After an hour's wait my officer, profuse in his apologies, arrived in a beautifully appointed limousine, beside which the British staff-car in which I had come looked cheap and very shabby. At the very beginning of the war the Belgian military authorities commandeered every car they could lay their hands on, and though many have been worn out and hundreds were lost during the retreat, they are still rather better supplied with luxurious cars than any of the other armies.
"There will be a moon to-night," said my cicerone, "so before going to La Panne, where quarters have been reserved for you, I shall take you to Furnes. The Grande Place is pure Spanish—it was built in the Duke of Alva's time, you know—and it is very beautiful by moonlight."
The road to Furnes took us through what had been, a few years before, quaint Flemish villages, but German Kultur, aided by the products of Frau Bertha Krupp, had transformed the beautiful sixteenth-century architecture into heaps of brick and stone. And nowhere did I see a church left standing. Whether the Germans shelled the churches because they honestly believed that their towers were used for observation purposes, or from sheer lust for destruction, I do not know. In any event, the churches are gone. In one little shell-torn village my companion pointed out to me the ruins of a church, amid which a company of infantry, going up to the trenches, had camped for the night. Just as the men were falling in at daybreak a German shell of large caliber exploded among them. Sixty-four—I think that was the number—were killed outright or died of their wounds. But not even the dead are permitted to sleep in peace. I saw several churchyards on which German shells had rained so heavily that the corpses had been disinterred, and whitened bones and grinning skulls littered the ploughed-up ground.
Darkness had fallen when we came to Furnes. In passing through the outskirts, we stopped to call on two young women—an Irish girl and a Canadian—who, undismayed by the periodic shell-storms which visit it, have pluckily stayed in the town ever since the battle of the Yser, caring for the few hundred townspeople who remain, nursing the wounded, and even conducting a school for the children. They live in a small bungalow which the military authorities have erected for them on the edge of the town. A few yards from their front door is a bomb-proof, looking exactly like a Kansas cyclone-cellar, in which they find refuge when one of the frequent bombardments begins. We found that the young women were not at home. I was disappointed, because I wanted to tell them how much I admired them.
My companion was quite right in saying that the Grande Place of Furnes by moonlight is worth seeing. It certainly is. The exquisite fifteenth-century buildings which face upon the square have, by some miracle, remained almost undamaged. There were no lights, of course, and the only person in sight was a sentry, on whose bayonet and steel helmet the moonbeams played fitfully. The darkness, the silence, the suggestion of mystery, the ancient buildings with their leaded windows and their carved façades, the steel-capped soldier, all made me feel that I had stepped back five hundred years and was in the Furnes of Inquisition times.
Our visit to Furnes had delayed us, so it was well into the evening before we drew up before the hotel in La Panne, where a room had been reserved for me by the Belgian État-Major. A seaside resort in midwinter is always a peculiarly depressing place, and La Panne was no exception. Though every hotel and villa in the place was chock-a-block with staff-officers, with nurses, and with wounded, the street-lamps were extinguished, not a ray of light escaped from the heavily curtained windows, and, to add to the general sense of melancholy, a cold, raw wind was blowing down from the North Sea and a drizzling rain had set in. Though La Panne is within easy range of the German batteries, which could eliminate it with neatness and despatch, it has, singularly enough, never been bombarded, nor has it been subjected to any serious air raids. This is the more surprising as all the neighboring towns, as well as Dunkirk, a dozen miles beyond, have been repeatedly shelled and bombed. The only explanation of this phenomenon is that the Germans do not wish to kill the Queen of the Belgians—she was Princess Elisabeth of Bavaria, remember—who lives with the King at La Panne. It is possible that this may be the correct explanation. I remember that when I was in Brussels during the early days of the German occupation, there occurred a serious collision between Prussian and Bavarian troops, the latter asserting that the ill-mannered North German soldiery had shown some disrespect to a portrait of "unsere Bayerische Prinzessin." Why the Germans should have any consideration for the safety of the Queen after the fashion in which they have treated her country and her people, only a Teutonic intellect could understand. But the exemption which La Panne has thus far enjoyed has not induced its inhabitants to omit any precautions. An ample number of bomb-proofs and dugouts have been constructed, and at night over all the windows are tacked thick black curtains. For they know the Germans.
La Panne is the last town on the Belgian littoral before you reach the French frontier and the last villa in the town is occupied by the King and Queen. It stands amid the sand-dunes, looking out across the Channel toward England. It is just such a square, plastered, eight-room villa as might be rented for the summer months by a family with an income of five thousand a year. The sentries who are on duty at its gates and the mounted gendarmes who constantly patrol its immediate vicinity, are the only signs that it is the residence of royalty. Almost any morning you can see the King and Queen—he tall and soldierly, with all griefs and anxieties which the war has brought him showing in his face; she small and trim and girlishly slender—riding on the hard sands of the beach, or strolling, unaccompanied, amid the dunes. What must it mean to them to know that though over there to the eastward lies Belgium, their Belgium, they cannot ride five miles toward it before they are halted by the German bar; to know that beyond that little river where the trenches run their people are suffering and waiting for help, and that, after nearly three years, they are not a yard nearer to them?
How clearly I remembered the last time that I had seen the Queen. It was in the Hotel St. Antoine, in Antwerp, the night before the flight of the Government and the royal family to Ostend, and less than a week before the fall of the city itself. For days past the grumble of the guns had constantly been growing louder, the streams of wounded had steadily increased; every one knew that the end was almost at hand. It was just before the dinner-hour and the great lobby of the hotel was crowded with officers—Belgian, French, and British—with members of the fugitive Government and Diplomatic Corps, and a few unofficial foreigners like myself. Then, unannounced and unaccompanied, the Queen entered. She had come to say farewell to the invalid wife of the Russian Minister, who was unable to go to the palace. She remained in the Russians' apartments (during the bombardment, a few days later, they were completely wrecked by a German shell) half an hour perhaps. Then she came down the winding stairs, a pathetically girlish figure in the simplest of white suits, leaning on the arm of the gallant old diplomat. Quite automatically the throng in the lobby separated, so as to form an aisle down which she passed. To those of us who were nearest she put out her hand and, bending low, we kissed it. Then the great doors were opened and she passed out into the darkness and the rain—a Queen without a country.
No one comes away from La Panne, at least no one should, without having visited the great hospital founded by Dr. Léon du Page, the famous Belgian surgeon. It started in one of the big tourist hotels facing on the sea, but it has gradually expanded until it now occupies a whole congeries of buildings. It has upward of a thousand beds, but, as the fighting was comparatively light at the time I was there, only about two-thirds of them were occupied. Though the American Ambulance at Neuilly, and some of the hospitals at the British base-camps are larger, Dr. du Page's hospital is the most complete and self-contained that I have seen on any front. To mend the broken men who are brought there no device of medical science has been left untried. There are giant magnets which are used to draw minute steel fragments from the brains of men wounded by shrapnel; there are beds, heated by hundreds of electric lights, for soldiers whose vitality has been dangerously lowered by shock or exhaustion; there is a department of facial surgery where men who have lost their noses or their jaws or even their faces are given new ones. The hospital is, as I have said, self-contained. The operating-tables, the beds, all the furniture, in fact, is made on the premises. It is the only hospital I know of which provides those patients who have lost their legs with artificial limbs. And they are by far the best artificial limbs that I have seen anywhere. Each one is made to order to match the man's remaining limb. They are shaped over plaster casts, according to a system originated by Dr. du Page, in alternate layers of glue and ordinary shavings, and the articulation of the joints almost equals that of nature. As a result the soldiers are sent out into the world provided with legs which are symmetrical, almost unbreakable, amazingly light, and so admirably constructed that the owner rarely requires the assistance of a cane. Another detail for which Dr. du Page has made provision is the manufacture of his own instruments. Before the war the best surgical instruments were made in Germany. There were, so far as Dr. du Page knew, only five first-class instrument-makers in Belgium. Three of these were, he ascertained, in the army, so through the King he obtained their release from military duty. Now they work in a completely equipped shop in the rear of the hospital making the shiny, terrifying instruments which the white-clad surgeons wield with such magical effect.