I still had no idea of war. Of course I knew that there would be hideous things which I didn't have in home life. I knew I could stand up to dirty monotonous work, but I was afraid I should faint if I saw blood. When very young, I had seen a dog run over, and I had seen a boy playmate mutilate a turtle. I was sickened. Years later, I came on a little child crying, holding up its hand. The wrist was bent back double, and the blood spurting till the little one was drenched. Those shocks had left a horror in me of seeing blood. But this thing that I feared most turned out not to have much importance. I found that the man who bled most heavily lay quiet. It was not the bloodshed that unnerved me. It was the writhing and moaning of men that communicated their pain to me. I seemed to see those whom I loved lying there. I transferred the wound to the ones I love. Sometimes soldiers gave me the address of wife and mother, to have me write that they were well. Then when the wounded came in, I thought of these wives and mothers. I knew how they felt, because I felt so. I knew, as the Belgian and French women know, that the war must be waged without wavering, and yet I always see war as hideous. There was no glory in those stricken men. I had no fear of dying, but I had a fear of being mangled.
One evening I walked into the Convent Hospital where the wounded lay so thickly that I had to step over the stretcher loads. The beds were full, the floor blocked, only one door open. There was a smell of foul blood, medicines, the stench of trench clothes. It came on an empty stomach, at the end of a tired day.
"Sister, will you hold this lamp?" a nurse said to me.
I held it over a man with a yawning hole in his abdomen. He lay unmurmuring. When the doctor pressed, the muscles twitched. I asked some one to hold the lamp. I went into the courtyard, and fainted. Hard work would have saved me.
One other time, there had been a persistent fire all day. A boy of nineteen was brought in screaming. He wanted water and he wanted his mother. In our dressing station room were crowded two doctors, three women, two stretcher bearers, a chauffeur, and ten soldiers. They cut away his uniform and boots. His legs were jelly, with red mouths of wounds. His leg gave at the knee, like a piece of limp twine. I went into the next room, and recovered myself. Then I returned, and stayed with the wounded. The greatest comfort was a doctor, who said it was a matter of stomach, not of nerve. A sound woman doesn't faint at the sight of blood any quicker than a man does. Those two experiences were the only times when the horror was too much for me. I saw terrible things and was able to see them. With the dead it seems different. They are at peace. It is motion in the wounded that transfers suffering to oneself. A red quiver is worse than a red calm.
Antwerp fell. The retreating Belgian army swarmed around us, passed us. In the excitement every one lost her kit and before two days of actual warfare were over we had completely forgotten those little tents that we had practised pitching so carefully, and that we had meant to sleep in at night. Little, dirty, unkempt, broken-hearted men came shuffling in the dust of the road by day, shambling along the road at night. Thousands of them passed. No sound, save the fall of footsteps. No contrast, save where a huddle of refugees passed, their children beside them, their household goods, or their old people, on their backs. We picked up the wounded. There was no time for the dead. In and out and among that army of ants, retreating to the edge of Belgium and the sea, we went. There seemed nothing but to return to England.
The war minister of Belgium saw us. He placed his son, Lieutenant Robert de Broqueville, in military command of us. We had access to every line, all the way to the trench and battlefield. We became a part of the Belgian army. We made our headquarters at Furnes. Luckily, a physician's house had been deserted, with china and silver on the table, apples, jellies and wines in the cellar. We commandeered it.
Winter came. The soldiers needed a dressing station somewhere along the front from Nieuport to Dixmude. Mrs. Knocker established one thirty yards behind the front line of trenches at Pervyse. Miss Chisholm and I joined her. In its cellar we found a rough bedstead of two pieces of unplaned lumber, with clean straw for a mattress, awaiting us. Any Englishwoman is respected in the Belgian lines. The two soldiers who had been living in our room had given it up cheerily. They had searched the village for a clean sheet, and showed it to us with pride. They lumped the straw for our pillows, and stood outside through the night, guarding our home with fixed bayonets. It was the most moving courtesy we had in the twelve months of war. The air in the little room was both foul and chilly. We took off our boots, and that was the extent of our undressing.
