This pretty little coast town, once a fishing village, then a summer resort, is now chiefly a hospital. All the large hotels have been taken over for wards and nurses’ quarters, the big casino filled with row on row of iron cots. It is an American hospital with American doctors, nurses and orderlies, but attached to the B. E. F. and filled of course with British patients. As in all the English hospitals, as soon as a patient is able to get out of bed he is dressed in a “suit of blues;” trousers and jumper blouse of bright blue cotton, white shirt, scarlet tie and handkerchief to match, making him look exactly like a grown-up Greenaway boy. The men hate them, they tell me, but I for one am grateful to the designer as the bright blue and scarlet makes wonderful splotches of color in the landscape.
There may be a more disgusted set of boys in France than these here in the hospital corps at Base No. 2, but if so I have yet to meet them. One of the first units to come across, landing in May of 1917, every man enlisted, so they tell me, because he thought it was the quickest means of getting to the front in field hospital service and most of them enlisted to do some form of specialized work; but, medical students, college professors, and motor experts, they each and all were given the job of hospital orderly which means scrubbing floors, washing windows, shovelling coal, doing the hard and dirty work of a hospital, and, most galling I fancy of all,—taking orders from girls with whom you are not allowed to associate or even speak except in the line of business. The X-ray expert has been delegated to the job of keeping the hospital pigs. I saw him in a pair of grimy overalls trundling a well-worn wheelbarrow down the street. The man who speaks eight languages, and enlisted as interpreter, spends his days checking up clothes in the laundry. And here as hospital orderlies in spite of their frantic efforts to get transferred, it seems likely that they will stay.
But these are dark days for us all just now, with the news that comes in every day of the German drive. “What do the officers in the hospital think? What do they say about it?” I tease the nurses.
“They think that we will hold them,” they reply, but none too hopefully.
At the hotel where I am staying there is a French officer en permission, with his wife and apparently unlimited offspring. With them is an English governess. She is a little nervous thing all a-twitter these days with excitement and apprehension. Will the Germans get through to Paris? Monsieur’s aged mother is there. He is thinking of going back to get her, together with a few essential household treasures. She herself had fled with the family from Paris in 1914. It was a dreadful experience; fourteen people crowded in a coach for six, and nothing to eat. Oh dear! wasn’t it all just too terrible!
There is also an old French lady here who frankly fled from Paris to escape the air-raids; now someone has taken all the joy out of life for her by suggesting that Etretat might be shelled from the sea by a German submarine.
The Tommies in the hospitals, they say, flatly refuse to believe that Paris is being shelled. It isn’t possible, they declare, for a gun to shoot as far as that, and to them that is the end of it. But tonight a little crowd of the hospital boys who had gone on pass to Paris came back as eye-witnesses. One of the first shells had fallen very close to them, killing a number of people who were sitting drinking in a sidewalk café. The boys had gone up to the Church of Sacré Cœur on Montmartre and from the tower there had watched the shelling of the city. It had been a beautiful clear day: they could see where each shell struck. One of the boys brought back with him for a souvenir a piece of a French lieutenant’s skull, picked up, after the shell had wrecked the café, from the sidewalk.
Tonight there was a concert at the Y hut here. The hall was crowded; the concert party, a group of pretty girls, had just completed, to much applause, the first number, when a horn sounded in the distance. Everybody started up. The Y man stepped forward and announced the programme over. In a few minutes the hut was deserted. “The convoy is in,” they said, which meant that a train load of wounded had arrived at the station.
Paris, Easter Sunday.
On the way here from Etretat I saw a sight which brought the war closer to me somehow than anything before; at the junction station connecting the line to Le Havre with the line to Amiens, a string of box cars full of women, little children and decrepit old men, packed in like cattle, fleeing before the German drive, many of them empty-handed, others with a few pathetic futile treasures, a hen or two, a copper cooking-pot, snatched up evidently in a moment of half-witless panic haste.