.]

[Footnote 31: It was so bad that it made me forget to pack the Commandant's Burberry and his Gillette razors and his pipe.]

[Footnote 32: The Commandant had had an adventure. The Belgian guide mistook the road and brought the car straight into the German lines instead of the British lines where it had been sent. If the Germans hadn't been preoccupied with firing at that moment, the Commandant and Ascot and the Belgian would all have been taken prisoner.]

[Footnote 33: Even now, five months after, I cannot tell whether it was or was not insanity.]

[Footnote 34: It is really dreadful to think of the nuisance we must have been to these dear people on the eve of their own flight.]

[Footnote 35: The Commandant had his own scheme for going back to Ghent, which fortunately he did not carry out.]

[Footnote 36: This girl's courage and self-devotion were enough to establish our innocence--they needed no persuasion. But I still hold myself responsible for her going, since it was my failure to control my obsession that first of all put the idea in her head.]

[Footnote 37: I saw nothing sinister about this arrangement at the time. It seemed incredible to me that I should not return.]

[Footnote 38: Having saved the suit-case, I guarded it as a sacred thing. But Dr. Hanson's best clothes and her surgical instruments were in the tin box after all.]

The following pages contain advertisements of books by the same author or on kindred subjects.

By THE SAME AUTHOR

The Return of the Prodigal

_Cloth, 12mo. $1.35_

"These are stories to be read leisurely with a feeling for the stylish and the careful workmanship which is always a part of May Sinclair's work. They need no recommendation to those who know the author's work and one of the things on which we may congratulate ourselves is the fact that so many Americans are her reading friends."--_Kansas City Gazette-Globe._

"They are the product of a master workman who has both skill and art, and who scorns to produce less than the best."--_Buffalo Express._

"Always a clever writer, Miss Sinclair at her best is an exceptionally interesting one, and in several of the tales bound together in this new volume we have her at her best."--_N. Y. Times._

" ... All of which show the same sensitive apprehension of unusual cases and delicate relations, and reveal a truth which would be hidden from the hasty or blunt observer."--_Boston Transcript._

"One of the best of the many collections of stories published this season."--_N. Y. Sun._

" ... All these stories are of deep interest because all of them are out of the rut."--_Kentucky Post._

"Let no one who cares for good and sincere work neglect this book."--_London Post._

"The stories are touched with a peculiar delicacy and whimsicality."--_Los Angeles Times._

PUBLISHED BY

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

64-66 Fifth Avenue, New York

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Three Sisters

By MAY SINCLAIR

Author of "The Divine Fire," "The Return of the Prodigal," etc.

_Cloth, 12mo, $1.35_

Every reader of "The Divine Fire," in fact every reader of any of Miss Sinclair's books, will at once accord her unlimited praise for her character work. "The Three Sisters" reveals her at her best. It is a story of temperament, made evident not through tiresome analyses but by means of a series of dramatic incidents. The sisters of the title represent three distinct types of womankind. In their reaction under certain conditions Miss Sinclair is not only telling a story of tremendous interest but she is really showing a cross section of life.

"Once again Miss Sinclair has shown us that among the women writers to-day she can be acclaimed as without rival in the ability to draw a character and to suggest atmosphere.... In "The Three Sisters" she gives full measure of her qualities. It is in every way a characteristic novel."--_London Standard._

"Miss Sinclair's singular power as an artist lies in her identification with nature.... She has seldom written a more moving story."--_Metropolitan._

"It is a book powerful alike in its description of the background and in its analysis of character.... This story confirms the impression of her unusual ability."--_Outlook._

"Miss Sinclair's most important book."--_Reedy's Mirror._

"'The Three Sisters' is a powerful novel, written with both vigor and delicacy, dramatic, absorbingly interesting."--_New York Times._

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

The Pentecost of Calamity

By OWEN WISTER

Author of "The Virginian," etc.

_Boards, 16mo, 50 cents_

The author of "The Virginian" has written a new book which describes, more forcibly and clearly than any other account so far published, the meaning, to America, of the tragic changes which are taking place in the hearts and minds of the German people.

Written with ease and charm of style, it is prose that holds the reader for its very beauty, even as it impresses him with its force. It is doubtful whether there will come out of the entire mass of war literature a more understanding or suggestive survey.

"Owen Wister has depicted the tragedy of Germany and has hinted at the possible tragedy of the United States.... We wish it could be read in full by every American."--_The Outlook._

The Military Unpreparedness of the United States

By FREDERIC L. HUIDEKOPER

_Cloth, 8vo_

By many army officers the author of this work is regarded as the foremost military expert in the United States. For nine years he has been striving to awaken the American people to a knowledge of the weaknesses of their land forces and the defencelessness of the country. Out of his extensive study and research he has compiled the present volume, which represents the last word on this subject. It comes at a time when its importance cannot be overestimated, and in the eight hundred odd pages given over to the discussion there are presented facts and arguments with which every citizen should be familiar. Mr. Huidekoper's writings in this field are already well known. These hitherto, however, have been largely confined to magazines and pamphlets, but his book deals with the matters under consideration with that frankness and authority evidenced in these previous contributions and much more comprehensively.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

AN IMPORTANT NEW WORK

With the Russian Army

By Col. ROBERT McCORMICK

_Illustrated, 8vo_

This book deals with the author's experiences in the war area. The work traces the cause of the war from the treaty of 1878 through the Balkan situation. It contains many facts drawn from personal observation, for Col. McCormick has had opportunities such as have been given to no other man during the present engagements. He has been at the various headquarters and actually in the trenches. One of the most interesting chapters of the volume is the concluding one dealing with great personalities of the war from first-hand acquaintance.

The work contains a considerable amount of material calculated to upset generally accepted ideas, comparisons of the fighting forces, and much else that is fresh and original.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

The World War:

How it Looks to the Nations Involved and What it Means to Us

By ELBERT FRANCIS BALDWIN

_Decorated cloth, 12mo, $1.25_

The present war in Europe has called forth a great many books bearing on its different phases, but in the majority of instances these have been written from the standpoint of some one of the nations. Elbert Francis Baldwin has here, however, brought together within the compass of a single volume a survey of the entire field.

Mr. Baldwin was in Europe at the outbreak of hostilities. He mingled with the people, observing their spirit and temper more intimately than it has been permitted most writers to do, and in consequence the descriptions which he gives of the German, or French, or English, or Russian attitude are truer and more complete than those found in previous studies of the war. Mr. Baldwin's statements are calm and just in conclusion. When discussing the German side he has included all of the factors which the Germans think important, and assimilated wholly the German feeling, as he has done in his considerations of the other countries.

"The one indispensable volume so far published for those who desire a comprehensive survey of the situation.... One of the most valuable contributions to the literature of the World War."--_Portland Express._

"The dramatic story ... is unusually calm and dispassionate, after the modern historical manner, with a great deal of fresh information."--_Philadelphia North American._

"Sets down without bias the real causes of the Great War."--_New York Times._

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

Russia and the World

By STEPHEN GRAHAM

Author of "With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem," "With Poor Immigrants to America," etc.

_Illustrated, cloth, 8vo, $2.00_

At the outbreak of the present European war Mr. Graham was in Russia, and his book opens, therefore, with a description of the way the news of war was received on the Chinese frontier, one thousand miles from a railway station, where he happened to be when the Tsar's summons came. Following this come other chapters on Russia and the War, considering such questions as, Is It a Last War?, Why Russia Is Fighting, The Economic Isolation of Russia, An Aeroplane Hunt at Warsaw, Suffering Poland: A Belgium of the East, and The Soldier and the Cross.

But "Russia and the World" is not by any means wholly a war book. It is a comprehensive survey of Russian problems. Inasmuch as the War is at present one of her problems, it receives its due consideration. It has been, however, Mr. Graham's intention to supply the very definite need that there is for enlightenment in English and American circles as to the Russian nation, what its people think and feel on great world matters. On almost every country there are more books and more concrete information than on his chosen land. In fact, "Russia and the World" may be regarded as one of the very first to deal with it in any adequate fashion.

"It shows the author creeping as near as he was allowed to the firing line. It gives broad views of difficult questions, like the future of the Poles and the Jews. It rises into high politics, forecasts the terms of peace and the rearrangement of the world, east and west, that may follow. But the salient thing in it is its interpretation for Western minds of the spirit of Russia."--_London Times._

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

German World Policies

(Der Deutsche Gedanke in der Welt)

By PAUL ROHRBACH

Translated by DR. EDMUND VON MACH

_Cloth, 12mo, $1.25_

Paul Rohrbach has been for several years the most popular author of books on politics and economics in Germany. He is described by his translator as a "constructive optimist," one who, at the same time, is an incisive critic of those shortcomings which have kept Germany, as he thinks, from playing the great part to which she is called. In this volume Dr. Rohrbach gives a true insight into the character of the German people, their aims, fears and aspirations.

Though it was written before the war started and has not been hastily put together, it still possesses peculiar significance now, for in its analysis of the German idea of culture and its dissemination, in its consideration of German foreign policies and moral conquests, it is an important contribution to the widespread speculation now current on these matters.

"Dr. von Mach renders an extraordinary service to his country in making known to English readers at this time a book like Rohrbach's."--_New York Globe._

"A clear insight into Prussian ideals."--_Boston Transcript._

"A valuable, significant, and most informing book."--_New York Tribune._

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York