INTRODUCTION (continued 2)

I know I haven't the ghost of a chance; I know that if I had—as things stand at present—not being a surgeon or a trained nurse, I wouldn't take it, even to get there. And at the same time I know, with a superior certainty, that this unlikely thing will happen. This sense of certainty is not at all uncommon, but it is, or seems, unintelligible. You can only conceive it as a premonition of some unavoidable event. It is as if something had been looking for you, waiting for you, from all eternity out here; something that you have been looking for; and, when you are getting near, it begins calling to you; it draws your heart out to it all day long. You can give no account of it. All that you know about it is that it is unique. It has nothing to do with your ordinary curiosities and interests and loves; nothing to do with the thirst for experience, or for adventure, or for glory, or for the thrill. You can't "get" anything out of it. It is something hidden and secret and supremely urgent. Its urgency, indeed, is so great that if you miss it you will have missed reality itself.

For me this uncanny anticipation is somehow connected with the turn of the south-east road. I do not see how I am ever going to get there or anywhere near there. But I am not uneasy or impatient any more. There is no hurry. The thing, whatever it is, will be irresistible, and if I don't go out to find it, it will find me.

········

Mrs. Torrence has gone, Heaven knows where. She has not been with the others at the Palais des Fêtes. Janet McNeil and Mrs. Lambert have been working there for five hours, serving meals to the refugees. Ursula Dearmer with extreme docility has been working all the afternoon with the nurses.

It looks as if we were beginning to settle down.

Mrs. Torrence has come back. The red German pom-pom has gone from her cap and she wears the badge of the Belgian Motor Cyclist Corps, black wings on a white ground. Providence has rehabilitated himself. He has abased our trained nurse and expert motorist in order to exalt her. He fairly flung her in the path of the Colonel of (I think) the Belgian Motor Cyclist Corps at a moment when the Colonel found himself in a jibbing motor-car without a chauffeur. We gather that the Colonel was becoming hectic with blasphemy when she appeared and settled the little difficulty between him and his car. She seems to have followed it up by driving him then and there straight up to the firing-line to look for wounded.

End of the adventure—she volunteered her services as chauffeur to the Colonel and was accepted.

The Commandant has received the news with imperturbable optimism.

As for her, she is appeased. She will realize her valorous dream of "the greatest possible danger;" and she will get to her wounded.

The others have come back too. They have toiled for five hours among the refugees.

[5.30.]

It is my turn now at the Palais des Fêtes.

It took ages to get in. The dining-hall is narrower than the sleeping-hall, but it extends beyond it on one side where there is a large door opening on the garden. But this door is closed to the public. You can only reach the dining-hall by going through the straw among the sleepers. And at this point the Commandant's optimism has broken down. He won't let you go in through the straw, and the clerk who controls the entry won't let you go in through the other door. You explain to the clerk that the English Ambulance being quartered in a Military Hospital, its rules are inviolable; it is not allowed to expose itself to the horrors of the straw. The clerk is not interested in the English Ambulance, he is not impressed by the fact that it has volunteered its priceless services to the Refugee Committee, and he is contemptuous of the orders of its Commandant. His business is to see that you go into the Palais through his door and not through any other door. And when you tell him that if he will not withdraw his regulations the Ambulance will be compelled to withdraw its services, he replies with delicious sarcasm, "Nous n'avons pas prévu ça." In the end you are referred to the Secretary in his bureau. He grasps the situation and is urbanity itself. Provided with a special permit bearing his sacred signature, you are admitted by the other door.

Your passage to the Vestiaire takes you through the infants' room and along the galleries past the wards. The crowd of refugees is so great that beds have been put up in the galleries. You take off your outer garments and put on the Belgian Red Cross uniform (you have realized by this time that your charming white overall and veil are sanitary precautions).

Coming down the wide wooden stairways you have a full view of the Inner Hall. This enormous oblong space below the galleries is the heart, the fervid central foyer of the Palais des Fêtes. At either end of it is an immense auditorium, tier above tier of seats, rising towards the gallery floors. All down each side of it, standards with triumphal devices are tilted from the balustrade. Banners hang from the rafters.

And under them, down the whole length of the hall from auditorium to auditorium, the tables are set out. Bare wooden tables, one after another, more tables than you can count.

From the door of the sleeping-hall to each auditorium, and from each auditorium down the line of the tables a gangway is roped off for the passage of the refugees.

They say there are ten thousand five hundred here to-night. Beyond the rope-line, along the inner hall, more straw has been laid down to bed the overflow from the outer hall. They come on in relays to be fed. They are marshalled first into the seats of each auditorium, where they sit like the spectators of some monstrous festival and wait for their turn at the tables.

This, the long procession of people streaming in without haste, in perfect order and submission, is heart-rending if you like. The immensity of the crowd no longer overpowers you. The barriers make it a steady procession, a credible spectacle. You can take it in. It is the thin end of the wedge in your heart. They come on so slowly that you can count them as they come. They have sorted themselves out. The fathers and the mothers are together, they lead their little children by the hand or push them gently before them. There is no anticipation in their eyes; no eagerness and no impatience in their bearing. They do not hustle each other or scramble for their places. It is their silence and submission that you cannot stand.

For you have a moment of dreadful inactivity after the setting of the tables for the premier service. You have filled your bowls with black coffee; somebody else has laid the slices of white bread on the bare tables. You have nothing to do but stand still and see them file in to the banquet. On the banners and standards from the roof and balustrades the Lion of Flanders ramps over their heads. And somewhere in the back of your brain a song sings itself to a tune that something in your brain wakes up:

It is the song the Belgian soldiers sang as they marched to battle in the first week of August. It is only the end of September now.

And somebody standing beside you says: "C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?"

You cannot look any more.

At the canteen the men are pouring out coffee from enormous enamelled jugs into the small jugs that the waitresses bring. This wastes your time and cools the coffee. So you take a big jug from the men. It seems to you no heavier than an ordinary teapot. And you run with it. To carry the largest possible jug at the swiftest possible pace is your only chance of keeping sane. (It isn't till it is all over that you hear the whisper of "Anglaise!" and realize how very far from sane you must have looked running round with your enormous jug.) You can fill up the coffee bowls again—the little bowls full, the big bowls only half full; there is more than enough coffee to go round. But there is no milk except for the babies. And when they ask you for more bread there is not enough to go twice round. The ration is now two slices of dry bread and a bowl of black coffee three times a day. Till yesterday there was an allowance of meat for soup at the mid-day meal; to-day the army has commandeered all the meat.

But you needn't stand still any more. After the first service the bowls have to be cleared from the tables and washed and laid ready for the next. Round the great wooden tubs there is a frightful competition. It is who can wash and dry and carry back the quickest. You contend with brawny Flemish women for the first dip into the tub and the driest towel. Then you race round the tables with your pile of crockery, and then with your jug, and so on over and over again for three hours, till the last relay is fed and the tables are deserted. You wash up again and it is all over for you till six o'clock to-morrow evening.

You go back to your mess-room and a ten-o'clock supper of cold coffee and sandwiches and Belgian current loaf eaten with butter. And in a nightmare afterwards Belgian refugees gather round you and pluck at your sleeve and cry to you for more bread: "Une petite tranche de pain, s'il vous plaît, mademoiselle!"

[Wednesday, 30th.]

No Germans, nor sign of Germans yet.

Fighting is reported at Saint Nicolas, between Antwerp and Ghent. The Commandant has an idea. He says that if the Belgian Army has to meet the Germans at Saint Nicolas, so as to cut off their advance on Antwerp, the base hospital must be removed from Ghent to some centre or point which will bring the Ambulance behind the Belgian lines. He thinks that working from Ghent would necessarily bring it behind the German lines. This is assuming that the Germans coming up from the south-east will cut in between Saint Nicolas and Ghent.

He consults the President, who apparently thinks that the base hospital will do very well where it is.

[2.30.]

Mrs. Torrence brought her Colonel in to lunch. He is battered and grizzled, but still a fine figure in the dark-green uniform of the Motor Cyclist Corps. He is very polite and gallant à la belge and vows that he has taken on Mrs. Torrence pour toujours, pour la vie! She diverts the flow of urbanity adroitly.

Except the Colonel nothing noteworthy seems to have occurred to-day. The three hours at the Palais des Fêtes were like the three hours last night.

[Thursday, October 1st.]

It really isn't safe for the Commandant to go out with Ursula Dearmer. For her luck in the matter of bombardments continues. (He might just as well be with Mrs. Torrence.) They have been at Termonde. What is more, it was Ursula Dearmer who got them through, in spite of the medical military officer whose vigorous efforts stopped them at the barrier. He seems at one point to have shown weakness and given them leave to go on a little way up the road; and the little way seems to have carried them out of his sight and onward till they encountered the Colonel (or it may have been a General) in command. The Colonel (or the General) seems to have broken down very badly, for the car and Ursula Dearmer and the Commandant went on towards Termonde. Young Haynes was with them this time, and on the way they had picked up Mr. G. L——, War Correspondent to the Daily Mail and Westminster. They left the car behind somewhere in a safe place where the fire from the machine-guns couldn't reach it. There is a street or a road—I can't make out whether it is inside or outside the town; it leads straight to the bridge over the river, which is about as wide there as the Thames at Westminster. The bridge is the key to the position; it has been blown up and built again several times in the course of the War, and the Germans are now entrenched beyond it. The road had been raked by their mitrailleuses the day before.

It seems to have struck the four simultaneously that it would be quite a good thing to walk down this road on the off-chance of the machine-guns opening fire again. The tale told by the Commandant evokes an awful vision of them walking down it, four abreast, the Commandant and Mr. G. L—— on the outside, fairly under shelter, and Ursula Dearmer and young Haynes a little in front of them down the middle, where the fire comes, when it does come. This spectacle seems to have shaken the Commandant in his view of bombarded towns as suitable places of amusement for young girls. Young Haynes ought to have known better. You tell him that as long as the world endures young Haynes will be young Haynes, and if there is danger in the middle of the road, it is there that he will walk by preference. And as no young woman of modern times is going to let herself be outdone by young Haynes, you must expect to find Ursula Dearmer in the middle of the road too. You cannot suppress this competitive heroism of young people. The roots strike too deep down in human nature. In the modern young man and woman competitive heroism has completely forgotten its origin and is now an end in itself.

And if it comes to that—how about Alost?

At the mention of Alost the Commandant's face becomes childlike again in its utter simplicity and innocence and candour. Alost was a very different thing. Looking for shells at Alost, you understand, was like looking for shells on the seashore. At Alost Ursula Dearmer was in no sort of danger. For at Alost she was under the Commandant's wing (young Haynes hasn't got any wings, only legs to walk into the line of fire on). He explains very carefully that he took her under his wing because she is a young girl and he feels responsible for her to her mother.

(Which, oddly enough, is just how I feel!)

As for young Haynes, I suppose he would plead that when he and Ursula Dearmer walked down the middle of the road there was no firing.

That seems to have been young Haynes's particular good fortune. I have now a perfect obsession of responsibility. I see, in one dreadful vision after another, the things that must happen to Ursula Dearmer under the Commandant's wing, and to young Haynes and the Commandant under Ursula Dearmer's.

No wounded were found, this time, at Termonde.

This little contretemps with the Commandant has made me forget to record a far more notable event. Mrs. Torrence brought young Lieutenant G—— in to luncheon. He is the hero of the Belgian Motor Cyclist Corps. He is said to have accounted for nine Germans with his own rifle in one morning. The Corps has already intimated that this is the first well-defined specimen of a man it has yet seen in Belgium. His dark-green uniform fits him exceedingly well. He is tall and handsome. Drenched in the glamour of the greatest possible danger, he gives it off like a subtle essence. As he was led in he had rather the air, the slightly awkward, puzzled and embarrassed air, of being on show as a fine specimen of a man. But it very soon wore off. In the absence of the Commandant he sat in the Commandant's place, so magnificent a figure that our mess, with gaps at every table, looked like a banquet given in his honour, a banquet whose guests had been decimated by some catastrophe.

Suddenly—whether it was the presence of the Lieutenant or the absence of the Commandant, or merely reaction from the strain of inactivity, I don't know, but suddenly madness came upon our mess. The mess-room was no longer a mess-room in a Military Hospital, but a British school-room. Mrs. Torrence had changed her woollen cap for a grey felt wide-awake. She was no longer an Arctic explorer, but the wild-western cowboy of British melodrama. She was the first to go mad. One moment she was seated decorously at the Lieutenant's right hand; the next she was strolling round the tables with an air of innocent abstraction, having armed herself in secret with the little hard round rolls supplied by order of the Commandant. Each little roll became a deadly obus in her hand. She turned. Her innocent abstraction was intense as she poised herself to aim.

With a shout of laughter Dr. Bird ducked behind the cover of his table-napkin.

I had a sudden memory of Mrs. Torrence in command of the party at Ostend, a figure of austere duty, of inexorable propriety, rigid with the discipline of the —— Hospital, restraining the criminal levity of the Red Cross volunteer who would look or dream of looking at Ostend Cathedral. Mrs. Torrence, like a seven-year-old child meditating mischief, like a baby panther at play, like a very young and very engaging demon let loose, is looking at Dr. Bird. He is not a Cathedral, but he suffered bombardment all the same. She got his range with a roll. She landed her shell in the very centre of his waistcoat.

Her madness entered into Dr. Bird. He replied with a spirited fire which fell wide of her and battered the mess-room door. The orderlies retreated for shelter into the vestibule beyond. Jean was the first to penetrate the line of fire. Max followed him.

Madness entered into Max. He ceased to be a hospital orderly. He became Prosper Panne again, the very young collégien, as he put down his dishes and glided unobtrusively into the affair.

And then the young Belgian Lieutenant went mad. But he gave way by degrees. At first he sat up straight and stiff with polite astonishment before the spectacle of a British "rag." He paid the dubious tribute of a weak giggle to the bombardment of Dr. Bird. He was convulsed at the first performance of Prosper Panne. In his final collapse he was rocking to and fro and crowing with helpless, hysterical laughter.

For with the entrance of Prosper Panne the mess-room became a scene at the Folies Bergères. There was Mrs. Torrence, première comédienne, in the costume of a wild-western cowboy; there was the young Lieutenant himself, looking like a stage-lieutenant in the dark-green uniform of the Belgian Motor Cyclist Corps; and there was Prosper Panne. He began by picking up Mrs. Torrence's brown leather motor glove with its huge gauntlet, and examining it with the deliciously foolish bewilderment of the accomplished clown. After one or two failures, brilliantly improvised, he fixed it firmly on his head. The huge gauntlet, with its limp five fingers dangling over his left ear, became a rakish képi with a five-pointed flap. Max—I mean Prosper Panne—wore it with an "air impayable." Out of his round, soft, putty-coloured face he made fifteen other faces in rapid succession, all incomparably absurd. He lit a cigarette and held it between his lower lip and his chin. The effect was of a miraculous transformation of those features, in which his upper lip disappeared altogether, his lower lip took on its functions, while his chin ceased to be a chin and became a lower lip. With this achievement Prosper Panne had his audience in the hollow of his hands. He could do what he liked with it. He did. He caused his motor-glove cap to fall from his head as if by some mysterious movement of its own. Then he went round the stalls and gravely and earnestly removed all our hats. With an air more and more "impayable" he wore each one of them in turn—the grey felt wide-awake of the wild-western cowboy, the knitted Jaeger head-gear of the little Arctic explorer, the dark-blue military cap with the red tassel assumed by Dr. Bird, even the green cap with the winged symbol of the young Belgian officer. By this time the young Belgian officer was so entirely the thrall of Prosper Panne that he didn't turn a hair.

Flushed with success, Max rose to his top-notch. Moving slowly towards the open door (centre) with his back to his audience and his head turned towards it over his left shoulder, by some extraordinary dislocation of his hip-joints, he achieved the immemorial salutation of the Folies Bergères—the last faint survival of the Old Athenian Comedy.

Up till now Jean had affected to ignore the performance of his colleague. But under this supreme provocation he yielded to the Aristophanic impulse, and—exit Max in the approved manner of the Folies Bergères.

········

It is all over. The young Belgian officer has flown away on his motor cycle to pot Germans; Mrs. Torrence has gone off to the field with the Colonel on the quest of the greatest possible danger. The Ambulance has followed them there.

I am in the mess-room, sitting at the disordered table and gazing at the ruins of our mess. I hear again the wild laughter of the mess-mates; it mingles with the cry of the refugees in the Palais des Fêtes: "Une petite tranche de pain, s'il vous plaît, mademoiselle!"

C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?

In the chair by the window Max lies back with his loose boyish legs extended limply in front of him; his round, close-cropped head droops to his shoulder, his round face (the face of a very young collégien) is white, the features are blurred and inert. Max is asleep with his dish-cloth in his hand, in the sudden, pathetic sleep of exhaustion. After his brief, funny madness, he is asleep. Jean comes and looks at him and shakes his head. You understand from Jean that Max goes mad like that now and then on purpose, so that he may forget in what manner his mother went mad.

We go quietly so as not to wake him a minute too soon, lest when he wakes he should remember.

There is a Taube hovering over Ghent.

Up there, in the clear blue sky it looks innocent, like an enormous greyish blond dragon-fly hovering over a pond. You stare at it, fascinated, as you stare at a hawk that hangs in mid-air, steadied by the vibration of its wings, watching its prey.

You are not in the least disturbed by the watching Taube. An aeroplane, dropping a few bombs, is nothing to what goes on down there where the ambulances are.

The ambulances have come back. I go out into the yard to look at them. They are not always nice to look at; the floors and steps would make you shudder if you were not past shuddering.

I have found something to do. Not much, but still something. I am to look after the linen for the ambulances, to take away the blood-stained pillow-slips and blankets, and deliver them at the laundry and get clean ones from the linen-room. It's odd, but I'm almost foolishly elated at being allowed to do this. We are still more or less weighed down by the sense of our uselessness. Even the Chaplain, though his services as a stretcher-bearer have been definitely recognized—even the Chaplain continues to suffer in this way. He has just come to me to tell me with pride that he is making a good job of the stretchers he has got to mend.

Then, just as I am beginning to lift up my head, the blow falls. Not one member of the Field Ambulance Corps is to be allowed to work at the Palais des Fêtes, for fear of bringing fever into the Military Hospital. And here we are, exactly where we were at the beginning of the week, Mrs. Lambert, Janet McNeil and I, three women out of five, with nothing to do and two convalescent orderlies waiting on us. If I could please myself I would tuck Max up in bed and wait on him.

In spite of the ambulance linen, this is the worst day of all for the wretched Secretary and Reporter. Five days in Ghent and not a thing done; not a line written of those brilliant articles (from the Front) which were to bring in money for the Corps. To have nothing to do but hang about the Hospital on the off-chance of the Commandant coming back unexpectedly and wanting a letter written; to pass the man with the bullet wound in his mouth a dozen times a day (he is getting very slowly better; his poor face was a little more human this morning); to see the maimed and crippled men trailing and hobbling about the hall, and the wounded carried in on their stretchers—dripping stretchers, agonized bodies, limbs rolled in bandages, blood oozing through the bandages, heads bound with bandages, bandages glued tight to the bone with blood—to see all this and be utterly powerless to help; to endure, day after day, the blank, blond horror of the empty mess-room; to sit before a marble-topped table with a bad pen, never enough paper and hardly any ink, and nothing at all to write about, while all the time the names of places, places you have not seen and never will see—Termonde, Alost, Quatrecht and Courtrai—go on sounding in your brain with a maddening, luring reiteration; to sit in a hateful inactivity, and a disgusting, an intolerable safety, and to be haunted by a vision of two figures, intensely clear on a somewhat vague background—Mrs. Torrence following her star of the greatest possible danger, and Ursula Dearmer wandering in youth and innocence among the shells; to be obliged to think of Ursula Dearmer's mother when you would much rather not think of her; to be profoundly and irrevocably angry with the guileless Commandant, whom at the moment you regard (it may be perversely) as the prime agent in this fatuous sacrifice of women's lives; to want to stop it and to be unable to stop it, and at the same time to feel a brute because you want to stop it—when they are enjoying the adventure—I can only say of the experience that I hope there is no depth of futility deeper than this to come. You might as well be taken prisoner by the Germans—better, since that would, at least, give you something to write about afterwards.

What's more, I'm bored.

When I told the Commandant all this he looked very straight at me and said, "Then you'd better come with us to Termonde." So straight he looked that the suggestion struck me less as a bona fide offer than an ironic reference to my five weeks' funk.

I don't tell him that that is precisely what I want to do. That his wretched Reporter nourishes an insane ambition—not to become a Special Correspondent; not to career under massive headlines in the columns of the Daily Mail; not to steal a march on other War Correspondents and secure the one glorious "scoop" of the campaign. Not any of these sickly and insignificant things. But—in defiance of Tom, the chauffeur—to go out with the Field Ambulance as an ambulancière, and hunt for wounded men, and in the intervals of hunting to observe the orbit of a shell and the manner of shrapnel in descending. To be left behind, every day, in an empty mess-room, with a bad pen, utterly deprived of copy or of any substitute for copy, and to have to construct war articles out of your inner consciousness, would be purgatory for a journalist. But to have a mad dream in your soul and a pair of breeches in your hold-all, and to see no possibility of "sporting" either, is the very refinement of hell. And your tortures will be unbearable if, at the same time, you have to hold your tongue about them and pretend that you are a genuine reporter and that all you want is copy and your utmost aim the business of the "scoop."

After a week of it you will not be likely to look with crystal clarity on other people's lapses from precaution.

But it would be absurd to tell him this. Ten to one he wouldn't believe it. He thinks I am funking all the time.

········

I am still very angry with him. He must know that I am very angry. I think that somewhere inside him he is rather angry too.

········

All the same he has come to me and asked me to give him my soap. He says Max has taken his.

I give him my soap, but—

These oppressions and obsessions, the deadly anxiety, the futile responsibility and the boredom are too much for me. I am thinking seriously of going home.

········

In the evening we—the Commandant and Janet McNeil and I—went down to the Hôtel de la Poste, to see the War Correspondents and hear the War news. Mr. G. L. and Mr. M. and Mr. P. were there. And there among them, to my astonishment, I found Mr. Davidson, the American sculptor.

The last time I saw Mr. Davidson it was in Mr. Joseph Simpson's studio, the one under mine in Edwardes Square. He was making a bust of Rabindranath Tagore; and as the great mystic poet disconcerted him by continually lapsing into meditation under this process, thereby emptying his beautiful face of all expression whatever, I had been called down from my studio to talk to him, so as to lure him, if possible, from meditation and keep his features in play. Mr. Davidson made a very fine bust of Rabindranath Tagore. And here he is, imperfectly disguised by the shortest of short beards, drawing caricatures of G. L.—G. L. explaining the plan of campaign to the Belgian General Staff; G. L. very straight and tall, the Belgian General Staff looking up to him with innocent, deferential faces, earnestly anxious to be taught. I am not more surprised at seeing Mr. Davidson here than he is at seeing me. In the world that makes war we have both entirely forgotten the world where people make busts and pictures and books. But we accept each other's presence. It is only a small part of the fantastic dislocation of war.

Nothing could be more different from the Flandria Palace Hotel, our Military Hospital, than the Hôtel de la Poste. It is packed with War Correspondents and Belgian officers. After the surgeons and the Red Cross nurses and their wounded, and the mysterious officials hanging about the porch and the hall, apparently doing nothing, after the English Ambulance and the melancholy inactivity of half its Corps, this place seems alive with a rich and virile life. It is full of live, exultant fighters, and of men who have their business not with the wounded and the dying but with live men and live things, and they have live words to tell about them. At least so it seems.

You listen with all your ears, and presently Termonde and Alost and Quatrecht and Courtrai cease to be mere names for you and become realities. It is as if you had been taken from your prison and had been let loose into the world again.

They are saying that there is no fighting at Saint Nicolas (the Commandant has been feeling about again for his visionary base hospital), but that the French troops are at Courtrai in great force. They have turned their left [?] wing round to the north-east and will probably sweep towards Brussels to cut off the German advance on Antwerp. The siege of Antwerp will then be raised. And a great battle will be fought outside Brussels, probably at Waterloo.

Waterloo!

Mr. L. looks at you as much as to say that is what he has had up his sleeve all the time. The word comes from him as casually as if he spoke of the London and South-Western terminus. But he is alive to the power of its evocation, to the unsurpassable thrill. So are you. It starts the current in that wireless system of vibrations that travel unperishing, undiminished, from the dead to the living. There are not many kilometres between Ghent and Waterloo; you are not only within the radius of the psychic shock, you are close to the central batteries, and ninety-nine years are no more than one pulse of their vibration. Through I don't know how many kilometres and ninety-nine years it has tracked you down and found you in your one moment of response.

It has a sudden steadying effect. Your brain clears. The things that loomed so large, the "Flandria," and the English Field Ambulance and its miseries, and the terrifying recklessness of its Commandant, are reduced suddenly to invisibility. You can see nothing but the second Waterloo. You forget that you have ever been a prisoner in an Hotel-Hospital. You understand the mystic fascination of the road under your windows, going south-east from Ghent to Brussels, somewhere towards Waterloo. You are reconciled to the incomprehensible lassitude of events. That is what we have all been waiting for—the second Waterloo. And we have only waited five days.

I am certainly not going back to England.

The French troops are being massed at Courtrai.

Suddenly it strikes me that I have done an injustice to the Commandant. It is all very well to say that he brought me out here against my will. But did he? He said it would interest me to see the siege of Antwerp, and I said it wouldn't. I said with the most perfect sincerity that I'd die rather than go anywhere near the siege of Antwerp, or of any other place. And now the siege-guns from Namur are battering the forts of Antwerp, and down there the armies are gathering towards the second Waterloo, and the Commandant was right. I am extremely interested. I would die rather than go back to England.

Is it possible that he knew me better than I knew myself?

When I think that it is possible I feel a slight revulsion of justice towards the Commandant. After all, he brought me here. We may disagree about the present state of Alost and Termonde, considered as health-resorts for English girls, but it is pretty certain that without him we would none of us have got here. Where, indeed, should we have been and how should we have got our motor ambulances, but for his intrepid handling of Providence and of the Belgian Red Cross and the Belgian Legation? There is genius in a man who can go out without one car, or the least little nut or cog of a châssis to his name, and impose himself upon a Government as the Commandant of a Motor Field Ambulance.

Still, though I am not going back to England as a protest, I am going to leave the Hospital Hotel for a little while. That bright idea has come to me just now while we are waiting for the Commandant to tear himself from the War Correspondents and come away. I shall get a room here in the Hôtel de la Poste for a week, and, while we wait for Waterloo, I shall write some articles. The War Correspondents will tell me what is being done, and what has been overdone and what remains to do. I shall at least hear things if I can't see them. And I shall cut the obsession of responsibility. It'll be worse than ever if there really is going to be a second Waterloo.

Waterloo with Ursula Dearmer and Janet in the thick of it, and Mrs. Torrence driving the Colonel's scouting-car!

There are moments of bitterness and distortion when I see the Commandant as a curious psychic monster bringing up his women with him to the siege-guns because of some uncanny satisfaction he finds in their presence there. There are moods, only less perverted, when I see him pursuing his course because it is his course, through sheer Highland Celtic obstinacy; lucid flashes when he appears, blinded by the glamour of his dream, and innocently regardless of actuality. Is it uncanniness? Is it obstinacy? Is it dreamy innocence? Or is it some gorgeous streak of Feminism? Is it the New Chivalry, that refuses to keep women back, even from the firing-line? The New Romance, that gives them their share of divine danger? Or, since nothing can be more absurd than to suppose that any person acts at all times and in all circumstances on one ground, or necessarily on any grounds, is it a little bit of all these things? I am not sure that Feminism, or at any rate the New Chivalry, doesn't presuppose them all.

The New Chivalry sees the point of its reporter's retirement to the Hôtel de la Poste, since it has decided that journalism is my work, and journalism cannot flourish at the "Flandria." So we interview the nice fat propriétaire, and the propriétaire's nice fat wife, and between them they find a room for me, a back room on the fourth floor, the only one vacant in the hotel; it looks out on the white-tiled walls and the windows of the enclosing wings. The space shut in is deep and narrow as a well. The view from that room is more like a prison than any view from the "Flandria," but I take it. I am not deceived by appearances, and I recognize that the peace of God is there.

It is a relief to think that poor Max will have one less to work for.

At the "Flandria" we find that the Military Power has put its foot down. The General—he cannot have a spark of the New Chivalry in his brutal breast—has ordered Mrs. Torrence off her chauffeur's job. You see the grizzled Colonel as the image of protest and desolation, helpless in the hands of the implacable Power. You are sorry for Mrs. Torrence (she has seen practically no service with the ambulance as yet), but she, at any rate, has had her fling. No power can take from her the memory of those two days.

Still, something is going to be done to-morrow, and this time, even the miserable Reporter is to have a look in. The Commandant has another scheme for a temporary hospital or a dressing-station or something, and to-morrow he is going with Car 1 to Courtrai to reconnoitre for a position and incidentally to see the French troops. A God-sent opportunity for the Reporter; and Janet McNeil is going, too. We are to get up at six o'clock in the morning and start before seven.

[Friday, October 2nd.]

We get up at six.

We hang about till eight-thirty or nine. A fine rain begins to fall. An ominous rain. Car 1 and Car 2 are drawn up at the far end of the Hospital yard. The rain falls ominously over the yellow-brown, trodden clay of the yard. There is an ominous look of preparation about the cars. There is also an ominous light in the blue eyes of the chauffeur Tom.

The chauffeur Tom appears as one inspired by hatred of the whole human race. You would say that he was also hostile to the entire female sex. For Woman in her right place he may, he probably does, feel tenderness and reverence. Woman in a field ambulance he despises and abhors. I really think it was the sight of us that accounted for his depression at Ostend. I have gathered from Mrs. Torrence that the chauffeur Tom has none of the New Chivalry about him. He is the mean and brutal male, the crass obstructionist who grudges women their laurels in the equal field.

I know the dreadful, blasphemous and abominable things that Tom is probably thinking about me as I climb on to his car. He is visibly disgusted with his orders. That he, a Red Cross Field Ambulance chauffeur, should be told to drive four—or is it all five?—women to look at the massing of the French troops at Courtrai! He is not deceived by the specious pretext of the temporary hospital. Hospitals be blowed. It's a bloomin' joy-ride, with about as much Red Cross in it as there is in my hat. He is glad that it is raining.

Yes, I know what Tom is thinking. And all the time I have a sneaking sympathy with Tom. I want to go to Courtrai more than I ever wanted anything in my life, but I see the expedition plainly from Tom's point of view. A field ambulance is a field ambulance and not a motor touring car.

And to-day Tom is justified. We have hardly got upon his car than we were told to get off it. We are not going to Courtrai. We are not going anywhere. From somewhere in those mysterious regions where it abides, the Military Power has come down.

Even as I get off the car and return to the Hospital-prison, in melancholy retreat over the yellow-brown clay of the yard, through the rain, I acknowledge the essential righteousness of the point of view. And, to the everlasting honour of the Old Chivalry, it should be stated that the chauffeur Tom repressed all open and visible expression of his joy.

The morning passes, as the other mornings passed, in unspeakable inactivity. Except that I make up the accounts and hand them over to Mr. Grierson. It seems incredible, but I have balanced them to the last franc.

I pack. Am surprised in packing by Max and Jean. They both want to know the reason why. This is the terrible part of the business—leaving Max and Jean.

I try to explain. Prosper Panne, who "writes for the Paris papers," understands me. He can see that the Hôtel de la Poste may be a better base for an attack upon the London papers. But Max does not understand. He perceives that I have a scruple about occupying my room. And he takes me into his room to show me how nice it is—every bit as good as mine. The implication being that if the Hospital can afford to lodge one of its orderlies so well, it can perfectly well afford to lodge me. (This is one of the prettiest things that Max has done yet! As long as I live I shall see him standing in his room and showing me how nice it is.)

Still you can always appeal from Max to Prosper Panne. He understands these journalistic tempers and caprices. He knows on how thin a thread an article can hang. We have a brief discussion on the comparative difficulties of the roman and the conte, and he promises me to cherish and protect the hat I must leave behind me as if it were his bride.

But Jean—Jean does not understand at all. He thinks that I am not satisfied with the service of our incomparable mess; that I prefer the flesh-pots of the "Poste" and the manners of its waiters. He has no other thought but this, and it is abominable; it is the worst of all. The explanation thickens. I struggle gloriously with the French language; one moment it has me by the throat and I am strangled; the next I writhe forth triumphant. Strange gestures are given to me; I plunge into the darkest pits of memory for the words that have escaped me; I find them (or others just as good); it is really quite easy to say that I am coming back again in a week.

Interview with Madame F. and M. G., the President.

Interview with the Commandant. Final assault on the defences of the New Chivalry (the Commandant's mind is an impregnable fortress).

And, by way of afterthought, I inquire whether, in the event of a sudden scoot before the Germans, a reporter quartered at the Hôtel de la Poste will be cut off from the base of communications and left to his or her ingenuity in flight?

The Commandant, vague and imperturbable, replies that in all probability it will be so.

And I (if possible more imperturbable than he) observe that the War Correspondents will make quite a nice flying-party.

In a little open carriage—the taxis have long ago all gone to the War—in an absurd little open carriage, exactly like a Cheltenham "rat," I depart like a lady of Cheltenham, for the Hôtel de la Poste. The appearance and the odour of this little carriage give you an odd sense of security and peace. The Germans may be advancing on Ghent at this moment, but for all the taste of war there is in it, you might be that lady, going from one hotel to the other, down the Cheltenham Promenade.

The further you go from the Military Hospital and the Railway Station the more it is so. The War does not seem yet to have shaken the essential peace of the bourgeois city. The Hôtel de la Poste is in the old quarter of the town, where the Cathedrals are. Instead of the long, black railway lines and the red-brick façade of the Station and Post Office; instead of the wooded fields beyond and the white street that leads to the battle-places south and east; instead of the great Square with its mustering troops and swarms of refugees, you have the quiet Place d'Armes, shut in by trees, and all round it are the hotels and cafés where the officers and the War Correspondents come and go. Through all that coming and going you get the sense of the old foreign town that was dreaming yesterday. People are sitting outside the restaurants all round the Place, drinking coffee and liqueurs as if nothing had happened, as if Antwerp were far-off in another country, and as if it were still yesterday. Mosquitoes come up from the drowsy canal water and swarm into the hotels and bite you. I found any number of mosquitoes clinging drowsily to my bedroom walls.

But there are very few women among those crowds outside the restaurants. There are not many women except refugees in the streets, and fewer still in the shops.

I have blundered across a little café with an affectionately smiling and reassuringly fat proprietress, where they give you brioches and China tea, which, as it were in sheer affection, they call English. It is not as happy a find as you might think. It is not, in the circumstances, happy at all. In fact, if you have never known what melancholy is and would like to know it, I can recommend two courses. Go down the Grand Canal in Venice in the grey spring of the year, in a gondola, all by yourself. Or get mixed up with a field ambulance which is not only doing noble work but running thrilling risks, in neither of which you have a share, or the ghost of a chance of a share; cut yourself off from your comrades, if it is only for a week, and go into a Belgian café in war-time and try to eat briochesand drink English tea all by yourself. This is the more successful course. You may see hope beyond the gondola and the Grand Canal. But you will see no hope beyond the brioche and the English tea.

I walk about again till it is time to go back to the Hotel. So far, my emancipation has not been agreeable.

[Evening. Hôtel de la Poste.]

I dined in the crowded restaurant, avoiding the War Correspondents, choosing a table where I hoped I might be unobserved. Somewhere through a glass screen I caught a sight of Mr. L.'s head. I was careful to avoid the glass screen and Mr. L.'s head. He shall not say, if I can possibly help it, that I am an infernal nuisance. For I know I haven't any business to be here, and if Belgium had a Kitchener I shouldn't be here. However you look at me, I am here on false pretences. In the eyes of Mr. L. I would have no more right to be a War Correspondent (if I were one) than I have to be on a field ambulance. It is with the game of war as it was with the game of football I used to play with my big brothers in the garden. The women may play it if they're fit enough, up to a certain point, very much as I played football in the garden. The big brothers let their little sister kick off; they let her run away with the ball; they stood back and let her make goal after goal; but when it came to the scrimmage they took hold of her and gently but firmly moved her to one side. If she persisted she became an infernal nuisance. And if those big brothers over there only knew what I was after they would make arrangements for my immediate removal from the seat of war.

The Commandant has turned up with Ursula Dearmer. He is drawn to these War Correspondents who appear to know more than he does. On the other hand, an ambulance that can get into the firing-line has an irresistible attraction for a War Correspondent. It may at any moment constitute his only means of getting there himself.

One of our cars has been sent out to Antwerp with dispatches and surgical appliances.

The sight of the Commandant reminds me that I have got all the funds of the Ambulance upstairs in my suit-case in that leather purse-belt—and if the Ambulance does fly from Ghent without me, and without that belt, it will find itself in considerable embarrassment before it has retreated very far.

It is quite certain that I shall have to take my chance. I have asked the Commandant again (either this evening or earlier) so that there may be no possible doubt about it: "If we do have to scoot from Ghent in a hurry I shall have nothing but my wits to trust to?"

And he says, "True for you."

And he looks as if he meant it.[3]

These remarkable words have a remarkable effect on the new War Correspondent. It is as if the coolness and the courage and the strength of a hundred War Correspondents and of fifty Red Cross Ambulances had been suddenly discharged into my soul. This absurd accession of power and valour[4] is accompanied by a sudden immense lucidity. It is as if my soul had never really belonged to me until now, as if it had been either drugged or drunk and had never known what it was to be sober until now. The sensation is distinctly agreeable. And on the top of it all there is a peace which I distinctly recognize as the peace of God.

So, while the Commandant talks to the War Correspondents as if nothing had happened, I go upstairs and unlock my suit-case and take from it the leather purse-belt with the Ambulance funds in it, and I bring it to the Commandant and lay it before him and compel him to put it on. As I do this I feel considerable compunction, as if I were launching a three-year-old child in a cockle-shell on the perilous ocean of finance. I remind him that fifteen pounds of the money in the belt is his (he would be as likely as not to forget it). As for the accounts, they are so clear that a three-year-old child could understand them. I notice with a diabolical satisfaction which persists through the all-pervading peace by no means as incongruously as you might imagine—I notice particularly that the Commandant doesn't like this part of it a bit. There is not anybody in the Corps who wants to be responsible for its funds or enjoys wearing that belt. But it is obvious that if the Ambulance can bear to be separated from its Treasurer-Secretary-Reporter, in the flight from Ghent, it cannot possibly bear to be separated from its funds.

I am alone with the Commandant while this happens, standing by one of the writing-tables in the lounge. Ursula Dearmer (she grows more mature every day) and the War Correspondents and a few Generals have melted somewhere into the background. The long, lithe pigskin belt lies between us on the table—between my friend and me—like a pale snake. It exerts some malign and poisonous influence. It makes me say things, things that I should not have thought it possible to say. And it is all about the shells at Alost.

He is astonished.

And I do not care.

I am sustained, exalted by that sense of righteousness you feel when you are insanely pounding somebody who thinks that in perfect sanity and integrity he has pounded you.

[Saturday, 3rd.]

Mr. L. asked me to breakfast. He has told me more about the Corps in five minutes than the Corps has been able to tell me in as many days. He has seen it at Alost and Termonde. You gather that he has seen other heroic enterprises also and that he would perjure himself if he swore that they were indispensable. Every Correspondent is besieged by the leaders of heroic enterprises, and I imagine that Mr. L. has been "had" before now by amateurs of the Red Cross, and his heart must have sunk when he heard of an English Field Ambulance in Ghent. And he owns to positive terror when he saw it, with its girls in breeches, its Commandant in Norfolk jacket, grey knickerbockers, heather-mixture stockings and deer-stalker; its Chaplain in khaki, and its Surgeon a mark for bullets in his Belgian officer's cap. I suggest that this absence of uniform only proves our passionate eagerness to be off and get to work. But it is right. Our ambulance is the real thing, and Mr. L. is going to be an angel and help it all he can. He will write about it in the Illustrated London News and the Westminster. When he hears that I came out here to write about the War and make a little money for the Field Ambulance, and that I haven't seen anything of the War and that my invasion of his hotel is simply a last despairing effort to at least hear something, he is more angelic than ever. He causes a whole cinema of war-scenes to pass before my eyes. When I ask if there is anything left for me to "do," he evokes a long procession of articles—pure, virgin copy on which no journalist has ever laid his hands—and assures me that it is mine, that the things that have been done are nothing to the things that are left to do. I tell him that I have no business on his pitch, and that I am horribly afraid of getting in the regular Correspondents' way and spoiling their game; as I am likely to play it, there isn't any pitch. Of course, I suppose, there is the "scoop," but that's another matter. It is the War Correspondent's crown of cunning and of valour, and nobody can take from him that crown. But in the psychology of the thing, every Correspondent is his own pitch. He has told me very nearly all the things I want to know, among them what the Belgian General said to the Commandant when he saw Ursula Dearmer at Alost:

"What the devil is the lady doing there?"

I gather that Mr. L. shares the General's wonder and my own anxiety. I am not far wrong in regarding Alost and Termonde as no fit place for Ursula Dearmer or any other woman.

Answered the Commandant's letters for him. Wrote to Ezra Pound. Wrote out the report for the last three days' ambulance work and sent it to the British Red Cross; also a letter to Mr. Rogers about a light scouting-car. The British Red Cross has written that it cannot spare any more motor ambulances, but it may possibly send out a small car. (The Commandant has cabled to Mr. Gould, of Gould Bros., Exeter, accepting his offer of his own car and services.)

Went down to the "Flandria" for news of the Ambulance. The car that was sent out yesterday evening got through all right to Antwerp and returned safely. It has brought very bad news. Two of the outer forts are said to have fallen. The position is critical, and grave anxiety is felt for the safety of the English in Antwerp. Mrs. St. Clair Stobart has asked us for one of our ambulances. But even if we could spare it we cannot give it up without an order from the military authority at Ghent. We hear that Dr. ——, one of Mrs. Stobart's women, is to leave Antwerp and work at our hospital. She is engaged to be married to Dr. ——, and the poor boy is somewhat concerned for her safety. I'm very glad I have left the "Flandria," for she can have my room.

I wish they would make Miss —— come away too.

Yes: Miss ——, that clever novelist, who passes for a woman of the world because she uses mundane appearances to hide herself from the world's importunity—Miss —— is here. The War caught her. Some people were surprised. I wasn't.[5]

········

Walked through the town again—old quarter. Walked and walked and walked, thinking about Antwerp all the time. Through streets of grey-white and lavender-tinted houses, with very fragile balconies. Saw the two Cathedrals[6] and the Town Hall—refugees swarming round it—and the Rab—I can't remember its name: see Baedeker—with its turrets and its moat. Any amount of time to see cathedrals in and no Mrs. Torrence to protest. I wonder how much of all this will be left by next month, or even by next week? Two of the Antwerp forts have fallen. They say the occupation of Ghent will be peaceful; while of Antwerp I suppose they would say, "C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?" They say the Germans will just march into Ghent and march out again, commandeering a few things here and there. But nobody knows, and by the stolid faces of these civilians you might imagine that nobody cares. Certainly none of them think that the fate of Antwerp can be the fate of Ghent.

And the faces of the soldiers, of the men who know? They are the faces of important people, cheerful people, pleasantly preoccupied with the business in hand. Only here and there a grave face, a fixed, drawn face, a face twisted with the irritation of the strain.

Why, the very refugees have the look of a rather tired tourist-party, wandering about, seeing Ghent, seeing the Cathedral.

Only they aren't looking at the Cathedral. They are looking straight ahead, across the Place, up the street; they do not see or hear the trams swinging down on them, or the tearing, snorting motors; they stroll abstractedly into the line of the motors and stand there; they start and scatter, wild-eyed, with a sudden recrudescence of the terror that has driven them here from their villages in the fields.

········

It seems incredible that I should be free to walk about like this. It is as if I had cut the rope that tied me to a soaring air-balloon and found myself, with firm feet, safe on the solid earth. Any bit of earth, even surrounded by Germans, seems safe compared with the asphyxiation of that ascent. And when the air-balloon wasn't going up it was as if I had lain stifling under a soft feather-bed for more than a year. Now I've waked up suddenly and flung the feather-bed off with a vigorous kick.

[[7]Sunday, 4th.]

(I have no clear recollection of Sunday morning, because in the afternoon we went to Antwerp; and Antwerp has blotted out everything that went near before it.)

The Ambulance has been ordered to take two Belgian professors (or else they are doctors) into Antwerp. There isn't any question this time of carrying wounded. It seems incredible, but I am going too. I shall see the siege of Antwerp and hear the guns that were brought up from Namur.

Somewhere, on the north-west horizon, a vision, heavenly, but impalpable, aerial, indistinct, of the Greatest Possible Danger.

I am glad I am going. But the odd thing is that there is no excitement about it. It seems an entirely fit and natural thing that the vision should materialize, that I should see the shells battering the forts of Antwerp and hear the big siege-guns from Namur. For all its incredibility, the adventure lacks every element of surprise. It is simply what I came out for. For here in Belgium the really incredible things are the things that existed and happened before the War. They existed and happened a hundred years ago and the memory of them is indistinct; the feeling of them is gone. You have ceased to have any personal interest in them; if they happened at all they happened to somebody else. What is happening now has been happening always. All your past is soaking in the vivid dye of these days, and what you are now you have been always. I have been a War Correspondent all my life—blasée with battles. The Commandant orders me into the front seat beside the chauffeur Tom, so that I may see things. Even Tom's face cannot shake me in my conviction that I am merely setting out once more on my usual, legitimate, daily job.

It is all so natural that you do not wonder in the least at this really very singular extension of your personality. You are not aware of your personality at all. If you could be you would see it undergoing shrinkage. It is, anyhow, one of the things that ceased to matter a hundred years ago. If you could examine its contents at this moment you would find nothing there but that shining vision of danger, the siege of Antwerp, indistinct, impalpable, aerial.

Presently the vision itself shrinks and disappears on the north-west horizon. The car has shot beyond the streets into the open road, the great paved highway to Antwerp, and I am absorbed in other matters: in Car 1 and in the chauffeur Tom, who is letting her rip more and more into her top speed with every mile; in M. C——, the Belgian Red Cross guide, beside me on my left, and in the Belgian soldier sitting on the floor at his feet. The soldier is confiding some fearful secret to M. C—— about somebody called Achille. M. C—— bends very low to catch the name, as if he were trying to intercept and conceal it, and when he has caught it he assumes an air of superb mystery and gravity and importance. With one gesture he buries the name of Achille in his breast under his uniform. You know that he would die rather than betray the secret of Achille. You decide that Achille is the heroic bearer of dispatches, and that we have secret orders to pick him up somewhere and convey him in safety to Antwerp. You do not grasp the meaning of this pantomime until the third sentry has approached us, and M. C—— has stopped for the third time to whisper "Ach-ille!" behind the cover of his hand, and the third sentry is instantly appeased.

(Concerning sentries, you learn that the Belgian kind is amiable, but that the French sentry is a terrible fellow, who will think nothing of shooting you if your car doesn't stop dead the instant he levels his rifle.)

Except for sentries and straggling troops and the long trains of refugees, the country is as peaceful between Ghent and Saint Nicolas as it was last week between Ostend and Ghent. It is the same adorable Flemish country, the same flat fields, the same paved causeway and the same tall, slender avenues of trees. But if anything could make the desolation of Belgium more desolate it is this intolerable beauty of slender trees and infinite flat land, the beauty of a country formed for the very expression of peace. In the vivid gold and green of its autumn it has become a stage dressed with ironic splendour for the spectacle of a people in flight. Half the population of Antwerp and the country round it is pouring into Ghent.[8] First the automobiles, Belgian officers in uniform packed tight between women and children and their bundles, convoying the train. Then the carriages secured by the bourgeois (they are very few); then men and boys on bicycles; then the carts, and with the coming on of the carts the spectacle grows incredible, fantastic. You see a thing advancing like a house on wheels. It is a tall hay-wagon—the tallest wagon you have ever seen in your life—piled with household furniture and mattresses on the top of the furniture, and on top of the mattresses, on the roof, as it were, a family of women and children and young girls. Some of them seem conscious of the stupendous absurdity of this appearance; they smile at you or laugh as the structure goes towering and toppling by.

Next, low on the ground, enormous and grotesque bundles, endowed with movement and with legs. Only when you come up to them do you see that they are borne on the bowed backs of men and women and children. The children—when there are no bundles to be borne these carry a bird in a cage, or a dog, a dog that sits in their arms like a baby and is pressed tight to their breasts. Here and there men and women driving their cattle before them, driving them gently, without haste, with a great dignity and patience.

These, for all the panic and ruin in their bearing, might be pilgrims or suppliants, or the servants of some religious rite, bringing the votive offerings and the sacrificial beasts. The infinite land and the avenues of slender trees persuade you that it is so.

And wherever the ambulance cars go they meet endless processions of refugees; endless, for the straight, flat Flemish roads are endless, and as far as your eye can see the stream of people is unbroken; endless, because the misery of Belgium is endless; the mind cannot grasp it or take it in. You cannot meet it with grief, hardly with conscious pity; you have no tears for it; it is a sorrow that transcends everything you have known of sorrow. These people have been left "only their eyes to weep with." But they do not weep any more than you do. They have no tears for themselves or for each other.[9] This is the terrible thing, this and the manner of their flight. It is not flight, it is the vast, unhasting and unending movement of a people crushed down by grief and weariness, pushed on by its own weight, by the ceaseless impact of its ruin.

This stream is the main stream from Antwerp, swollen by its tributaries. It doesn't seem to matter where it comes from, its strength and volume always seem the same. After the siege of Antwerp it will thicken and flow from some other direction, that is all. And all the streams seem to flow into Ghent and to meet in the Palais des Fêtes.[10]

I forget whether it was near Lokeren or Saint Nicolas that we saw the first sign of fighting, in houses levelled to the ground to make way for the artillery fire; levelled, and raked into neat plots without the semblance of a site.

After the refugees, the troops. Village streets crowded with military automobiles and trains of baggage wagons and regiments of infantry. Little villas with desolate, surprised and innocent faces, standing back in their gardens; soldiers sitting in their porches and verandahs, soldiers' faces looking out of their windows; soldiers are quartered in every room, and the grass grows high in their gardens. Soldiers run down the garden paths to look at our ambulance as it goes by.

There is excitement in the village streets.

At Saint Nicolas we overtake Dr. Wilson and Mr. Davidson walking into Antwerp. They tell us the news.

The British troops have come. At last. They have been through before us on their way to Antwerp. Dr. Wilson and Mr. Davidson have seen the British troops. They have talked to them.

Mr. Davidson cannot conceal his glee at getting in before the War Correspondents. Pure luck has given into his hands the great journalistic scoop of the War in Belgium. And he is not a journalist. He is a sculptor out for the busts of warriors, and for actuality in those tragic and splendid figures that are grouped round memorial columns, for the living attitude and gesture.

We take up Mr. Davidson and Dr. Wilson, and leave one of our professors (if he is a professor) at Saint Nicolas, for the poor man has come without his passport. He will have to hang about at Saint Nicolas, doing nothing, until such time as it pleases Heaven to send us back from Antwerp. He resigns himself, and we abandon him, a piteous figure wrapped in a brown shawl.

After Saint Nicolas more troops, a few batteries of artillery, some infantry, long, long regiments of Belgian cavalry, coming to the defence of the country outside Antwerp. Cavalry halting at a fork of the road by a little fir-wood. A road that is rather like the road just outside Wareham as you go towards Poole. More troops. And after the troops an interminable procession of labourers trudging on foot. At a distance you take them for refugees, until you see that they are carrying poles and spades. Presently the road cuts through the circle of stakes and barbed wire entanglements set for the German cavalry. And somewhere on our left (whether before or after Saint Nicolas I cannot remember), across a field, the rail embankment ran parallel with our field, and we saw the long ambulance train, flying the Red Cross and loaded with wounded, on its way from Antwerp to Ghent. At this point the line is exposed conspicuously, and we must have been well within range of the German fire, for the next ambulance train—but we didn't know about the next ambulance train till afterwards.

After the circle of the stakes and wire entanglements you begin to think of the bombardment. You strain your ears for the sound of the siege-guns from Namur. Somewhere ahead of us on the horizon there is Antwerp. Towers and tall chimneys in a very grey distance. Every minute you look for the flight of the shells across the grey and the fall of a tower or a chimney. But the grey is utterly peaceful and the towers and the tall chimneys remain. And at last you turn in a righteous indignation and say: "Where is the bombardment?"

The bombardment is at the outer forts.

And where are the forts, then? (You see no forts.)

The outer forts? Oh, the outer forts are thirty kilometres away.

No. Not there. To your right.

And you, who thought you would have died rather than see the siege of Antwerp, are dumb with disgust. Your heart swells with a holy and incorruptible resentment of the sheer levity of the Commandant.

A pretty thing—to bring a War Correspondent out to see a bombardment when there isn't any bombardment, or when all there ever was is a hundred—well then, thirty kilometres away.[11]

It was twilight as we came into Antwerp. We approached it by the west, by the way of the sea, by the great bridge of boats over the Scheldt. The sea and the dykes are the defence of Antwerp on this side. Whole regiments of troops are crossing the bridge of boats. Our car crawls by inches at a time. It is jammed tight among some baggage wagons. It disentangles itself with difficulty from the baggage wagons, and is wedged tighter still among the troops. But the troops are moving, though by inches at a time. We get our front wheels on to the bridge. Packed in among the troops, but moving steadily as they move, we cross the Scheldt. On our right the sharp bows and on our left the blunt sterns of the boats. Boat after boat pressed close, gunwale to gunwale, our roadway goes across their breasts. Their breasts are taut as the breasts of gymnasts under the tramping of the regiments. They vibrate like the breasts of living things as they bear us up.

No heaving of any beautiful and beloved ship, no crossing of any sea, no sight of any city that has the sea at her feet, not New York City nor Venice, no coming into any foreign land, ever thrilled me as that coming into Antwerp with the Belgian army over that bridge of boats.

At twilight, from the river, with its lamps lit and all its waters shining, Antwerp looked beautiful as Venice and as safe and still. For the dykes are her defences on this side. But for the trudging regiments you would not have guessed that on the land side the outer ramparts were being shelled incessantly.

It was a struggle up the slope from the river bank to the quay, a struggle in which we engaged with commissariat and ammunition wagons and troops and refugees in carts, all trying to get away from the city over the bridge of boats. The ascent was so steep and slippery that you felt as though at any moment the car might hurl itself down backwards on the top of the processions struggling behind it.

At last we landed. I have no vivid recollection[12] of our passage through the town. Except that I know we actually were in Antwerp I could not say whether I really saw certain winding streets and old houses with steep gables or whether I dreamed them. There was one great street of white houses and gilded signs that stood shimmering somewhere in the twilight; but I cannot tell you what street it was. And there were some modern boulevards, and the whole place was very silent. It had the silence and half darkness of dreams, and the beauty and magic and sinister sadness of dreams. And in that silence and sadness our car, with its backings and turnings and its snorts, and our own voices as we asked our way (for we were more or less lost in Antwerp) seemed to be making an appalling and inappropriate and impious noise.

Antwerp seems to me to have been all hospitals, though I only saw two, or perhaps three. One was in an ordinary house in a street, and I think this must have been the British Field Hospital; for Mrs. Winterbottom was there. And of all the women I met thus casually "at the front" she was, by a long way, the most attractive. We went into one or two of the wards; in others, where the cases were very serious, we were only allowed to stand for a second in the doorway; there were others again which we could not see at all.

I think, unless I am rolling two hospitals into one, that we saw a second—the English Hospital. It was for the English Hospital that we heard the Commandant inquire perpetually as we made our way through the strange streets and the boulevards beyond them, following at his own furious pace, losing him in byways and finding him by some miracle again. Talk of dreams! Our progress through Antwerp was like one of those nightmares which have no form or substance but are made up of ghastly twilight and hopeless quest and ever-accelerating speed. It was not till it was all over that we knew the reason for his excessive haste.

When we got to Mrs. St. Clair Stobart's Hospital—in a garden, planted somewhere away beyond the boulevards in an open place—we had hardly any time to look at it. All the same, I shall never forget that Hospital as long as I live. It had been a concert-hall[13] and was built principally of glass and iron; at any rate, if it was not really the greenhouse that it seemed to be there was a great deal of glass about it, and it had been shelled by aeroplane the night before. No great damage had been done, but the sound and the shock had terrified the wounded in their beds. This hospital, as everybody knows, is run entirely by women, with women doctors, women surgeons, women orderlies. Mrs. St. Clair Stobart and some of her gallant staff came out to meet us on a big verandah in front of this fantastic building, she and her orderlies in the uniform of the British Red Cross, her surgeons in long white linen coats over their skirts. Dr. —— whom we are to take back with us to Ghent, was there.

We asked for Miss ——, and she came to us finally in a small room adjoining what must have been the restaurant of the concert-hall.

I was shocked at her appearance. She was quieter than ever and her face was grey and worn with watching. She looked as if she could not have held out another night.

She told us about last night's bombardment. The effect of it on this absurd greenhouse must have been terrific. Every day they are expecting the bombardment of the town.

No, none of them are leaving except two. Every woman will stick to her post[14] till the order comes to evacuate the hospital, and then not one will quit till the last wounded man is carried to the transport.

It seems that Miss —— is a hospital orderly, and that her duty is to stand at the gate of the garden with a lantern as the ambulances come in and to light them to the door of the hospital, and then to see that each man has the number of his cot pinned to the breast of his sleeping-jacket.

Mrs. Stobart, very properly, will have none but trained women in her hospital. But even an untrained woman is equal to holding a lantern and pinning on tickets, so I implored Miss —— to let me take her place while she went back to rest in my room at Ghent, if it was only for one night. I used every argument I could think of, and for one second I thought the best argument had prevailed. But it was only for a second. Probably not even for a second. Miss —— may drop to pieces at her post, but it is there that she will drop.

Outside on the verandah the Commandant was fairly ramping to be off. No—I can't see the Hospital. There isn't any time to see the Hospital. But Miss —— could not bear me not to see it, and together we made a surreptitious bolt for it, and I did see the Hospital.

It was not like any hospital you had ever seen before. Except that the wounded were all comfortably bedded, it was more like the sleeping-hall of the Palais des Fêtes. The floor of the great concert-hall was covered with mattresses and beds, where the wounded lay about in every attitude of suffering. No doubt everything was in the most perfect order, and the nurses and doctors knew how to thread their way through it all, but to the hurried spectator in the doorway the effect was one of the most macabre confusion. Only one object stood out—the large naked back of a Belgian soldier, who sat on the edge of his bed waiting to be washed. He must have been really the most cheerful and (comparatively) uninjured figure in the whole crowd, but he seemed the most pitiful, because of the sheer human insistence of his pathetic back.

Over this back and over all that prostrate agony the enormous floriated bronze rings that carried the lights of the concert-hall hung from the ceiling in frightful, festive decoration.

Miss —— whispered: "One of them is dying. We can't save him."

She seemed to regard this one as a positive slur on their record. I thought: "Only one—among all that crowd!"

Mrs. Stobart came after us in some alarm as we ran down the garden.

"What are you doing with Miss ——? You're not going to carry her off?"

"No," I said, "we're not. She won't come."

But we have got off with Dr. ——.

Mrs. Stobart has refused the Commandant's offer of one of our best surgeons in exchange. He is a man. And this hospital is a Feminist Show.

We dined in a great hurry in a big restaurant in one of the main streets. The restaurant was nearly empty and funereal black cloths were hung over the windows to obscure the lights.

Mr. Davidson (this cheerful presence was with us in our dream-like career through Antwerp)—Mr. Davidson and I amused ourselves by planning how we will behave when we are taken prisoner by the Germans. He is safe, because he is an American citizen. The unfortunate thing about me is my passport, otherwise, by means of a well-simulated nasal twang I might get through as an American novelist. I've been mistaken for one often enough in my own country. But, as I don't mean to be taken prisoner, and perhaps murdered or have my hands chopped off, without a struggle, my plan is to deliver a speech in German, as follows: "Ich bin eine berühmte Schriftstellerin" (on these occasions you stick at nothing), "berühmt in England, aber viel berühmter in den Vereinigten Staaten, und mein Schicksal will den Presidenten Wilson nicht gleichgültig sein." I added by way of rhetorical flourish as the language went to my head: "Er will mein Tod zu vertheidigen gut wissen;" but I was aware that this was overdoing it.

Mr. Davidson thought it would be better on the whole if he were to pass me off as his wife. Perhaps it would, but it seems a pity that so much good German should be wasted.

We got up from that dinner with even more haste than we had sat down. All lights in the town were put out at eight-thirty, and we didn't want to go crawling and blundering about in the dark with our ambulance car. There was a general feeling that the faster we ran back to Ghent the better.

We left Mr. Davidson and Dr. Wilson in Antwerp. They were staying over-night for the fun of the thing.

Another awful struggle on the downward slope from the quay to the bridge of boats. A bad jam at the turn. A sudden loosening and letting go of the traffic, and we were over.

We ran back to Ghent so fast that at Saint Nicolas (where we stopped to pick up our poor little Belgian professor) we took the wrong turn at the fork of the road and dashed with considerable élan over the Dutch frontier. We only realized it when a sentry in an unfamiliar uniform raised his rifle and prepared to fire, not with the cheerful, perfunctory vigilance of our Belgians, but in a determined, business-like manner, and the word "Achille," imparted in a burst of confidence, produced no sympathy whatever. On the contrary, this absurd sentry (who had come out of a straw sentry-box that was like an enormous beehive) went on pointing his rifle at us with most unnecessary persistence. I was so interested in seeing what he would do next that I missed the very pleasing behaviour of the little Belgian professor, who sat next to me, wrapped in his brown shawl. He still imagined himself to be on the road to Ghent, and when he saw that sentry continuing to prepare to fire in spite of our password, he concluded that we and the road to Ghent were in the hands of the Germans. So he instantly ducked behind me for cover and collapsed on the floor of the ambulance in his shawl.

Then somebody said "We're in Holland!" and there were shouts of laughter from everybody in the car except the little Belgian. Then shouts of laughter from the Dutch sentries and Customs officers, who enjoyed this excellent joke as much as we did.

We were now out of our course by I don't know how many miles and short of petrol. But one of the Customs officers gave us all we wanted.

It's heart-breaking the way these dear Belgians take the British. They have waited so long for our army, believing that it would come, till they could believe no more. In Ghent, in Antwerp, you wouldn't know that Belgium had any allies; you never see the British flag, or the French either, hanging from the windows. The black, yellow and red standard flies everywhere alone. Now that we have come, their belief in us is almost unbearable. They really think we are going to save Antwerp. Somewhere between Antwerp and Saint Nicolas the population of a whole village turned out to meet us with cries of "Les Anglais! Les Anglaises!" and laughed for joy. Terrible for us, who had heard Belgians say reproachfully: "We thought that the British would come to our help. But they never came!" They said it more in sorrow than in anger; but you couldn't persuade them that the British fought for Belgium at Mons.

We got into Ghent about midnight.

Dr. —— is to stay at the Hôtel de la Poste to-night.

[Monday, 5th.]

The mosquitoes from the canal have come up and bitten me. I was ill all night with something that felt like malarial fever, if it isn't influenza. Couldn't get up—too drowsy.

Mr. L. came in to see me first thing in the morning. He also came to hear at first hand the story of our run into Antwerp. He was extremely kind. He sat and looked at me sorrowfully, as if he had been the family doctor, and gave me some of his very own China tea (in Belgium in war-time this is one of the most devoted things that man can do for his brother). He was so gentle and so sympathetic that my heart went out to him, and I forgot all about poor Mr. Davidson, and gave up to him the whole splendid "scoop" of the British troops at Saint Nicolas.

I couldn't tell him much about the run into Antwerp. No doubt it was a thrilling performance—through all the languor of malaria it thrills me now when I think of it—but it wasn't much to offer a War Correspondent, since it took us nowhere near the bombardment. It had nothing for the psychologist or for the amateur of strange sensations, and nothing for the pure and ardent Spirit of Adventure, and nothing for that insatiable and implacable Self, that drives you to the abhorred experiment, determined to know how you will come out of it. For there was no more danger in the excursion than in a run down to Brighton and back; and I know no more of fear or courage than I did before I started.

But now that I realize what the insatiable and implacable Self is after, how it worked in me against all decency and all pity, how it actually made me feel as if I wanted to see Antwerp under siege, and how the spirit of adventure backed it up, I can forgive the Commandant. I still think that he sinned when he took Ursula Dearmer to Termonde and to Alost. But the temptation that assailed him at Alost and Termonde was not to be measured by anybody who was not there.

It must have been irresistible.

Besides, it is not certain that he did take Ursula Dearmer into danger; it is every bit as likely that she took him; more likely still that they were both victims of force majeure, fascinated by the lure of the greatest possible danger. And, oh, how I did pitch into him!

I am ashamed of the things I said in that access of insulting and indignant virtue.

Can it be that I was jealous of Ursula Dearmer, that innocent girl, because she saw a shell burst and I didn't? I know this is what was the matter with Mrs. Torrence the other day. She even seemed to imply that there was some feminine perfidy in Ursula Dearmer's power of drawing shells to her. (She, poor dear, can't attract even a bullet within a mile of her.)[15]

Lying there, in that mosquito-haunted room, I dissolved into a blessed state, a beautiful, drowsy tenderness to everybody, a drowsy, beautiful forgiveness of the Commandant. I forgot that he intimated, sternly, that no ambulance would be at my disposal in the flight from Ghent—I remember only that he took me into Antwerp yesterday, and that he couldn't help it if the outer forts were thirty kilometres away, and I forgive him, beautifully and drowsily.

But when he came running up in great haste to see me, and rushed down into the kitchens of the Hotel to order soup for me, and into the chemist's shop in the Place d'Armes to get my medicine, and ran back again to give it me, before I knew where I was (such is the debilitating influence of malaria), instead of forgiving him, I found myself, in abject contrition, actually asking him to forgive me.

It was all wrong, of course; but the mosquitoes had bitten me rather badly.

········

Mrs. Torrence and Janet McNeil have got to work at last. All afternoon and all night yesterday they were busy between the Station and the hospitals removing the wounded from the Antwerp trains.

And Car 1 had no sooner got into the yard of the "Flandria" to rest after its trip to Antwerp and back than it was ordered out again with the Commandant and Ursula Dearmer and Mrs. Torrence to meet the last ambulance train. The chauffeur Tom was nowhere to be seen when the order came. He was, however, found after much search, in the Park, in the company of the Cricklewood bus and a whole regiment of Tommies.

One of these ambulance trains had been shelled by the Germans (they couldn't have been very far from us in our run from Antwerp—it was their nearness, in fact, that accounted for our prodigious haste!), and many of the men came in worse wounded than they went out.

We are all tremendously excited over the arrival of the Tommies and the Cricklewood bus. We can think of nothing else but the relief of Antwerp.

Ursula Dearmer came to see me. She understands that I have forgiven her that shell—and why. She wore the clothes—the rather heart-rending school-girl clothes—she wore when she came to see the Committee. But oh, how the youngest but one has grown up since then!

Mrs. Torrence came to see me also, and Janet McNeil. Mrs. Torrence, though that shell still rankles, is greatly appeased by the labours of last night. So is Janet.

They told rather a nice story.

A train full of British troops from Ostend came into the station yesterday at the same time as the ambulance train from Antwerp. The two were drawn up one on each side of the same platform. When the wounded Belgians saw the British they struggled to their feet. At every window of the ambulance train bandaged heads were thrust out and bandaged hands waved. And the Belgians shouted.

But the British stood dumb, stolid and impassive before their enthusiasm.

Mrs. Torrence called out, "Give them a cheer, boys. They're the bravest little soldiers in the world."

Then the Tommies let themselves go, and the Station roof nearly flew off with the explosion.

The Corps worked till four in the morning clearing out those ambulance trains. The wards are nearly full. And this is only the beginning.

[Tuesday, 6th.]

Malaria gone.

The Commandant called to give his report of the ambulance work. He, Mrs. Torrence, Janet McNeil, Ursula Dearmer and the men were working all yesterday afternoon and evening till long past dark at Termonde. It's the finest thing they've done yet. The men and the women crawled on their hands and knees in the trenches [? under the river bank] under fire. Ursula Dearmer (that girl's luck is simply staggering!)—Ursula Dearmer, wandering adventurously apart, after dark, on the battle-field, found a young Belgian officer, badly wounded, lying out under a tree. She couldn't carry him, but she went for two stretchers and three men; and they put the young officer on one stretcher, and she trotted off with his sword, his cap and the rest of his accoutrements on the other. He owes his life to this manifestation of her luck.

Dr. Wilson has come back from Antwerp.

It looks as if Dr. Haynes and Dr. Bird would go. At any rate, I think they will give up working on the Field Ambulance. There aren't enough cars for four surgeons and four field-women, and they have seen hardly any service. This is rather hard luck on them, as they gave up their practice to come out with us. Naturally, they don't want to waste any more time.

I managed to get some work done to-day. Wrote a paragraph about the Ambulance for Mr. L., who will publish it in the Westminster under his name, to raise funds for us. He is more than ever certain that it (the Ambulance) is the real thing.

Also wrote an article ("L'Hôpital Militaire, No. 2") for the Daily Chronicle; the first bit of journalism I've had time or material for.

Shopped. Very triste affair.

Went to mass in the Cathedral. Sat far back among the refugees.

If you want to know what Religion really is, go into a Catholic church in a Catholic country under invasion. You only feel the tenderness, the naïveté of Catholicism in peace-time. In war-time you realize its power.

[Evening.]

Saw Mr. P., who has been at Termonde. He spoke with great praise of the gallantry of our Corps.

It's odd—either I'm getting used to it, or it's the effect of that run into Antwerp—but I'm no longer torn by fear and anxiety for their safety.

[?] Dined with Mr. L. in a restaurant in the town. It proved to be more expensive than either of us cared for. Our fried sole left us hungry and yet conscience-stricken, as if after an orgy, suffering in a dreadful communion of guilt.

[Wednesday, 7th.]

7 A.M. Got up early and went to Mass in the Cathedral.

Prepared report for British Red Cross. Wrote "Journal of Impressions" from September 25th to September 26th, 11 A.M. It's slow work. Haven't got out of Ostend yet!

Fighting at Zele.

[Afternoon.]

Got very near the fighting this time.

Mr. L. (Heaven bless him!) took me out with him in the War Correspondents' car to see what the Ambulance was doing at Zele, and, incidentally, to look at the bombardment of some evacuated villages near it (I have no desire to see the bombardment of any village that has not been evacuated first). Mr. M. came too, and they brought a Belgian lady with them, a charming and beautiful lady, whose name I forget.