As a result there has grown up in me an extraordinary affection for him. Greater even than my admiration of his careless courage is my liking for the man. For all his manhood he has so much of the child in him; he is such a chatterbox and so full of laughter, and never are his laugh and badinage so quick as when he has the sternest work on hand. Unshaven, mud-bespattered, hungry, so tired that he can hardly walk or lift his rifle to his shoulder, he will bear himself with a gallant gayety which, I think, is quite his own and is altogether fascinating.
As time goes on perhaps it will be the faces of the dead and wounded that will live most clearly in the memory, but at present the pictures of the Belgian soldier which stand out sharpest are less lugubrious and more commonplace.
I walked one day back toward Antwerp, along that awful road which ran by Contich and Waerloos to Waelhem. Daily along that road the German shells fell nearer to the city, so that whenever one went out to the place that he had visited yesterday he was likely to find himself disagreeably surprised. One day I found myself, (I would not have been there had I known it,) perhaps a mile inside the range of the enemy's guns. A Red Cross car had dropped me and picked up wounded men instead, and there was nothing for it but to walk back along the road.
Along the road from the foremost trenches came a dozen Belgian soldiers, just relieved after twenty-four hours of what it is difficult to describe otherwise than as hell. Muddied from head to heel, they could hardly drag their feet along, and, glad of any company, I fell in and walked with the last straggler of the little band, while the shrapnel with its long-drawn scream—whew-ew-ew-ew-bang!—broke on either side of us.
At every whew-ew-ew-ew which came too near I dived for cover. If there was no friendly wall or vehicle or tree trunk at hand the ditch beside the road was always there. And every time I dived my companion stood in the middle of the road and shook with laughter—not unkindly, but in the utmost friendliness and good humor—waiting till I rejoined him and we resumed our walk.
A little man, shockingly bedraggled, worn out almost to the point of collapse, utterly indifferent to his own danger, and taking a huge, childlike delight in my care for my personal safety, the picture of him as he stood and laughed all alone in the bare road amid the bursting shells seems to me curiously typical of the whole Belgian Army.
Another picture also—a composite photograph—I shall never forget. It is the same man—sometimes blonde, sometimes dark, but always the same smallish man—as, on picket duty, he stops you to examine your papers. He does not understand the papers in the least. The British passport begins with the words, "We, Sir Edward Grey, a Baronet of the United Kingdom...." Sternly he wrinkles his brow over the formidable document, earnestly trying to do his duty. At last, "Votre nom, Edouard Gra-ee?" he asks. You explain that you wish that it was and call attention to the place where your own insignificant name is mentioned lower down. To his immense relief he has mastered the central fact, namely, that you are English. And his face lights up with the smile which one has come to know so well; a smile of real pleasure and good-will.
Sometimes he speaks a word of English, and with what pride he uses it! "All ri'!" "Good night!" "How do?" And you go on into the night feeling that you are leaving a friend behind whom you would like to stop and talk to. And he, you know, has been cheered in his lonely duty by the mere contact with an ally.