My War Experiences in Two Continents Part 4

As soon as a wounded man has been attended to and is able to be put on a stretcher again he is sent to Calais. We have to keep emptying the wards for other patients to come in, and besides, if the fighting comes this way, we shall have to fall back a little further.

We have a river between us and the Germans, so we shall always know when they are coming and get a start and be all right.

Your loving S. MACNAUGHTAN.

_25 October._--A glorious day. Up in the blue even Taubes--those birds of prey--look beautiful, like eagles wheeling in their flight. It is all far too lovely to leave, yet men are killing each other painfully with every day that dawns.

I had a tiresome day in spite of the weather, because the hospital was evacuated suddenly owing to the nearness of the Germans, and I missed going with the ambulance, so I hung about all day.

_26 October. My birthday._--This morning several women were brought in horribly wounded. One girl of sixteen had both legs smashed. I was taking one old woman to the civil hospital and I had to pa.s.s eighteen dead men; they were laid out beside some women who were washing clothes, and I noticed how tired even in death their poor dirty feet looked.

[Page Heading: TO THE EDGE OF THE FIGHTING LINE]

We started early in the ambulance to-day, and went to pick up the wounded. It was a wild gusty morning, one of those days when the sky takes up nearly all the picture and the world looks small. The mud was deep on the road, and a cyclist corps plunged heavily along through it.

The car steered badly and we drove to the edge of the fighting-line.

First one comes to a row of ammunition vans, with men cooking breakfast behind them. Then come the long grey guns, tilted at various angles, and beyond are the sh.e.l.ls bursting and leaving little clouds of black or white in the sky. We signalled to a gun not to fire down the road in much the same way as a bobby signals to a hansom. When we got beyond the guns they fired over us with a long streaky sort of sound. We came back to the road and picked up the wounded wherever we could find them.

The churches are nearly all filled with straw, the chairs piled anywhere, and the sacrament removed from the altar. In cottages and little inns it is the same thing--a litter of straw, and men lying on it in the chilly weather. Here and there through some little window one sees surgeons in their white coats dressing wounds. Half the world seems to be wounded and inefficient. We filled our ambulance, and stood about in curious groups of English men and women who looked as if they were on some shooting-party. When our load was complete we drove home.

Dr. Munro told me that last night he met a German prisoner quite naked being marched in, proudly holding his head up. Lots of the men fight naked in the trenches. In hospital we meet delightful German youths.

Amongst others who were brought in to-day was Mr. "d.i.c.k" Reading, the editor of a sporting paper. He was serving in the Belgian army, and was behind a gun-carriage when it was fired upon and started. Reading clung on behind with both his legs broken, and he stuck to it till the gun-carriage was pulled up! He came in on a stretcher as bright as a b.u.t.ton, smoking a cigar and laughing.

[Page Heading: POPERINGHE]

Late this afternoon we had to turn out of Furnes and fly to Poperinghe.

The drive was intensely interesting, through crowds of troops of every nationality, and the town seemed large and well lighted. It was crowded with people to see all our ambulances arrive. We went to a cafe, where there was a fire but nothing to eat, so some of the party went out and bought chops, and I cooked them in a stuffy little room which smelt of burnt fat.

After supper we went to a convent where the Queen of the Belgians had made arrangements for us to sleep. It was delightful. Each of us had a snowy white bed with white curtains in a long corridor, and there was a basin of water, cold but clean, and a towel for each of us. We thoroughly enjoyed our luxuries.

_28 October._--The tide of battle seems to have swung away from us again and we were recalled to Furnes to-day. The hospital looked very bare and empty as all the patients had been evacuated, and there was nothing to do till fresh ones should come in. Three sh.e.l.ls came over to-day and landed in a field near us. Some people say they were sent by our own naval guns firing wide. The souvenir grafters went out and got pieces of them.

[Page Heading: DUNKIRK]

_2 November._--I have been spending a couple of nights in Dunkirk, where I went to meet Miss Fyfe. The _Invicta_ got in late because the _Hermes_ had been torpedoed and they had gone to her a.s.sistance. No doubt the torpedo was intended for the _Invicta_, which carries ammunition, and is becoming an unpopular boat in consequence. Forty of the _Hermes_ men were lost.

Dunkirk is full of people, and one meets friends at every turn. I had tea at the Consulate one afternoon, and was rather glad to get away from the talk of sh.e.l.ls and wounds, which is what one hears most of at Furnes.

I saw Lord Kitchener in the town one day; he had come to confer with Joffre, Sir John French, Monsieur Poincare, and Mr. Churchill, at a meeting held at the Chapeau Rouge Hotel. Rather too many valuable men in one room, I thought--especially with so many spies about! Three men in English officers' uniforms were found to be Germans the other day and taken out and shot.

The d.u.c.h.ess of Sutherland has a hospital at our old Casino at Malo les Bains, and has made it very nice. I had a long chat with a Coldstream man who was there. He told me he was carried to a barn after being shot in the leg and the bone shattered. He lay there for six days before he was found, with nothing to eat but a few biscuits. He dressed his own wound.

"But," he said, "the string of my puttee had been driven in so far by the shot I couldn't find it to get the thing off, so I had to bandage over it."

I went down to the station one day to see if anything could be done for the wounded there. They are coming in at the rate of seven hundred a day, and are laid on straw in an immense goods-shed. They get nothing to eat, and the atmosphere is so bad that their wounds can't be dressed.

They are all patient, as usual, only the groans are heartbreaking sometimes. We are arranging to have soup given to them, and a number of ambulance men arrived who will remove them to hospital ships and trains.

But the goods-shed is a shambles, and let us leave it at that.[1]

[1] It must not be thought that in this and in subsequent pa.s.sages referring to the sufferings of the wounded Miss Macnaughtan alludes to any hardships endured by British troops. Her time in Flanders was all spent behind the French and Belgian lines.--ED.

Mrs. Knocker came into Dunkirk for a night's rest while I was staying there. She had been out all the previous day in a storm of wind and rain driving an ambulance. It was heavy with wounded, and sh.e.l.ls were dropping very near. She--the most courageous woman that ever lived--was quite unnerved at last. The gla.s.s of the car she was driving was dim with rain and she could carry no lights, and with this swaying load of injured men behind her on the rutty road she had to stick to her wheel and go on.

Some one said to her, "There is a doctor in such-and-such a farmhouse, and he has no dressings. You must take him these."

She demurred (a most unusual thing for her), but men do not protect women in this war, and they said she had to take them. She asked one of the least wounded of the men to get down and see what was in front of her, and he disappeared altogether. The dark ma.s.s she had seen in the road was a huge hole made by a sh.e.l.l! After steering into dead horses and going over awful roads Mrs. Knocker came b.u.mping into the yard, steering so badly that they ran to see what was wrong, and they found her fainting, and she was carried into the house. At Dunkirk she got a good dinner and a night's rest.

_Furnes. 5 November._--The hospital is beginning to fill up again, and the nurses are depressed because only those cases which are nearly hopeless are allowed to stay, so it is death on all sides and just a h.e.l.l of suffering. One man yelled to me to-night to kill him. I wish I might have done so. The tragedy of war presses with a fearful weight after being in a hospital, and wherever one is one hears the infernal sound of the guns. On Sunday about forty sh.e.l.ls came into Furnes, but I was at Dunkirk. This morning about five dropped on to the station.

[Page Heading: NIEUPORT]

To-day I went out to Nieuport. It is like some town one sees in a horrible nightmare. Hardly a house is left standing, but that does not describe the scene. Nothing can fitly describe it except perhaps such a pen as Victor Hugo's. The cathedral at Nieuport has two outer walls left standing. The front leans forward helplessly, the aisles are gone. The trees round about are burnt up and shot away. In the roadway are great holes which sh.e.l.ls have made. The very cobbles of the street are scattered by them. Not a window remains in the place; all are shattered and many hang from their frames. The fronts of the houses have fallen out, and one sees glimpses of wretched domestic life: a baby's cradle hangs in mid-air, some tin boxes have fallen through from the box-room in the attic to the ground floor. Shops are shivered and their contents strewn on all sides; the interiors of other houses have been hollowed out by fire. There is a toy-shop with dolls grinning vacantly at the ruins or bobbing brightly on elastic strings.

In a wretched cottage some soldiers are having breakfast at a fine-carved table. In one house, surrounded by a very devastation of wreckage, some cheap ornaments stand intact on a mantelpiece. From another a little ginger-coloured cat strolls out unconcernedly! The bedsteads hanging midway between floors look twisted and thrawn--nothing stands up straight. Like the wounded, the town has been rendered inefficient by war.

_6 November._--Furnes always seems to me a weird tragic place. I cannot think why this is so, but its influence is to me rather curious. I feel as if all the time I was living in some blood-curdling ghost story or a horrid dream. Every day I try to overcome the feeling, but I can't succeed. This afternoon I made up my mind to return to our villa and write my diary. The day was lovely, and I meant to enjoy a rest and a scribble, but so strong was the horrid influence of the place that I couldn't settle to anything. I can't describe it, but it seemed to stifle me, and I can only compare it to some second sight in which one sees death. I sat as long as I could doing my writing, but I had to give in at last, and I tucked my book under my arm and walked back to the hospital, where at least I was with human beings and not ghosts.

Our life here is made up of many elements and many people, all rather incongruous, but the average of human nature is good. A villa belonging to a Dr. Joos was given to our staff. It is a pretty little house, with three beds in it, and we are eighteen people, so most of us sleep on the floor. It wouldn't be a bad little place (except for the drains) if only there wasn't this horrid influence about it all. I always particularly dislike toddling after people like a little lost dog, but here I find that unless I am with somebody the ghosts get the better of me.

The villa is being ruined by us I fear, but I have a woman to clean it, and I am trying to keep it in order. It is a cold little place for we have no fires. We can, by pumping, get a little very cold water, and there is a tap in the bath-room and one basin at which everyone tries to wash and shave at the same time. We get our meals at a butcher's shop, where there is a large room which we more than fill. The lights of the town are all out by 6 o'clock, so we grope about, but there is a lamp in our dining-room. When we come out we have to pa.s.s through the butcher's shop, and one may find oneself running into the interior of a sheep.

We get up about 7 o'clock and fight for the basin. Then we walk round to the butcher's shop and have breakfast at 7.30. Most people think they start off for the day's work at 8, but it is generally quite 10 o'clock before all the brown-hooded ambulances with their red crosses have moved out of the yard. We do not as a rule meet again till dinner-time, and even then many of the party are absent. They come in at all times, very dirty and hungry, and the greeting is always the same, "Did you get many?"--_i.e._, "Have you picked up many wounded?"

One night Dr. Munro got bowled over by the actual air force created by a sh.e.l.l, which however did not hit him. Yesterday Mr. Secher was shot in the leg. I am amazed that not more get hit. They are all very cheery about it.

To-day we heard that a jolly French boy with white teeth, who has been very good at making coffee at our picnic lunches, was put up against a tree and shot at daybreak. Someone had made him drunk the night before, and he had threatened an officer with a revolver.

[Page Heading: A DRAMATIC INCIDENT]

_7 November. St. Malo les Bains._--Lady Bagot turned up here to-day, and I lunched with her at the Hotel des Arcades. Just before lunch a bomb was dropped from a Taube overhead, and hardly had we sat down to lunch when a revolver shot rang through the room. A French officer had discharged his pistol by mistake, and he lay on the floor in his scarlet trews. The scene was really the Adelphi, and as the man had only slightly hurt himself one was able to appreciate the scenic effect and to notice how well staged it was. A waiter ran for me. I ran for dressings to one of our ambulances, and we knelt in the right att.i.tude beside the hero in his scarlet clothes, while the "lady of the bureau"

begged for the bullet!

In the evening Lady Bagot and I worked at the railway-sheds till 3 a.m.

One immense shed had 700 wounded in it. The night scene, with its inevitable accompaniment of low-turned lamps and gloom, was one I shall not forget. The railway-lines on each side of the covered platform were spread with straw, and on this wounded men, bedded down like cattle, slept. There were rows of them sleeping feet to feet, with straw over them to make a covering. I didn't hear a grumble, and hardly a groan.

Most of them slept heavily.

Near the door was a row of Senegalese, their black faces and gleaming eyes looking strange above the straw; and further on were some Germans, whom the French authorities would not allow our men to touch; then rows of men of every colour and blood; Zouaves, with their picturesque dress all grimed and colourless; Turcos, French, and Belgians. Nearly all had their heads and hands bound up in filthy dressings. We went into the dressing-station at the far end of the great shed and dressed wounds till about 3 o'clock, then we pa.s.sed through the long long lines of sleeping wounded men again and went home.

_To Lady Clementine Waring._

_8 November._ MY DEAREST CLEMMIE,

I have a big job for you. Will you do it? I know you are the person for it, and you will be prompt and interested.