Part 19

I went into Alost during a mild bombardment. The crashing of timbers was fascinating. It is in human nature to enjoy destruction. I used to love to jump on strawberry boxes in the woodshed and hear them crackle. And with the plunge of the shells, something echoed back to the delight of my childhood. I enjoyed the crash, for something barbaric stirred. There was no connection in my mind between the rumble and wounded men. The curiosity of ignorance wanted to see a large crash. Shell-fire to me was a noise.

I still had no idea of war. Of course I knew that there would be hideous things which I didn't have in home life. I knew I could stand up to dirty monotonous work, but I was afraid I should faint if I saw blood. When very young, I had seen a dog run over, and I had seen a boy playmate mutilate a turtle. I was sickened. Years later, I came on a little child crying, holding up its hand. The wrist was bent back double, and the blood spurting till the little one was drenched. Those shocks had left a horror in me of seeing blood. But this thing that I feared most turned out not to have much importance. I found that the man who bled most heavily lay quiet. It was not the bloodshed that unnerved me. It was the writhing and moaning of men that communicated their pain to me. I seemed to see those whom I loved lying there. I transferred the wound to the ones I love. Sometimes soldiers gave me the address of wife and mother, to have me write that they were well. Then when the wounded came in, I thought of these wives and mothers. I knew how they felt, because I felt so. I knew, as the Belgian and French women know, that the war must be waged without wavering, and yet I always see war as hideous. There was no glory in those stricken men. I had no fear of dying, but I had a fear of being mangled.

One evening I walked into the Convent Hospital where the wounded lay so thickly that I had to step over the stretcher loads. The beds were full, the floor blocked, only one door open. There was a smell of foul blood, medicines, the stench of trench clothes. It came on an empty stomach, at the end of a tired day.

"Sister, will you hold this lamp?" a nurse said to me.

I held it over a man with a yawning hole in his abdomen. He lay unmurmuring. When the doctor pressed, the muscles twitched. I asked some one to hold the lamp. I went into the courtyard, and fainted. Hard work would have saved me.

One other time, there had been a persistent fire all day. A boy of nineteen was brought in screaming. He wanted water and he wanted his mother. In our dressing station room were crowded two doctors, three women, two stretcher bearers, a chauffeur, and ten soldiers. They cut away his uniform and boots. His legs were jelly, with red mouths of wounds. His leg gave at the knee, like a piece of limp twine. I went into the next room, and recovered myself. Then I returned, and stayed with the wounded. The greatest comfort was a doctor, who said it was a matter of stomach, not of nerve. A sound woman doesn't faint at the sight of blood any quicker than a man does. Those two experiences were the only times when the horror was too much for me. I saw terrible things and was able to see them. With the dead it seems different. They are at peace. It is motion in the wounded that transfers suffering to oneself. A red quiver is worse than a red calm.

Antwerp fell. The retreating Belgian army swarmed around us, passed us. In the excitement every one lost her kit and before two days of actual warfare were over we had completely forgotten those little tents that we had practised pitching so carefully, and that we had meant to sleep in at night. Little, dirty, unkempt, broken-hearted men came shuffling in the dust of the road by day, shambling along the road at night. Thousands of them passed. No sound, save the fall of footsteps. No contrast, save where a huddle of refugees passed, their children beside them, their household goods, or their old people, on their backs. We picked up the wounded. There was no time for the dead. In and out and among that army of ants, retreating to the edge of Belgium and the sea, we went. There seemed nothing but to return to England.

The war minister of Belgium saw us. He placed his son, Lieutenant Robert de Broqueville, in military command of us. We had access to every line, all the way to the trench and battlefield. We became a part of the Belgian army. We made our headquarters at Furnes. Luckily, a physician's house had been deserted, with china and silver on the table, apples, jellies and wines in the cellar. We commandeered it.

Winter came. The soldiers needed a dressing station somewhere along the front from Nieuport to Dixmude. Mrs. Knocker established one thirty yards behind the front line of trenches at Pervyse. Miss Chisholm and I joined her. In its cellar we found a rough bedstead of two pieces of unplaned lumber, with clean straw for a mattress, awaiting us. Any Englishwoman is respected in the Belgian lines. The two soldiers who had been living in our room had given it up cheerily. They had searched the village for a clean sheet, and showed it to us with pride. They lumped the straw for our pillows, and stood outside through the night, guarding our home with fixed bayonets. It was the most moving courtesy we had in the twelve months of war. The air in the little room was both foul and chilly. We took off our boots, and that was the extent of our undressing.

Disguised as a haystack, this shelter stands out in a field within easy shell fire of the enemy. A concealed battery, in which these boys are gunners, is near by. In their spare time they smoke, read, swim, carve rings out of shrapnel, play cards and forget the strain of war.]

The dreariness of war never came on us till we went out there to live behind the trenches. To me it was getting up before dawn, and washing in ice-cold water, no time to comb the hair, always carrying a feeling of personal mussiness, with an adjustment to dirt. It is hard to sleep in one's clothes, week after week, to look at hands that have become permanently filthy. One morning our chauffeur woke up, feeling grumpy. He had slept with a visiting doctor. He said the doctor's revolver had poked him all night long in the back. The doctor had worn his entire equipment for warmth, like the rest of us. I suffered from cold wet feet. I hated it that there was never a moment I could be alone. The toothbrush was the one article of decency clung to. I seemed never to go into the back garden to clean my teeth without bringing on shell-fire. I got a sense of there being a connection between brushing the teeth and the enemy's guns. You find in roughing it that a coating of dirt seems to keep out chill. We women suffered, but we knew that the boys in tennis shoes suffered more in that wet season, and the soldiers without socks, just the bare feet in boots.

In the late fall, we rooted around in the deserted barns for potatoes. Once, creeping into a farm, which was islanded by water, "Jane Pervyse," our homeless dog, led us up to the wrecked bedroom. A bonnet and best dress were in the cupboard. A soldier put on the bonnet and grimaced. Always after that, in passing the house, "Jane Pervyse" trembled and whined as if it had been her home till the destruction came.

In our house, we cleaned vegetables. There was nothing romantic about our work in these first days. It was mostly cooking, peeling hundreds of potatoes, slicing bushels of onions, cutting up chunks of meat, until our arms were aching. These bits were boiled together in great black pots. Our job, when it wasn't to cook the stew, was to take buckets of it to the trenches. Here we ladled it out to each soldier. Always we went early, while mist still hung over the ground, for we could see the Germans on clear days. It was an adventure, tramping in the freezing cold of night to the outposts and in early morning to the trenches, back to the house to refill the buckets, back to the trenches. The mornings were bitterly cold. Very early in my career as a nurse, I rid myself of skirts. Boots, covered with rubber boots to the knees in wet weather, or bound with puttees in warm; breeches; a leather coat and as many jerseys as I could walk in--these were my clothes. But, as I slept in them, they didn't keep me very warm in the early morning.

We had one real luxury in the dressing station--a piano. While we cooked and scrubbed and pared potatoes, men from the lines played for us.

There were other things, necessities, that we lacked. Water, except for the stagnant green liquid that lay in the ditches where dead men and dead horses rotted, we went without--once for as long as three days. During that time we boiled the ditch water and made tea of it. Even then, it was a deep purplish black and tasted bitter.

All we could do to help the wounded was to wash off mud and apply the simplest of first-aids, iodine and bandages. We burned bloody clothing and scoured mackintoshes and scrubbed floors. The odors were bad, a mixture of decaying matter and raw flesh and cooking food and disinfectant.

Pervyse was one more dear little Flemish village, with yawning holes in the houses, and through the holes you saw into the home, the precious intimate things which revealed how the household lived--the pump, muffled for winter, the furniture placed for occupancy, a home lately inhabited. In the burgomaster's house, there were two old mahogany frames with rare prints, his store of medicines, the excellent piano which cheered us, in his attic a skeleton. So you saw him in his home life as a quiet, scholarly man of taste and education. You entered another gaping house, with two or three bits of inherited mahogany--clearly, the heirlooms of an old family. Another house revealed bran new commonplace trinkets. Always the status of the family was plain to see--their mental life, their tastes, and ambitions. You would peek in through a broken front and see a cupboard with crotched mahogany trimmings, one door splintered, the other perfect. You would catch a glimpse of a round center table with shapely legs, a sofa drawn up in front of a fireplace. When we went, Pervyse was still partly upstanding, but the steady shelling of the winter months slowly flattened it into a wreck. It is the sense of sight through which war makes its strongest impression on me.

The year falls into a series of pictures, evenings of song when a boy soldier would improvise verses to our head nurse; a fight between a Belgian corporal and an English nurse with seltzer bottles; the night when our soldiers were short of ammunition and we sat up till dawn awaiting the attack that might send us running for our lives; the black nights when some spy back of our lines flashed electric messages to the enemy and directed their fire on our ammunition wagons.

And deeper than those pictures is the consciousness of how adaptable is the human spirit. Human nature insists on creating something. Under hunger and danger, it develops a wealth of resource--in art and music, and carving, making finger-rings of shrapnel, playing songs of the Yser. Something artistic and playful comes to the rescue. Instead of war getting us as Andreieff's "Red Laugh" says it does, making regiments of men mad, we "got" war, and remained sane. If we hadn't conquered it by spells of laughing relief, we shouldn't have had nerve when the time came. Too much strain would break down the bravest Belgian and the gayest Fusilier Marin.

I came to feel I would rather get "pinked" in Pervyse than retire to Furnes, seven miles back of the trenches. Pervyse seemed home, because we belonged there with necessary work to do. Then, too, there was a certain regularity in the German gun-fire. If they started shelling from the Chateau de Vicoigne, they were likely to continue shelling from that point. So we lived that day in the front bedroom. If they shelled from Ramscappelle, the back kitchen became the better room, for we had a house in between. We were so near their guns, that we could plot the arc of flight. Pervyse seemed to visitors full of death, simply because it received a daily dose of shell-fire, like a little child sitting up and gulping its medicine. With what unconcern in those days we went out by ambulance to some tight angle, and waited for something to happen.

"We're right by a battery." But the battery was interesting.

"If this is danger, all right. It's great to be in danger." I have sat all day writing letters by our artillery. Every time a gun went off my pencil slid. The shock was so sudden, my nerves never took it on. Yet I was able to sleep a few yards in front of a battery. It would pound through the night, and I never heard it. The nervous equipment of an American would ravel out, if it were not for sound sleep. If shells came no nearer than four hundred yards, we considered it a quiet day.

One day I learned the full meaning of fear. We had had several quiet safe hours. Night was coming on, and we were putting up the shutters, when a shell fell close by in the trench. Next, our floor was covered with dripping men, five of them unbandaged. Shells and wounds were connected in my mind by that close succession.

No one was secure in that wrecked village of Pervyse. Along the streets, homeless dogs prowled, pigeons circled, hungry cats howled. Behind the trenches, the men had buried their dead and had left great mounds where they had tried to bury the horses. Shells dropped every day, some days all day. I have seen men running along the streets, flattening themselves against a house whenever they heard the whirr of a shell.

It is not easy to eat, and sleep, and live together in close quarters, sometimes with rush work, sometimes through severer hours of aimless waiting. Again and again, we became weary of one another, impatient over trifles.

These lookout posts for observing and directing gun fire carry a portable telephone, adapted to sudden changes of position.]

What war does is to reveal human nature. It does not alter it. It heightens the brutality and the heroism. Selfishness shines out nakedly and kindliness is seen clearer than in routine peace days. War brings out what is inside the person. Sentimental pacifists sit around three thousand miles away and say, "War brutalizes men," and when I hear them I think of the English Tommies giving me their little stock of cigarettes for the Belgian soldiers. Then I read the militarists and they say, "Be hard. Live dangerously. War is beneficent," and I see the wrecked villages of Belgium, with the homeless peasants and the orphaned babies. War ennobles some men by sacrifice, by heroism. It debases other men by handing over the weak to them for torture and murder. What is in the man comes out under the supreme test, where there are no courts of appeal, no public opinion, no social restraint; only the soldier alone with helpless victims.

You can't share the chances of life and death with people, without feeling a something in common with them, that you do not have even with life-long friends. The high officer and the cockney Tommy have that linking up. There was one person whom I couldn't grow to like. But with him I have shared a ticklish time, and there is that cord of connection. Then, too, one is glad of a record of oneself. There is some one to verify what you say. You have passed through an unbelievable thing together, and you have a witness.