The visitor may see about as much of what is going on in the La Bassée region as an ant can see of the surrounding landscape when promenading in the grass. The only variation in the flatness of the land is the overworked ditches which try to drain it. Look upward, and rows of poplar trees along the level, and a hedge, a grove, a cottage, or trees and shrubs around it, limit your vision. Thus, if a breeze starts timidly in a field it is stopped before it goes far. That "hot corner" is all the hotter for a burning July sun. The army water-carts which run back to wells of cool water are busy filling empty canteens, while shrapnel trims the hedges.
A stretcher was being borne into the doorway of an estaminet which had escaped destruction by shells, and above the door was chalked some lettering which indicated that it was a first clearing station for the wounded. Lying on other stretchers on the floor were some wounded men. Of the two nearest, one had a bandage around his head and one a bandage around his arm. They had been stunned, which was only natural when you have been as close as they had to a shell- burst—a shell that made a hit. The concussion was bound to have this effect.
A third man was the best illustration of shell-destructiveness. Bullets make only holes. Shells make gouges, fractures, pulp. He, too, had a bandaged head and had been hit in several places; but the worst wound was in the leg, where an artery had been cut. He was weak, with a sort of where-am-I look in his eyes. If the fragment which had hit his leg had hit his head, or his neck, or his abdomen, he would have been killed instantly. He was also an illustration of how hard it is to kill a man even with several shell-fragments, unless some of them strike in the right place. For he was going to live; the surgeon had whispered the fact in his ear, that one important fact. He had beaten the German shell, after all.
Returning by the same road by which we came a motor-car ran swiftly by, the only kind of car allowed on that road. We had a glimpse of the big, painted red cross on an ambulance side, and at the rear, where the curtains were rolled up for ventilation, of four pairs of soldier boot- soles at the end of four stretchers, which had been slid into place at the estaminet by the sturdy, kindly, experienced medical corps men.
Before we reached the village where our car waited, the ambulance passed us on the way back to the estaminet. Very soon after the shell-burst, a telephone bell had rung down the line from the extreme front calling for an ambulance and stating the number of men hit, so that everybody would know what to prepare for. At the village, which was outside the immediate danger zone, was another clearing station. Here the stretchers were taken into a house—taken without a jolt by men who were specialists in handling stretchers—for any re- dressing if necessary, before another ambulance started journey, with motor-trucks and staff motor-cars giving right of way, to a spotless, white hospital ship which would take them home to England the next night.
It had been an incident of life at the front, and of the organization of war, causing less flurry than an ambulance call to an accident in a great city.
XXVI
Finding The Grand Fleet
Good fortune slipped a message across the Channel to the British front, which became the magic carpet of transition from the life of the burrowing army in its trenches to the life of battleships; from motors trailing dust over French roads, to destroyers trailing foam in choppy seas off English coasts.
But there was more than one place to go in that wonderful week; more than ships to see if one would know something of the intricate, busy world of the Admiralty's work, which makes coastguards a part of its personnel. The transition is less sudden if we begin with a ride in an open car along the coast of Scotland. Dusk had fallen on the purple cloudlands of heather dotted with the white spots of grazing sheep in the Scottish Highlands under changing skies, with headlands stretching out into the misty reaches of the North Sea, forbidding in the chill air after the warmth of France and suggestive of the uninviting theatre where, in approaching winter, patrols and trawlers and mine-sweepers carried on their work to within range of the guns of Heligoland. A people who lived in such a chill land, in sight of such a chill sea, and who spoke of their "Bonnie Scotland forever," were worthy to be masters of that sea. The Americans who think of Britain as a small island forget the distance from Land's End to John o' Groat's, which represents coast line to be guarded; and we may find a lesson, too, we who must make our real defence by sea, in tireless vigils which may be our own if the old Armageddon beast ever comes threatening the far-longer coast line that we have to defend. For you may never know what war is till war comes. Not even the Germans knew, though they had practised with a lifelike dummy behind the curtains for forty years.
At intervals, just as in the military zone in France, sentries stopped us and took the number of our car; but this time sentries who were guarding a navy's rather than an army's secrets. With darkness we passed the light of an occasional inn, while cottage lights made a scattered sprinkling among the dim masses of the hills. A man might have been puzzled as to where all the kilted Highland soldiers whom he had seen at the front came from, if he had not known that the canny Highlanders enlist Lowlanders in kilty regiments.