The Soul of the War Part 20

"All safe? ... That was luck!"

"O mon Dieu! O, cre nom! O! O!"

It was a man's voice crying in agony, rising to a shuddering, blood- curdling scream:

"O Jesus! O! O!"

One could not deafen one's ears against that note of human agony. It pierced into one's soul. One could only stand gripping one's hands in this torture chamber, with darkness between high walls, and with shadows making awful noises out of the gulfs of blackness.

The cries of the wounded men died down and whimpered out into a dull faint moaning.

A laugh came chuckling behind an ambulance.

"Hot? ... I should think it was! But we picked the men up and crossed the bridge all right... The sh.e.l.ls were falling on every side of us. ... I was pretty scared, you bet... It's a bit too thick, you know!"

Silence again. Then a voice speaking quietly across the yard:

"Anyone to lend a hand? There's a body to be carried out."

I helped to carry out the body, as every one helped to do any small work if he had his hands free at the moment. It was the saving of one's sanity and self-respect. Yet to me, more sensitive perhaps than it is good to be, it was a moral test almost greater than my strength of will to enter that large room where the wounded lay, and to approach a dead man through a lane of dying. (So many of them died after a night in our guest-house. Not all the skill of surgeons could patch up some of those bodies, torn open with ghastly wounds from German sh.e.l.ls.) The smell of wet and muddy clothes, coagulated blood and gangrened limbs, of iodine and chloroform, sickness and sweat of agony, made a stench which struck one's senses with a foul blow. I used to try and close my nostrils to it, holding my breath lest I should vomit. I used to try to keep my eyes upon the ground, to avoid the sight of those smashed faces, and blinded eyes, and tattered bodies, lying each side of me in the hospital cots, or in the stretchers set upon the floor between them. I tried to shut my eyes to the sounds in this room, the hideous snuffle of men drawing their last breaths, the long- drawn moans of men in devilish pain, the ravings of fever-stricken men crying like little children--"Maman! O Maman!"--or repeating over and over again some angry protest against a distant comrade.

But sights and sounds and smells forced themselves upon one's senses. I had to look and to listen and to breathe in the odour of death and corruption. For hours afterwards I would be haunted with the death face of some young man, lying half-naked on his bed while nurses dressed his horrible wounds. What waste of men! What disfigurement of the beauty that belongs to youth! Bearded soldier faces lay here in a tranquillity that told of coming death. They had been such strong and st.u.r.dy men, tilling their Flemish fields, and living with a quiet faith in their hearts. Now they were dying before their time, conscious, some of them, that death was near, so that weak tears dropped upon their beards, and in their eyes was a great fear and anguish.

"Je ne veux pas mourir!" said one of them. "O ma pauvre femme! Je ne veux pas mourir!"

He did not wish to die... but in the morning he was dead.

The corpse that I had to carry out lay pinned up in a sheet. The work had been very neatly done by the nurse. She whispered to me as I stood on one side of the bed, with a friend on the other side.

"Be careful. ... He might fall in half."

I thought over these words as I put my hands under the warm body and helped to lift its weight on to the stretcher. Yes, some of the sh.e.l.l wounds were rather big. One could hardly sew a man together again with bits of cotton... It was only afterwards, when I had helped to put the stretcher in a separate room on the other side of the courtyard, that a curious trembling took possession of me for a moment... The horror of it all! Were the virtues which were supposed to come from war, "the binding strength of nations," "the cleansing of corruption,"

all the falsities of men who make excuses for this monstrous crime, worth the price that was being paid in pain and tears and death? It is only the people who sit at home who write these things. When one is in the midst of war false heroics are blown out of one's soul by all its din and tumult of human agony. One learns that courage itself exists, in most cases, as the pride in the heart of men very much afraid--a pride which makes them hide their fear. They do not become more virtuous in war, but only reveal the virtue that is in them. The most heroic courage which came into the courtyard at Furnes was not that of the stretcher-bearers who went out under fire, but that of the doctors and nurses who tended the wounded, toiling ceaselessly in the muck of blood, amidst all those sights and sounds. My spirit bowed before them as I watched them at work. I was proud if I could carry soup to any of them when they came into the refectory for a hurried meal, or if I could wash a plate clean so that they might fill it with a piece of meat from the kitchen stew. I would have cleaned their boots for them if it had been worth while cleaning boots to tramp the filthy yard.

"It's not surgery!" said one of the young surgeons, coming out of the operating-theatre and was.h.i.+ng his hands at the kitchen sink; "it's butchery!"

He told me that he had never seen such wounds or imagined them, and as for the conditions in which he worked--he raised his hands and laughed at the awfulness of them, because it is best to laugh when there is no remedy. There was a scarcity of dressings, of instruments, of sterilizers. The place was so crowded that there was hardly room to turn, and wounded men poured in so fast that it was nothing but hacking and sewing.

"I'm used to blood," said the young surgeon. "It's some years now since I was put through my first ordeal, of dissecting dead bodies and then handling living tissue. You know how it's done--by gradual stages until a student no longer wants to faint at the sight of raw flesh, but regards it as so much material for scientific work. But this!"--he looked towards the room into which the wounded came--"It's getting on my nerves a little. It's the sense of wanton destruction that makes one loathe it, the utter senselessness of it all, the waste of such good stuff. War is a h.e.l.lish game and I'm so sorry for all the poor Belgians who are getting it in the neck. They didn't ask for it!"

The wooden gates opened to let in another ambulance full of Belgian wounded, and the young surgeon nodded to me with a smile.

"Another little lot! I must get back into the slaughterhouse. So long!"

I helped out one of the "sitting-up" cases--a young man with a wound in his chest, who put his arm about my neck and said, "Merci! Merci!"

with a fine courtesy, until suddenly he went limp, so that I had to hold him with all my strength, while he vomited blood down my coat. I had to get help to carry him indoors.

And yet there was laughter in the convent where so many men lay wounded. It was only by gaiety and the quick capture of any jest that those doctors and nurses and ambulance girls could keep their nerves steady. So in the refectory, when they sat down for a meal, there was an endless fire of raillery, and the blue-eyed boy with the blond hair used to crow like Peter Pan and speak a wonderful mixture of French and English, and play the jester gallantly. There would be processions of plate-bearers to the kitchen next door, where a splendid Englishwoman--one of those fine square-faced, brown-eyed, cheerful souls--had been toiling all day in the heat of oven and stoves to cook enough food for fifty-five hungry people who could not wait for their meals. There was a scramble between two doctors for the last potatoes, and a duel between one of them and myself in the slicing up of roast beef or boiled mutton, and amorous advances to the lady cook for a t.i.t-bit in the baking-pan. There never was such a kitchen, and a County Council inspector would have reported on it in lurid terms. The sink was used as a wash-place by surgeons, chauffeurs, and stretcher-bearers. Nurses would come through with b.l.o.o.d.y rags from the ward, which was only an open door away. Lightly wounded men, covered with Yser mud, would sit at a side table, eating the remnants of other people's meals. Above the sizzling of sausages and the clatter of plates one could hear the moaning of the wounded and the incessant monologue of the fever-stricken. And yet it is curious I look back upon that convent kitchen as a place of gaiety, holding many memories of comrades.h.i.+p, and as a little sanctuary from the misery of war. I was a scullion in it, at odd hours of the day and night when I was not following the ambulance wagons to the field, or helping to clean the courtyard or doing queer little jobs which some one had to do.

"I want you to dig a hole and help me to bury an arm," said one of the nurses. "Do you mind?"

I spent another hour helping a lady to hang up blankets, not very well washed, because they were still stained with blood, and not very sanitary, because the line was above a pile of straw upon which men had died. There were many rubbish heaps in the courtyard near which it was not wise to linger, and always propped against the walls were stretchers soppy with blood, or with great dark stains upon them where blood had dried. It was like the courtyard of a shambles, this old convent enclosure, and indeed it was exactly that, except that the animals were not killed outright, but lingered in their pain.

13

Early each morning the ambulances started on their way to the zone of fire, where always one might go gleaning in the harvest fields of war. The direction was given us, with the pa.s.sword of the day, by young de Broqueville, who received the latest reports from the Belgian headquarters staff. As a rule there was not much choice. It lay somewhere between the roads to Nieuport on the coast, and inland, to Pervyse, Dixmude, St. Georges, or Ramscapelle where the Belgian and German lines formed a crescent down to Ypres.

The centre of that half-circle girdled by the guns was an astounding and terrible panorama, traced in its outline by the black fumes of sh.e.l.l-fire above the stabbing flashes of the batteries. Over Nieuport there was a canopy of smoke, intensely black, but broken every moment by blue glares of light as a sh.e.l.l burst and rent the blackness. Villages were burning on many points of the crescent, some of them smouldering drowsily, others blazing fiercely like beacon fires.

Dixmude was still alight at either end, but the fires seemed to have burnt down at its centre. Beyond, on the other horn of the crescent, were five flaming torches, which marked what were once the neat little villages of a happy Belgium. It was in the centre of this battleground, and the roads about me had been churned up by sh.e.l.ls and strewn with shrapnel bullets. Close to me in a field, under the cover of a little wood, were some Belgian batteries. They were firing with a machine-like regularity, and every minute came the heavy bark of the gun, followed by the swish of the sh.e.l.l, as it flew in a high arc and then smashed over the German lines. It was curious to calculate the length of time between the flash and the explosion. Further away some naval guns belonging to the French marines were getting the range of the enemy's positions, and they gave a new note of music to this infernal orchestra. It was a deep, sullen crash, with a tremendous menace in its tone. The enemy's sh.e.l.ls were bursting incessantly, and at very close range, so that at times they seemed only a few yards away. The Germans had many great howitzers, and the burst of the sh.e.l.l was followed by enormous clouds which hung heavily in the air for ten minutes or more. It was these sh.e.l.ls which dug great holes in the ground deep enough for a cart to be buried. Their moral effect was awful, and one's soul was a shuddering coward before them.

The roads were enc.u.mbered with long convoys of provisions for the troops, ambulances, Red Cross motor-cars, gun-wagons, and farm carts. Two regiments of Belgian cavalry--the cha.s.seurs a cheval-- were dismounted and bivouacked with their horses drawn up in single line along the roadway for half a mile or more. The men were splendid fellows, hardened by the long campaign, and amazingly careless of sh.e.l.ls. They wore a variety of uniforms, for they were but the gathered remnants of the Belgian cavalry division which had fought from the beginning of the war. I was surprised to see their horses in such good condition, in spite of a long ordeal which had so steadied their nerves that they paid not the slightest heed to the turmoil of the guns.

Near the line of battle, through outlying villages and past broken farms, companies of Belgian infantry were huddled under cover out of the way of shrapnel bullets if they could get the shelter of a doorway or the safer side of a brick wall. I stared into their faces and saw how dead they looked. It seemed as if their vital spark had already been put out by the storm of battle. Their eyes were sunken and quite expressionless. For week after week, night after night, they had been exposed to sh.e.l.l-fire, and something had died within them--perhaps the desire to live. Every now and then some of them would duck their heads as a sh.e.l.l burst within fifty or a hundred yards of them, and I saw then that fear could still live in the hearts of men who had become accustomed to the constant chance of death. For fear exists with the highest valour, and its psychological effect is not unknown to heroes who have the courage to confess the truth.

14

"If any man says he is not afraid of sh.e.l.l-fire," said one of the bravest men I have ever met--and at that moment we were watching how the enemy's shrapnel was ploughing up the earth on either side of the road on which we stood--"he is a liar!" There are very few men in this war who make any such pretence. On the contrary, most of the French, Belgian, and English soldiers with whom I have had wayside conversations since the war began, find a kind of painful pleasure in the candid confession of their fears.

"It is now three days since I have been frightened," said a young English officer, who, I fancy, was never scared in his life before he came out to see these battlefields of terror.

"I was paralysed with a cold and horrible fear when I was ordered to advance with my men over open ground under the enemy's shrapnel," said a French officer with the steady brown eyes of a man who in ordinary tests of courage would smile at the risk of death.

But this sh.e.l.l-fire is not an ordinary test of courage. Courage is annihilated in the face of it. Something else takes its place--a philosophy of fatalism, sometimes an utter boredom with the way in which death plays the fool with men, threatening but failing to kill; in most cases a strange extinction of all emotions and sensations, so that men who have been long under sh.e.l.l-fire have a peculiar rigidity of the nervous system, as if something has been killed inside them, though outwardly they are still alive and untouched.

The old style of courage, when man had pride and confidence in his own strength and valour against other men, when he was on an equality with his enemy in arms and intelligence, has almost gone. It has quite gone when he is called upon to advance or hold the ground in face of the enemy's artillery. For all human qualities are of no avail against those death-machines. What are quickness of wit, the strength of a man's right arm, the heroic fibre of his heart, his cunning in warfare, when he is opposed by an enemy's batteries which belch out bursting sh.e.l.ls with frightful precision and regularity? What is the most courageous man to do in such an hour? Can he stand erect and fearless under a sky which is raining down jagged pieces of steel? Can he adopt the pose of an Adelphi hero, with a scornful smile on his lips, when a yard away from him a hole large enough to bury a taxicab is torn out of the earth, and when the building against which he has been standing is suddenly knocked into a ridiculous ruin?

It is impossible to exaggerate the monstrous horror of the sh.e.l.l-fire, as I knew when I stood in the midst of it, watching its effect upon the men around me, and a.n.a.lysing my own psychological sensations with a morbid interest. I was very much afraid--day after day I faced that musis and hated it--but there were all sorts of other sensations besides fear which worked a change in me. I was conscious of great physical discomfort which reacted upon my brain. The noises were even more distressing to me than the risk of death. It was terrifying in its tumult. The German batteries were hard at work round Nieuport, Dixmude, Pervyse, and other towns and villages, forming a crescent, with its left curve sweeping away from the coast. One could see the stabbing flashes from some of the enemy's guns and a loud and unceasing roar came from them with regular rolls of thunderous noise interrupted by sudden and terrific shocks, which shattered into one's brain and shook one's body with a kind of disintegrating tumult. High above this deep-toned concussion came the cry of the sh.e.l.ls--that long carrying buzz--like a monstrous, angry bee rus.h.i.+ng away from a burning hive--which rises into a shrill singing note before ending and bursting into the final boom which scatters death.

But more awful was the noise of our own guns. At Nieuport I stood only a few hundred yards away from the wars.h.i.+ps lying off the coast.

Each sh.e.l.l which they sent across the dunes was like one of Jove's thunderbolts, and made one's body and soul quake with the agony of its noise. The vibration was so great that it made my skull ache as though it had been hammered. Long afterwards I found myself trembling with those waves of vibrating sounds. Worse still, because sharper and more piercingly staccato, was my experience close to a battery of French cent-vingt. Each sh.e.l.l was fired with a hard metallic crack, which seemed to knock a hole into my ear-drums. I suffered intolerably from the noise, yet--so easy it is to laugh in the midst of pain---I laughed aloud when a friend of mine, pa.s.sing the battery in his motor-car, raised his hand to one of the gunners, and said, "Un moment, s'il vous plait!" It was like asking Jove to stop his thunderbolts.

Some people get accustomed to the noise, but others never. Every time a battery fired simultaneously one of the men who were with me, a hard, tough type of mechanic, shrank and ducked his head with an expression of agonized horror. He confessed to me that it "knocked his nerves to pieces." Three such men out of six or seven had to be invalided home in one week. One of them had a crise de nerfs, which nearly killed him. Yet it was not fear which was the matter with them.

Intellectually they were brave men and coerced themselves into joining many perilous adventures. It was the intolerable strain upon the nervous system that made wrecks of them. Some men are attacked with a kind of madness in the presence of sh.e.l.ls. It is what a French friend of mine called la folie des obus. It is a kind of spiritual exultation which makes them lose self-consciousness and be caught up, as it were, in the delirium of those cras.h.i.+ng, screaming things. In the hottest quarter of an hour in Dixmude one of my friends paced about aimlessly with a dreamy look in his eyes. I am sure he had not the slightest idea where he was or what he was doing. I believe he was "outside himself," to use a good old-fas.h.i.+oned phrase. And at Antwerp, when a convoy of British ambulances escaped with their wounded through a storm of sh.e.l.ls, one man who had shown a strange hankering for the heart of the inferno, stepped off his car, and said: "I must go back, I must go back! Those sh.e.l.ls call to me." He went back and has never been heard of again.

Greater than one's fear, more overmastering in one's interest is this sh.e.l.l-fire. It is frightfully interesting to watch the shrapnel bursting near bodies of troops, to see the sh.e.l.ls kicking up the earth, now in this direction and now in that; to study a great building gradually losing its shape and falling into ruins; to see how death takes its toll in an indiscriminate way--smas.h.i.+ng a human being into pulp a few yards away and leaving oneself alive, or scattering a roadway with bits of raw flesh which a moment ago was a team of horses, or whipping the stones about a farmhouse with shrapnel bullets which spit about the crouching figures of soldiers who stare at these pellets out of sunken eyes. One's interest holds one in the firing zone with a grip from which one's intelligence cannot escape whatever may be one's cowardice.

It is the most satisfying thrill of horror in the world. How foolish this death is! How it picks and chooses, taking a man here and leaving a man there by just a hair's-breadth of difference. It is like looking into h.e.l.l and watching the fury of supernatural forces at play with human bodies, tearing them to pieces with great splinters of steel and burning them in the furnace-fires of sh.e.l.l-stricken towns, and in a devilish way obliterating the image of humanity in a welter of blood.

There is a beauty in it too, for the aestheticism of a Nero. Beautiful and terrible were the fires of those Belgian towns which I watched under a star-strewn sky. There was a pure golden glow, as of liquid metal, beneath the smoke columns and the leaping tongues of flame.

And many colours were used to paint this picture of war, for the enemy used sh.e.l.ls with different coloured fumes, by which I was told they studied the effect of their fire. Most vivid is the ordinary shrapnel, which tears a rent through the black volumes of smoke rolling over a smouldering town with a luminous sphere of electric blue. Then from the heavier guns come dense puff-b.a.l.l.s of tawny orange, violet, and heliotrope, followed by fleecy little c.u.muli of purest white. One's mind is absorbed in this pageant of sh.e.l.l-fire, and with a curious intentness, with that rigidity of nervous and muscular force which I have described, one watches the zone of fire sweeping nearer to oneself, bursting quite close, killing people not very far away.

Men who have been in the trenches under heavy sh.e.l.l-fire, sometimes for as long as three days, come out of their torment like men who have been buried alive. They have the brownish, ashen colour of death. They tremble as through anguish. They are dazed and stupid for a time. But they go back. That is the marvel of it. They go back day after day, as the Belgians went day after day. There is no fun in it, no sport, none of that heroic adventure which used perhaps--G.o.ds know--to belong to warfare when men were matched against men, and not against unapproachable artillery. This is their courage, stronger than all their fear. There is something in us, even divine pride of manhood, a dogged disregard of death, though it comes from an unseen enemy out of a smoke-wracked sky, like the thunderbolts of the G.o.ds, which makes us go back, though we know the terror of it. For honour's sake men face again the music of that infernal orchestra, and listen with a deadly sickness in their hearts to the song of the sh.e.l.l screaming the French word for kill, which is tue!

tue!