A Journal of Impressions in Belgium

by May Sinclair

I shall never forget the look of the E.s' drawing-room, smothered in blankets and littered with the members of the Corps, who lay about it in every pathetic posture of fatigue. A group of seven or eight snuggled down among the blankets on the floor in front of the hearth like a camp before a campfire. Janet McNeil, curled up on one window-seat, and Ursula Dearmer, rolled in a blanket on the other, had the heart-rending beauty of furry animals under torpor. The chauffeurs Tom and Bert made themselves entirely lovable by going to sleep bolt upright on dining-room chairs on the outer ring of the camp. The E.s' furniture came in where it could with fantastic and incongruous effect.

I don't know how I got through the next three hours, for my obsession came back on me again and again, and as soon as I shut my eyes I saw the face and eyes of the wounded man. I remember sitting part of the time beside Miss Ashley-Smith, wide-awake, in a corner of the room behind Bert's chair. I remember wandering about the E.s' house. I must have got out of it, for I also remember finding myself in their garden, at sunrise.

And I remember the garden, though I was not perfectly aware of it at the time. It had a divine beauty, a serenity that refused to enter into, to ally itself in any way with an experience tainted by the sadness of the retreat from Ghent.

But because of its supernatural detachment and tranquillity and its no less supernatural illumination I recalled it the more vividly afterwards.

It was full of tall bushes and little slender trees standing in a delicate light. The mist had cleared to the transparency of still water, so still that under it the bushes and the trees stood in a cold, quiet radiance without a shimmer. The light itself was intensely still. What you saw was not the approach of light, but its mysterious arrest. It was held suspended in crystalline vapour, in thin shafts of violet and gold, clear as panes; it was caught and lifted upwards by the high bushes and the slender trees; it was veiled in the silver-green masses of their tops. Every green leaf and every blade of grass was a vessel charged. It was not so much that the light revealed these things as that these things revealed the light. There was no kindling touch, no tremor of dawn in that garden. It was as if it had removed the walls and put off the lacing webs and the thick cloths of grey stuff by some mystic impulse of its own, as if it maintained itself in stillness by an inner flame. Only the very finest tissues yet clung to it, to show that it was the same garden that disclosed itself in this clarity and beauty.

The next thing I remember is the Chaplain coming to me and our going together into the E.s' dining-room, and Miss Ashley-Smith's joining us there. My malady was contagious and she had caught it, but with no damage to her self-control.

She says very simply and quietly that she is going back to Ghent. And the infection spreads to the Chaplain. He says that neither of us is going back to Ghent, but that he is going. The poor boy tries to arrange with us how he may best do it, in secrecy, without poisoning the Commandant[35] and the whole Ambulance with the spirit of return. With difficulty we convince him that it would be useless for any man to go. He would be taken prisoner the minute he showed his nose in the "Flandria" and set to dig trenches till the end of the War.

Then he says, if only he had his cassock with him. They would respect that (which is open to doubt).

We are there a long time discussing which of us is going back to Ghent. Miss Ashley-Smith is fertile and ingenious in argument. She is a nurse, and I and the Chaplain are not. She has friends in Ghent who have not been warned, whom she must go back to. In any case, she says, it was a toss-up whether she went or stayed.

And while we are still arguing, we go out on the road that leads to the village, to find the ambulances and see if any of the chauffeurs will take us back to Ghent. I am not very hopeful about the means of transport. I do not think that Tom or any of the chauffeurs will move, this time, without orders from the Commandant. I do not think that the Commandant will let any of us go except himself.