A Journal of Impressions in Belgium Part 3

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 a.s.sure 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 a.s.sure 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 s.p.a.ce 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, G.o.d 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. Gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sions.

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 ta.s.sel 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 a.s.sume 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 mult.i.tudes 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_!"