I came here this morning and had to run about for a long time before I started getting a "laissez-passer" for the road, as spies are being shot almost at sight now. By good chance I got a motor-car which brought me all the way; trains are uncertain, and filled with troops, and one never knows when they will arrive.
STORIES OF THE BRITISH FRONT
I found poor old Alan at the Base Hospital, in terrible pain, poor boy, but not dangerously wounded. He has been through an awful time, and nearly all the officers of his regiment have been killed or wounded. For my part, in spite of his pain, I can thank God that he is out of the firing-line for a bit. The horror of the war has got right into him, and he has seen things which few boys of eighteen can have witnessed. Eight days in the trenches at Ypres under heavy fire day and night is a pretty severe test, and Alan has behaved splendidly. He told me the most awful tales of what he had seen, but I believe it did him good to get things off his chest, so I listened. The thing he found the most ghastly was the fact that when a trench has been taken or lost the wounded and dying and dead are left out in the open. He says that firing never ceases, and it is impossible to reach these men, who die of starvation within sight of their comrades.
"Sometimes," Alan said, "we see them raise themselves on an arm for an instant, and they yell to us to come to them, but we can't."
His own wound was received when the Germans "got their range to an inch" and began shelling their trenches. A whole company next to Alan was wiped out, and he started to go back to tell his Colonel the trench could not be held. The communication trench by which he went was not quite finished, and he had to get out into the open and race across to where the unfinished trench began again. Poor child, running for his life! He was badly hit in the groin, but managed just to tumble into the next bit of the trench, where he found two men who carried him, pouring with blood, to his Colonel. He was hastily bound up and carried four miles on crossed rifles to the hospital at Ypres, where his wound was properly dressed, and after an hour he was put on the train for Boulogne.
Alan had one story of how he was told to wait at a certain spot with 130 men. "So I waited," he said, "but the fire was awful." His regiment had, it seems, gone round another way. "I got thirty of the men away," Alan said, "the rest were killed." It means something to be an officer and a gentleman.
Every day the list of casualties grows longer, and I wonder who will be left.
19 November. Furnes.—Early on Monday, the 16th, I left Boulogne in Lady Bagot's car and came to Dunkirk, where I was laid up with a cold for two or three days. It was singularly uncomfortable, as no one ever answered my bell, etc.; but I had a bed, which is always such a comfort, and the room was heated, so I got my things dry. Very often I find the only way to do this or to get dry clothing is to take things to bed with one—it is rather chilly, but better than putting on wet things in the morning.
The usual number of unexpected people keep coming and going. At Boulogne I met Lady Eileen Elliot, Ian Malcolm, Lord Francis Scott, and various others—all very English and clean and well fed. It was quite different from Furnes, to which I returned on Wednesday. Most of us sleep on mattresses on the floor at Furnes, but even these were all occupied, so I hopped about getting in where I could. The cold weather "set in in earnest" as newspapers say, and when it does that in Furnes it seems to be particularly in earnest.