A Journal of Impressions in Belgium Part 27

But whoever went and whoever stayed, its four field-women have remained at the Front. Two of them are attached to the Third Division of the Belgian Army; all four have distinguished themselves by their devotion to that Army and by their valour, and they have all received the Order of Leopold II., the highest Belgian honour ever given to women.

The Commandant, being a man, has the Order of Leopold I. Mr.

Ashmead-Bartlett and Mr. Philip Gibbs and Dr. Souttar have described his heroic action at the Battle of Dixmude on the 22nd of October, 1914, when he went into the cellars of the burning and toppling Town Hall to rescue the wounded. And from that day to this the whole Corps--old volunteers and new--has covered itself with glory.

On our two chauffeurs, Tom and Bert, the glory lies quite thick. "Tom"

(if I may quote from my own story of the chauffeurs) "Tom was in the battle of Dixmude. At the order of his commandant he drove his car straight into the thick of it, over the ruins of a shattered house that blocked the way. He waited with his car while all the bombs that he had ever dreamed of crashed around him, and houses flamed, and tottered and fell. 'Pretty warm, ain't it?' was Tom's comment.

"Four days later he was waiting at Oudekappele with his car when he heard that the Hospital of Saint-Jean at Dixmude was being sh.e.l.led and that the Belgian military man who had been sent with a motor-car to carry off the wounded had been turned back by the fragment of a sh.e.l.l that dropped in front of him. Tom thereupon drove into Dixmude to the Hospital of Saint-Jean and removed from it two wounded soldiers and two aged and paralysed civilians who had sheltered there, and brought them to Furnes. The military ambulance men then followed his lead, and the Hospital was emptied. That evening it was destroyed by a sh.e.l.l.

"And Bert--it was Bert who drove his ambulance into Kams-Kappele to the barricade by the railway. It was Bert who searched in a sh.e.l.l-hole to pick out three wounded from among thirteen dead; who with the help of a Belgian priest, carried the three several yards to his car, under fire, and who brought them in safety to Furnes."

And the others, the brave "Chaplain," and "Mr. Riley," and "Mr.

Lambert," have also proved themselves.

But when I think of the Corps it is chiefly of the four field-women that I think--the two "women of Pervyse," and the other two who joined them at their dangerous _poste_.

Both at Furnes and Pervyse they worked all night, looking after their wounded; sometimes sleeping on straw in a room shared by the Belgian troops, when there was no other shelter for them in the bombarded town.

One of them has driven a heavy ambulance car--in a pitch-black night, along a road raked by sh.e.l.l-fire, and broken here and there into great pits--to fetch a load of wounded, a performance that would have racked the nerves of any male chauffeur ever born. She has driven the same car, _alone_, with five German prisoners for her pa.s.sengers. The four women served at Pervyse (the town nearest to the firing-line) in "Mrs.

Torrence's" dressing-station--a cellar only twenty yards behind the Belgian trenches. In that cellar, eight feet square and lighted and ventilated only by a slit in the wall, two lived for three weeks, sleeping on straw, eating what they could get, drinking water that had pa.s.sed through a cemetery where nine hundred Germans are buried. They had to burn candles night and day. Here the wounded were brought as they fell in the trenches, and were tended until the ambulance came to take them to the base hospital at Furnes.

Day in, day out, and all night long, with barely an interval for a wash or a change of clothing, the women stayed on, the two always, and the four often, till the engineers built them a little hut for a dressing-station; they stayed till the Germans sh.e.l.led them out of their little hut.

This is only a part of what they have done. The finest part will never be known, for it was done in solitary places and in the dark, when special correspondents are asleep in their hotels. There was no limelight on the road between Dixmude and Furnes, or among the blood and straw in the cellar at Pervyse.

And Miss Ashley-Smith (who is now Mrs. McDougall)--her escape from Ghent (when she had no more to do there) was as heroic as her return.

Since then she has gone back to the Front and done splendid service in her own Corps, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.

M. S.

July 15th, 1915.

THE END

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FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: It would be truer to say she was in love with duty which was often dangerous.]

[Footnote 2: She very soon let us know why. "Followed" is the wrong word.]

[Footnote 3: He didn't. People never do mean these things.]

[Footnote 4: This only means that, whether you attended to it or not (you generally didn't), as long as you were in Belgium, your sub-consciousness was never entirely free from the fear of Uhlans--of Uhlans in the flesh. The illusion of valour is the natural, healthy reaction of your psyche against its fear and your indifference to its fear.]

[Footnote 5: n.o.body need have been surprised. She had distinguished herself in other wars.]

[Footnote 6: One is a church and not a cathedral.]

[Footnote 7: I am puzzled about this date. It stands in my ambulance Day-Book as Sat.u.r.day, 3rd, with a note that the British came into Ghent on their way to Antwerp on the evening of that day. Now I believe there were no British in Antwerp before the evening of Sunday, the 4th, yet "Dr. Wilson" and Mr. Davidson, going into Saint Nicolas before us, saw the British there, and "Mrs. Torrence" and "Janet McNeil" saw more British come into Ghent in the evening. I was ill with fever the day after the run into Antwerp, and got behindhand with my Day-Book. So it seems safest to a.s.sume that I made a wrong entry and that we went into Antwerp on Sunday, and to record Sat.u.r.day's events as spreading over the whole day. Similarly the events that the Day-Book attributes to Monday must have belonged to Tuesday. And if Tuesday's events were really Wednesday's, that clears up a painful doubt I had as to Wednesday, which came into my Day-Book as an empty extra which I couldn't account for in any way. There I was with a day left over and nothing to put into it.

And yet Wednesday, the 7th, was the first day of the real siege of Antwerp. On Thursday, the 8th, I started clear.]

[Footnote 8: It wasn't. This was only the first slender trickling. The flood came three days later with the bombardment of the city.]

[Footnote 9: Of all the thousands and thousands of refugees whom I have seen I have only seen three weep, and they were three out of six hundred who had just disembarked at the Prince of Wales's Pier at Dover. But in Belgium not one tear.]

[Footnote 10: This is all wrong. The main stream went as straight as it could for the sea-coast--Holland or Ostend.]

[Footnote 11: The outer forts were twelve miles away.]

[Footnote 12: At the time of writing--February 19th, 1915. My Day-Book gives no record of anything but the hospitals we visited.]

[Footnote 13: There must be something wrong here, for the place was, I believe, a convent.]

[Footnote 14: Every woman did.]

[Footnote 15: This was made up to her afterwards! Her cup fairly ran over.]

[Footnote 16: I have heard a distinguished alienist say that this reminiscent sensation is a symptom of approaching insanity. As it is not at all uncommon, there must be a great many lunatics going about.]

[Footnote 17: Except that n.o.body had any time to attend to us, I can't think why we weren't all four of us arrested for spies. We hadn't any business to be looking for the position of the Belgian batteries.]

[Footnote 18: More than likely our appearance there stopped the firing.]

[Footnote 19: I have since been told that he was not. And I think in any case I am wrong about his "matchboard" car. It must have been somebody else's. In fact, I'm very much afraid that "he" was somebody else--that I hadn't the luck really to meet him.]

[Footnote 20: He did. She was not a lady whom it was possible to leave behind on such an expedition.]

[Footnote 21: I'm inclined to think it may have been the dogs of Belgium, after all. I can't think where the guns could have been.

Antwerp had fallen. It might have been the bombardment of Melle, though.]

[Footnote 22: The fate of "Mr. Lambert" and the scouting-car was one of those things that ought never to have happened. It turned out that the car was not the property of his paper, but his own car, hired and maintained by him at great expense; that this brave and devoted young American had joined our Corps before it left England and gone out to the front to wait for us. And he was kept waiting long after we got there.

But if he didn't see as much service at Ghent as he undertook to see (though he did some fine things on his own even there), it was made up to him in Flanders afterwards, when, with the Commandant and other members of the Corps, he distinguished himself by his gallantry at Furnes and in the Battle of Dixmude.

(For an account of his wife's services see Postscript.)]