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.



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.



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.

Henri, our Belgian orderly, has that feeling for us, and we for him. It isn't respect, nor fondness, alone. Companionship meant for him new shirts, dry boots, more chocolate, a daily supply of cigarettes. It meant our seeing the picture of wife and child in Liege, hearing about his home. It was the sharing of danger, the facing together of the horror that underlies life, and which we try to forget in soft peace days. The friendships of war are based on a more fundamental thing than the friendships of safe living. In the supreme experience of motherhood, the woman goes down alone into the place of suffering, leaving the man, however dear, far away. But in this supreme experience of facing death to save life, you go together. The little Belgian soldier is at your side. Together you sit tight under fire, put the bandages on the wounded, and speed back to a safer place.

Once I went to the farthest outpost. A Belgian soldier stepped out of the darkness.

"Come along, miss, I've a good gun. I'll take you."

Walking up the road, not in the middle where machine guns could rake us, but huddled up by the trees at the siding, we went. It will be a different thing to meet him one day in Antwerp, than it will be to greet again the desk-clerk of the La Salle Hotel in Chicago. It lies deeper than doing you favors, and assigning a sunny room.

The men are not impersonal units in an army machine. They become individuals to us, with sharply marked traits. It is impossible to see them as cases. Out of the individuals, we built our types—we constructed our Belgian soldier, out of the hundreds who had told us of their work and home.

"You must have met so many you never came to know their stories."

It was the opposite. Paul Collaer, who played beautifully; Gilson, the mystic; Henri of Liege; the son of Ysaye, they were all clear to us. There was a splendid fat doctor who felt physical fear, but never shirked his job. He used to go and hide behind the barn, with his pipe, till there was work for him. His wasn't the fear that spreads disaster through a crowd. He was fat and funny. A fat man is comfortable to have around, at any time, even when he is unhappy. No one lost respect for this man. Every one enjoyed him thoroughly.

Commandant Gilson of the Belgian army was one of our firm friends. My introduction to him was when I heard a bit of a Liszt rhapsody floating into the kitchen from our piano, the fingers rapid and fluent, and long nails audible on the keys. I remember the first meal with him, a luncheon of fried sardines, fruit cake, bread and cheese. The doctor across the way had sent a bottle of champagne. After luncheon he received word of an attack. He kissed the hand of each of us, said good-by, and went out to clean his gun. We did not think we should see him again. He retook the outpost and had many more meals with us. He would rise from broken English into swift French—stories of the Congo, one night till 2 a.m. Always smoking a cigarette—his mustache sometimes singed from the fire of the diminishing butt. For orderly, he had a black fat Congo boy, in dark blue Belgian uniform, flat-nosed, with wrinkles down the forehead. He was Gilson's man, never looking at him in speaking, and using an open vowel dialect. Before one of the attacks, a soldier came to Gilson with his wife's picture, watch, ring, and money, and his home address.

"I'm not going to come out," said the soldier.

It happened so.

The Commandant's pockets were heavy with these mementoes of the predestined—the letters of boys to their mothers. He had that tenderness and agreeable sentiment which seem to go with bravery. He filled his uniform with souvenirs of pleasant times, a china slipper—our dinner favor to him—a roadside weed, a paper napkin from a happy luncheon—a score or more little pieces of sentimental value. When he went into dangerous action, he never ordered any one to follow him. He called for volunteers, and was grieved that it was the lads of sixteen and seventeen years that were always the first to offer.

We had grown to care for these men. From the first, soldiers of France and Belgium had given us courtesy. In Paris, it was a soldier who stood in line for me, and got the paper. It was a soldier who shared his food and wine on the fourteen-hour trip from Paris to Dieppe—four hours in peace days, fourteen hours in mobilization. It was a soldier who left the car and found out the change of train and the hour—always a soldier who did the helpful thing. It did not require war to create their quality of friendliness and unselfish courtesy.

How could Red Cross work be impersonal? No one would go over to be shot at on an impersonal errand of mercy. You risk yourself for individual men, for men in whose cause you believe. Surely, the loyal brave German women feel as we felt. Red Cross work is not only a service to suffering flesh. It is work to remake a soldier, who will make right prevail. The Red Cross worker is aiming her rifle at the enemy by every bandage she ties on wounded Belgians. She is rebuilding the army. She is as efficient and as deadly as the workman that makes the powder, the chauffeur that drives it to the trench in transports, and the gunner that shoots it into the hostile line. The mother does not extend her motherliness to the destroyer of her family. There is no hater like the mother when she faces that which violates her brood. The same mother instinct makes you take care of your own, and fight for your own. We all of us would go for a Belgian first, and tend to a Belgian first. We would take one of our own by the roadside in preference, if there was room only for one. But if you brought in a German, wounded, he became an individual in need of help. There was a high pride in doing well by him. We would show them of what stuff the Allies were made. Clear of hate and bitterness, we had nothing but good will for the gallant little German boys, who smiled at us from their cots in Furnes hospital. And who could be anything but kindly for the patient German fathers of middle age, who lay in pain and showed pictures of "Frau" and the home country, where some of them would never return. Two or three times, the Queen of the Belgians stopped at our base hospital. She talked with the wounded Germans exactly as she talked to her own Belgians—the same modest courtesy and gift of personal caring.

I think the key to our experience was the mother instinct in the three women. What we tried to do was to make a home out of an emergency station at the heart of war. We took hold of a room knee-high with battered furniture and wet plaster, cleaned it, spread army blankets on springs, found a bowl and jug, and made a den for the chauffeur. In our own room, we arranged an old lamp, then a shade to soften the light. On a mantel, were puttees, cold cream and a couple of books; in the wall, nails for coats and scarfs. The soldiers, entering, said it was homelike. It was a rest after the dreariness of the trench. We brought glass from Furnes, and patched the windows. We dined, slept, lived, and tended wounded men in the one room. In another room, a shell had sprayed the ceiling, so we had to pull the plaster down to the bare lathing. We commandeered a stove from a ruined house. Night after night, we carried a sick man there and had a fire for him. We treated him for a bad throat, and put him to bed. A man dripping from the inundations, we dried out. For a soldier with bruised feet, we prepared a pail of hot water, and gave a thorough soaking.

In the early morning we took down the shutters, carried our own coal, built our own fires, brought water from a ditch, scrubbed table tops and swept the floor, prepared tincture of iodine, the bandages, and cotton wool. We went up the road around 8.30, for the Germans had a habit of shelling at 9 o'clock. Sometimes they broke their rule, and began lopping them in at half-past eight. Then we had to wait till ten. We kept water hot for sterilizing instruments. We sat around, reading, thinking, chatting, letter-writing, waiting for something to happen. There would be long days of waiting. There were days when there was no shelling. Besides the wounded, we had visits from important personages—the Mayor of Paris, the Queen of the Belgians, officers from headquarters, Maxine Elliott. For a very special supper, we would jug a Belgian hare or cook curry and rice, and add beer, jam, and black army bread. An officer gave us an order for one hundred kilos of meat, and we could send daily for it. On Christmas Day, 1914, for eight of us, we had plum puddings, a bottle of port, a bottle of champagne, a tiny pheasant and a small chicken, and a box of candies. We had a steady stream of shells, and a few wounded. It was a day of sunshine on a light fall of snow.

I learned in the Pervyse work that an up-to-date skirt is no good for a man's work. With rain five days out of seven, rubber boots, breeches, raincoat, two pairs of stockings, and three jerseys are the correct costume. We were criticized for going to Dunkirk in breeches. So I put on a skirt one time when I went there for supplies. I fell in alighting from the motor-car, collecting a bigger crowd by sprawling than any of us had collected by our uniform. Later, again in a skirt, I jumped on a military motor-car, and couldn't climb the side. I had to pull my skirt up, and climb over as a man climbs. If women are doing the work of a man, they must have the dress of a man.

That way of dressing and of living released me from the sense of possession, once and for all. When I first went to Belgium with a pair of fleece-lined gloves, I was sure, if I ever lost that pair, that they were irreplaceable. I lost them. I lost article after article, and was freed from the clinging. I lost a pin for the bodice. I left my laundry with a washerwoman. Her village was bombarded, and we had to move on. I lost my kit. A woman has a tie-in with those material things, and the new life brought freedom from that.

I put on a skirt to return to London for a rest. I found there people dressed modishly, and it looked uncomfortable. Styles had been changing: women were in funny shoes and hats. I went wondering that they could dress like that.

And then an overpowering desire for pretty things came on me—for a piece of old lace, a pink ribbon. After sleeping by night in the clothes worn through the day, wearing the same two shirts for four months, no pajamas, no sheets, with spots of grease and blood on all the costume, I had a longing for frivolous things, such as a pink tea gown. Old slippers and a bath and shampoo seemed good. I had a wholesome delight in a modest clean blouse and in buying a new frock.

I returned to Pervyse. The Germans changed their range: an evening, a morning and an afternoon—three separate bombardments with heavy shells. The wounded were brought in. Nearly every one died. We piled them together, anywhere that they wouldn't be tripped over. To the back kitchen we carried the bodies of two boys. One of the orderlies knew them. He went in with us to remove the trinkets from their necks. Every now and then, he went back again, to look at them. They were very beautiful, young, healthy, lying there together in the back kitchen. It was a quiet half hour for us, after luncheon. The doctors and nurses were reading or smoking. I was writing a letter.

A shell drove itself through the back kitchen wall and exploded over the dead boys, bringing rafters and splintered glass and bricks down on them. My pencil slid diagonally across the sheet, and I got up. Our two orderlies and three soldiers rushed in, holding their eyes from the blue fumes of the explosion. When one shell comes, the chances are that it will be followed by three more, aimed at the same place. It had always been my philosophy that it is better to be "pinked" in the house than on the road, but not on this particular day. An army ambulance was standing opposite our door, with its nose turned toward the trenches. The Belgian driver rushed for the door, slammed it shut because of the shells, opened it again. He ran to the car, cranked it, turned it around. We stood in the doorway and waited, watching the shells dropping with a wail, tearing up the road here, then there. After that we moved back to La Panne.



There I stayed on with Miss Georgie Fyfe, who is doing such excellent work among the Belgian refugees. She is chief of the evacuation of civilians who still remain in the bombarded villages and farms. She brings the old and the sick and the children out of shell fire and finds them safe homes. To the Refugee House she takes the little ones to be cared for till there are fifty. Then she sends them to Switzerland, where brothers and sisters are kept unseparated in family groups until the war is over. The Queen busies herself with these children. For the newest generation of Belgians Miss Fyfe has established a Maternity Hospital. Nearly one hundred babies have come to live there.

It was my work to keep track of clothes and supplies. On a flying trip to Paris, I told the American Relief Committee the story of this work, and Geoffrey Dodge sent thirty complete layettes, bran-new, four big cases, four gunny-sack bags, full of clothing for men, women, and children, special brands of milk for young mothers in our maternity hospital. Later, he sent four more sacks and four great wooden cases.

We used to tramp through many fields, over a single plank bridging the ditches, to reach the lonely shelled farm, and persuade the stubborn, unimaginative Flemish parents to give up their children for a safe home. One mother had a yoke around her neck, and two heavy pails.

"When can I send my child?" she asked.

She had already sent two and had received happy letters from them. Other mothers are suspicious of us, and flatly refuse, keeping their children in the danger zone till death comes. During a shelling, the cure would telephone for our ambulance. He would collect the little ones and sick old people. Miss Fyfe could persuade them to come more easily when the shells were falling. At the moment of parting, everybody cries. The children are dressed. The one best thing they own is put on—a pair of shoes from the attic, stiff new shoes, worked on the little feet unused to shoes. Out of a family of ten children we would win perhaps three. Back across the fields they trooped to our car, clean faces, matted dirty hair, their wee bundle tied up in a colored handkerchief, no hats, under the loose dark shirt a tiny Catholic charm. We lifted the little people into the big yellow ambulance—big brother and sister, sitting at the end to pin them in. We carried crackers and chocolate. They are soon happy with the sweets, chattering, enjoying their first motor-car ride, and eager for the new life.



LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE

The boy soldier is willing to make any day his last if it is a good day. It is not so with the middle-aged man. He is puzzled by the war. What he has to struggle with more than bodily weakness is the malady of thought. Is the bloody business worth while?

I SAW him first, my middle-aged man, one afternoon on the boards of an improvised stage in the sand-dunes of Belgium. On that last thin strip of the shattered kingdom English and French and Belgians were grimly massed. He was a Frenchman, and he was cheering up his comrades. With shining black hair and volatile face, he played many parts that day. He recited sprightly verses of Parisian life. He carried on amazing twenty-minute dialogues with himself, mimicking the voice of girl and woman, bully and dandy. His audience had come in stale from the everlasting spading and marching. They brightened visibly under his gaiety. If he cared to make that effort in the saddened place, they were ready to respond. When he dismissed them, the last flash of him was of a smiling, rollicking improvisator, bowing himself over to the applause till his black hair was level with our eyes.

And then next day as I sat in my ambulance, waiting orders, he trudged by in his blue, "the color of heaven" once, but musty now from nights under the rain. His head of hair, which the glossy black wig had covered, was gray-white. The sparkling, pantomimic face had dropped into wrinkles. He was patient and old and tired. Perhaps he, too, would have been glad of some one to cheer him up. He was just one more territorial—trench-digger and sentry and filler-in. He became for me the type of all those faithful, plodding soldiers whose first strength is spent. In him was gathered up all that fatigue and sadness of men for whom no glamour remains.

They went past me every day, hundreds of them, padding down the Nieuport road, their feet tired from service and their boots road-worn—crowds of men beyond numbering, as far as one could see into the dry, volleying dust and beyond the dust; men coming toward me, a nation of them. They came at a long, uneven jog, a cluttered walk. Every figure was sprinkled and encircled by dust—dust on their gray temples, and on their wet, streaming faces, dust coming up in puffs from their shuffling feet, too tired to lift clear of the heavy roadbed. There was a hot, pitiless sun, and every man of them was shrouded in the long, heavy winter coat, as soggy as a horse blanket, and with thick leather gaiters, loose, flapping, swathing their legs as if with bandages. On the man's back was a pack, with the huge swell of the blanket rising up beyond the neck and generating heat-waves; a loaf of tough black bread fastened upon the knapsack or tied inside a faded red handkerchief; and a dingy, scarred tin Billy-can. At his shapeless, rolling waist his belt hung heavy with a bayonet in its casing. On the shoulder rested a dirt-caked spade, with a clanking of metal where the bayonet and the Billy-can struck the handle of the spade. Under a peaked cap showed the bearded face and the white of strained eyes gleaming through dust and sweat. The man was too tired to smile and talk. The weight of the pack, the weight of the clothes, the dust, the smiting sun—all weighted down the man, leaving every line in his body sagging and drooping with weariness.

These are the men that spade the trenches, drive the food-transports and ammunition-wagons, and carry through the detail duties of small honor that the army may prosper. When has it happened before that the older generation holds up the hands of the young? At the western front they stand fast that the youth may go forward. They fill in the shell-holes to make a straight path for less-tired feet. They drive up food to give good heart to boys.

War is easy for the young. The boy soldier is willing to make any day his last if it is a good day. It is not so with the middle-aged man. He is puzzled by the war. What he has to struggle with more than bodily weakness is the malady of thought. Is the bloody business worth while? Is there any far-off divine event which his death will hasten? The wines of France are good wines, and his home in fertile Normandy was pleasant.

As we stood in the street in the sun one hot afternoon, four men came carrying a wounded man. The stretcher was growing red under its burden. The man's face was greenish white, with a stubble of beard. The flesh of his body was as white as snow from loss of blood. It was torn at the chest and sides. They carried him to the dressing-station, and half an hour later lifted him into our car. We carried him in for two miles. Four flies fed on the red rim of his closed left eye. He lay silent, motionless. Only a slight flutter of the coverlet, made by his breathing, gave a sign of life. At the Red Cross post we stopped. The coverlet still slightly rose and fell. The doctor, brown-bearded, in white linen, stepped into the car, tapped the man's wrist, tested his pulse, put a hand over his heart. Then the doctor muttered, drew the coverlet over the greenish-white face, and ordered the marines to remove him. In the moment of arrival the wounded man had died.

In the courtyard next our post two men were carrying in long strips of wood. This wood was for coffins, and one of them would be his.

A funeral passes our car, one every day, sometimes two: a wooden cross in front, carried by a soldier; the white-robed chaplain chanting; the box of light wood, on a frame of black; the coffin draped in the tricolor, a squad of twenty soldiers following the dead. That is the funeral of the middle-aged man. There is no time wasted on him in the brisk business of war; but his comrades bury him. One in particular faithful at funerals I had learned to know—M. Le Doze. War itself is so little the respecter of persons that this man had found himself of value in paying the last small honor to the obscure dead as they were carried from his Red Cross post to the burial-ground. One hopes that he will receive no hasty trench burial when his own time comes.

I cannot write of the middle-aged man of the Belgians because he has been killed. That first mixed army, which in thin line opposed its body to an immense machine, was crushed by weight and momentum. Little is left but a memory. But I shall not forget the veteran officer of the first army, near Lokeren, who kept his men under cover while he ran out into the middle of the road to see if the Uhlans were coming. The only Belgian army today is an army of boys. Recently we had a letter from Andre Simont, of the "Obusiers Lourdes, Beiges," and he wrote:

If you promise me you will come back for next summer, I won't get pinked. If I ever do, it doesn't matter. I have had twenty years of very happy life.

If he were forty-five, he would say, as a French officer at Coxyde said to me:

"Four months, and I haven't heard from my wife and children. We had a pleasant home. I was well to do. I miss the good wines of my cellar. This beer is sour. We have done our best, we French, our utmost, and it isn't quite enough. We have made a supreme effort, but it hasn't cleared the enemy from our country. La guerre—c'est triste."

He, too, fights on, but that overflow of vitality does not visit him, as it comes to the youngsters of the first line. It is easy for the boys of Brittany to die, those sailors with a rifle, the stanch Fusiliers Marins, who, outnumbered, held fast at Melle and Dixmude, and for twelve months made Nieuport, the extreme end of the western battle-line, a great rock. It is easy, because there is a glory in the eyes of boys. But the older man lives with second thoughts, with a subdued philosophy, a love of security. He is married, with a child or two; his garden is warm in the afternoon sun. He turns wistfully to the young, who are so sure, to cheer him. With him it is bloodshed, the moaning of shell-fire, and harsh command.

One afternoon at Coxyde, in the camp of the middle-aged—the territorials—an open-air entertainment was given. Massed up the side of a sand-dune, row on row, were the bearded men, two thousand of them. There were flashes of youth, of course—marines in dark blue, with jaunty round hat with fluffy red centerpiece; Zouaves with dusky Algerian skin, yellow-sorrel jacket, and baggy harem trousers; Belgians in fresh khaki uniform; and Red Cross British Quakers. But the mass of the men were middle-aged—territorials, with the light-blue long-coat, good for all weathers and the sharp night, and the peaked cap. Over the top of the dune where the soldiers sat an observation balloon was suspended in a cloudless blue sky, like a huge yellow caterpillar. Beyond the pasteboard stage, high on a western dune, two sentries stood with their bayonets touched by sunlight. To the south rose a monument to the territorial dead. To the north an aeroplane flashed along the line, full speed, while gun after gun threw shrapnel at it.

As I looked on the people, suddenly I thought of the Sermon on the Mount, with the multitude spread about, tier on tier, hungry for more than bread. It was a scene of summer beauty, with the glory of the sky thrown in, and every now and then the music of the heart. Half the songs of the afternoon were gay, and half were sad with long enduring, and the memory of the dear ones distant and of the many dead. Not in lightness or ignorance were these men making war. When I saw the multitude and how they hungered, I wished that Bernhardt could come to them in the dunes and express in power what is only hinted at by humble voices. I thought how everywhere we wait for some supreme one to gather up the hope of the nations and the anguish of the individual, and make a music that will send us forward to the Rhine.

But a better thing than that took place. One of their own came and shaped their suffering into song. And together, he and they, they made a song that is close to the great experience of war. A Belgian, one of the boy soldiers, came forward to sing to the bearded men. And the song that he sang was "La valse des obus"—"The Dance of the Shells."

"Dear friends, I'm going to sing you some rhymes on the war at the Yser."

The men to whom he was singing had been holding the Yser for ten months.

"I want you to know that life in the trenches, night by night, isn't gay."

Two thousand men, unshaved and tousled, with pain in their joints from those trench nights, were listening.

"As soon as you get there, you must set to work. It doesn't matter whether it's a black night or a full moon; without making a sound, close to the enemy, you must fill the sand-bags for the fortifications."

Every man on the hill had been doing just that thing for a year.

Then came his chorus:

"Every time we are in the trenches, Crack! There breaks the shell."

But his French has a verve that no literal translation will give. Let us take it as he sang it:

"Crack! Il tombe des obus," sang the slight young Belgian, leaning out toward the two thousand men of many colors, many nations; and soon the sky in the north was spotted with white clouds of shrapnel-smoke.

"There we are, all of us, crouching with bent back—Crack! Once more an obus. The shrapnel, which try to stop us at our job, drive us out; but the things that bore us still more—Crack!—are just those obus."

With each "Crack! Il tombe des obus," the big bass-drum boomed like the shell he sang of. His voice was as tense and metallic as a taut string, and he snapped out the lilting line in swift staccato as if he were flaying his audience with a whip. Man after man on the hillside took up the irresistible rhythm in an undertone, and "Cracked" with the singer. In front of me was being created a folk-song. The bitterness and glory of their life were being told to them, and they were hearing the singer gladly. Their leader was lifting the dreary trench night and death itself into a surmounting and joyous thing.

"When you've made your entrenchment, then you must go and guard it without preliminaries. All right; go ahead. But just as you're moving, you have to squat down for a day and a night—yes, for a full twenty-four hours—because things are hot. Somebody gives you half a drop of coffee. Thirst torments you. The powder-fumes choke you."

Here and there in the crowd, listening intently, men were stirring. The lad was speaking to the exact intimate detail of their experience. This was the life they knew. What would he make of it?

"Despite our sufferings, we cherish the hope some day of returning and finding our parents, our wives, and our little ones. Yes, that is my hope, my joyous hope. But to come to that day, so like a dream, we must be of good cheer. It is only by enduring patience, full of confidence, that we shall force back our oppressors. To chase away those cursed Prussians—Crack! We need the obus. My captain calling, 'Crack! More, still more of those obus!' Giving them the bayonet in the bowels, we shall chase them clean beyond the Rhine. And our victory will be won to the waltz of the obus."

It was a song out of the heart of an unconquerable boy. It climbed the hillock to the top. The response was the answer of men moved. His song told them why they fought on. There is a Belgium, not under an alien rule, which the shells have not shattered, and that dear kingdom is still uninvaded. The mother would rather lose her husband and her son than lose the France that made them. Their earthly presence is less precious than the spirit that passed into them out of France. That is why these weary men continue their fight. The issue will rest in something more than a matter of mathematics. It is the last stand of the human spirit.

What is this idea of country, so passionately held, that the women walk to the city gates with son and husband and send them out to die? It is the aspect of nature shared in by folk of one blood, an arrangement of hill and pasture which grew dear from early years, sounds and echoes of sound that come from remembered places. It is the look of a land that is your land, the light that flickers in an English lane, the bells that used to ring in Bruges.

Transcribers note: In the original and html version this poem is centered, in this text is is rendered flat to the margin.



LA VALSE DES OBUS

I

Chers amis, je vais Vous chanter des couplets, Sur la guerre, A l'Yser. Pour vous faire savoir, Que la vie, tous les soirs, Aux tranchees, N'est pas gaie. A peine arrive, 'l Faut aller travailler. Qu'il fasse noir' ou qu'il y ait clair de lune, Et sans fair' du bruit, Nous allons pres de l'ennemi, Remplir des sacs pour fair' des abris.

Ir et IIe Refrain

Chaqu' fois que nous sommes aux tranchees, Crack! Il tombe des obus.

Nous sommes tous la, le dos courbee Crack! Encore un obus. Les shrapnels pour nous divetir, Au travail, nous font deguerpir. Mais, et qui nous ennuie le plus, Crack! se sont les obus.

II

L'abri termine, 'l Faut aller l'occuper, Sans facons. Allez-donc. Pas moyen d' se bouger Donc, on doit y rester Accroupi, Jour et nuit, Pendant la chaleur, Pour passer vingt-quatr' heures. On nous donn' une d'mi gourde de cafe. La soif nous tourmente, Et la poudre asphyxiante, Nous etouffe au dessus du marche.

III

Malgre nos souffrances, Nous gardons l'esperance D' voir le jour, De notr' retour De r'trouver nos parents, Nos femmes et nos enfants. Plein de joie, Oui ma foi, Mais pour arriver, A ce jour tant reve, Nous devons tous y mettre du coeur, C'est avec patience, Et plein de confiance, Que nous repouss'rons les oppresseurs.

Refrain

Pour chasser ces maudits All'mands Crack! Il faut des obus. En plein dedans mon commandant, Crack! Encore des obus. Et la baionnett' dans les reins, Nous les chass'rons au dela du Rhin. La victoire des Allies s'ra due A la valse des obus.



There is little value in telling of suffering unless something can be done about it. So I close this book with an appeal for help in a worthy work.



REMAKING FRANCE

There was a young peasant farmer who went out with his fellows, and stopped the most powerful and perfectly equipped army of history. He saved France, and the cause of gentleness and liberty. He did it by the French blood in him—in gay courage and endurance. He was happy in doing it, or, if not happy, yet glorious. But he paid the price. The enemy artillery sent a splinter of shell that mangled his arm. He lay out through the long night on the rich infected soil. Then the stretcher bearers found him and lifted him to the car, and carried him to the field hospital. There they had to operate swiftly, for infection was spreading. So he was no longer a whole man, but he was still of good spirit, for he had done his bit for France. Then they bore him to a base hospital, where he had white sheets and a wholesome nurse. He lay there weak and content. Every one was good to him. But there came a day when they told him he must leave to make room for the fresher cases of need. So he was turned loose into a world that had no further use for him. A cripple, he couldn't fight and he couldn't work, for his job needed two arms, and he had given one, up yonder on the Marne. He drifted from shop to shop in Paris. But he didn't know a trade. Life was through with him, so one day, he shot himself.

That, we learn from authoritative sources, is the story of more than one broken soldier of Joffre's army.

To be shot clean dead is an easier fate than to be turned loose into life, a cripple, who must beg his way about. Shall these men who have defended France be left to rot? All they ask is to be allowed to work. It is gallant and stirring to fight, and when wounded the soldier is tenderly cared for. But when he comes out, broken, he faces the bitterest thing in war. After the hospital—what? Too bad, he's hurt—but there is no room in the trades for any but a trained man.

Why not train him? Why not teach him a trade? Build a bridge that will lead him from the hospital over into normal life. That is better than throwing him out among the derelicts. Pauperism is an ill reward for the service that shattered him, and it is poor business for a world that needs workers. If these crippled ones are not permitted to reconstruct their working life, the French nation will be dragged down by the multitude of maimed unemployable men, who are being turned loose from the hospitals—unfit to fight, untrained to work: a new and ever-increasing Army of The Miserable. The stout backbone and stanch spirit of even France will be snapped by this dead-weight of suffering.

In our field hospital at Fumes, we had one ward where a wave of gaiety swept the twenty beds each morning. It came when the leg of the bearded man was dressed by the nurse. He thrust it out from under the covering: a raw stump, off above the ankle. It was an old wound, gone sallow with the skin lapped over. The men in the cots close by shouted with laughter at the look of it, and the man himself laughed till he brought pain to the wound. Then he would lay hold of the sides of the bed to control his merriment. The dressing proceeded, with brisk comment from the wardful of men, and swift answers from the patient under treatment. The grim wound had so obviously made an end of the activity of that particular member and, as is war's way, had done it so evilly, with such absence of beauty, that only the human spirit could cover that hurt. So he and his comrades had made it the object of gaiety.

For legless men, there are a dozen trades open, if they are trained. They can be made into tailors, typists, mechanicians. The soldiers' schools, already established, report success in shoemaking, for instance. The director sends us this word:—

"From the first we had foreseen for this the greatest success—the results have surpassed our hopes. We are obliged to double the size of the building, and increase the number of professors.

"Why?

"Because, more than any other profession, that of shoemaking is the most feasible in the country, in the village, in the small hamlet. This is the one desire of most of these wounded soldiers: before everything, they wish to be able to return to their homes. And all the more if a wife and children wait them there, in a little house with a patch of garden. Out of our fifty men now learning shoemaking, twenty-nine were once sturdy farm laborers. The profession is not fatiguing and, in spite of our fears, not one of our leg-amputated men has given up his apprenticeship on account of fatigue or physical inability."

Very many of the soldiers are maimed in hand or arm. On the broad beach of La Panne, in front of the Ocean Hospital of Dr. Depage, a young soldier talked with my wife one afternoon. Early in the war his right arm had been shot through the bicep muscle. He had been sent to London, where a specialist with infinite care linked the nerves together. Daily the wounded boy willed strength into the broken member, till at last he found he could move the little finger. It was his hope to bring action back to the entire hand, finger by finger.

"You can't do anything—you can't even write," they said to him. So he met that, by schooling his left hand to write.

"Your fighting days are over," they said. He went to a shooting gallery, and with his left arm learned how to hold a rifle and aim it. Through the four months of his convalescence he practised to be worthy of the front line. The military authorities could not put up an objection that he did not meet. So he won his way back to the Yser trenches. And there he had received his second hurt and this time the enemy wounded him thoroughly. And now he was sitting on the sands wondering what the future held for him.

Spirit like that does not deserve to be broken by despair. Apparatus has been devised to supply the missing section of the arm, and such a trade as toy-making offers a livelihood. It is carried on with a sense of fun even in the absence of all previous education. One-armed men are largely employed in it. Let us enter the training shop at Lyon, and watch the work. The wood is being shot out from the sawing-machine in thin strips and planed on both sides. This is being done by a man, who used to earn his living as a packer, and suffered an amputation of his right leg. The boards are assembled in thicknesses of twenty, and cut out by a "ribbon saw." This is the occupation of a former tile layer, with his left leg gone. Others employed in the process are one-armed men.

Of carpentry the report from the men is this: "This work seems to generate good humor and liveliness. For this profession two arms are almost necessary. It can be practised by a man whose leg has been amputated, preferably the right leg, for the resting point, in handling the plane, is on the left leg. However, we cannot forget that one-armed men have achieved wonderful results."

The profits of the work are divided in full among the pupils as soon as they have reached the period of production. Each section has its individual fund box. The older members divide among themselves two thirds of the gain. The more recently trained take the remainder. The new apprentices have nothing, because they make no finished product as yet. That was the rule of the shop. But certain sections petitioned that the profits should be equally divided among all, without distinction. They said that among the newcomers there were many as needy as the older apprentices.

The director says:

"This request came from too noble a sentiment not to be granted, especially as in this way we are certain that our pupils will see to the discipline of the workshops, being the first concerned that no one shall shirk."

He adds:

"I wish to cite an incident. One of the pupils of the group of shoemakers, having been obliged to remain over a month in the hospital, had his share fall to nothing. His comrades got together and raised among themselves a sum equal to their earnings, so that his enforced absence would not cause him to suffer any loss. These are features one is happy to note, because they reveal qualities of heart in our pupils, much to be appreciated in those who have suffered, and because they show that our efforts have contributed to keep around them an atmosphere where these qualities can develop."

The war has been ingenious in devising cruel hurts, robbing the painter of his hand, the musician of his arm, the horseman of his leg. It has taken the peasant from his farm, and the mason from his building. Their suffering has enriched them with the very quality that will make them useful citizens, if they can be set to work, if only some one will show them what to do. For each of these men there is an answer for his wrecked life, and the answer is found in these workshops where disabled soldiers can learn the new trade fitted to their crippled condition.

It costs only four to five francs a day to support the man during his period of education. The length of time of his tuition depends on the man and his trade—sometimes three months, sometimes six months. One hundred dollars will meet the average of all cases. The Americans in Paris raised $20,000 immediately on learning of this need. In our country we are starting the "American Committee for Training in Suitable Trades the Maimed Soldiers of France." Mrs. Edmund Lincoln Baylies is chairman for the United States. Her address is Room B, Plaza Hotel, New York.

We have been owing France through a hundred years for that little matter of first aid in our American Revolution. Here is an admirable chance to show we are still warmed by the love and succor she rendered us then.

At this moment 30,000 maimed soldiers are asking for work; 30,000 jobs are ready for them. The employers of France are holding the positions open, because they need these workers. Only the training is lacking. This society to train maimed soldiers is not in competition with any existing form of relief work: it supplements all the others—ambulances and hospitals and dressing stations. They are temporary, bridging the month of calamity. This gives back to the men the ten, twenty, thirty years of life still remaining. They must not remain the victims of their own heroism. They ask only to be permitted to go on with their work for France. They will serve in the shop and the factory as they have served at the Aisne and the Yser. This is a charity to do away with the need of charity. It is help that leads directly to self-help.

THE END



FOOTNOTES

[A] When I first published these statements the following letter appeared in the "New York Tribune":—

GERMANY'S SPY SYSTEM

To the Editor of "The Tribune."

Sir: I was particularly interested in the article by Mr. Gleason in this morning's "Tribune" because, having spent several months in this region in ambulance work, I am able to support several of his statements from personal observation.

The house he mentions on the beach near Coxyde Bains was beyond doubt intended for the purpose he describes. I visited it several times before it was completely destroyed, and have now in my possession photographs which show the nature of the building, besides a tile from the flooring.

Two instances in which spies were detected came to my knowledge; in one case the person in question was the mayor of the town, in the other a peasant woman. One other time I know of information was given undetected which resulted in the shelling of a road at a time when a convoy of motors was about to pass.

The high esteem in which the Red Cross flag is held by German gunners (as a target) is only too forcibly impressed upon one in that service.

MALCOLM T. ROBERTSON.

Mr. Robertson is a member of the Junior Class in Princeton University.

[B] When this record was first made public the "New York Tribune" stated editorially:—

"The writer of the foregoing communication was for several years a member of 'The Tribune' staff. For the utter trustworthiness of any statement made by Mr. Gleason, this newspaper is willing to vouch. Mr. Gleason was at the front caring for the Belgian wounded. He speaks with full knowledge and complete authority and 'The Tribune' is glad to be able to submit to its readers a first-hand, eye-witness account of atrocities written by an American. It calls attention again to the fact, cited by Mr. Gleason, that his testimony is included in the Bryce Report, which should give Americans new insight into the value of this document."

When Theodore Roosevelt read this record of German atrocity, he made the following public statement:

"Remember, there is not the slightest room for honest question either as to the dreadful, the unspeakably hideous, outrages committed on the Belgians, or as to the fact that these outrages were methodically committed by the express command of the German Government in order to terrorize both the Belgians and among neutrals those men who are as cold and timid and selfish as our governmental leaders have shown themselves to be. Let any man who doubts read the statement of an American eye-witness of these fearful atrocities, Mr. Arthur H. Gleason, in the 'New York Tribune' of November 25, 1915."

From the Bryce Report, English edition, Page 167.

British subject:—

"The girl was at the point of death. Mr. G—— was with me and can corroborate me as to this and also as to the other facts mentioned below. On the same day at the same place I saw one L. de M——. I took this statement from him.... He signed his statement in my pocket book, and I hold my pocket book at the disposal of the Belgian and English authorities.

"I also saw at the hospital an old woman of eighty who was run clean through by a bayonet thrust.

"I next went up to another wounded Belgian in the same ward. His name was F. M——. I wrote his statement in my pocket book and he signed it after having read it."

The full statement in the Bryce Report of the atrocities which I witnessed covers a page. The above sentences are extracts. Mr. Niemira had neglected to make a note of the exact date in his pocket book, and calls it "about the 15th of September." It was September 29.

[C] If any one wants a history of them, and the world ought to want it, the book of their acts, is it not written in singing prose in Le Goffic's "Dixmude, un Chapitre de l'histoire des Fusiliers Marins"? Le Goffic is a Breton and his own son is with the fighting sailors. He deals with their autumn exploits in Dixmude on the Yser, that butt-end of wreck. Legends will spring out of them and the soil they have reddened. We have heard little of the French in this war—and almost nothing at all from them. And yet it is the French that have held the decisive battle line. Unprepared and peace-loving, they have stood the shock of a perfectly equipped and war-loving army.

Monsieur Le Goffic is the official historian of the Fusiliers Marins. His book has gone through forty-nine editions. He is a poet, novelist and critic. That American sympathy is appreciated is proved by this sentence from a letter of Le Goffic to an American who had expressed admiration for the Breton sailors:—"Merci, Monsieur, au nom de mon pays, merci pour nos marins, et merci pour moi meme."

THE END