Among all the variously assorted anguish of that halt at Ecloo the figures and the behaviour of Mrs. E. and her husband and their children are beautiful to remember—their courtesy, their serenity, their gentle and absolving wonder that anybody should see anything in the least frightful or distressing, or even disconcerting and unusual, in the situation; the little girl who sat beside me, showing me her picture-book of animals, accepting gravely and earnestly all that you had to tell her about the ways of squirrels, of kangaroos and opossums, while we waited for the ambulance cars to take us to Bruges; the boy who ran after us as we went, and stood looking after us and waving to us in the lane; the aspect of that Flemish house and garden as we left them—there is no word that embraces all these things but beauty.
We stopped in the village to take up our wounded from the Convent. The nuns brought us through a long passage and across a little court to the refectory, which had been turned into a ward. Bowls steaming with the morning meal for the patients stood on narrow tables between the two rows of beds. Each bed was hung round and littered with haversacks, boots, rifles, bandoliers and uniforms bloody and begrimed. Except for the figures of the nuns and the aspect of its white-washed walls and its atmosphere of incorruptible peace, the place might have been a barracks or the dormitory in a night lodging, rather than a convent ward.
When we had found and dressed our men, we led them out as we had come. As we went we saw, framed through some open doorway, sunlight and vivid green, and the high walls and clipped alleys of the Convent garden.
Of all our sad contacts and separations, these leave-takings at the convents were the saddest. And it was not only that this place had the same poignant and unbearable beauty as the place we had just left, but its beauty was unique. You felt that if the friends you had just left were turned out of their house and garden to-morrow, they might still return some day. But here you saw a carefully guarded and fragile loveliness on the very eve of its dissolution. The place was fairly saturated with holiness, and the beauty of holiness was in the faces and in every gesture of the nuns. And you felt that they and their faces and their gestures were impermanent, that this highly specialized form of holiness had continued with difficulty until now, that it hung by a single thread to a world that had departed very far from it.
Yet, for the moment while you looked at it, it maintained itself in perfection.
We shall never know all that the War has annihilated. But for that moment of time while it lasted, the Convent at Ecloo annihilated the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, every century between now and the fifteenth. What you saw was a piece of life cut straight out of the Middle Ages. What you felt was the guarded and hidden beauty of the Middle Ages, the beauty of obedience, simplicity and chastity, of souls set apart and dedicated, the whole insoluble secret charm of the cloistered life. The very horror of the invasion that threatened it at this hour of the twentieth century was a horror of the Middle Ages.
But these devoted women did not seem aware of it. The little high-bred English nun who conducted us talked politely and placidly of England and of English things as of things remembered with a certain mortal affection but left behind without regret. It was as if she contemplated the eternal continuance of the Convent at Ecloo with no break in its divine tranquillity. One sister went so far as to express the hope that their Convent would be spared. It was as if she were uttering some merely perfunctory piety. The rest, without ceasing from their ministrations, looked up at us and smiled.
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On the way up to Bruges we passed whole regiments of the Belgian Army in retreat. They trooped along in straggling disorder, their rifles at trail; behind them the standard-bearers trudged, carrying the standard furled and covered with black. The speed of our cars as we overtook them was more insufferable than ever.
[Bruges.]