Chapter 3

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

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

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

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

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

And at noon no orders have come for us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I abandon myself to my malady of self-distrust.

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

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

We converse.

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

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

Prosper Panne.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[_Monday, 28th._]

We have been here a hundred years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is once more bearable.

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

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

And I think of the poor little dreamy, guileless Commandant in his conspicuous car, and I smile at her in secret, thanking Heaven that it's Ursula Dearmer and not Mrs. Torrence who is at his side.

The ambulance has come back from Alost with two or three wounded and some refugees. The Commandant is visibly elated, elated out of all proportion to the work actually done. Ursula Dearmer is not elated in the very least, but she is wide-awake. Her docility has vanished with her torpor. She and the Commandant both look as if something extremely agreeable had happened to them at Alost. But they are reticent. We gather that Ursula Dearmer has been working with the nuns in the Convent at Alost, where the wounded were taken before the ambulance cars removed them to Ghent. It sounded very safe.

But the Commandant dashed into my room after luncheon. His face was radiant, almost ecstatic. He was like a child who has rushed in to tell you how ripping the pantomime was.

"We've been _under fire_!"

But I was very angry. Coldly and quietly angry. I felt like that when I was ten years old and piloting my mother through the thick of the traffic between Guildhall and the Bank, and she broke from me and was all but run over. I don't quite know what I said to him, but I think I said he ought to be ashamed of himself. For it seems that Ursula Dearmer was with him.

I remembered how Ursula Dearmer's mother had come to me in the committee-room and asked me how near we proposed to go to the firing-line, and whether her daughter would be in any danger, and how I said, first of all, that there wasn't any use pretending that there wouldn't be danger, and that the chances were--and how the Commandant had intervened at that moment to assure her that danger there would be none. With a finger on the map of France and Belgium he traced the probable, the inevitable, course of the campaign; and in light, casual tones which allayed all anxiety, he explained how, as the Germans advanced upon any point, we should retire upon our base. As for the actual field-work, with one gesture he swept the whole battle-line into the distance, and you saw it as an infinitely receding tide that left its wrack strewn on a place of peace where the ambulance wandered at its will, secure from danger. The whole thing was done with such compelling and convincing enthusiasm that Ursula Dearmer's mother adopted more and more the humble attitude of a mere woman who has failed to grasp the conditions of modern warfare. Ursula Dearmer herself looked more docile than ever, though a little bored, and very sleepy.

And I remembered how when it was all over Ursula Dearmer's mother implored me, if there _was_ any danger, to see that Ursula Dearmer was sent home, and how I promised that whatever happened Ursula Dearmer would be safe, clinching it with a frightfully sacred inner vow, and saying to myself at the same time what a terrible nuisance this young girl is going to be. I saw myself at the moment of parting, standing on the hearthrug, stiff as a poker with resolution, and saying solemnly, "I'll keep my word!"

And here was the Commandant informing me with glee that a shell had fallen and burst at Ursula Dearmer's feet.

He was so pleased, and with such innocent and childlike pleasure, that I hadn't the heart to tell him that there wasn't much resemblance between those spaces of naked peace behind the receding battle-line and the narrow streets of a bombarded village. I only said that I should write to Ursula Dearmer's mother and ask her to release me from my promise. He said I would do nothing of the kind. I said I would. And I did. And the poor Commandant left me, somewhat dashed, and not at all pleased with me.

It seems that the shell burst, not exactly at Ursula Dearmer's feet, but ten yards away from her. It came romping down the street with immense impetus and determination; and it is not said of Ursula Dearmer that she was much less coy in the encounter. She took to shell-fire "like a duck to water."

Dr. Bird told us this. Ursula Dearmer herself was modest, and claimed no sort of intimacy with the shell that waked her up. She was as nice as possible about it. But all the same, into the whole Corps (that part of it that had been left behind) there has crept a sneaking envy of her luck. I feel it myself. And if _I_ feel it, what must Mrs. Torrence and Janet feel?

Mrs. Lambert, anyhow, has had nothing to complain of so far. Her husband took her to Alost in his motor-car; I mean the motor-car which is the property of his paper.