It was always round the corner, this sudden death. Just a step or two from any window of war.
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Halfway through my stay at Dunkirk I made a trip to England and back, getting a free passage in the Government ship Invicta, which left by night to dodge the enemy's submarines, risking their floating mines. It gave me one picture of war which is unforgettable. We were a death-ship that night, for we carried the body of a naval officer who had been killed on one of the monitors which I had seen in action several times off Nieuport. With the corpse came also several seamen, wounded by the same shell. I did not see any of them until the Invicla lay alongside the Prince of Wales pier. Then a party of marines brought up the officer's body on a stretcher. They bungled the job horribly, jamming the stretcher poles in the rails of the gangway, and, fancying myself an expert in stretcher work, for I had had a little practice, I gave them a hand and helped to carry the corpse to the landing-stage. It was sewn up tightly in canvas, exactly like a piece of meat destined for Smithfield market, and was treated with no more ceremony than such a parcel by the porters who received it.
"Where are you going to put that, Dick?"
"Oh, stow it over there, Bill!"
That was how a British hero made his home-coming.
But I had a more horrible shock, although I had been accustomed to ugly sights. It was when the wounded seamen came up from below. The lamps on the landing-stage, flickering in the high wind, cast their white light upon half a dozen men walking down the gangway in Indian file. At least I had to take them on trust as men, but they looked more like spectres who had risen from the tomb, or obscene creatures from some dreadful underworld. When the German shell had burst on their boat, its fragments had scattered upwards, and each man had been wounded in the face, some of them being blinded and others scarred beyond human recognition. Shrouded in ship's blankets, with their heads swathed in bandages, their faces were quite hidden behind masks of cotton-wool coming out to a point like beaks and bloody at the tip. I shuddered at the sight of them, and walked away, cursing the war and all its horrors.
After my return to Dunkirk, I did not stay very long there. There was a hunt for correspondents, and my name was on the black list as a man who had seen too much. I found it wise to trek southwards, turning my back on Belgium, where I had had such strange adventures in the war-zone. The war had settled down into its winter campaign, utterly dreary and almost without episodes in the country round Furnes. But I had seen the heroism of the Belgian soldiers in their last stand against the enemy who had ravaged their little kingdom, and as long as life lasts the memory of these things will remain to me like a tragic song. I had been sprinkled with the blood of Belgian soldiers, and had helped to carry them, wounded and dead. I am proud of that, and my soul salutes the spirit of those gallant men— the remnants of an army—who, without much help from French or English, stood doggedly in their last ditches, refusing to surrender, and with unconquerable courage until few were left, holding back the enemy from their last patch of soil. It was worth the risk of death to see those things.
Chapter VIII The Soul Of Paris
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