A Journal of Impressions in Belgium Part 25

I slept peaceably on this prospect of a usefulness that seemed to justify my existence at a moment when it most needed vindication.

[_Tuesday, 13th._]

I got up at six. Last thing at night I had said to myself that I must wake early and go round to the Hospital with the money.

With my first sleep the obsession of Ghent had slackened its hold. And though it came back again after I had got up, dressed and had realized my surroundings, its returns were at longer and longer intervals.

The first thing I did was to go round to the _Kursaal_. The Hospital was being evacuated, the wounded were lying about everywhere on the terraces and galleries, waiting for the ambulances. Williams and Fisher and the other man were nowhere to be seen. I was told that their ward had been cleared out first, and that the three were now safe on their way to England.

I went away very grieved that they had not got their money.

At the Hotel I find the Commandant very cheerful. He has made Miss ---- his Secretary and Reporter till my return.[37]

He goes down to the quay to make arrangements for my transport and returns after some considerable time. There have been difficulties about this detail. And the Commandant has an abhorrence of details, even of easy ones.

He comes back. He looks abstracted. I inquire, a little too anxiously, perhaps, about my transport. It is all right, all perfectly right. He has arranged with Dr. Beavis of the British Field Hospital to take me on his ship.

He looks a little spent with his exertions, and as he has again become abstracted I forbear to press for more information at the moment.

We breakfasted. Presently I ask him the name of Dr. Beavis's ship.

Oh, the _name_ of the ship is the _Dresden_.

Time pa.s.ses. And presently, just as he is going, I suggest that it would be as well for me to know what time the _Dresden_ sails.

This detail either he never knew or has forgotten. And there is something about it, about the nature of stated times, as about all things conventional and mechanical and precise, that peculiarly exasperates him.

He waves both hands in a fury of nescience and cries, "Ask me another!"

By a sort of mutual consent we a.s.sume that the _Dresden_ will sail with Dr. Beavis at ten o'clock. After all, it is a very likely hour.

More time pa.s.ses. Finally we go into the street that runs along the Digue. And there we find Dr. Beavis sitting in a motor-car. We approach him. I thank him for his kindness in giving me transport. I say I'm sure his ship will be crowded with his own people, but that I don't in the least mind standing in the stoke-hole, if _he_ doesn't mind taking me over.

He looks at me with a dreamy benevolence mixed with amazement. He would take me over with pleasure if he knew how he was to get away himself.

"But," I say to the Commandant, "I thought you had arranged with Dr.

Beavis to take me on the _Dresden_."

The Commandant says nothing. And Dr. Beavis smiles again. A smile of melancholy knowledge.

"The _Dresden_," he says, "sailed two hours ago."

So it is decided that I am to proceed with the Ambulance to Dunkirk, thence by train to Boulogne, thence to Folkestone. It sounds so simple that I wonder why we didn't think of it before.

But it was not by any means so simple as it sounded.

First of all we had to collect ourselves. Then we had to collect Dr.

Hanson's luggage. Dr. Hanson was one of Mrs. St. Clair Stobart's women surgeons, and she had left her luggage for Miss ---- to carry from Ostend to England. There was a yellow tin box and a suit-case. Dr.

Hanson's best clothes and her cases of surgical instruments were in the suit-case and all the things she didn't particularly care about in the tin box. Or else the best clothes and the surgical instruments were in the tin box, and the things she didn't particularly care about in the suit-case. As we were certainly going to take both boxes, it didn't seem to matter much which way round it was.

Then there was Mr. Foster's green canvas kit-bag to be taken to Folkestone and sent to him at the Victoria Hospital there.

And there was a British Red Cross lady and her luggage--but we didn't know anything about the lady and her luggage yet.

We found them at the _Kursaal_ Hospital, where some of our ambulances were waiting.

By this time the courtyard, the steps and terraces of the Hospital were a scene of the most ghastly confusion. The wounded were still being carried out and still lay, wrapped in blankets, on the terraces; those who could sit or stand sat or stood. Ambulance cars jostled each other in the courtyard. Red Cross nurses dressed for departure were grouped despairingly about their luggage. Other nurses, who were not dressed for departure, who still remained superintending the removal of their wounded, paid no attention to these groups and their movements and their cries. The Hospital had cast off all care for any but its wounded.

Women seized hold of other women for guidance and instruction, and received none. n.o.body was rudely shaken off--they were all, in fact, very kind to each other--but n.o.body had time or ability to attend to anybody else.

Somebody seized hold of the Commandant and sent us both off to look for the kitchen and for a sack of loaves which we would find in it. We were to bring the sack of loaves out as quickly as we could. We went off and found the kitchen, we found several kitchens; but we couldn't find the sack of loaves, and had to go back without it. When we got back the lady who had commandeered the sack of loaves was no more to be seen on the terrace.

While we waited on the steps somebody remarked that there was a German aeroplane in the sky and that it was going to drop a bomb. There was. It was sailing high over the houses on the other side of the street. And it dropped its bomb right in front of us, above an enormous building not fifty yards away.

We looked, fascinated. We expected to see the building knocked to bits and flying in all directions. The bomb fell. And nothing happened.

Nothing at all.

It was soon after the bomb that my attention was directed to the lady.

She was a British Red Cross nurse, stranded with a hold-all and a green canvas trunk, and most particularly forlorn. She had lost her friends, she had lost her equanimity, she had lost everything except her luggage.

How she attached herself to us I do not know. The Commandant says it was I who made myself responsible for her safety. We couldn't leave her to the Germans with her green canvas trunk and her hold-all.

So I heaved up one end of the canvas trunk, and the Commandant tore it from me and flung it to the chauffeurs, who got it and the hold-all into Bert's ambulance. I grasped the British Red Cross lady firmly by the arm, lest she should get adrift again, and hustled her along to the Hotel, where the yellow tin box and the suit-case and the kit-bag waited. Somebody got them into the ambulance somehow.

It was at this point that Ursula Dearmer appeared. (She had put up at some other hotel with Mrs. Lambert.)

My British Red Cross lady was explaining to me that she had by no means abandoned her post, but that she was doing the right thing in leaving Ostend, seeing that she meant to apply for another post on a hospital ship. She was sure, she said, she was doing the right thing. I said, as I towed her securely along by one hand through a gathering crowd of refugees (we were now making for the ambulance cars that were drawn up along the street by the Digue), I said I was equally sure she was doing the right thing and that n.o.body could possibly think otherwise.

And, as I say, Ursula Dearmer appeared.

The youngest but one was seated with Mr. Riley in the military scouting-car that was to be our convoy to Dunkirk. I do not know how it had happened, but in this hour, at any rate, she had taken over the entire control and command of the Ambulance; and this with a coolness and competence that suggested that it was no new thing. It suggested, also, that without her we should not have got away from Ostend before the Germans marched into it. In fact, it is hardly fair to say that she had taken everything over. Everything had lapsed into her hands at the supreme crisis by a sort of natural fitness.

We were all ready to go. The only one we yet waited for was the Commandant, who presently emerged from the Hotel. In his still dreamy and abstracted movements he was pursued by an excited waiter flourishing a bill. I forgot whose bill it was (it may have been mine), but anyhow it wasn't _his_ bill.

We may have thought we were following the retreat of the Belgian Army when we went from Ghent to Bruges. We were, in fact, miles behind it, and the regiments we overtook were stragglers. The whole of the Belgian Army seemed to be poured out on to that road between Ostend and Dunkirk.

Sometimes it was going before us, sometimes it was mysteriously coming towards us, sometimes it was stationary, but always it was there. It covered the roads; we had to cut our way through it. It was retreating slowly, as if in leisure, with a firm, unhasting dignity.

Every now and then, as we looked at the men, they smiled at us, with a curious still and tragic smile.

And it is by that smile that I shall always remember the look of the Belgian Army in the great retreat.

Our own retreat--the Ostend-Dunkirk bit of it--is memorable chiefly by Miss ----'s account of the siege of Antwerp and the splendid courage of Mrs. St. Clair Stobart and her women.

But that is her story, not mine, and it should be left to her to tell.

[_Dunkirk._]

At Dunkirk the question of the Secretary's transport again arose. It contended feebly with the larger problem of where and when and how the Corps was to lunch, things being further complicated by the Commandant's impending interview with Baron de Broqueville, the Belgian Minister of War. I began to feel like a large and useless parcel which the Commandant had brought with him in sheer absence of mind, and was now anxious to lose or otherwise get rid of. At the same time the Ambulance could not go on for more than three days without further funds, and, as the courier to be despatched to fetch them, I was, for the moment, the most important person in the Corps; and my transport was not a question to be lightly set aside.