The Soul of the War Part 22

In Furnes the news of the danger seemed to have been scented by the people. They had packed a few things into bundles and made ready to leave their homes. In the convent where I had helped to wash up and to fill the part of odd-job man when I was not out with the "flying column," the doctors and nurses were already loading the ambulances with all their cases. The last of the wounded was sent away to a place of safety. He was a man with a sabre-cut on his head, who for four days had lain quite still, with a grave Oriental face, which seemed in the tranquillity of death.

A group of nuns pleaded to be taken with the doctors and nurses.

They could help in the wards or in the kitchen--if only they might go and escape the peril of the German soldiery.

I went across the square to my own room in the Hotel de la Couronne, and put a few things together. A friend of mine who helped me told the story of a life--the mistakes that had nearly ruined it, the adventures of a heart. A queer conversation at a time when the enemy was coming down the road. The guns were very loud over Wulpen way. They seemed to be coming closer. Yet there was no panic. There was even laughter in the courtyard of the hospital, where the doctors tossed blankets, mattresses, food stores and stoves into the motor ambulances. They were in no hurry to go. It was not the first or the second time they had to evacuate a house menaced by the enemy. They had made a habit of it, and were not to be flurried. I helped the blue-eyed boy to lift the great stoves. They were "some"

weight, as an American would say, and both the blue-eyed boy and myself were plastered with soot, so that we looked like sweeps calling round for orders. I lifted packing-cases which would have paralysed me in times of peace and scouted round for some of the thousand and one things which could not be left behind without a tragedy. But at last the order was given to start, and the procession of motor-cars started out for Poperinghe, twenty-five kilometres to the south. Little by little the sound of the guns died away, and the cars pa.s.sed through quiet fields where French troops bivouacked round their camp fires. I remember that we pa.s.sed a regiment of Moroccans half- way to Poperinghe, and I looked back from the car to watch them pacing up and down between their fires, which glowed upon their red cloaks and white robes and their grave, bearded Arab faces. They looked miserably cold as the wind flapped their loose garments, but about these men in the muddy field there was a sombre dignity which took one's imagination back to the day when the Saracens held European soil.

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It was dark when we reached Poperinghe and halted our cars in the square outside the Town Hall, among a crowd of other motor-cars, naval lorries, mitrailleuses, and wagons. Groups of British soldiers stood about smoking cigarettes and staring at us curiously through the gloom as though not quite sure what to make of us. And indeed we must have looked an odd party, for some of us were in khaki and some of us in civilian clothes with Belgian caps, and among the crowd of nurses was a carriage-load of nuns, huddled up in their black cloaks. Warning of our arrival in Poperinghe should have been notified to the munic.i.p.al authorities, so that they might find lodgings for us; and the Queen of the Belgians had indeed sent through a message to that effect, But there seemed to be some trouble about finding a roof under which to lay our heads, and an hour went by in the square while the lady in charge of the domesticity department interviewed the mayor, cajoled the corporation, and inspected convents down side streets. She came back at last with a little hopelessness in her eyes.

"Goodness knows where we can go! There doesn't seem room for a mouse in Poperinghe, and meanwhile the poor nurses are dying of hunger. We must get into some kind of shelter."

I was commissioned to find at least a temporary abode and to search around for food; not at all an easy task in a dark town where I had never been before and crowded with the troops of three nations. I was also made the shepherd of all these sheep, who were commanded to keep their eyes upon me and not to go astray but to follow where I led. It was a most ridiculous position for a London journalist of a shy and retiring nature, especially as some of the nurses were getting out of hand and indulging in private adventures.

One of them, a most buxom and jolly soul, who, as she confided to me, "didn't care a d.a.m.n," had established friendly relations with a naval lieutenant, and I had great trouble in dragging her away from his engaging conversation. Others had discovered a shop where hot coffee was being served to British soldiers who were willing to share it with attractive ladies. A pretty shepherd I looked when half my flock had gone astray!

Then one of the chauffeurs had something like an apoplectic stroke in the street--the effect of a nervous crisis after a day under sh.e.l.l-fire-- and with two friendly "Tommies" I helped to drag him into the Town Hall. He was a very stout young man, with well-developed muscles, and having lain for some time in a state of coma, he suddenly became delirious and tried to fight me. I disposed of him in a backyard, where he gradually recovered, and then I set out again in search of my sheep. After scouting about Poperinghe in the darkness, I discovered a beer tavern with a fair-sized room in which the party might be packed with care, and then, like a pocket patriarch with the children of Israel, I led my ladies on foot to the place of sanctuary and disposed the nuns round the bar, with the reverend mother in the centre of them, having a little aureole round her head from the glamour of the pewter pots. The others crowded in anyhow and said in a dreadful chorus, like Katherine in "The Taming of the Shrew," "We want our supper!"

A brilliant inspiration came to me. As there were British troops in Poperinghe, there must also be British rations, and I had glorious visions of Maconochie and army biscuits. Out into the dark streets again I went with my little car, and after wayside conversations with British soldiers who knew nothing but their own job, found at last the officer in charge of the commissariat. He was a tall fellow and rather haughty in the style of a British officer confronted abruptly with an unusual request. He wanted to know who the devil I was, not liking my civilian clothes and suspecting a German spy. But he became sympathetic when I told him, quite dishonestly, that I was in charge of a British field ambulance under the Belgian Government, which had been forced to evacuate Fumes as the enemy had broken through the Belgian lines. I expressed my grat.i.tude for his kindness, which I was sure he would show, in providing fifty-five army rations for fifty- five doctors and nurses devilishly hungry and utterly dest.i.tute. After some hesitation he consented to give me a "chit," and turning to a sergeant who had been my guide down a dark street, said: "Take this officer to the depot and see that he gets everything he wants." It was a little triumph not to be appreciated by readers who do not know the humiliations experienced by correspondents in time of war.

A few minutes later the officer came padding down the street after me, and I expected instant arrest and solitary confinement to the end of the war. But he was out for information.

"I beg your pardon, sir," he said, very politely, "but would you mind giving me a sketch of the military situation round your part?"

I gave him an outline of the affair which had caused the Belgian headquarters staff to s.h.i.+ft from Furnes, and though it was, I fancy, slightly over-coloured, he was very much obliged... So, gloriously, I drove back to the beer-tavern with the fifty-five army rations which were enough to feed fifty-five starving people for a week, and was received with cheers. That night, conscious of good deeds, I laid down in the straw of a school-house which had been turned into a barracks, and by the light of several candle-ends, scribbled a long dispatch, which became a very short one when the British censor had worked his will with it.

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After all, the ambulance column did not have to stay in Poperinghe, but went back to their old quarters, with doctors, nurses and nuns, and all their properties. The enemy had not followed up its advantages, and the Belgian troops, aided by French marines and other French troops who now arrived in greater numbers, thrust them back and barred the way to Dunkirk. The waters of the Yser had helped to turn the tide of war. The sluice-gates were opened and flooded the surrounding fields, so that the enemy's artillery was bogged and could not move.

For a little while the air in all that region between Furnes and Nieuport, Dixmude and Pervyse, was cleansed of the odour and fume of battle.

But there were other causes of the German withdrawal after one day, at least, when it seemed that nothing short of miraculous aid could hold them from a swift advance along the coast. The chief cause was to be found at Ypres, where the British army sustained repeated and most desperate onslaughts. Ypres was now the storm centre in a ten- days' battle of guns, which was beyond all doubt the most ferocious and b.l.o.o.d.y episode in the first year of war on the Western side of operations. Repeatedly, after being checked in their attacks by a slaughter which almost annihilated entire regiments, the Germans endeavoured to repair their shattered strength by bringing up every available man and gun for another bout of blood. We know now that it was one of the most awful conflicts in which humanity has ever agonized. Heroism shone through it on both sides. The resistance and nerve strength of the British troops were almost superhuman; and in spite of losses which might have demoralized any army, however splendid in valour, they fought on with that dogged spirit which filled the trenches at Badajoz and held the lines of Torres Vedras, a hundred years before, when the British race seemed to be stronger than its modern generation.

There were hours when all seemed lost, when it was impossible to bring up reserves to fill the gaps in our bleeding battalions, when so many dead and wounded lay about and so few remained to serve the guns and hold the trenches that another attack pushed home would have swept through our lines and broken us to bits. The cooks and the commissariat men took their places in the trenches, and every man who could hold a rifle fired that day for England's sake, though England did not know her peril.

But the German losses were enormous also, and during those ten days they sacrificed themselves with a kind of Oriental valour, such as heaped the fields of Omdurman with Soudanese. The Kaiser was the new Mahdi for whom men died in ma.s.ses, going with fatalistic resignation to inevitable death. After a lull for burning and burial, for the refilling of great gaps in regiments and divisions, the enemy moved against us with new ma.s.ses, but again death awaited them, in spite of all their guns, and the British held their ground.

They held their ground with superb and dauntless valour, and out of the general horror of it all there emerges the fine, bright chivalry of young officers and men who did amazing deeds, which read like fairy tales, even when they are told soberly in official dispatches. In this slaughter field the individual still found a chance now and then of personal prowess, and not all his human qualities had been annihilated or stupefied by the overwhelming power of artillery.

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The town of Ypres was added to the list of other Belgian towns like those in which I saw the ruin of a nation.

It existed no longer as a place of ancient beauty in which men and women made their homes, trustful of fate. Many of its houses had fallen into the roadways and heaped them high with broken bricks and shattered gla.s.s. Others burned with a fine, fierce glow inside the outer walls. The roofs had crashed down into the cellars. All between, furniture and panelling and household treasures, had been burnt out into black ash or mouldered in glowing embers.

The great Cloth Hall, which had been one of the most magnificent treasures of ancient architecture in Europe, was smashed and battered by incessant sh.e.l.ls, so that it became one vast ruin of broken walls and fallen pillars framed about a sc.r.a.pheap of twisted iron and calcined statues, when one day later in the war I wandered for an hour or more, groping for some little relic which would tell the tale of this tragedy.

On my desk now at home there are a few long, rusty nails, an old lock of fifteenth-century workmans.h.i.+p, and a little broken window with leaded panes, which serve as mementoes of this destruction.

The inhabitants of Ypres had gone, unless some of them were hiding, or buried in their cellars. A few dogs roamed about, barking or whining at the soldiers who pa.s.sed through the outskirts staring at all this destruction with curious eyes, and storing up images for which they will never find the right words.

Two young naval officers who went into Ypres one day tried to coax one of the dogs to come with them. "Might have brought us luck,"

they said, hiding their pity for a poor beast. But it slunk back into the ruin of its master's house, distrustful of men who did things not belonging to the code of beasts.

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Human qualities were not annihilated, I have said. Yet in a general way that was the effect of modern weapons, and at Ypres ma.s.ses of men did not fight so much as stand until they died.

"We just wait for death," said a Belgian officer one night, "and wonder if it doesn't reach us out of all this storm of sh.e.l.ls. It is a war without soul or adventure. In the early days, when I scoured the country with a party of motor scouts there was some sport in it. Any audacity we had, or any cunning, could get some kind of payment. The individual counted."

"But now, in the business round Ypres, what can men do--infantry, cavalry, scouts? It is the gun that does all the business heaving out sh.e.l.ls, delivering death in a merciless way. It is guns, with men as targets, helpless as the leaves that are torn from these autumn trees around us by a storm of hail. Our men are falling like the leaves, and the ground is heaped with them, and there is no decisive victory on either side. One week of death is followed by another week of death.

The position changes a little, that is all, and the business goes on again. It is appalling."

The same words were used to me on the same night by a surgeon who had just come from the station of Dunkirk, where the latest batch of wounded--a thousand of them--were lying on the straw. "It is appalling," he said. "The destruction of this sh.e.l.l-fire is making a shambles of human bodies. How can we cope with it? What can we do with such a butchery?"

Round about Furnes there was a fog in the war zone. In the early dawn until the morning had pa.s.sed, and then again as the dusk fell and the mists crept along the ca.n.a.ls and floated over the flat fields, men groped about it like ghosts, with ghostly guns.

Sh.e.l.ls came hurtling out of the veil of the mist and burst in places which seemed hidden behind cotton-wool. An unseen enemy was killing unseen men, and other guns replied into this grim, grey mystery, not knowing what destruction was being done.

It was like the war itself, which was utterly shrouded in these parts by a fog of mystery. Watching it close at hand (when things are more difficult to sort into any order of logic) my view was clouded and perplexed by the general confusion. A few days previously, it seemed that the enemy had abandoned his attack upon the coast-line and the country between Dixmude and Nieuport. There was a strange silence behind the mists, but our aeroplanes, reconnoitring the enemy's lines, were able to see movements of troops drifting southwards towards the region round Ypres.

Now there was an awakening of guns in places from which they seemed to be withdrawn. Dixmude, quiet in its ruins, trembled again, and crumbled a little more, under the vibration of the enemy's sh.e.l.ls, firing at long range towards the Franco-Belgian troops.

Here and there, near Pervyse and Ramscapelle, guns, not yet located, fired "pot shots" on the chance of killing something--soldiers or civilians, or the wounded on their stretchers.

Several of them came into Furnes, bursting quite close to the convent, and one smashed into the Hotel de la n.o.ble Rose, going straight down a long corridor and then making a great hole in a bedroom wall. Some of the officers of the Belgian staff were in the room downstairs, but not a soul was hurt.

French and Belgian patrols thrusting forward cautiously found themselves under rifle-fire from the enemy's trenches which had previously appeared abandoned. Something like an offensive developed again, and it was an unpleasant surprise when Dixmude was retaken by the Germans.

As a town its possession was not of priceless value to the enemy.

They had retaken a pitiful ruin, many streets of skeleton houses filled with burnt-out ashes, a Town Hall with gaping holes in its roof, an archway which thrust up from a wreck of pillars like a gaunt rib, and a litter of broken gla.s.s, bricks and decomposed bodies.

If they had any pride in the capture it was the completeness of their destruction of this fine old Flemish town.

But it was a disagreeable thing that the enemy, who had been thrust back from this place and the surrounding neighbourhood, and who had abandoned their attack for a time in this region, should have made such a sudden hark-back in sufficient strength to regain ground which was won by the Belgian and French at the cost of many thousands of dead and wounded.

The renewed attack was to call off some of the allied troops from the lines round Ypres, and was a part of the general shock of the offensive all along the German line in order to test once more the weakest point of the Allies' strength through which to force a way.

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