CHAPTER XXXII

THURSDAY

Thursday is a queer day, a day of no beginning and no ending.

It is haunted by such immense noise that it loses all likeness to what we know in ordinary life as "a day"--the thing that comes in between two nights.

It is, in fact, nothing but one cataclysmal bang and shriek of shells and shrapnel. The earth seems to break open from its centre every five minutes or so, and my brain begins to formulate to itself a tremendous sense of height and space, as well as of noise, until I feel as though I am in touch with the highest skies as well as with the lowest earth, because things that seem to belong essentially to earth are now happening in the skies.

The roof of the world is now enacting a rôle that is just as strange and just as surprising as if the roof of a theatre had suddenly begun to take part in a drama.

One looks above as often as one looks below or around one.

Flinging themselves forward with thin whinging cries like millions of mosquitoes on the attack, the shrapnel rushes perpetually overhead, and the high-explosive shells pour down upon the city, deafening, stupefying, until at last, by the very immensity of their noise, they gradually lose their power to affect one, even though they break all round.

Instead of listening to the bombardment I find myself listening crossly to the creaking of our lift, which makes noises exactly like those of the shrapnel outside.

In fact, when I am in my bedroom, and the lift is going up and down, I really don't know which is lift and which is shrapnel.

* * * * *

Seven o'clock on Thursday morning.

The bombardment goes on fiercely, but I forget about it here in the big, bare, smoky café, because I cannot hear the lift.

A waiter brings me some coffee and I stand and drink it and look about me.

The café is surrounded with glass doors, and through these doors I see thousands and thousands of people hurrying for dear life along the roads.

As time goes on their numbers increase, until they are flowing by as steadily as some ceaseless black stream moving Holland-wards.

Men, women, children, nuns, priests, motor cars, carriages, cabs, carts, drays, trolleys, perambulators, every species of human being and of vehicle goes hurrying past the windows, and always the vehicles are laden to the very utmost with their freight of human life.

One's brain reels before the immensity of this thing that is happening here; a city is being evacuated by a million inhabitants; the city is in flames and shells are raining down on it; yet the cook is making soup in the kitchen....

Among the human beings struggling onwards towards the Breda Gate which will lead them to Holland, making strange little notes in the middle of the human beings, I see every now and then some poor pathetic animal, moving along in timid bewilderment--a sheep--a dog--a donkey--a cow--a horse--more cows perhaps than anything, big, simple, wondering cows, trudging along behind desolate little groups of peasants with all their little worldly belongings tied up in a big blue-and-white check handkerchief, while crash over their heads goes on the cannonading from the forts, and with each fresh shock the vast concourse of fleeing people starts and hurries forward.

It seems to me as though the End of the World will be very like to-day.

A huge gun-carriage, crowded with people, is passing. It is twenty feet long, and drawn by two great, bulky Flemish horses. Sitting all along the middle, with great wood stakes fixed along the edges to keep them from falling out, are different families getting away into Holland. Fathers, mothers, children. Two men go by with a clothes-basket covered with a blanket. Dozens of beautiful dogs, bereft of their collars in this final parting with their masters, run wildly back and forth along the roads. A boy with a bicycle is wheeling an old man on it. Three wounded blue and scarlet soldiers march along desolately, carrying brown paper parcels. Belgian Boy Scouts in khaki, with yellow handkerchiefs round their necks, flash past on bicycles. A man pushes a dog-cart with his three children and his wife in it, while the yellow dog trots along underneath, his tongue out. A black-robed priest rides by, mounted on a great chestnut mare, with a scarlet saddle cloth.

All the dramas of Æschylus pale into insignificance before this scene....

It is more than a procession of human beings. It is a procession of broken hearts, of torn, bleeding souls, and ruined homes, of desolate lives, of blighted hopes, and grim, grey despair--grim, grey despair in a thousand shapes and forms; and ever It hurries along the roads, ever It blocks the hotel windows, casting its thick shadows as the sun rises in the heavens, defying the black smoke palls that hang athwart the skies.

Sometimes I find tears streaming down my cheeks, and as they splash on my hands I look at them stupidly, and wonder what they are, and why they come, for no one can think clearly now.

Once it is the sight of a little, young, childlike nun, guarding an old, tottering, white-bearded man who is dumb as well as deaf, and who can only walk with short, little, halting steps. Is she really going to try and get him to Holland, I wonder?