I am to come again and tell her what time to be ready with her wounded, when we know whether we are going and when.

Came back to the "Flandria" and finished entries in my Day-Book.

[Evening.]

The Commandant has come back from Melle; but he is going there again almost directly. He has been to the British lines, and heard for certain that the Germans will be in Ghent before morning. We have orders to clear out before two in the morning. I am to have all his things packed by midnight.

The British Consul has left Ghent.

The news spread through the "Flandria."

Max has gone about all day with a scared, white face. They say he is suffering from cold feet. But I will not believe it. He has just appeared in the mess-room and summoned me mysteriously. He takes me along the corridor to that room of his which he is so proud of. There is a brand-new uniform lying on the bed, the uniform of a French soldier of the line. Max handles it with love and holy adoration, as a priest handles his sacred vestments. He takes it in his arms, he spreads before me the grey-blue coat, the grey-blue trousers, and his queer eyes are in their solemnity large and quiet as dark moons.

Max is going to rejoin his regiment.

It is sheer nervous excitement that gave him that wild, white face.

Max is confident that we shall meet again; and I have a horrid vision of Max carried on a bloody stretcher, a brutally wounded Max.

He has given me his address in Brussels, which will not find him there for long enough: if ever.

Jean also is to rejoin his regiment.

Marie, the bonne, stands at the door of the service room and watches us with frightened eyes. She follows me into the mess-room and shuts the door. The poor thing has been seized with panic, and her one idea is to get away from Ghent. Can I find a place for her on one of our ambulance cars? She will squeeze in anywhere, she will stand outside on the step. Will I take her back to England? She will do any sort of work, no matter what, and she won't ask for wages if only I will take her there. I tell her we are not going to England. We are going to Bruges. We have to follow the Belgian Army wherever it is sent.

Then will I take her to Bruges? She has a mother there.

It is ghastly. I have to tell her that it is impossible; that there will be no place for her in the ambulance cars, that they will be crammed with wounded, that we will have to stand on the steps ourselves, that I do not know how many we shall have to take from the Convent, or how many from the hospitals; that I can do nothing without the Commandant's orders, and that the Commandant is not here. And she pleads and implores. She cannot believe that we can be so cruel, and I find my voice growing hard and stern with sheer, wrenching pity. At last I tell her that if there is room I will see what can be done, but that I am afraid that there will not be room. She stays, she clings, trying to extort through pity a more certain promise, and I have to tell her to go. She goes, looking at me with the dull resentment of a helpless creature whom I have hurt. The fact that she has left me sick with pity will not do her any good. Nothing can do her any good but that place on the ambulance which I have no power to give her.

For Marie is not the only one.

I see all the servants in the "Flandria" coming to me before the night is over, and clinging and pleading for a place in the ambulance cars.

And this is only the beginning. After Marie comes Janet McNeil. She, poor child, has surrendered to the overpowering assault on her feelings and has pledged herself to smuggle the four young children of Madame —— into the ambulance somehow. I don't see how it was possible for her to endure the agony of refusing this request. But what we are to do with four young children in cars packed with wounded soldiers, through all the stages of the Belgian Army's retreat—!

The next problem that faced me was the Commandant's packing—how to get all the things he had brought with him into one small Gladstone bag and a sleeping-sack. There was a blue serge suit, two sleeping-suits, a large Burberry, a great many pocket-handkerchiefs, socks and stockings, an assortment of neckties, a quantity of small miscellaneous objects whose fugitive tendencies he proposed to frustrate by confinement in a large tin biscuit-box; there was the biscuit-box itself, a tobacco tin, a packet of Gillette razors, a pipe, a leather case containing some electric apparatus, and a fat scarlet volume: Freud's "Psychopathology of Everyday Life." All these things he had pointed out to me as they lay flung on the bed or strewn about the room. He had impressed on me the absolute necessity of packing every one of them, and by the pathetic grouping around the Gladstone bag of the biscuit-box, the tobacco-tin, the case of instruments and Freud, I gathered that he believed that they would all enter the bag placably and be contained in it with ease.

The night is still young.

I pack the Gladstone bag. By alternate coaxing and coercion Freud and the tobacco-tin and the biscuit-box occupy it amicably enough; but the case of instruments offers an unconquerable resistance.

The night is not quite so young as it has been, and I think I must have left off packing to run over to the Hotel Cecil and pay my bill; for I remember going out into the Place and seeing a crowd drawn up in the middle of it before the "Flandria." An official was addressing this crowd, ordering them to give up their revolvers and any arms they had on them.

The fate of Ghent depends on absolute obedience to this order.

When I get back I find Mrs. Torrence downstairs in the hall of the "Flandria." I ask her what we had better do about our refugee children. She says we can do nothing. There must be no refugee children. How can there be in an ambulance packed with wounded men? When I tell her that the children will certainly be there if somebody doesn't do something to stop them, she goes off to do it. I do not envy her her job. She is not enjoying it herself. First of all she has got to break it to Janet. And Janet will have to break it to the mother.

As to poor Marie, she is out of the question. I shall have to break it to Marie.

The night goes on. I sit with Mr. —— for a little while. I have still to finish the Commandant's packing; I have not yet begun my own, and it is time that I should go round to the Convent to tell Miss Ashley-Smith to be ready with her British before two o'clock.

I sit with him for what seems a very long time. It is appalling to me that the time should seem long. For it is really such a little while, and when it is over there will be nothing more that I shall ever do for him. This thought is not prominent and vivid; it is barely discernible; but it is there, a dull background of pain under my anxiety for the safety of the English over there in the Couvent de Saint Pierre. It is more than time that I should go and tell them to be ready.

He holds out his hands to be sponged "if I don't mind." I sponge them over and over again with iced water and eau de Cologne, gently and very slowly. I am afraid lest he should be aware that there is any hurry. The time goes on, and my anxiety becomes acuter every minute, till with each slow, lingering turn of my hand I think, "If I don't go soon it will be too late."

I hear that the children will be all right. Somebody has had a crise de nerfs, and Janet was the victim.

It is past midnight, and very dark. The Place and the boulevards are deserted. I cannot see the Red Cross flag hanging from the window of the Convent. The boulevards look all the same in the blackness, and I turn up the one to the left. I run on and on very fast, but I cannot see the white flag with the red cross anywhere; I run back, thinking I must have passed it, turn and go on again.

There is nobody in sight. No sound anywhere but the sound of my own feet running faster and faster up the wrong boulevard.

At last I know I have gone too far, the houses are entirely strange. I run back to the Place to get my bearings, and start again. I run faster than ever. I pass a solitary civilian coming down the boulevard. The place is so empty and so still that he and I seem to be the only things alive and awake in this quarter of the town. As I pass he turns to look after me, wondering at the solitary lady running so fast at this hour of the morning. I see the Red Cross flag in the distance, and I come to a door that looks like the door of the Convent. It is the door of the Convent.

I ring the bell. I ring it many times. Nobody comes.

I ring a little louder. A tired lay sister puts her head out of an upper window and asks me what I want. I tell her. She is rather cross and says I've come to the wrong door. I must go to the second door; and she puts her head in and shuts the window with a clang that expresses her just resentment.

I go to the second door, and ring many times again. And another lay sister puts her head out of an upper window.

She is gentle but sleepy and very slow. She cannot take it in all at once. She says they are all asleep in the Convent, and she does not like to wake them. She says this several times, so that I may understand.

I am exasperated.

"Mais, Madame—de grace! C'est peut-etre la vie ou la mort!"

The minute I've said it it sounds to me melodramatic and absurd. I am melodramatic and absurd, with my running feet, and my small figure and earnest, upturned face, standing under a Convent wall at midnight, and talking about la vie et la mort. It is too improbable. I am too improbable. I feel that I am making a fuss out of all proportion to the occasion. And I am sorry for frightening the poor lay sister all for nothing.

Very soon, down the south-east road, the Germans will be marching upon Ghent.

And I cannot realize it. The whole thing is too improbable.

But the lay sister has understood this time. She will go and wake the porteress. She is not at all frightened.

I wait a little longer, and presently the porteress opens the door. When she hears my message she goes away, and returns after a little while with one of the nuns.

They are very quiet, very kind, and absolutely unafraid. They say that Miss Ashley-Smith and her British wounded shall be ready before [?] two o'clock.

I go back to the "Flandria."

The Commandant, who went out to Melle in Tom's car, has not come back yet.

I think Ursula Dearmer and Mrs. Lambert have gone to bed. They are not taking the Germans very seriously.

There is nobody in the mess-room but the other three chauffeurs, Bert, Tom and Newlands. Newlands has just come back from Ostend. They have had no supper. We bustle about to find some.

We all know the Germans are coming into Ghent. But we do not speak of it. We are all very polite, almost supernaturally gentle, and very kind to each other. The beautiful manners of Newlands are conspicuous in this hour, the tragedy of which we are affecting to ignore. I behave as if there was nothing so important in the world as cutting bread for Newlands. Newlands behaves as if there were nothing so important as fetching a bottle of formamint, which he has with him, to cure my cough. (It has burst out again worse than ever after the unnatural repression of last night.)

When the chauffeurs are provided with supper I go into the Commandant's room and finish his packing. The ties, the pocket-handkerchiefs and the collars are all safe in the Gladstone bag. Only the underclothing and the suits remain and there is any amount of room for them in the hold-all.

I roll up the blue serge coat, and the trousers, and the waistcoat very smooth and tight, also the underclothes. It seems very simple. I have only got to put them in the hold-all and then roll it up, smooth and tight, too—

It would have been simple, if the hold-all had been a simple hold-all and if it had been nothing more. But it was also a sleeping-bag and a field-tent. As sleeping-bag, it was provided with a thick blanket which took up most of the room inside, and a waterproof sheet which was part of itself. As field-tent, it had large protruding flanges, shaped like jib-sails, and a complicated system of ropes.

First of all I tucked in the jib-sails and ropes and laid them as flat as might be on the bottom of the sleeping-bag, with the blanket on the top of them. Then I packed the clothes on the top of the blanket and turned it over them to make all snug; I buttoned up the waterproof sheet over everything, rolled up the hold-all and secured it with its straps. This was only done by much stratagem and strength, by desperate tugging and pushing, and by lying flat on my waist on the rolled-up half to keep it quiet while I brought the loose half over. No sooner had I secured the hold-all by its straps than I realized that it was no more a hold-all than it was a sleeping-bag and a field tent, and that its contents were exposed to the weather down one side, where they bulged through the spaces that yawned between the buttons, strained almost to bursting.

I still believed in the genius that had devised this trinity. Clearly the jib-sails which made it a field-tent were intended to serve also as the pockets of the hold-all. I had done wrong to flatten them out and tuck them in, frustrating the fulfilment of their function. It was not acting fairly by the inventor.

I unpacked the hold-all, I mean the field-tent.

Then, with the Commandant's clothes again lying round me on the floor, I grappled with the mystery of the jib-sails and their cords. The jib-sails and their cords were, so to speak, the heart of this infernal triple entity.

They were treacherous. They had all the appearance of pockets, but owing to the intricate and malign relations of their cords, it was impossible to deal faithfully with them on this footing. When the contents had been packed inside them, the field-tent asserted itself as against the hold-all and refused to roll up. And I am sure that if the field-tent had had to be set up in a field in a hurry, the hold-all and the sleeping-bag would have arisen and insisted on their consubstantial rights.

I unpacked the field-tent and packed it all over again exactly as I had packed it before, but more carefully, swearing gently and continuously, as I tugged with my arms and pushed with my knees, and pressed hard on it with my waist to keep it still. I cursed the day when I had first heard of it; I cursed myself for giving it to the Commandant; more than all I cursed the combined ingenuity and levity of its creator, who had indulged his fantasy at our expense, without a thought to the actual conditions of the retreat of armies and of ambulances.

And in the middle of it all Janet came in, and curled herself up in a corner, and forecast luridly and inconsolably the possible fate of her friends, the nurses in the "Flandria." For the moment her coolness and her wise impassivity had gone. Her behaviour was lacerating.

This was the very worst moment we had come to yet.[31]

And it seemed that Ursula Dearmer and Mrs. Lambert had gone to bed, regardless of the retreat from Ghent.

Somewhere in the small hours of the morning the Commandant came back from Melle.[32]

* * * * *

It is nearly two o'clock. Downstairs, in the great silent hall two British wounded are waiting for some ambulance to take them to the Station. They are sitting bolt upright on chairs near the doorway, their heads nodding with drowsiness. One or two Belgian Red Cross men wait beside them. Opposite them, on three other chairs, the three doctors, Dr. Haynes, Dr. Bird and Dr. —— sit waiting for our own ambulance to take them. They have been up all night and are utterly exhausted. They sit, fast asleep, with their heads bowed on their breasts.

Outside, the darkness has mist and a raw cold sting in it.

A wretched ambulance wagon drawn by two horses is driven up to the door. It had a hood once, but the hood has disappeared and only the naked hoops remain. The British wounded from two [?] other hospitals are packed in it in two rows. They sit bolt upright under the hoops, exposed to mist and to the raw cold sting of the night; some of them wear their blankets like shawls over their shoulders as they were taken from their beds. The shawls and the head bandages give these British a strange, foreign look, infinitely helpless, infinitely pitiful.

Nobody seems to be out there but Mrs. Torrence and one or two Belgian Red Cross men. She and I help to get our two men taken gently out of the hall and stowed away in the ambulance wagon. There are not enough blankets. We try to find some.

At the last minute two bearers come forward, carrying a third. He is tall and thin; he is wrapped in a coat flung loosely over his sleeping-jacket; he wears a turban of bandages; his long bare feet stick out as he is carried along. It is Cameron, my poor Highlander, who was shot through the brain.

They lift him, very gently, into the wagon.

Then, very gently, they lift him out again.

This attempt to save him is desperate. He is dying.

They carry him up the steps and stand him there with his naked feet on the stone. It is anguish to see those thin white feet on the stone; I take off my coat and put it under them.

It is all I can do for him.

Presently they carry him back into the Hospital.

They can't find any blankets. I run over to the Hotel Cecil for my thick, warm travelling-rug to wrap round the knees of the wounded, shivering in the wagon.

It is all I can do for them.

And presently the wagon is turned round, slowly, almost solemnly, and driven off into the darkness and the cold mist, with its load of weird and piteous figures, wrapped in blankets like shawls. Their bandages show blurred white spots in the mist, and they are gone.

It is horrible.

* * * * *

I am reminded that I have not packed yet, nor dressed for the journey. I go over and pack and dress. I leave behind what I don't need and it takes seven minutes. There is something sad and terrible about the little hotel, and its proprietors and their daughter, who has waited on me. They have so much the air of waiting, of being on the eve. They hang about doing nothing. They sit mournfully in a corner of the half-darkened restaurant. As I come and go they smile at me with the patient Belgian smile that says, "C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?" and no more.

The landlord puts on his soft brown felt hat and carries my luggage over to the "Flandria." He stays there, hanging about the porch, fascinated by these preparations for departure. There is the same terrible half-darkness here, the same expectant stillness. Now and then the servants of the hospital look at each other and there are whisperings, mutterings. They sound sinister somehow and inimical. Or perhaps I imagine this because I do not take kindly to retreating. Anyhow I am only aware of them afterwards. For now it is time to go and fetch Miss Ashley-Smith and her three wounded men from the Convent.

Tom has come up with his first ambulance car. He is waiting for orders in the porch. His enormous motor goggles are pushed up over the peak of his cap. They make it look like some formidable helmet. They give an air of mastership to Tom's face. At this last hour it wears its expression of righteous protest, of volcanic patience, of exasperated discipline.

The Commandant is nowhere to be seen. And every minute of his delay increases Tom's sense of tortured integrity.

I tell Tom that he is to drive me at once to the Couvent de Saint Pierre. He wants to know what for.

I tell him it is to fetch Miss Ashley-Smith and three British wounded.

He shrugs his shoulders. He knows nothing about the Couvent de Saint Pierre and Miss Ashley-Smith and three British wounded, and his shrug implies that he cares less.

And he says he has no orders to go and fetch them.

I perceive that in this supreme moment I am up against Tom's superstition. He won't move anywhere without orders. It is his one means of putting himself in the right and everybody else in the wrong.

And the worst of it is he is right.

I am also up against Tom's sex prejudices. I remember that he is said to have sworn with an oath that he wasn't going to take orders from any woman.

And the Commandant is nowhere to be seen.

Tom sticks to the ledge of the porch and stares at me defiantly. The servants of the Hospital come out and look at us. They are so many reinforcements to Tom's position.

I tell him that the arrangement has been made with the Commandant's consent, and I repeat firmly that he is to get into his car this minute and drive to the Couvent de Saint Pierre.

He says he does not know where the Convent is. It may be anywhere.

I tell him where it is, and he says again he hasn't got orders.

I stand over him and with savage and violent determination I say: "You've got them now!"

And, actually, Tom obeys. He says, "All right, all right, all right," very fast, and humps his shoulders and slouches off to his car. He cranks it up with less vehemence than I have yet known him bring to the starting of any car.

We get in. Then, and not till then, I am placable. I say: "You see, Tom, it wouldn't do to leave that lady and three British wounded behind, would it?"

What he says about orders then is purely by way of apology.

Regardless of my instructions, he does what I did and dashes up the wrong boulevard as if the Germans were even now marching into the Place behind him. But he works round somehow and we arrive.

They are all there, ready and waiting. And the Mother Superior and two of her nuns are in the corridor. They bring out glasses of hot milk for everybody. They are so gentle and so kind that I recall with agony my impatience when I rang at their gate. Even familiar French words desert me in this crisis, and I implore Miss Ashley-Smith to convey my regrets for my rudeness. Their only answer is to smile and press hot milk on me. I am glad of it, for I have been so absorbed in the drama of preparation that I have entirely forgotten to eat anything since lunch.

The wounded are brought along the passage. We help them into the ambulance. Two, Williams and ——, are only slightly wounded; they can sit up all the way. But the third, Fisher, is wounded in the head. Sometimes he is delirious and must be looked after. A fourth man is dying and must be left behind.

Then we say good-bye to the nuns.

The other ambulance cars are drawn up in the Place before the "Flandria," waiting. For the first time I hate the sight of them. This feeling is inexplicable but profound.

We arrange for the final disposal of the wounded in one of the new Daimlers, where they can all lie down. Mrs. Torrence comes out and helps us. The Commandant is not there yet. Dr. Haynes and Dr. Bird pack Dr. —— away well inside the car. They are very quiet and very firm and refuse to travel otherwise than together. Mrs. Torrence goes with the wounded.

I go into the Hospital and upstairs to our quarters to see if anything has been left behind. If I can find Marie we must take her. There is room, after all.

But Marie is nowhere to be seen.

Nobody is to be seen but the Belgian night nurses on duty, watching, one on each landing at the entrance to her corridor. They smile at me gravely and sadly as they say good-bye.

I have left many places, many houses, many people behind me, knowing that I shall never see them again. But of all leave-takings this seems to me the worst. For those others I have been something, done something that absolves me. But for these and for this place I have not done anything, and now there is not anything to be done.

I go slowly downstairs. Each flight is a more abominable descent. At each flight I stand still and pull myself together to face the next nurse on the next landing. At the second story I go past without looking. I know every stain on the floor of the corridor there as you turn to the right. The number of the door and the names on the card beside it have made a pattern on my brain.

* * * * *

It is quarter to three.

They are all ready now. The Commandant is there giving the final orders and stowing away the nine wounded he has brought from Melle. The hall of the Hospital is utterly deserted. So is the Place outside it. And in the stillness and desolation our going has an air of intolerable secrecy, of furtive avoidance of fate. This Field Ambulance of ours abhors retreat.

It is dark with the black darkness before dawn.

And the Belgian Red Cross guides have all gone. There is nobody to show us the roads.

At the last minute we find a Belgian soldier who will take us as far as Ecloo.

The Commandant has arranged to stay at Ecloo for a few hours. Some friends there have offered him their house. The wounded are to be put up at the Convent. Ecloo is about half-way between Ghent and Bruges.

We start. Tom's car goes first with the Belgian soldier in front. Ursula Dearmer, Mrs. Lambert, Miss Ashley-Smith and Mr. Riley and I are inside. The Commandant sits, silent, wrapped in meditation, on the step.

We are not going so very fast, not faster than the three cars behind us, and the slowest of the three (the Fiat with the hard tyres, carrying the baggage) sets the pace. We must keep within their sight or they may lose their way. But though we are not really going fast, the speed seems intolerable, especially the speed that swings us out of sight of the "Flandria." You think that is the worst. But it isn't. The speed with its steady acceleration grows more intolerable with every mile. Your sense of safety grows intolerable.

You never knew that safety could hurt like this.

Somewhere on this road the Belgian Army has gone before us. We have got to go with it. We have had our orders.

That thought consoles you, but not for long. You may call it following the Belgian Army. But the Belgian Army is retreating, and you are retreating with it. There is nothing else you can do; but that does not make it any better. And this speed of the motor over the flat roads, this speed that cuts the air, driving its furrow so fast that the wind rushes by you like strong water, this speed that so inspired and exalted you when it brought you into Flanders, when it took you to Antwerp and Baerlaere and Lokeren and Melle, this vehement and frightful and relentless speed is the thing that beats you down and tortures you. For several hours, ever since you had your orders to pack up and go, you have been working with no other purpose than this going; you have contemplated it many times with equanimity, with indifference; you knew all along that it was not possible to stay in Ghent for ever; and when you were helping to get the wounded into the ambulances you thought it would be the easiest thing in the world to get in yourself and go with them; when you had time to think about it you were even aware of looking forward with pleasure to the thrill of a clean run before the Germans. You never thought, and nobody could possibly have told you, that it would be like this.

I never thought, and nobody could possibly have told me, that I was going to behave as I did then.

The thing began with the first turn of the road that hid the "Flandria." Up till that moment, whatever I may have felt about the people we had to leave behind us, as long as none of our field-women were left behind, I had not the smallest objection to being saved myself. And if it had occurred to me to stay behind for the sake of one man who couldn't be moved and who had the best surgeon in the Hospital and the pick of the nursing-staff to look after him, I think I should have disposed of the idea as sheer sentimentalism. When I was with him to-night I could think of nothing but the wounded in the Couvent de Saint Pierre. And afterwards there had been so much to do.

And now that there was nothing more to do, I couldn't think of anything but that one man.

The night before came back to me in a vision, or rather an obsession, infinitely more present, more visible and palpable than this night that we were living in. The light with the red shade hung just over my head on my right hand; the blond walls were round me; they shut me in alone with the wounded man who lay stretched before me on the bed. And the moments were measured by the rhythm of his breathing, and by the closing and opening of his eyes.

I thought, he will open his eyes to-night and look for me and I shall not be there. He will know that he has been left to the Belgians, who cannot understand him, whom he cannot understand. And he will think that I have betrayed him.

I felt as if I had betrayed him.

I am sitting between Mr. Riley and Miss Ashley-Smith. Mr. Riley is ill; he has got blood-poisoning through a cut in his hand. Every now and then I remember him, and draw the rug over his knees as it slips. Miss Ashley-Smith, tired with her night watching, has gone to sleep with her head on my shoulder, where it must be horribly jolted and shaken by my cough, which of course chooses this moment to break out again. I try to get into a position that will rest her better; and between her and Mr. Riley I forget for a second.

Then the obsession begins again, and I am shut in between the blond walls with the wounded man.

I feel his hand and arm lying heavily on my shoulder in the attempt to support me as I kneel by his bed with my arms stretched out together under the hollow of his back, as we wait for the pillow that never comes.

It is quite certain that I have betrayed him.

It seems to me then that nothing that could happen to me in Ghent could be more infernal than leaving it. And I think that when the ambulance stops to put down the Belgian soldier I will get out and walk back with him to Ghent.

Every half-mile I think that the ambulance will stop to put down the Belgian soldier.

But the ambulance does not stop. It goes on and on, and we have got to Ecloo before we seem to have put three miles between us and Ghent.

Still, though I'm dead tired when we get there, I can walk three miles easily. I do not feel at all insane with my obsession. On the contrary, these moments are moments of exceptional lucidity.[33] While the Commandant goes to look for the Convent I get out and look for the Belgian soldier. Other Belgian soldiers have joined him in the village street.

I tell him I want to go back to Ghent. I ask him how far it is to walk, and if he will take me. And he says it is twenty kilometres. The other soldiers say, too, it is twenty kilometres. I had thought it couldn't possibly be more than four or five at the outside. And I am just sane enough to know that I can't walk as far as that if I'm to be any good when I get there.

We wait in the village while they find the Convent and take the wounded men there; we wait while the Commandant goes off in the dark to find his friend's house.

The house stands in a garden somewhere beyond the railway station, up a rough village street and a stretch of country road. It is about four in the morning when we get there. A thin ooze of light is beginning to leak through the mist. The mist holds it as a dark cloth holds a fluid that bleaches it.

There is something queer about this light. There is something queer, something almost inimical, about the garden, as if it tried to protect itself by enchantment from the fifteen who are invading it. The mist stands straight up from the earth like a high wall drawn close about the house; it blocks with dense grey stuff every inch of space between the bushes and trees; they are thrust forward rank upon rank, closing in upon the house; they loom enormous and near. A few paces further back they appear as without substance in the dense grey stuff that invests them; their tops are tangled and lost in a web of grey. In this strange garden it is as if space itself had solidified in masses, and solid objects had become spaces between.

When your eyes get used to this curious inversion it is as if the mist was no longer a wall but a growth; the garden is the heart of a jungle bleached by enchantment and struck with stillness and cold; a tangle of grey; a muffled, huddled and stifled bower, all grey, and webbed and laced with grey.

The door of the house opens and the effect of queerness, of inimical magic disappears.

Mr. E., our kind Dutch host, and Mrs. E., our kind English hostess, have got up out of their beds to receive us. This hospitality of theirs is not a little thing when you think that their house is to be invaded by Germans, perhaps to-day.[34]

They do not allow you to think of it. For all you are to see of the tragedy they and their house might be remaining at Ecloo in leisure and perfect hospitality and peace. Only, as they see us pouring in over their threshold a hovering twinkle in their kind eyes shows that they are not blind to the comic aspect of retreats.

They have only one spare bedroom, which they offer; but they have filled their drawing-room with blankets; piles and piles of white fleecy blankets on chairs and sofas and on the floor. And they have built up a roaring fire. It is as if they were succouring fifteen survivors of shipwreck or of earthquake, or the remnants of a forlorn hope. To be sure, we are flying from Ghent, but we have only flown twenty kilometres as yet.

However, most of the Corps have been up all night for several nights, and the mist outside is a clinging and a biting mist, and everybody is grateful.

I shall never forget the look of the E.s' drawing-room, smothered in blankets and littered with the members of the Corps, who lay about it in every pathetic posture of fatigue. A group of seven or eight snuggled down among the blankets on the floor in front of the hearth like a camp before a campfire. Janet McNeil, curled up on one window-seat, and Ursula Dearmer, rolled in a blanket on the other, had the heart-rending beauty of furry animals under torpor. The chauffeurs Tom and Bert made themselves entirely lovable by going to sleep bolt upright on dining-room chairs on the outer ring of the camp. The E.s' furniture came in where it could with fantastic and incongruous effect.

I don't know how I got through the next three hours, for my obsession came back on me again and again, and as soon as I shut my eyes I saw the face and eyes of the wounded man. I remember sitting part of the time beside Miss Ashley-Smith, wide-awake, in a corner of the room behind Bert's chair. I remember wandering about the E.s' house. I must have got out of it, for I also remember finding myself in their garden, at sunrise.

And I remember the garden, though I was not perfectly aware of it at the time. It had a divine beauty, a serenity that refused to enter into, to ally itself in any way with an experience tainted by the sadness of the retreat from Ghent.

But because of its supernatural detachment and tranquillity and its no less supernatural illumination I recalled it the more vividly afterwards.

It was full of tall bushes and little slender trees standing in a delicate light. The mist had cleared to the transparency of still water, so still that under it the bushes and the trees stood in a cold, quiet radiance without a shimmer. The light itself was intensely still. What you saw was not the approach of light, but its mysterious arrest. It was held suspended in crystalline vapour, in thin shafts of violet and gold, clear as panes; it was caught and lifted upwards by the high bushes and the slender trees; it was veiled in the silver-green masses of their tops. Every green leaf and every blade of grass was a vessel charged. It was not so much that the light revealed these things as that these things revealed the light. There was no kindling touch, no tremor of dawn in that garden. It was as if it had removed the walls and put off the lacing webs and the thick cloths of grey stuff by some mystic impulse of its own, as if it maintained itself in stillness by an inner flame. Only the very finest tissues yet clung to it, to show that it was the same garden that disclosed itself in this clarity and beauty.

The next thing I remember is the Chaplain coming to me and our going together into the E.s' dining-room, and Miss Ashley-Smith's joining us there. My malady was contagious and she had caught it, but with no damage to her self-control.

She says very simply and quietly that she is going back to Ghent. And the infection spreads to the Chaplain. He says that neither of us is going back to Ghent, but that he is going. The poor boy tries to arrange with us how he may best do it, in secrecy, without poisoning the Commandant[35] and the whole Ambulance with the spirit of return. With difficulty we convince him that it would be useless for any man to go. He would be taken prisoner the minute he showed his nose in the "Flandria" and set to dig trenches till the end of the War.

Then he says, if only he had his cassock with him. They would respect that (which is open to doubt).

We are there a long time discussing which of us is going back to Ghent. Miss Ashley-Smith is fertile and ingenious in argument. She is a nurse, and I and the Chaplain are not. She has friends in Ghent who have not been warned, whom she must go back to. In any case, she says, it was a toss-up whether she went or stayed.

And while we are still arguing, we go out on the road that leads to the village, to find the ambulances and see if any of the chauffeurs will take us back to Ghent. I am not very hopeful about the means of transport. I do not think that Tom or any of the chauffeurs will move, this time, without orders from the Commandant. I do not think that the Commandant will let any of us go except himself.

And Miss Ashley-Smith says if only she had a horse.

If she had a horse she would be in Ghent in no time. Perhaps, if none of the chauffeurs will take her back, she can find a horse in the village.

She keeps on saying very quietly and simply that she is going, and explaining the reasons why she should go rather than anybody else. And I bring forward every reason I can think of why she should do nothing of the sort.

I abhor the possibility of her going back instead of me; but I am not yet afraid of it. I do not yet think seriously that she will do it. I do not see how she is going to, if the chauffeurs refuse to take her. (I do not see how, in this case, I am to go myself.) And I do not imagine for one moment that she will find a horse. Still, I am vaguely uneasy. And the Chaplain doesn't make it any better by backing her up and declaring that as she will be more good than either of us when she gets there, her going is the best thing that in the circumstances can be done.

And in the end, with an extreme quietness and simplicity, she went.

We had not yet found the ambulance cars, and it seemed pretty certain that Miss Ashley-Smith would not get her horse any more than the Chaplain could get his cassock.

And then, just when we thought the difficulties of transport were insuperable, we came straight on the railway lines and the station, where a train had pulled up on its way to Ghent. Miss Ashley-Smith got on to the train. I got on too, to go with her, and the Chaplain, who is abominably strong, put his arms round my waist and pulled me off.

I have never ceased to wish that I had hung on to that train.

On our way back to the E.s' house we met the Commandant and told him what had happened. I said I thought it was the worst thing that had happened yet. It wasn't the smallest consolation when he said it was the most sensible solution.

And when Mrs. —— for fifteen consecutive seconds took the view that I had decoyed Miss Ashley-Smith out on to that accursed road in order to send her to Ghent, and deliberately persuaded her to go back to the "Flandria" instead of me, for fifteen consecutive seconds I believed that this diabolical thing was what I had actually done.

Mrs. ——'s indignation never blazes away for more than fifteen seconds; but while the conflagration lasts it is terrific. And on circumstantial evidence the case was black against me. When last seen, Miss Ashley-Smith was entirely willing to be saved. She goes out for a walk with me along a quiet country road, and the next thing you hear is that she has gone back to Ghent. And since, actually and really, it was my obsession that had passed into her, I felt that if I had taken Miss Ashley-Smith down that road and murdered her in a dyke my responsibility wouldn't have been a bit worse, if as bad.

And it seemed to me that all the people scattered among the blankets in that strange room, those that still lay snuggling down amiably in the warmth, and those that had started to their feet in dismay, and those that sat on chairs upright and apart, were hostile with a just and righteous hostility, that they had an intimate knowledge of my crime, and had risen up in abhorrence of the thing I was.

And somewhere, as if they were far off in some blessed place on the other side of this nightmare, I was aware of the merciful and pitiful faces of Mrs. Lambert and Janet McNeil.

Then, close beside me, there was a sudden heaving of the Chaplain's broad shoulders as he faced the room.

And I heard him saying, in the same voice in which he had declared that he was going to hold Matins, that it wasn't my fault at all—that it was he who had persuaded Miss Ashley-Smith to go back to Ghent.[36]

The Chaplain has a moral nerve that never fails him.

Then Mrs. Torrence says that she is going back to protect Miss Ashley-Smith, and Ursula Dearmer says that she is going back to protect Mrs. Torrence, and somebody down in the blankets remarks that the thing was settled last night, and that all this going back is simply rotten.

I can only repeat that it is all my fault, and that therefore, if Mrs. Torrence goes back, nobody is going back with her but me.

And there can be no doubt that three motor ambulances, with possibly the entire Corps inside them, certainly with the five women and the Chaplain and the Commandant, would presently have been seen tearing along the road to Ghent, one in violent pursuit of the other, if we had not telephoned and received news of Miss Ashley-Smith's safe arrival at the "Flandria," and orders that no more women were to return to Ghent.

Among all the variously assorted anguish of that halt at Ecloo the figures and the behaviour of Mrs. E. and her husband and their children are beautiful to remember—their courtesy, their serenity, their gentle and absolving wonder that anybody should see anything in the least frightful or distressing, or even disconcerting and unusual, in the situation; the little girl who sat beside me, showing me her picture-book of animals, accepting gravely and earnestly all that you had to tell her about the ways of squirrels, of kangaroos and opossums, while we waited for the ambulance cars to take us to Bruges; the boy who ran after us as we went, and stood looking after us and waving to us in the lane; the aspect of that Flemish house and garden as we left them—there is no word that embraces all these things but beauty.

We stopped in the village to take up our wounded from the Convent. The nuns brought us through a long passage and across a little court to the refectory, which had been turned into a ward. Bowls steaming with the morning meal for the patients stood on narrow tables between the two rows of beds. Each bed was hung round and littered with haversacks, boots, rifles, bandoliers and uniforms bloody and begrimed. Except for the figures of the nuns and the aspect of its white-washed walls and its atmosphere of incorruptible peace, the place might have been a barracks or the dormitory in a night lodging, rather than a convent ward.

When we had found and dressed our men, we led them out as we had come. As we went we saw, framed through some open doorway, sunlight and vivid green, and the high walls and clipped alleys of the Convent garden.

Of all our sad contacts and separations, these leave-takings at the convents were the saddest. And it was not only that this place had the same poignant and unbearable beauty as the place we had just left, but its beauty was unique. You felt that if the friends you had just left were turned out of their house and garden to-morrow, they might still return some day. But here you saw a carefully guarded and fragile loveliness on the very eve of its dissolution. The place was fairly saturated with holiness, and the beauty of holiness was in the faces and in every gesture of the nuns. And you felt that they and their faces and their gestures were impermanent, that this highly specialized form of holiness had continued with difficulty until now, that it hung by a single thread to a world that had departed very far from it.

Yet, for the moment while you looked at it, it maintained itself in perfection.

We shall never know all that the War has annihilated. But for that moment of time while it lasted, the Convent at Ecloo annihilated the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, every century between now and the fifteenth. What you saw was a piece of life cut straight out of the Middle Ages. What you felt was the guarded and hidden beauty of the Middle Ages, the beauty of obedience, simplicity and chastity, of souls set apart and dedicated, the whole insoluble secret charm of the cloistered life. The very horror of the invasion that threatened it at this hour of the twentieth century was a horror of the Middle Ages.

But these devoted women did not seem aware of it. The little high-bred English nun who conducted us talked politely and placidly of England and of English things as of things remembered with a certain mortal affection but left behind without regret. It was as if she contemplated the eternal continuance of the Convent at Ecloo with no break in its divine tranquillity. One sister went so far as to express the hope that their Convent would be spared. It was as if she were uttering some merely perfunctory piety. The rest, without ceasing from their ministrations, looked up at us and smiled.

* * * * *

On the way up to Bruges we passed whole regiments of the Belgian Army in retreat. They trooped along in straggling disorder, their rifles at trail; behind them the standard-bearers trudged, carrying the standard furled and covered with black. The speed of our cars as we overtook them was more insufferable than ever.

[Bruges.]

We thought that the Belgian Army would be quartered in Bruges, and that we should find a hospital there and serve the Army from that base.

We took our wounded to the Convent, and set out to find quarters for ourselves in the town. We had orders to meet at the Convent again at a certain hour.

Most of the Corps were being put up at the Convent. The rest of us had to look for rooms.

In the search I got separated from the Corps, and wandered about the streets of Bruges with much interest and a sense of great intimacy and leisure. By the time I had found a pension in a narrow street behind the market-place, I felt it to be quite certain that we should stay in Bruges at least as long as we had stayed in Ghent, and what moments I could spare from the obsession of Ghent I spent in contemplating the Belfry. Very soon it was time to go back to the Convent. The way to the Convent was through many tortuous streets, but I was going in the right direction, accompanied by a kind Flamand and her husband, when at the turn by the canal bridge I was nearly run over by one of our own ambulance cars. It was Bert's car, and he was driving with fury and perturbation away from the Convent and towards the town. Janet McNeil was with him. They stopped to tell me that we had orders to clear out of Bruges. The Germans had taken Ghent and were coming on to Bruges. We had orders to go on to Ostend.

We found the rest of the cars drawn up in a street near the Convent. We had not been two hours in Bruges, and we left it, if anything, quicker than we had come in. The flat land fairly dropped away before our speed. I sat on the back step of the leading car, and I shall never forget the look of those ambulances, three in a line, as they came into sight scooting round the turns on the road to Ostend.

Besides the wounded we had brought from Ghent, we took with us three footsore Tommies whom we had picked up in Bruges. They had had a long march. The stoutest, biggest and most robust of these three fainted just as we drew up in the courtyard of the Kursaal at Ostend.

[Ostend.]

The Kursaal had been taken by some English and American women and turned into a Hospital. It was filled already to overflowing, but they found room for our wounded for the night. Ostend was to be evacuated in the morning. In fact, we were considered to be running things rather fine by staying here instead of going on straight to Dunkirk. It was supposed that if the Germans were not yet in Bruges they might be there any minute.

But we had had so many premature orders to clear out, and the Germans had always been hours behind time, and we judged it a safe risk. Besides, there were forty-seven Belgian wounded in Bruges, and three of our ambulance cars were going back to fetch them.

There was some agitation as to who would and who wouldn't be allowed to go back to Bruges. The Commandant was at first inclined to reject his Secretary as unfit. But if you take him the right way he is fairly tractable, and I managed to convince him that nothing but going back to Bruges could make up for my failure to go back to Ghent. He earned my everlasting gratitude by giving me leave. As for Mrs. Torrence, she had no difficulty. She was obviously competent.

Then, just as I was congratulating myself that the shame of Ecloo was to be wiped out (to say nothing of that ignominious overthrow at Melle), there occurred a contretemps that made our ambulance conspicuous among the many ambulances in the courtyard of the Hospital.

We had reckoned without the mistimed chivalry of our chauffeurs.

They had all, even Tom, been quite pathetically kind and gentle during and ever since the flight from Ghent. (I remember poor Newlands coming up with his bottle of formamint just as we were preparing to leave Ecloo.) It never occurred to us that there was anything ominous in this mood.

Mrs. Torrence and I were just going to get into (I think) Newlands' car, when we were aware of Newlands standing fixed on the steps of the Hospital, looking like Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in khaki, and flatly refusing to drive his car into Bruges, not only if we were in his car, but if one woman went with the expedition in any other car.

He stood there, very upright, on the steps of the Hospital, and rather pale, while the Commandant and Mrs. Torrence surged up to him in fury. The Commandant told him he would be sacked for insubordination, and Mrs. Torrence, in a wild flight of fancy, threatened to expose him "in the papers."

But Newlands stood his ground. He was even more like Lord Kitchener than Tom. He simply could not get over the idea that women were to be protected. And to take the women into Bruges when the Germans were, for all we knew, in Bruges, was an impossibility to Newlands, as it would have been to Lord Kitchener. So he went on refusing to take his car into Bruges if one woman went with the expedition. In retort to a charge of cold feet, he intimated that he was ready to drive into any hell you pleased, provided he hadn't got to take any women with him. He didn't care if he was sacked. He didn't care if Mrs. Torrence did report him in the papers. He wouldn't drive his car into Bruges if one woman—

Here, in his utter disregard of all discipline, the likeness between Newlands and Lord Kitchener ends. Enough that he drove his car into Bruges on his own terms, and Mrs. Torrence and I were left behind.

The expedition to Bruges returned safely with the forty-seven Belgian wounded.

We found rooms in a large hotel on the Digue, overlooking the sea. Before evening I went round to the Hospital to see Miss Ashley-Smith's three wounded men. The Kursaal is built in terraces and galleries going all round the front and side of it. I took the wrong turning round one of them and found myself in the doorway of an immense ward. From somewhere inside there came loud and lacerating screams, high-pitched but appallingly monotonous and without intervals. I thought it was a man in delirium; I even thought it might be poor Fisher, of whose attacks we had been warned. I went in.

I had barely got a yard inside the ward before a kind little rosy-faced English nurse ran up to me. I told her what I wanted.

She said, "You'd better go back. You won't be able to stand it."

Even then I didn't take it in, and said I supposed the poor man was delirious.

She cried out, "No! No! He is having his leg taken off."

They had run short of anaesthetics.

I don't know what I must have looked like, but the little rosy-faced nurse grabbed me and said, "Come away. You'll faint if you see it."

And I went away. Somebody took me into the right ward, where I found Fisher and Williams and the other man. Fisher was none the worse for his journey, and Williams and the other man were very cheerful. Another English nurse, who must have had the tact of a heavenly angel, brought up a bowl of chicken broth and said I might feed Fisher if I liked. So I sat a little while there, feeding Fisher, and regretting for the hundredth time that I had not had the foresight to be trained as a nurse when I was young. Unfortunately, though I foresaw this war ten years ago, I had not foreseen it when I was young. I told the men I would come and see them early in the morning, and bring them some money, as I had promised Miss Ashley-Smith. I never saw them again.

Nothing happened quite as I had planned it.

To begin with, we had discovered as we lunched at Bruges that the funds remaining in the leather purse-belt were hardly enough to keep the Ambulance going for another week. And our hotel expenses at Ostend were reducing its term to a problematic three days. So it was more or less settled amongst us that somebody would have to go over to England the next day and return with funds, and that the supernumerary Secretary was, on the whole, the fittest person for the job.

I slept peaceably on this prospect of a usefulness that seemed to justify my existence at a moment when it most needed vindication.

[Tuesday, 13th.]

I got up at six. Last thing at night I had said to myself that I must wake early and go round to the Hospital with the money.

With my first sleep the obsession of Ghent had slackened its hold. And though it came back again after I had got up, dressed and had realized my surroundings, its returns were at longer and longer intervals.

The first thing I did was to go round to the Kursaal. The Hospital was being evacuated, the wounded were lying about everywhere on the terraces and galleries, waiting for the ambulances. Williams and Fisher and the other man were nowhere to be seen. I was told that their ward had been cleared out first, and that the three were now safe on their way to England.

I went away very grieved that they had not got their money.

At the Hotel I find the Commandant very cheerful. He has made Miss —— his Secretary and Reporter till my return.[37]

He goes down to the quay to make arrangements for my transport and returns after some considerable time. There have been difficulties about this detail. And the Commandant has an abhorrence of details, even of easy ones.

He comes back. He looks abstracted. I inquire, a little too anxiously, perhaps, about my transport. It is all right, all perfectly right. He has arranged with Dr. Beavis of the British Field Hospital to take me on his ship.

He looks a little spent with his exertions, and as he has again become abstracted I forbear to press for more information at the moment.

We breakfasted. Presently I ask him the name of Dr. Beavis's ship.

Oh, the name of the ship is the Dresden.

Time passes. And presently, just as he is going, I suggest that it would be as well for me to know what time the Dresden sails.

This detail either he never knew or has forgotten. And there is something about it, about the nature of stated times, as about all things conventional and mechanical and precise, that peculiarly exasperates him.

He waves both hands in a fury of nescience and cries, "Ask me another!"

By a sort of mutual consent we assume that the Dresden will sail with Dr. Beavis at ten o'clock. After all, it is a very likely hour.

More time passes. Finally we go into the street that runs along the Digue. And there we find Dr. Beavis sitting in a motor-car. We approach him. I thank him for his kindness in giving me transport. I say I'm sure his ship will be crowded with his own people, but that I don't in the least mind standing in the stoke-hole, if he doesn't mind taking me over.

He looks at me with a dreamy benevolence mixed with amazement. He would take me over with pleasure if he knew how he was to get away himself.

"But," I say to the Commandant, "I thought you had arranged with Dr. Beavis to take me on the Dresden."

The Commandant says nothing. And Dr. Beavis smiles again. A smile of melancholy knowledge.

"The Dresden," he says, "sailed two hours ago."

So it is decided that I am to proceed with the Ambulance to Dunkirk, thence by train to Boulogne, thence to Folkestone. It sounds so simple that I wonder why we didn't think of it before.

But it was not by any means so simple as it sounded.

First of all we had to collect ourselves. Then we had to collect Dr. Hanson's luggage. Dr. Hanson was one of Mrs. St. Clair Stobart's women surgeons, and she had left her luggage for Miss —— to carry from Ostend to England. There was a yellow tin box and a suit-case. Dr. Hanson's best clothes and her cases of surgical instruments were in the suit-case and all the things she didn't particularly care about in the tin box. Or else the best clothes and the surgical instruments were in the tin box, and the things she didn't particularly care about in the suit-case. As we were certainly going to take both boxes, it didn't seem to matter much which way round it was.

Then there was Mr. Foster's green canvas kit-bag to be taken to Folkestone and sent to him at the Victoria Hospital there.

And there was a British Red Cross lady and her luggage—but we didn't know anything about the lady and her luggage yet.

We found them at the Kursaal Hospital, where some of our ambulances were waiting.

By this time the courtyard, the steps and terraces of the Hospital were a scene of the most ghastly confusion. The wounded were still being carried out and still lay, wrapped in blankets, on the terraces; those who could sit or stand sat or stood. Ambulance cars jostled each other in the courtyard. Red Cross nurses dressed for departure were grouped despairingly about their luggage. Other nurses, who were not dressed for departure, who still remained superintending the removal of their wounded, paid no attention to these groups and their movements and their cries. The Hospital had cast off all care for any but its wounded.

Women seized hold of other women for guidance and instruction, and received none. Nobody was rudely shaken off—they were all, in fact, very kind to each other—but nobody had time or ability to attend to anybody else.

Somebody seized hold of the Commandant and sent us both off to look for the kitchen and for a sack of loaves which we would find in it. We were to bring the sack of loaves out as quickly as we could. We went off and found the kitchen, we found several kitchens; but we couldn't find the sack of loaves, and had to go back without it. When we got back the lady who had commandeered the sack of loaves was no more to be seen on the terrace.

While we waited on the steps somebody remarked that there was a German aeroplane in the sky and that it was going to drop a bomb. There was. It was sailing high over the houses on the other side of the street. And it dropped its bomb right in front of us, above an enormous building not fifty yards away.

We looked, fascinated. We expected to see the building knocked to bits and flying in all directions. The bomb fell. And nothing happened. Nothing at all.

It was soon after the bomb that my attention was directed to the lady. She was a British Red Cross nurse, stranded with a hold-all and a green canvas trunk, and most particularly forlorn. She had lost her friends, she had lost her equanimity, she had lost everything except her luggage. How she attached herself to us I do not know. The Commandant says it was I who made myself responsible for her safety. We couldn't leave her to the Germans with her green canvas trunk and her hold-all.

So I heaved up one end of the canvas trunk, and the Commandant tore it from me and flung it to the chauffeurs, who got it and the hold-all into Bert's ambulance. I grasped the British Red Cross lady firmly by the arm, lest she should get adrift again, and hustled her along to the Hotel, where the yellow tin box and the suit-case and the kit-bag waited. Somebody got them into the ambulance somehow.

It was at this point that Ursula Dearmer appeared. (She had put up at some other hotel with Mrs. Lambert.)

My British Red Cross lady was explaining to me that she had by no means abandoned her post, but that she was doing the right thing in leaving Ostend, seeing that she meant to apply for another post on a hospital ship. She was sure, she said, she was doing the right thing. I said, as I towed her securely along by one hand through a gathering crowd of refugees (we were now making for the ambulance cars that were drawn up along the street by the Digue), I said I was equally sure she was doing the right thing and that nobody could possibly think otherwise.

And, as I say, Ursula Dearmer appeared.

The youngest but one was seated with Mr. Riley in the military scouting-car that was to be our convoy to Dunkirk. I do not know how it had happened, but in this hour, at any rate, she had taken over the entire control and command of the Ambulance; and this with a coolness and competence that suggested that it was no new thing. It suggested, also, that without her we should not have got away from Ostend before the Germans marched into it. In fact, it is hardly fair to say that she had taken everything over. Everything had lapsed into her hands at the supreme crisis by a sort of natural fitness.

We were all ready to go. The only one we yet waited for was the Commandant, who presently emerged from the Hotel. In his still dreamy and abstracted movements he was pursued by an excited waiter flourishing a bill. I forgot whose bill it was (it may have been mine), but anyhow it wasn't his bill.

We may have thought we were following the retreat of the Belgian Army when we went from Ghent to Bruges. We were, in fact, miles behind it, and the regiments we overtook were stragglers. The whole of the Belgian Army seemed to be poured out on to that road between Ostend and Dunkirk. Sometimes it was going before us, sometimes it was mysteriously coming towards us, sometimes it was stationary, but always it was there. It covered the roads; we had to cut our way through it. It was retreating slowly, as if in leisure, with a firm, unhasting dignity.

Every now and then, as we looked at the men, they smiled at us, with a curious still and tragic smile.

And it is by that smile that I shall always remember the look of the Belgian Army in the great retreat.

Our own retreat—the Ostend-Dunkirk bit of it—is memorable chiefly by Miss ——'s account of the siege of Antwerp and the splendid courage of Mrs. St. Clair Stobart and her women.

But that is her story, not mine, and it should be left to her to tell.

[Dunkirk.]

At Dunkirk the question of the Secretary's transport again arose. It contended feebly with the larger problem of where and when and how the Corps was to lunch, things being further complicated by the Commandant's impending interview with Baron de Broqueville, the Belgian Minister of War. I began to feel like a large and useless parcel which the Commandant had brought with him in sheer absence of mind, and was now anxious to lose or otherwise get rid of. At the same time the Ambulance could not go on for more than three days without further funds, and, as the courier to be despatched to fetch them, I was, for the moment, the most important person in the Corps; and my transport was not a question to be lightly set aside.

I was about to solve the problem for myself by lugging my lady to the railway station, when Ursula Dearmer took us over too, in her stride, as inconsiderable items of the business before her. I have nothing but admiration for her handling of it.

We halted in the main street of Dunkirk while Mr. Riley and the chauffeurs unearthed from the baggage-car my hold-all and suit-case and the British Red Cross lady's hold-all and trunk and Mr. Foster's kit-bag and Dr. Hanson's suit-case with her best clothes and her surgical instruments and the tin—No, not the tin box, for the Commandant, now possessed by a violent demon of hurry, resisted our efforts to drag it from its lair.[38]

All these things were piled on Ursula Dearmer's military scouting-car. The British Red Cross lady (almost incredulous of her good luck) and I got inside it, and Ursula Dearmer and Mr. Riley drove us to the railway station.

By the mercy of Heaven a train was to leave for Boulogne either a little before or a little after one, and we had time to catch it.

There was a long line of refugee bourgeois drawn up before the station doors, and I noticed that every one of them carried in his hand a slip of paper.

Ursula Dearmer hailed a porter, who, she said, would look after us like a father. With a matchless celerity he and Mr. Riley tore down the pile of luggage. The porter put them on a barrow and disappeared with them very swiftly through the station doors.

At least I suppose it was through the doors. All we knew was that he disappeared.

Then Ursula Dearmer handed over to me three cables to be sent from Dunkirk. I said good-bye to her and Mr. Riley. They got back into the motor-car, and they, too, very swiftly disappeared.

Mr. Riley went away bearing with him the baffling mystery of his personality. After nearly three weeks' association with him I know that Mr. Riley's whole heart is in his job of carrying the wounded. Beyond that I know no more of him than on the day when he first turned up before our Committee.

But with Ursula Dearmer it is different. Before the Committee she appeared as a very young girl, docile, diffident, only half-awake, and of dubious efficiency. I remember my solemn pledges to her mother that Ursula Dearmer should not be allowed to go into danger, and how, if danger insisted on coming to her, she should be violently packed up and sent home. I remember thinking what a nuisance Ursula Dearmer will be, and how, when things are just beginning to get interesting, I shall be told off to see her home.

And Ursula Dearmer, the youngest but one, has gone, not at all docilely and diffidently, into the greatest possible danger, and come out of it. And here she is, wide awake and in full command of the Ostend-Dunkirk expedition. And instead of my seeing her off and all the way home, she is very thoroughly and competently seeing me off.

At least this was her beautiful intention.

But getting out of France in war-time is not a simple matter.

When we tried to follow the flight of our luggage through the station door we were stopped by a sentry with a rifle. We produced our passports. They were not enough.

At the sight of us brought to halt there, all the refugees began to agitate their slips of paper. And on the slips we read the words "Laissez-passer."

My British Red Cross lady had no "laissez-passer." I had only my sixteenth part in the "laissez-passer" of the Corps, and that, hidden away in the Commandant's breast-pocket, was a part either of the luncheon-party or of the interview with the Belgian Minister of War.

We couldn't get military passes, for military passes take time; and the train was due in about fifteen minutes.

And the fatherly porter had vanished, taking with him the secret of our luggage.

It was a fatherly old French gentleman who advised us to go to the British Consulat. And it was a fatherly old French cocher who drove us there, or rather who drove us through interminable twisted streets and into blind alleys and out of them till we got there.

As for our luggage, we renounced it and Mr. Foster's and Dr. Hanson's luggage in the interests of our own safety.

At last we got to the British Consulat. Only I think the cocher took us to the Town Hall and the Hospital and the British Embassy and the Admiralty offices first.

At intervals during this transit the British Red Cross lady explained again that she was doing the right thing in leaving Ostend. It wasn't as if she was leaving her post, she was going on a hospital ship. She was sure she had done the right thing.

It was not for me to be unsympathetic to an obsession produced by a retreat, so I assured her again and again that if there ever was a right thing she had done it. My heart bled for this poor lady, abandoned by the organization that had brought her out.

In the courtyard of the Consulat we met a stalwart man in khaki, who smiled as a god might smile at our trouble, and asked us why on earth we hadn't got a passage on the naval transport Victoria, sailing at three o'clock. We said nothing would have pleased us better, only we had never heard of the Victoria and her sailing. And he took us to the Consul, and the Consul—who must have been buried alive in detail—gave us a letter to Captain King of the Victoria, and the cocher drove us to the dock.

Captain King was an angel. He was the head of a whole hierarchy of angels who called themselves ship's officers.

There is no difficulty about our transport. But we must be at the docks by half-past two.

We have an hour before us; so we drive back to the station to see if, after all, we can find that luggage. Not that we in the least expected to find it, for we had been told that it had gone on by the train to Boulogne.

Now the British Red Cross lady declared many times that but for me and my mastery of the French language she would never have got out of Dunkirk. And it was true that I looked on her more as a sacred charge than as a valuable ally in the struggle with French sentries, porters and officials. As for the cocher, I didn't consider him valuable at all, even as the driver of an ancient fiacre. And yet it was the lady and the cocher who found the luggage. It seems that the station hall is open between trains, and they had simply gone into the hall and seen it there, withdrawn bashfully into a corner. The cocher's face as he announces his discovery makes the War seem a monstrous illusion. It is incredible that anything so joyous should exist in a country under German invasion.

We drive again to the Victoria in her dock. The stewards run about and do things for us. They give us lunch. They give us tea. And the other officers come in and make large, simple jokes about bombs and mines and submarines. We have the ship all to ourselves except for a few British soldiers, recruits sent out to Antwerp too soon and sent back again for more training.

They looked, poor boys, far sadder than the Belgian Army.

And I walk the decks; I walk the decks till we get to Dover. My sacred charge appears and disappears. Every now and then I see her engaged in earnest conversation with the ship's officers; and I wonder whether she is telling them that she has not really left her post and that she is sure she has done right. I am no longer concerned about my own post, for I feel so sure that I am going back to it.

To-morrow I shall get the money from our Committee; and on Thursday I shall go back.

And yet—and yet—I must have had a premonition. We are approaching England. I can see the white cliffs.

And I hate the white cliffs. I hate them with a sudden and mysterious hatred.

More especially I hate the cliffs of Dover. For it is there that we must land. I should not have thought it possible to hate the white coast of my own country when she is at war.

And now I know that I hate it because it is not the coast of Flanders. Which would be absurd if I were really going back again.

Yes, I must have had a premonition.

[Dover.]

We have landed now. I have said good-bye to Captain King and all the ship's officers and thanked them for their kindness. I have said good-bye to the British Red Cross lady, who is not going to London.

And I go to the station telegraph-office to send off five wires.

I am sending off the five wires when I hear feet returning through the station hall. The Red Cross lady is back again. She is saying this time that she is really sure she has done the right thing.

And again I assure her that she has.

Well—there are obsessions and obsessions. I do not know whether I have done the right thing or not in leaving Flanders (or, for that matter, in leaving Ghent). All that I know is that I love it and that I have left it. And that I want to go back.



POSTSCRIPT

There have been changes in that Motor Field Ambulance Corps that set out for Flanders on the 25th of September, 1914.

Its Commandant has gone from it to join the Royal Army Medical Corps. A few of the original volunteers have dropped out and others have taken their places, and it is larger now than it was, and better organized.

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

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

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

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

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

And the others, the brave "Chaplain," and "Mr. Riley," and "Mr. Lambert," have also proved themselves.

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

Both at Furnes and Pervyse they worked all night, looking after their wounded; sometimes sleeping on straw in a room shared by the Belgian troops, when there was no other shelter for them in the bombarded town. One of them has driven a heavy ambulance car—in a pitch-black night, along a road raked by shell-fire, and broken here and there into great pits—to fetch a load of wounded, a performance that would have racked the nerves of any male chauffeur ever born. She has driven the same car, alone, with five German prisoners for her passengers. The four women served at Pervyse (the town nearest to the firing-line) in "Mrs. Torrence's" dressing-station—a cellar only twenty yards behind the Belgian trenches. In that cellar, eight feet square and lighted and ventilated only by a slit in the wall, two lived for three weeks, sleeping on straw, eating what they could get, drinking water that had passed through a cemetery where nine hundred Germans are buried. They had to burn candles night and day. Here the wounded were brought as they fell in the trenches, and were tended until the ambulance came to take them to the base hospital at Furnes.

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

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

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

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

M. S.

July 15th, 1915.



THE END



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA



FOOTNOTES:

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 5: Nobody need have been surprised. She had distinguished herself in other wars.]

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

[Footnote 7: I am puzzled about this date. It stands in my ambulance Day-Book as Saturday, 3rd, with a note that the British came into Ghent on their way to Antwerp on the evening of that day. Now I believe there were no British in Antwerp before the evening of Sunday, the 4th, yet "Dr. Wilson" and Mr. Davidson, going into Saint Nicolas before us, saw the British there, and "Mrs. Torrence" and "Janet McNeil" saw more British come into Ghent in the evening. I was ill with fever the day after the run into Antwerp, and got behindhand with my Day-Book. So it seems safest to assume that I made a wrong entry and that we went into Antwerp on Sunday, and to record Saturday's events as spreading over the whole day. Similarly the events that the Day-Book attributes to Monday must have belonged to Tuesday. And if Tuesday's events were really Wednesday's, that clears up a painful doubt I had as to Wednesday, which came into my Day-Book as an empty extra which I couldn't account for in any way. There I was with a day left over and nothing to put into it. And yet Wednesday, the 7th, was the first day of the real siege of Antwerp. On Thursday, the 8th, I started clear.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 14: Every woman did.]

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

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

[Footnote 17: Except that nobody had any time to attend to us, I can't think why we weren't all four of us arrested for spies. We hadn't any business to be looking for the position of the Belgian batteries.]

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

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

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

[Footnote 21: I'm inclined to think it may have been the dogs of Belgium, after all. I can't think where the guns could have been. Antwerp had fallen. It might have been the bombardment of Melle, though.]

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

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

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

[Footnote 23: I record these details (March 11th, 1915) because the Commandant accused me subsequently of a total lack of "balance" upon this occasion.]

[Footnote 24: This is no reflection on Tom's courage. His chief objection was to driving three women so near the German lines. The same consideration probably weighed with the Commandant and M. ——.]

[Footnote 25: The whole thing was a piece of rank insubordination. The Commandant was entirely right to forbid the expedition, and we were entirely wrong in disobeying him. But it was one of those wrong things that I would do again to-morrow.]

[Footnote 26: Antwerp had surrendered on Friday, the 9th.]

[Footnote 27: All the same it was splendidly equipped and managed.]

[Footnote 28: Even now, when I am asked if I did any nursing when I was in Belgium I have to think before I answer: "Only for one morning and one night"—it would still be much truer to say, "I was nursing all the time."]

[Footnote 29: My Day-Book ends abruptly here; and I have no note of the events that followed.]

[Footnote 30: Incorrect. It was, I believe, the uniform of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps.]

[Footnote 31: It was so bad that it made me forget to pack the Commandant's Burberry and his Gillette razors and his pipe.]

[Footnote 32: The Commandant had had an adventure. The Belgian guide mistook the road and brought the car straight into the German lines instead of the British lines where it had been sent. If the Germans hadn't been preoccupied with firing at that moment, the Commandant and Ascot and the Belgian would all have been taken prisoner.]

[Footnote 33: Even now, five months after, I cannot tell whether it was or was not insanity.]

[Footnote 34: It is really dreadful to think of the nuisance we must have been to these dear people on the eve of their own flight.]

[Footnote 35: The Commandant had his own scheme for going back to Ghent, which fortunately he did not carry out.]

[Footnote 36: This girl's courage and self-devotion were enough to establish our innocence—they needed no persuasion. But I still hold myself responsible for her going, since it was my failure to control my obsession that first of all put the idea in her head.]