5
It was in Calais, to which I had gone back for a day or two, that I found my chance to get into the firing lines in Belgium. I was sitting at an open window with my two friends when I saw a lady's face in the street. The last time I had seen it was in an old English mansion, filled with many gallant and gentle ghosts of history, and with laughing girls who went scampering out to a game of tennis on the lawn below the terrace from which a scent of roses and climbing plants was wafted up on the drowsy air of an English summer. It was strange to see one of those girls in Calais, where such a different game was being played. She had a gravity in her eyes which I had not seen before in England, and yet, afterwards, I heard her laughter ring out within a little distance of bursting shells. She had a motor-car and a pass to the Belgian front, and a good, nature which gave me a free seat, provided I was "jolly quick." I was so quick that, with a few things scrambled into a handbag, I was ready in two shakes of a jiffy, whatever that may be, and had only time to give a hasty grip to the hands of the two friends who had gone along many roads with me in this adventure of war, watching its amazing dramas. The Philosopher and the Strategist are but shadows in this book, but though I left them on the kerbstone, I took with me the memory of a comradeship which had been good to have.
6
The town of Furnes, in Belgium, into which I came when dusk crept into its streets and squares, was the headquarters of King Albert and his staff, and its people could hear all day long the roll of guns a few kilometres away, where the remnant of their army held the line of the Yser canal and the trenches which barred the roads to Dixmude, Pervyse and other little towns and villages on the last free patch of Belgian soil. I drove into the Grande Place and saw the beauty of this old Flemish square, typical of a hundred others, not less quaint and with not less dignity, which had been smashed to pieces by German guns. Three great buildings dominated its architecture—the Town Hall, with a fine stately façade, and two ancient churches, with massive brick towers, overshadowing the narrow old houses and timber-front shops with stepped gables and wrought-iron signs. For three centuries or more time had slept here, and no change of modern life had altered the character of this place, where merchant princes had dwelt around the market. If there had been peace here in that velvety twilight which filled the square when I first passed through it, I should have expected to see grave burghers in furred hoods pacing across the cobble stones to the Hôtel de Ville, and the florid-faced knights whom Franz Hals loved to paint, quaffing wine inside the Hotel de la Couronne, and perhaps a young king in exile known as the Merry Monarch smiling with a roguish eye at some fair-haired Flemish wench as he leaned on the arm of my lord of Rochester on his way to his lodging on the other side of the way. But here was no peace. It was a backyard of war, and there was the rumble of guns over the stones, and a litter of war's munitions under the church wall. Armoured cars were parked in the centre of the square, a corps of military cyclists had propped their machines against gun wagons and forage carts, out of the black shadows under high walls poked the snouts of guns, wafts of scented hay came from carts with their shafts down in the gutters, sentries with bayonets which caught the light of old lanterns paced up and down below the Town Hall steps, Belgian soldiers caked in the mud of the trenches slouched wearily in the side streets, and staff officers in motor-cars with glaring headlights and shrieking horns threaded their way between the wagons and the guns. From beyond the town dull shocks of noise grumbled, like distant thunder-claps, and through the tremulous dusk of the sky there came an irregular repetition of faint flashes.
As the twilight deepened and the shadows merged into a general darkness I could see candles being lit through the bull's-eye windows of small shops, and the rank smell of paraffin lamps came from vaulted cellars, into which one descended by steps from the roadway, where soldiers were drinking cups of coffee or cheap wine in a flickering light which etched Rembrandt pictures upon one's vision.
A number of staff officers came down the steps of the Town Hall and stood at the foot of the steps as though waiting for some one. They had not long to wait, for presently a very tall soldier came out to join them. For a moment he stood under the portico lighting a cigarette, and the flare of his match put a glamour upon his face. It was the King of the Belgians, distinguished only by his height from the simple soldiers who stood around him, and as he came down the steps he had the dignity of his own manhood but no outward sign of royalty. I could hardly see his face then, but afterwards in the daylight I saw him pass down the lines of some of his heroic regiments and saw his gravity and the sadness of his eyes, and his extreme simplicity… The first time I had seen him was in a hall in Brussels, when he opened the Great Exhibition in royal state, in the presence of many princes and ministers and all his Court. Even then it seemed to me he had a look of sadness—it may have been no more than shyness—as though the shadow of some approaching tragedy touched his spirit. I spoke of it at the time to a friend of mine and he smiled at the foolishness of the remark.
Here in Furnes his personality was touched with a kind of sanctity because his kingship of the last piece of Belgian soil symbolized all the ruin and desolation of his poor country and all the heroism of its resistance against an overpowering enemy and all the sorrows of those scattered people who still gave him loyalty. Men of Republican instincts paid a homage in their hearts to this young king, sanctified by sorrow and crowned with martyrdom. Living plainly as a simple soldier, sharing the rations, the hardships and the dangers of his men, visiting them in their trenches and in their field-hospitals, steeling his nerves to the sight of bloody things and his heart to the grim task of fighting to the last ditch of Belgian ground, he seemed to be the type of early kingship, as it was idealized by poets and minstrels, when those who were anointed by the Church dedicated their souls to the service of the people and their swords to justice. He stood in this modern world and in this modern war as the supreme type of the Hero, and mythical stories are already making a legend of his chivalrous acts and virtue, showing that in spite of all our incredulities and disillusions hero-worship is still a natural instinct in the minds of men.
7
I had a job to do on my first night in Furnes, and earned a dinner, for a change, by honest work. The staff of an English hospital with a mobile column attached to the Belgian cavalry for picking up the wounded on the field, had come into the town before dusk with a convoy of ambulances and motorcars. They established themselves in an old convent with large courtyards and many rooms, and they worked hurriedly as long as light would allow, and afterwards in darkness, to get things ready for their tasks next day, when many wounded were expected. This party of doctors and nurses, stretcher- bearers and chauffeurs, had done splendid work in Belgium. Many of them were in the siege of Antwerp, where they stayed until the wounded had to be taken away in a hurry; and others, even more daring, had retreated from town to town, a few kilometres in advance of the hostile troops. I had met some of the party in Malo-les-Bains, where they had reassembled before coming to Fumes, and I had been puzzled by them. In the "flying column," as they called their convoy of ambulances, were several ladies very practically dressed in khaki coats and breeches, and very girlish in appearance and manners. They did not seem to me at first sight the type of woman to be useful on a battlefield or in a field-hospital. I should have expected them to faint at the sight of blood, and to swoon at the bursting of a shell. Some of them at least were too pretty, I thought, to play about in fields of war among men and horses smashed to pulp. It was only later that I saw their usefulness and marvelled at the spiritual courage of these young women, who seemed not only careless of shell-fire but almost unconscious of its menace, and who, with more nervous strength than that of many men, gave first-aid to the wounded without shuddering at sights of agony which might turn a strong man sick.
It is not an easy task to settle down into a new hospital, especially in time of war not far from the enemy's lines, and as a volunteer in the work I was able to make myself useful by lending a hand with mattresses and beds and heavy cases of medical material. It was a strange experience, as far as I was concerned, and sometimes seemed a little unreal as, with a bed on my head, I staggered across dark courtyards, or with my arms full of lint and dressings. I groped my way down the long, unlighted corridors of a Flemish convent. Nurses chivvied about with little squeals of laughter as they bumped into each other out of the shadow world, but not losing their heads or their hands, with so much work to do. Framed in one or other of the innumerable doorways stood a Belgian nun, with a white face, staring out upon those flitting shadows. The young doctors had flung their coats off and were handling the heaviest stuff like dock labourers at trade union rates, though with more agility. I made friends with them on the other side of cases too heavy for one man to handle—with a golden-haired, blue-eyed boy from Bart's (I think), who made the most preposterous jokes in the darkness, so that I laughed and nearly dropped my end of the box (I saw him in the days to come doing heroic and untiring work in the operating theatre), and with another young surgeon whose keen, grave face lighted up marvellously when an ironical smile caught fire in his brooding eyes, and with other men in this hospital and ambulance column who will be remembered in Belgium as fine and fearless men. With the superintendent of the commissariat department—an Italian lady with a pretty sense of humour and a devil-may-care courage which she inherited from Stuart ancestors—I went on a shopping expedition into the black gulfs of Fumes, stumbling into holes and jerking up against invisible gun-wagons, but bringing back triumphantly some fat bacon and, more precious still, some boxes of tallow candles, of great worth in a town which had lost its gas.