A Journal of Impressions in Belgium Part 7

And your tortures will be unbearable if, at the same time, you have to hold your tongue about them and pretend that you are a genuine reporter and that all you want is copy and your utmost aim the business of the "scoop."

After a week of it you will not be likely to look with crystal clarity on other people's lapses from precaution.

But it would be absurd to tell him this. Ten to one he wouldn't believe it. He thinks I am funking all the time.

I am still very angry with him. He must know that I am very angry. I think that somewhere inside him he is rather angry too.

All the same he has come to me and asked me to give him my soap. He says Max has taken his.

I give him my soap, but--

These oppressions and obsessions, the deadly anxiety, the futile responsibility and the boredom are too much for me. I am thinking seriously of going home.

In the evening we--the Commandant and Janet McNeil and I--went down to the Hotel de la Poste, to see the War Correspondents and hear the War news. Mr. G. L. and Mr. M. and Mr. P. were there. And there among them, to my astonishment, I found Mr. Davidson, the American sculptor.

The last time I saw Mr. Davidson it was in Mr. Joseph Simpson's studio, the one under mine in Edwardes Square. He was making a bust of Rabindranath Tagore; and as the great mystic poet disconcerted him by continually lapsing into meditation under this process, thereby emptying his beautiful face of all expression whatever, I had been called down from my studio to talk to him, so as to lure him, if possible, from meditation and keep his features in play. Mr. Davidson made a very fine bust of Rabindranath Tagore. And here he is, imperfectly disguised by the shortest of short beards, drawing caricatures of G. L.--G. L.

explaining the plan of campaign to the Belgian General Staff; G. L. very straight and tall, the Belgian General Staff looking up to him with innocent, deferential faces, earnestly anxious to be taught. I am not more surprised at seeing Mr. Davidson here than he is at seeing me. In the world that makes war we have both entirely forgotten the world where people make busts and pictures and books. But we accept each other's presence. It is only a small part of the fantastic dislocation of war.

Nothing could be more different from the Flandria Palace Hotel, our Military Hospital, than the Hotel de la Poste. It is packed with War Correspondents and Belgian officers. After the surgeons and the Red Cross nurses and their wounded, and the mysterious officials hanging about the porch and the hall, apparently doing nothing, after the English Ambulance and the melancholy inactivity of half its Corps, this place seems alive with a rich and virile life. It is full of live, exultant fighters, and of men who have their business not with the wounded and the dying but with live men and live things, and they have live words to tell about them. At least so it seems.

You listen with all your ears, and presently Termonde and Alost and Quatrecht and Courtrai cease to be mere names for you and become realities. It is as if you had been taken from your prison and had been let loose into the world again.

They are saying that there is no fighting at Saint Nicolas (the Commandant has been feeling about again for his visionary base hospital), but that the French troops are at Courtrai in great force.

They have turned their left [?] wing round to the north-east and will probably sweep towards Brussels to cut off the German advance on Antwerp. The siege of Antwerp will then be raised. And a great battle will be fought outside Brussels, probably at Waterloo.

WATERLOO!

Mr. L. looks at you as much as to say that is what he has had up his sleeve all the time. The word comes from him as casually as if he spoke of the London and South-Western terminus. But he is alive to the power of its evocation, to the unsurpa.s.sable thrill. So are you. It starts the current in that wireless system of vibrations that travel unperishing, undiminished, from the dead to the living. There are not many kilometres between Ghent and Waterloo; you are not only within the radius of the psychic shock, you are close to the central batteries, and ninety-nine years are no more than one pulse of their vibration. Through I don't know how many kilometres and ninety-nine years it has tracked you down and found you in your one moment of response.

It has a sudden steadying effect. Your brain clears. The things that loomed so large, the "Flandria," and the English Field Ambulance and its miseries, and the terrifying recklessness of its Commandant, are reduced suddenly to invisibility. You can see nothing but the second Waterloo.

You forget that you have ever been a prisoner in an Hotel-Hospital. You understand the mystic fascination of the road under your windows, going south-east from Ghent to Brussels, somewhere towards Waterloo. You are reconciled to the incomprehensible la.s.situde of events. That is what we have all been waiting for--the second Waterloo. And we have only waited five days.

I am certainly not going back to England.

The French troops are being ma.s.sed at Courtrai.

Suddenly it strikes me that I have done an injustice to the Commandant.

It is all very well to say that he brought me out here against my will.

But did he? He said it would interest me to see the siege of Antwerp, and I said it wouldn't. I said with the most perfect sincerity that I'd die rather than go anywhere near the siege of Antwerp, or of any other place. And now the siege-guns from Namur are battering the forts of Antwerp, and down there the armies are gathering towards the second Waterloo, and the Commandant was right. I am extremely interested. I would die rather than go back to England.

Is it possible that he knew me better than I knew myself?

When I think that it is possible I feel a slight revulsion of justice towards the Commandant. After all, he brought me here. We may disagree about the present state of Alost and Termonde, considered as health-resorts for English girls, but it is pretty certain that without him we would none of us have got here. Where, indeed, should we have been and how should we have got our motor ambulances, but for his intrepid handling of Providence and of the Belgian Red Cross and the Belgian Legation? There is genius in a man who can go out without one car, or the least little nut or cog of a _cha.s.sis_ to his name, and impose himself upon a Government as the Commandant of a Motor Field Ambulance.

Still, though I am not going back to England as a protest, I _am_ going to leave the Hospital Hotel for a little while. That bright idea has come to me just now while we are waiting for the Commandant to tear himself from the War Correspondents and come away. I shall get a room here in the Hotel de la Poste for a week, and, while we wait for Waterloo, I shall write some articles. The War Correspondents will tell me what is being done, and what has been overdone and what remains to do. I shall at least hear things if I can't see them. And I shall cut the obsession of responsibility. It'll be worse than ever if there really is going to be a second Waterloo.

Waterloo with Ursula Dearmer and Janet in the thick of it, and Mrs.

Torrence driving the Colonel's scouting-car!

There are moments of bitterness and distortion when I see the Commandant as a curious psychic monster bringing up his women with him to the siege-guns because of some uncanny satisfaction he finds in their presence there. There are moods, only less perverted, when I see him pursuing his course because it is his course, through sheer Highland Celtic obstinacy; lucid flashes when he appears, blinded by the glamour of his dream, and innocently regardless of actuality. Is it uncanniness?

Is it obstinacy? Is it dreamy innocence? Or is it some gorgeous streak of Feminism? Is it the New Chivalry, that refuses to keep women back, even from the firing-line? The New Romance, that gives them their share of divine danger? Or, since nothing can be more absurd than to suppose that any person acts at all times and in all circ.u.mstances on one ground, or necessarily on any grounds, is it a little bit of all these things? I am not sure that Feminism, or at any rate the New Chivalry, doesn't presuppose them all.

The New Chivalry sees the point of its reporter's retirement to the Hotel de la Poste, since it has decided that journalism is my work, and journalism cannot flourish at the "Flandria." So we interview the nice fat _proprietaire_, and the _proprietaire's_ nice fat wife, and between them they find a room for me, a back room on the fourth floor, the only one vacant in the hotel; it looks out on the white-tiled walls and the windows of the enclosing wings. The s.p.a.ce shut in is deep and narrow as a well. The view from that room is more like a prison than any view from the "Flandria," but I take it. I am not deceived by appearances, and I recognize that the peace of G.o.d is there.

It is a relief to think that poor Max will have one less to work for.

At the "Flandria" we find that the Military Power has put its foot down.

The General--he cannot have a spark of the New Chivalry in his brutal breast--has ordered Mrs. Torrence off her chauffeur's job. You see the grizzled Colonel as the image of protest and desolation, helpless in the hands of the implacable Power. You are sorry for Mrs. Torrence (she has seen practically no service with the ambulance as yet), but she, at any rate, has had her fling. No power can take from her the memory of those two days.

Still, something is going to be done to-morrow, and this time, even the miserable Reporter is to have a look in. The Commandant has another scheme for a temporary hospital or a dressing-station or something, and to-morrow he is going with Car 1 to Courtrai to reconnoitre for a position and incidentally to see the French troops. A G.o.d-sent opportunity for the Reporter; and Janet McNeil is going, too. We are to get up at six o'clock in the morning and start before seven.

[_Friday, October 2nd._]

We get up at six.

We hang about till eight-thirty or nine. A fine rain begins to fall. An ominous rain. Car 1 and Car 2 are drawn up at the far end of the Hospital yard. The rain falls ominously over the yellow-brown, trodden clay of the yard. There is an ominous look of preparation about the cars. There is also an ominous light in the blue eyes of the chauffeur Tom.

The chauffeur Tom appears as one inspired by hatred of the whole human race. You would say that he was also hostile to the entire female s.e.x.

For Woman in her right place he may, he probably does, feel tenderness and reverence. Woman in a field ambulance he despises and abhors. I really think it was the sight of us that accounted for his depression at Ostend. I have gathered from Mrs. Torrence that the chauffeur Tom has none of the New Chivalry about him. He is the mean and brutal male, the cra.s.s obstructionist who grudges women their laurels in the equal field.

I know the dreadful, blasphemous and abominable things that Tom is probably thinking about me as I climb on to his car. He is visibly disgusted with his orders. That he, a Red Cross Field Ambulance chauffeur, should be told to drive four--or is it all five?--women to look at the ma.s.sing of the French troops at Courtrai! He is not deceived by the specious pretext of the temporary hospital. Hospitals be blowed.

It's a bloomin' joy-ride, with about as much Red Cross in it as there is in my hat. He is glad that it is raining.

Yes, I know what Tom is thinking. And all the time I have a sneaking sympathy with Tom. I want to go to Courtrai more than I ever wanted anything in my life, but I see the expedition plainly from Tom's point of view. A field ambulance is a field ambulance and not a motor touring car.

And to-day Tom is justified. We have hardly got upon his car than we were told to get off it. We are not going to Courtrai. We are not going anywhere. From somewhere in those mysterious regions where it abides, the Military Power has come down.

Even as I get off the car and return to the Hospital-prison, in melancholy retreat over the yellow-brown clay of the yard, through the rain, I acknowledge the essential righteousness of the point of view.

And, to the everlasting honour of the Old Chivalry, it should be stated that the chauffeur Tom repressed all open and visible expression of his joy.

The morning pa.s.ses, as the other mornings pa.s.sed, in unspeakable inactivity. Except that I make up the accounts and hand them over to Mr.

Grierson. It seems incredible, but I have balanced them to the last franc.

I pack. Am surprised in packing by Max and Jean. They both want to know the reason why. This is the terrible part of the business--leaving Max and Jean.

I try to explain. Prosper Panne, who "writes for the Paris papers,"

understands me. He can see that the Hotel de la Poste may be a better base for an attack upon the London papers. But Max does not understand.

He perceives that I have a scruple about occupying my room. And he takes me into _his_ room to show me how nice it is--every bit as good as mine.

The implication being that if the Hospital can afford to lodge one of its orderlies so well, it can perfectly well afford to lodge me. (This is one of the prettiest things that Max has done yet! As long as I live I shall see him standing in his room and showing me how nice it is.)

Still you can always appeal from Max to Prosper Panne. He understands these journalistic tempers and caprices. He knows on how thin a thread an article can hang. We have a brief discussion on the comparative difficulties of the _roman_ and the _conte_, and he promises me to cherish and protect the hat I must leave behind me as if it were his bride.