A Journal of Impressions in Belgium Part 23

Somewhere on this road the Belgian Army has gone before us. We have got to go with it. We have had our orders.

That thought consoles you, but not for long. You may call it following the Belgian Army. But the Belgian Army is retreating, and you are retreating with it. There is nothing else you can do; but that does not make it any better. And this speed of the motor over the flat roads, this speed that cuts the air, driving its furrow so fast that the wind rushes by you like strong water, this speed that so inspired and exalted you when it brought you into Flanders, when it took you to Antwerp and Baerlaere and Lokeren and Melle, this vehement and frightful and relentless speed is the thing that beats you down and tortures you. For several hours, ever since you had your orders to pack up and go, you have been working with no other purpose than this going; you have contemplated it many times with equanimity, with indifference; you knew all along that it was not possible to stay in Ghent for ever; and when you were helping to get the wounded into the ambulances you thought it would be the easiest thing in the world to get in yourself and go with them; when you had time to think about it you were even aware of looking forward with pleasure to the thrill of a clean run before the Germans.

You never thought, and n.o.body could possibly have told you, that it would be like this.

I never thought, and n.o.body could possibly have told me, that I was going to behave as I did then.

The thing began with the first turn of the road that hid the "Flandria."

Up till that moment, whatever I may have felt about the people we had to leave behind us, as long as none of our field-women were left behind, I had not the smallest objection to being saved myself. And if it had occurred to me to stay behind for the sake of one man who couldn't be moved and who had the best surgeon in the Hospital and the pick of the nursing-staff to look after him, I think I should have disposed of the idea as sheer sentimentalism. When I was with him to-night I could think of nothing but the wounded in the Couvent de Saint Pierre. And afterwards there had been so much to do.

And now that there was nothing more to do, I couldn't think of anything but that one man.

The night before came back to me in a vision, or rather an obsession, infinitely more present, more visible and palpable than this night that we were living in. The light with the red shade hung just over my head on my right hand; the blond walls were round me; they shut me in alone with the wounded man who lay stretched before me on the bed. And the moments were measured by the rhythm of his breathing, and by the closing and opening of his eyes.

I thought, he will open his eyes to-night and look for me and I shall not be there. He will know that he has been left to the Belgians, who cannot understand him, whom he cannot understand. And he will think that I have betrayed him.

I felt as if I _had_ betrayed him.

I am sitting between Mr. Riley and Miss Ashley-Smith. Mr. Riley is ill; he has got blood-poisoning through a cut in his hand. Every now and then I remember him, and draw the rug over his knees as it slips. Miss Ashley-Smith, tired with her night watching, has gone to sleep with her head on my shoulder, where it must be horribly jolted and shaken by my cough, which of course chooses this moment to break out again. I try to get into a position that will rest her better; and between her and Mr.

Riley I forget for a second.

Then the obsession begins again, and I am shut in between the blond walls with the wounded man.

I feel his hand and arm lying heavily on my shoulder in the attempt to support me as I kneel by his bed with my arms stretched out together under the hollow of his back, as we wait for the pillow that never comes.

It is quite certain that I have betrayed him.

It seems to me then that nothing that could happen to me in Ghent could be more infernal than leaving it. And I think that when the ambulance stops to put down the Belgian soldier I will get out and walk back with him to Ghent.

Every half-mile I think that the ambulance will stop to put down the Belgian soldier.

But the ambulance does not stop. It goes on and on, and we have got to Ecloo before we seem to have put three miles between us and Ghent.

Still, though I'm dead tired when we get there, I can walk three miles easily. I do not feel at all insane with my obsession. On the contrary, these moments are moments of exceptional lucidity.[33] While the Commandant goes to look for the Convent I get out and look for the Belgian soldier. Other Belgian soldiers have joined him in the village street.

I tell him I want to go back to Ghent. I ask him how far it is to walk, and if he will take me. And he says it is twenty kilometres. The other soldiers say, too, it is twenty kilometres. I had thought it couldn't possibly be more than four or five at the outside. And I am just sane enough to know that I can't walk as far as that if I'm to be any good when I get there.

We wait in the village while they find the Convent and take the wounded men there; we wait while the Commandant goes off in the dark to find his friend's house.

The house stands in a garden somewhere beyond the railway station, up a rough village street and a stretch of country road. It is about four in the morning when we get there. A thin ooze of light is beginning to leak through the mist. The mist holds it as a dark cloth holds a fluid that bleaches it.

There is something queer about this light. There is something queer, something almost inimical, about the garden, as if it tried to protect itself by enchantment from the fifteen who are invading it. The mist stands straight up from the earth like a high wall drawn close about the house; it blocks with dense grey stuff every inch of s.p.a.ce between the bushes and trees; they are thrust forward rank upon rank, closing in upon the house; they loom enormous and near. A few paces further back they appear as without substance in the dense grey stuff that invests them; their tops are tangled and lost in a web of grey. In this strange garden it is as if s.p.a.ce itself had solidified in ma.s.ses, and solid objects had become s.p.a.ces between.

When your eyes get used to this curious inversion it is as if the mist was no longer a wall but a growth; the garden is the heart of a jungle bleached by enchantment and struck with stillness and cold; a tangle of grey; a m.u.f.fled, huddled and stifled bower, all grey, and webbed and laced with grey.

The door of the house opens and the effect of queerness, of inimical magic disappears.

Mr. E., our kind Dutch host, and Mrs. E., our kind English hostess, have got up out of their beds to receive us. This hospitality of theirs is not a little thing when you think that their house is to be invaded by Germans, perhaps to-day.[34]

They do not allow you to think of it. For all you are to see of the tragedy they and their house might be remaining at Ecloo in leisure and perfect hospitality and peace. Only, as they see us pouring in over their threshold a hovering twinkle in their kind eyes shows that they are not blind to the comic aspect of retreats.

They have only one spare bedroom, which they offer; but they have filled their drawing-room with blankets; piles and piles of white fleecy blankets on chairs and sofas and on the floor. And they have built up a roaring fire. It is as if they were succouring fifteen survivors of shipwreck or of earthquake, or the remnants of a forlorn hope. To be sure, we are flying from Ghent, but we have only flown twenty kilometres as yet.

However, most of the Corps have been up all night for several nights, and the mist outside is a clinging and a biting mist, and everybody is grateful.

I shall never forget the look of the E.s' drawing-room, smothered in blankets and littered with the members of the Corps, who lay about it in every pathetic posture of fatigue. A group of seven or eight snuggled down among the blankets on the floor in front of the hearth like a camp before a campfire. Janet McNeil, curled up on one window-seat, and Ursula Dearmer, rolled in a blanket on the other, had the heart-rending beauty of furry animals under torpor. The chauffeurs Tom and Bert made themselves entirely lovable by going to sleep bolt upright on dining-room chairs on the outer ring of the camp. The E.s' furniture came in where it could with fantastic and incongruous effect.

I don't know how I got through the next three hours, for my obsession came back on me again and again, and as soon as I shut my eyes I saw the face and eyes of the wounded man. I remember sitting part of the time beside Miss Ashley-Smith, wide-awake, in a corner of the room behind Bert's chair. I remember wandering about the E.s' house. I must have got out of it, for I also remember finding myself in their garden, at sunrise.

And I remember the garden, though I was not perfectly aware of it at the time. It had a divine beauty, a serenity that refused to enter into, to ally itself in any way with an experience tainted by the sadness of the retreat from Ghent.

But because of its supernatural detachment and tranquillity and its no less supernatural illumination I recalled it the more vividly afterwards.

It was full of tall bushes and little slender trees standing in a delicate light. The mist had cleared to the transparency of still water, so still that under it the bushes and the trees stood in a cold, quiet radiance without a shimmer. The light itself was intensely still. What you saw was not the approach of light, but its mysterious arrest. It was held suspended in crystalline vapour, in thin shafts of violet and gold, clear as panes; it was caught and lifted upwards by the high bushes and the slender trees; it was veiled in the silver-green ma.s.ses of their tops. Every green leaf and every blade of gra.s.s was a vessel charged. It was not so much that the light revealed these things as that these things revealed the light. There was no kindling touch, no tremor of dawn in that garden. It was as if it had removed the walls and put off the lacing webs and the thick cloths of grey stuff by some mystic impulse of its own, as if it maintained itself in stillness by an inner flame. Only the very finest tissues yet clung to it, to show that it was the same garden that disclosed itself in this clarity and beauty.

The next thing I remember is the Chaplain coming to me and our going together into the E.s' dining-room, and Miss Ashley-Smith's joining us there. My malady was contagious and she had caught it, but with no damage to her self-control.

She says very simply and quietly that she is going back to Ghent. And the infection spreads to the Chaplain. He says that neither of us is going back to Ghent, but that he is going. The poor boy tries to arrange with us how he may best do it, in secrecy, without poisoning the Commandant[35] and the whole Ambulance with the spirit of return. With difficulty we convince him that it would be useless for any man to go.

He would be taken prisoner the minute he showed his nose in the "Flandria" and set to dig trenches till the end of the War.

Then he says, if only he had his ca.s.sock with him. They would respect _that_ (which is open to doubt).

We are there a long time discussing which of us is going back to Ghent.

Miss Ashley-Smith is fertile and ingenious in argument. She is a nurse, and I and the Chaplain are not. She has friends in Ghent who have not been warned, whom she must go back to. In any case, she says, it was a toss-up whether she went or stayed.

And while we are still arguing, we go out on the road that leads to the village, to find the ambulances and see if any of the chauffeurs will take us back to Ghent. I am not very hopeful about the means of transport. I do not think that Tom or any of the chauffeurs will move, this time, without orders from the Commandant. I do not think that the Commandant will let any of us go except himself.

And Miss Ashley-Smith says if only she had a horse.

If she had a horse she would be in Ghent in no time. Perhaps, if none of the chauffeurs will take her back, she can find a horse in the village.

She keeps on saying very quietly and simply that she is going, and explaining the reasons why she should go rather than anybody else. And I bring forward every reason I can think of why she should do nothing of the sort.

I abhor the possibility of her going back instead of me; but I am not yet afraid of it. I do not yet think seriously that she will do it. I do not see how she is going to, if the chauffeurs refuse to take her. (I do not see how, in this case, I am to go myself.) And I do not imagine for one moment that she will find a horse. Still, I am vaguely uneasy. And the Chaplain doesn't make it any better by backing her up and declaring that as she will be more good than either of us when she gets there, her going is the best thing that in the circ.u.mstances can be done.

And in the end, with an extreme quietness and simplicity, she went.

We had not yet found the ambulance cars, and it seemed pretty certain that Miss Ashley-Smith would not get her horse any more than the Chaplain could get his ca.s.sock.

And then, just when we thought the difficulties of transport were insuperable, we came straight on the railway lines and the station, where a train had pulled up on its way to Ghent. Miss Ashley-Smith got on to the train. I got on too, to go with her, and the Chaplain, who is abominably strong, put his arms round my waist and pulled me off.

I have never ceased to wish that I had hung on to that train.

On our way back to the E.s' house we met the Commandant and told him what had happened. I said I thought it was the worst thing that had happened yet. It wasn't the smallest consolation when he said it was the most sensible solution.

And when Mrs. ---- for fifteen consecutive seconds took the view that I had decoyed Miss Ashley-Smith out on to that accursed road in order to send her to Ghent, and deliberately persuaded her to go back to the "Flandria" instead of me, for fifteen consecutive seconds I believed that this diabolical thing was what I had actually done.

Mrs. ----'s indignation never blazes away for more than fifteen seconds; but while the conflagration lasts it is terrific. And on circ.u.mstantial evidence the case was black against me. When last seen, Miss Ashley-Smith was entirely willing to be saved. She goes out for a walk with me along a quiet country road, and the next thing you hear is that she has gone back to Ghent. And since, actually and really, it was my obsession that had pa.s.sed into her, I felt that if I had taken Miss Ashley-Smith down that road and murdered her in a d.y.k.e my responsibility wouldn't have been a bit worse, if as bad.

And it seemed to me that all the people scattered among the blankets in that strange room, those that still lay snuggling down amiably in the warmth, and those that had started to their feet in dismay, and those that sat on chairs upright and apart, were hostile with a just and righteous hostility, that they had an intimate knowledge of my crime, and had risen up in abhorrence of the thing I was.