Young Hilda at the Wars

E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
HILDA in her motor-ambulance uniform wearing the Order of Leopold II, conferred on her by King Albert in person.
AUTHOR OF THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS LOVE, HOME AND THE INNER LIFE, ETC.
NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1915, by Frederick A. Stokes Company
All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages
TO CHEVALIER HELEN OF PERVYSE

( By way of Preface )
Of these sketches that tell of ruined Belgium, I must say that I saw what I have told of. They are not meditations in a library. Because of the great courtesy of the Prime Minister of Belgium, who is the war minister, and through the daily companionship of his son, our little group of helpers were permitted to go where no one else could go, to pass in under shell fire, to see action, to lift the wounded out of the muddy siding where they had fallen. Ten weeks of Red Cross work showed me those faces and torn bodies which I have described. The only details that have been altered for the purpose of story-telling are these: The Doctor who rescued the thirty aged at Dixmude is still alive; Smith did not receive the decoration, but Hilda did; it was a candlestick on the piano of Pervyse that vibrated to shell fire; the spy continues to signal without being caught; Pervyse, the war-baby, was not adopted by an American financier; motor ambulances were given to the Corps, not to an individual. With these exceptions, the incidents are lifted over from the experience of two English women and my wife in Pervyse, and my own weeks as stretcher-bearer on an ambulance.
In that deadlock of slaughter where I worked, I saw no pageantry of war, no glitter and pomp, at all. Nothing remains to me of war pictures except the bleakness. When I think suddenly of Belgium, I see a town heavy with the coming horror:—almost all the houses sealed, the curtains drawn, the friendly door barred. And then I see a town after the invaders have shelled it and burned it, with the homeless dogs howling in the streets, and the pigeons circling in search of their cote, but not finding it. Or I look down a long, lonely road, gutted with shell holes, with dead cattle in the fields, and farm-houses in a heap of broken bricks and dust.