I think, unless I am rolling two hospitals into one, that we saw a second—the English Hospital. It was for the English Hospital that we heard the Commandant inquire perpetually as we made our way through the strange streets and the boulevards beyond them, following at his own furious pace, losing him in byways and finding him by some miracle again. Talk of dreams! Our progress through Antwerp was like one of those nightmares which have no form or substance but are made up of ghastly twilight and hopeless quest and ever-accelerating speed. It was not till it was all over that we knew the reason for his excessive haste.
When we got to Mrs. St. Clair Stobart's Hospital—in a garden, planted somewhere away beyond the boulevards in an open place—we had hardly any time to look at it. All the same, I shall never forget that Hospital as long as I live. It had been a concert-hall[13] and was built principally of glass and iron; at any rate, if it was not really the greenhouse that it seemed to be there was a great deal of glass about it, and it had been shelled by aeroplane the night before. No great damage had been done, but the sound and the shock had terrified the wounded in their beds. This hospital, as everybody knows, is run entirely by women, with women doctors, women surgeons, women orderlies. Mrs. St. Clair Stobart and some of her gallant staff came out to meet us on a big verandah in front of this fantastic building, she and her orderlies in the uniform of the British Red Cross, her surgeons in long white linen coats over their skirts. Dr. —— whom we are to take back with us to Ghent, was there.
We asked for Miss ——, and she came to us finally in a small room adjoining what must have been the restaurant of the concert-hall.
I was shocked at her appearance. She was quieter than ever and her face was grey and worn with watching. She looked as if she could not have held out another night.
She told us about last night's bombardment. The effect of it on this absurd greenhouse must have been terrific. Every day they are expecting the bombardment of the town.
No, none of them are leaving except two. Every woman will stick to her post[14] till the order comes to evacuate the hospital, and then not one will quit till the last wounded man is carried to the transport.
It seems that Miss —— is a hospital orderly, and that her duty is to stand at the gate of the garden with a lantern as the ambulances come in and to light them to the door of the hospital, and then to see that each man has the number of his cot pinned to the breast of his sleeping-jacket.
Mrs. Stobart, very properly, will have none but trained women in her hospital. But even an untrained woman is equal to holding a lantern and pinning on tickets, so I implored Miss —— to let me take her place while she went back to rest in my room at Ghent, if it was only for one night. I used every argument I could think of, and for one second I thought the best argument had prevailed. But it was only for a second. Probably not even for a second. Miss —— may drop to pieces at her post, but it is there that she will drop.
Outside on the verandah the Commandant was fairly ramping to be off. No—I can't see the Hospital. There isn't any time to see the Hospital. But Miss —— could not bear me not to see it, and together we made a surreptitious bolt for it, and I did see the Hospital.
It was not like any hospital you had ever seen before. Except that the wounded were all comfortably bedded, it was more like the sleeping-hall of the Palais des Fêtes. The floor of the great concert-hall was covered with mattresses and beds, where the wounded lay about in every attitude of suffering. No doubt everything was in the most perfect order, and the nurses and doctors knew how to thread their way through it all, but to the hurried spectator in the doorway the effect was one of the most macabre confusion. Only one object stood out—the large naked back of a Belgian soldier, who sat on the edge of his bed waiting to be washed. He must have been really the most cheerful and (comparatively) uninjured figure in the whole crowd, but he seemed the most pitiful, because of the sheer human insistence of his pathetic back.