A Journal of Impressions in Belgium Part 11

Also wrote an article ("L'Hopital Militaire, No. 2") for the _Daily Chronicle_; the first bit of journalism I've had time or material for.

Shopped. Very _triste_ affair.

Went to ma.s.s in the Cathedral. Sat far back among the refugees.

If you want to know what Religion really is, go into a Catholic church in a Catholic country under invasion. You only feel the tenderness, the navete of Catholicism in peace-time. In war-time you realize its power.

[_Evening._]

Saw Mr. P., who has been at Termonde. He spoke with great praise of the gallantry of our Corps.

It's odd--either I'm getting used to it, or it's the effect of that run into Antwerp--but I'm no longer torn by fear and anxiety for their safety.

[?] Dined with Mr. L. in a restaurant in the town. It proved to be more expensive than either of us cared for. Our fried sole left us hungry and yet conscience-stricken, as if after an orgy, suffering in a dreadful communion of guilt.

[_Wednesday, 7th._]

7 A.M. Got up early and went to Ma.s.s in the Cathedral.

Prepared report for British Red Cross. Wrote "Journal of Impressions"

from September 25th to September 26th, 11 A.M. It's slow work. Haven't got out of Ostend yet!

Fighting at Zele.

[_Afternoon._]

Got very near the fighting this time.

Mr. L. (Heaven bless him!) took me out with him in the War Correspondents' car to see what the Ambulance was doing at Zele, and, incidentally, to look at the bombardment of some evacuated villages near it (I have no desire to see the bombardment of any village that has not been evacuated first). Mr. M. came too, and they brought a Belgian lady with them, a charming and beautiful lady, whose name I forget.

When Mr. L. told me to get up and come with him to Zele, I did get up with an energy and enthusiasm that amazed me; I got up like one who has been summoned at last, after long waiting, to a sure and certain enterprise. I can trust Mr. L. or any War Correspondent who means business, as I cannot (after Antwerp) trust the Commandant. So far, if the Commandant happens upon a bombardment it has been either in the way of duty, or by sheer luck, or both, as at Alost and Termonde, when duty took him to these places, and any bombardment or firing was, as it were, thrown in. He did not go out deliberately to seek it, for its own sake, and find it infallibly, which is the War Correspondent's way. So that if Mr. L. says there is going to be a bombardment, we shall probably get somewhere nearer to it than thirty kilometres.

We took the main road to Zele. I don't know whether it was really a continuation of the south-east road that runs under the Hospital windows; anyhow, we left it very soon, striking southwards to the right to find what Mr. L. believed to be a short cut. Thus we never got to Zele at all. We came out on a good straight road that would no doubt have led us there in time, but that we allowed ourselves to be lured by the smoke of the great factory at Schoonard burning away to the south.

For a long time I could not believe that it was smoke we saw and not an enormous cloud blown by the wind across miles of sky. We seemed to run for miles with that terrible banner streaming on our right to the south, apparently in the same place, as far off as ever. East of it, on the sky-line, was a whole fleet of little clouds that hung low over the earth; that rose from it; rose and were never lifted, but as they were shredded away, scattered and vanished, were perpetually renewed. This movement of their death and re-birth had a horrible sinister pulse in it.

Each cloud of this fleet of clouds was the smoke from a burning village.

At last, after an endless flanking pursuit of the great cloud that continued steadily on our right, piling itself on itself and mounting incessantly, we struck into a side lane that seemed to lead straight to the factory on fire. But in this direct advance the cloud eluded us at every turn of the lane. Now it was rising straight in front of us in the south, now it was streaming away somewhere to the west of our track.

When we went west it went east. When we went east it went west. And wherever we went we met refugees from the burning villages. They were trudging along slowly, very tired, very miserable, but with no panic and no violent grief. We pa.s.sed through villages and hamlets, untouched still, but waiting quietly, and a little breathlessly, on the edge of their doom.

At the end of one lane, where it turned straight to the east round the square of a field we came upon a great lake ringed with trees and set in a green place of the most serene and vivid beauty. It seemed incredible that the same hour should bring us to this magic stillness and peace and within sight of the smoke of war and within sound of the guns.

At the next turn we heard them.

We still thought that we could get to Schoonard, to the burning factory, and work back to Zele by a slight round. But at this turn we had lost sight of Schoonard and the great cloud altogether, and found ourselves in a little hamlet Heaven knows where. Only, straight ahead of us, as we looked westwards, we heard the guns. The sound came from somewhere over there and from two quarters; German guns booming away on the south, Belgian [? French] guns answering from the north.

Judging by these sounds and those we heard afterwards, we must have been now on the outer edge of a line of fire stretching west and east and following the course of the Scheldt. The Germans were entrenched behind the river.

In the little hamlet we asked our way of a peasant. As far as we could make out from his mixed French and Flemish, he told us to turn back and take the road we had left where it goes south to the village of Baerlaere. This we did. We gathered that we could get a road through Baerlaere to Schoonard. Failing Schoonard, our way to Zele lay through Baerlaere in the opposite direction.

We set off along a very bad road to Baerlaere.

Coming into Baerlaere, we saw a house with a remarkable roof, a steep-pitched roof of black and white tiles arranged in a sort of chequer-board pattern. I asked Mr. L. if he had ever seen a roof like that in his life and he replied promptly, "Yes; in China." And that roof--if it was coming into Baerlaere that we saw it--is all that I can remember of Baerlaere. There was, I suppose, the usual church with its steeple where the streets forked and the usual town hall near it, with a flight of steps before the door and a three-cornered cla.s.sic pediment; and the usual double line of flat-fronted, grey-shuttered houses; I do seem to remember these things as if they had really been there, but you couldn't see the bottom half of the houses for the troops that were crowded in front of them, or the top half for the sh.e.l.ls you tried to see and didn't. They were sweeping high up over the roofs, making for the entrenchments and the batteries beyond the village.

We had come bang into the middle of an artillery duel. It was going on at a range of about a mile and a half, but all over our heads, so that though we heard it with great intensity, we saw nothing.

There were intervals of a few seconds between the firing. The Belgian [?

French] batteries were pounding away on the left quite near (the booming seemed to come from behind the houses at our backs), and the German on the right, farther away.

Now, you may have hated and dreaded the sound of guns all your life, as you hate and dread any immense and violent noise, but there is something about the sound of the first near gun of your first battle that, so far from being hateful or dreadful, or in any way abhorrent to you, will make you smile in spite of yourself with a kind of quiet exultation mixed very oddly with reminiscence[16] so that, though your first impression (by no means disagreeable) is of being "in for it," your next, after the second and the third gun, is that of having been in for it many times before. The effect on your nerves is now like that of being in a very small sailing-boat in a very big-running sea. You climb wave after high wave, and are not swallowed up as you expected. You wait, between guns, for the boom and the shock of the next, with a pa.s.sionate antic.i.p.ation, as you wait for the next wave. And the sound of the gun when it comes is like the exhilarating smack of the wave that you and your boat mean to resist and do resist when it gets you.

You do not think, as you used to think when you sat safe in your little box-like house in St. John's Wood, how terrible it is that sh.e.l.ls should be hurtling through the air and killing men by whole regiments. You do not think at all. n.o.body anywhere near you is thinking that sort of thing, or thinking very much at all.

At the sound of the first near gun I found myself looking across the road at a French soldier. We were smiling at each other.

When we tried to get to Schoonard from the west end of the town we were stopped and turned back by the General in command. Not in the least abashed by this _contretemps_, Mr. L., after some parley with various officers, decided not to go back in ignominious safety by the way we came, but to push on from the east end of the village into the open country through the line of fire that stretched between us and the road to Zele. On our way, while we were about it, he said, we might as well stop and have a look at the Belgian batteries at work--as if he had said we might as well stop at Olympia and have a look at the Motor Show on our way to Richmond.

At this point the unhappy chauffeur, who had not found himself by any means at home in Baerlaere, remarked that he had a wife and family dependent on him.

Mr. L. replied with dignity that he had a wife and family too, and that we all had somebody or something; and that War Correspondents cannot afford to think of their wives and families at these moments.

Mr. M.'s face backed up Mr. L. with an expression of extreme determination.

The little Belgian lady smiled placidly and imperturbably, with an air of being ready to go anywhere where these intrepid Englishmen should see fit to take her.

I felt a little sorry for the chauffeur. He had been out with the War Correspondents several times already, and I hadn't.

We left him and his car behind us in the village, squeezed very tight against a stable wall that stood between them and the German fire. We four went on a little way beyond the village and turned into a bridle path across the open fields. At the bottom of a field to our left was a small slump of willows; we had heard the Belgian guns firing from that direction a few minutes before. We concluded that the battery was concealed behind the willows. We strolled on like one half of a picnic party that has been divided and is looking innocently for the other half in a likely place.[17] But as we came nearer to the willows we lost our clue. The battery had evidently made up its mind not to fire as long as we were in sight. Like the cloud of smoke from the Schoonard factory, it eluded us successfully. And indeed it is hardly the way of batteries to choose positions where interested War Correspondents can come out and find them.[18]

So we went back to the village, where we found the infantry being drawn up in order and doing something to its rifles. For one thrilling moment I imagined that the Germans were about to leap out of their trenches and rush the village, and that the Belgians [? French] were preparing for a bayonet charge.

"In that case," I thought, "we shall be very useful in picking up the wounded and carrying them away in that car."

I never thought of the ugly rush and the horrors after it. It is extraordinary how your mind can put away from it any thought that would make life insupportable.

But no, they were not fixing bayonets. They were not doing anything to their rifles; they were only stacking them.

It was then that you thought of the ugly rush and were glad that, after all, it wouldn't happen.

You were glad--and yet in spite of that same gladness, there was a little sense of disappointment, unaccountable, unpardonable, and not quite sane.

One of the men showed us a burst shrapnel sh.e.l.l. We examined it with great interest as the kind of thing that would be most likely to hit us on our way from Baerlaere to Zele.

We had been barely half an hour hanging about Baerlaere, but it seemed as if we had wasted a whole afternoon there. At last we started. We were told to drive fast, as the fire might open on us at any minute. We drove very fast. Our road lay through open country flat to the river, with no sort of cover anywhere from the German fire, if it chose to come. About half a mile ahead of us was a small hamlet that had been sh.e.l.led. Mr. L.

told us to duck when we heard the guns. I remember thinking that I particularly didn't want to be wounded in my right arm, and that as I sat with my right arm resting on the ledge of the car it was somewhat exposed to the German batteries, so I wriggled low down in my seat and tucked my arm well under cover for quite five minutes. But you couldn't see anything that way, so I popped up again and presently forgot all about my valuable arm in the sheer excitement of the rush through the danger zone. Our car was low on the ground; still, it was high enough and big enough to serve as a mark for the German guns and it fairly gave them the range of the road.