"Canada has been wonderful," she said. "They are doing everything."

The ready response of Canada to the demand for both troops and supplies appeared to have touched Her Majesty. She spoke at length about the troops, the distance they had come, the fine appearance the men made, and their popularity with the crowds when they paraded on the streets of London. I had already noticed this. A Canadian regiment was sure to elicit cheers at any time, although London, generally speaking, has ceased any but silent demonstration over the soldiers.

"Have you seen any of the English hospitals on the Continent?" the Queen asked.

"I have seen a number, Your Majesty,"

"Do they seem well supplied?"

I replied that they appeared to be thoroughly equipped, but that the amount of supplies required w&s terrifying and that at one time some of the hospitals had experienced difficulty in securing what they needed.

"One hospital in Calais," I said, "received twelve thousand pairs of bed socks in one week last autumn, and could not get a bandage."

"Those things happened early in the war. We are doing much better now. England had not expected war. We were totally unprepared."

And in the great analysis that is to come, that speech of the Queen of England is the answer to many questions. England had not expected war. Every roll of the drum as the men of the new army march along the streets, every readjustment necessary to a peaceful people suddenly thrust into war, every month added to the length of time it has taken to put England in force into the field, shifts the responsibility to where it belongs. Back of all fine questions of diplomatic negotiation stands this one undeniable fact. To deny it is absurd; to accept it is final.

"What is your impression of the French and Belgian hospitals?" Her Majesty inquired.

I replied that none were so good as the English, that France had always depended on her nuns in such emergencies, and, there being no nuns in France now, her hospital situation was still not good.

"The priests of Belgium are doing wonderful work," I said. "They have suffered terribly during the war."

"It is very terrible," said Her Majesty. "Both priests and nuns have suffered, as England has reason to know."

The Queen spoke of the ladies connected with the Guild.

"They are really much overworked," she said. "They are giving all their time day after day. They are splendid. And many of them, of course, are in great anxiety."

Already, by her tact and her simplicity of manner, she had put me at my ease. The greatest people, I have found, have this quality of simplicity. When she spoke of the anxieties of her ladies, I wished that I could have conveyed to her, from so many Americans, their sympathy in her own anxieties, so keen at that time, so unselfishly borne. But the lady-in-waiting was speaking:

"Please tell the Queen about your meeting with King Albert."

So I told about it. It had been unconventional, and the recital amused Her Majesty. It was then that I realised how humorous her mouth was, how very blue and alert her eyes. I told it all to her, the things that insisted on slipping off my lap, and the King's picking them up; the old envelope he gave me on which to make notes of the interview; how I had asked him whether he would let me know when the interview was over, or whether I ought to get up and go! And finally, when we were standing talking before my departure, how I had suddenly remembered that I was not to stand nearer to His Majesty than six feet, and had hastily backed away and explained, to his great amusement.

Queen Mary laughed. Then her face clouded.

"It is all so very tragic," she said. "Have you seen the Queen?"

I replied that the Queen of the Belgians had received me a few days after my conversation with the King.

"She is very sad," said Her Majesty. "It is a terrible thing for her, especially as she is a Bavarian by birth."

From that to the ever-imminent subject of the war itself was but a step. An English officer had recently made a sensational escape from a German prison camp, and having at last got back to England, had been sent for by the King. With the strange inconsistencies that seem to characterise the behaviour of the Germans, the man to whom he had surrendered after a gallant defence had treated him rather well. But from that time on his story was one of brutalities and starvation.

The officer in question had told me his story, and I ventured to refer to it Her Majesty knew it quite well, and there was no mistaking the grief in her Voice as she commented on it, especially on that part of it which showed discrimination against the British prisoners. Major V—— had especially emphasised the lack of food for the private soldiers and the fearful trials of being taken back along the lines of communication, some fifty-two men being locked in one of the small Continental box cars which are built to carry only six horses. Many of them were wounded. They were obliged to stand, the floor of the car being inches deep with filth. For thirty hours they had no water and no air, and for three days and three nights no food.

"I am to publish Major V——'s statement in America, Your Majesty," I said.

"I think America should know it," said the Queen. "It is most unjust. German prisoners in England are well cared for. They are well fed, and games and other amusements are provided for them. They even play football!"

I stepped back as Her Majesty prepared to continue her visit round the long room. But she indicated that I was to accompany her. It was then that one realised that the Queen of England is the intensely practical daughter of a practical mother. Nothing that is done in this Guild, the successor of a similar guild founded by the late Duchess of Teck, Her Majesty's mother, escapes her notice. No detail is too small if it makes for efficiency. She selected at random garments from the tables, and examined them for warmth, for quality, for utility.

Generally she approved. Before a great heap of heavy socks she paused.

"The soldiers like the knitted ones, we are told," she said. "These are not all knitted but they are very warm."

A baby sweater of a hideous yellow roused in her something like wrath.

"All that labour!" she said, "and such a colour for a little baby!" And again, when she happened on a pair of felt slippers, quite the largest slippers I have ever seen, she fell silent in sheer amazement. They amused her even while they shocked her. And again, as she smiled, I regretted that the photographs of the Queen of England may not show her smiling.

A small canvas case, skilfully rolled and fastened, caught Her Majesty's attention. She opened it herself and revealed with evident pride its numerous contents. Many thousands of such cases had already been sent to the army.

This one was a model of packing. It contained in its small compass an extraordinary number of things—changes of under flannels, extra socks, an abdominal belt, and, in an inclosure, towel, soap, toothbrush, nailbrush and tooth powder. I am not certain, but I believe there was also a pack of cards.

"I am afraid I should never be able to get it all back again!" said Her Majesty. So one of the ladies took it in charge, and the Queen went on.

My audience was over. As Her Majesty passed me she held out her hand. I took it and curtsied.

"Were you not frightened the night you were in the Belgian trenches?" she inquired.

"Not half so frightened as I was this afternoon, Your Majesty," I replied.

She passed on, smiling.

* * * * *

And now, when enough time has elapsed to give perspective to my first impression of Queen Mary of England, I find that it loses nothing by this supreme test. I find that I remember her, not as a great Queen but as a gracious and kindly woman, greatly beloved by those of her immediate circle, totally without arrogance, and of a simplicity of speech and manner that must put to shame at times those lesser lights that group themselves about a throne.

I find another impression also—that the Queen of England is intensely and alertly mental—alive to her finger tips, we should say in America. She has always been active. Her days are crowded. A different type of royal woman would be content to be the honoured head of the Queen's Guild. But she is in close touch with it at all times. It is she who dictates its policy, and so competently that the ladies who are associated with the work that is being done speak of her with admiration not unmixed with awe.

From a close and devoted friend of Queen Mary I obtained other characteristics to add to my picture: That the Queen is acutely sensitive to pain or distress in others—it hurts her; that she is punctual—and this not because of any particular sense of time but because she does not like to keep other people waiting. It is all a part of an overwhelming sense of that responsibility to others that has its origin in true kindliness.

The work of the Queen's Guild is surprising in its scope. In a way it is a vast clearing house. Supplies come in from every part of the world, from India, Ceylon, Java, Alaska, South America, from the most remote places. I saw the record book. I saw that a woman from my home city had sent cigarettes to the soldiers through the Guild, that Africa had sent flannels! Coming from a land where the sending, as regards Africa, is all the other way, I found this exciting. Indeed, the whole record seems to show how very small the earth is, and how the tragedy of a great war has overcome the barriers of distance and time and language.

From this clearing house in England's historic old palace, built so long ago by Bluff King Hal, these offerings of the world are sent wherever there is need, to Servia, to Egypt, to South and East Africa, to the Belgians. The work was instituted by the Queen the moment war broke out, and three things are being very carefully insured: That a real want exists, that the clothing reaches its proper destination, and that there shall be no overlapping.

The result has been most gratifying to the Queen, but it was difficult to get so huge a business—for, as I have already said, it is a business now—under way at the beginning. Demand was insistent. There was no time to organise a system in advance. It had to be worked out in actual practice.

One of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting wrote in February, apropos of the human element in the work:

"There was a great deal of human element in the start with its various mistakes. The Queen wished, on the breaking out of war, to start the Guild in such a way as to prevent the waste and overlapping which occurred in the Boer War.... The fact that the ladies connected with the work have toiled daily and unceasingly for seven months is the most wonderful part of it all."

Before Christmas nine hundred and seventy thousand belts and socks were collected and sent as a special gift to the soldiers at the front, from the Queen and the women of the empire. That in itself is an amazing record of efficiency.

It is rather comforting to know that there were mistakes in the beginning. It is so human. It is comforting to think of this exceedingly human Queen being a party to them, and being divided between annoyance and mirth as they developed. It is very comforting also to think that, in the end, they were rectified.

We had a similar situation during our Civil War. There were mistakes then also, and they too were rectified. What the heroic women of the North and South did during that great conflict the women of Great Britain are doing to-day. They are showing the same high and courageous spirit, the same subordination of their personal griefs to the national cause, the same cheerful relinquishment of luxuries. It is a United Britain that confronts the enemy in France. It is a united womanhood, united in spirit, in labour, in faith and high moral courage, that looks east across the Channel to that land beyond the horizon, "somewhere in France," where the Empire is fighting for life.

A united womanhood, and at its head a steadfast and courageous Queen and mother, Mary of England.



CHAPTER XXXII

THE QUEEN OF THE BELGIANS

On the third of August, 1914, the German Army crossed the frontier into Belgium. And on the following day, the fourth, King Albert made his now famous speech to the joint meeting of the Belgian Chamber and Senate. Come what might, the Belgian people would maintain the freedom that was their birthright.

"I have faith in our destinies," King Albert concluded. "A country which defends itself wins respect and cannot perish."

With these simple and dignified words Belgium took up the struggle. She was beaten before she began, and she knew it. No matter what the ultimate out-come of the war, she must lose. The havoc would be hers. The old battleground of Europe knew what war meant; no country in the world knew better. And, knowing, Belgium took up the burden.

To-day, Belgium is prostrate. That she lives, that she will rise again, no Belgian doubts. It may be after months—even after years; but never for a moment can there be any doubt of the national integrity. The Germans are in Belgium, but not of it. Belgium is still Belgium—not a part of the German Empire. Until the Germans are driven out she is waiting.

As I write this, one corner of her territory remains to her, a wedge-shaped piece, ten miles or so in width at the coast, narrowing to nothing at a point less than thirty miles inland. And in that tragic fragment there remains hardly an undestroyed town. Her revenues are gone, being collected as an indemnity, for God knows what, by the Germans. King Albert himself has been injured. The Queen of the Belgians has pawned her jewels. The royal children are refugees in England. Two-thirds of the army is gone. And, of even that tiny remaining corner, much is covered by the salt floods of the sea.

The King of the Belgians is often heard of. We hear of him at the head of his army, consulting his staff, reviewing his weary and decimated troops. We know his calibre now, both as man and soldier. He stands out as one of the truly heroic figures of the war.

But what of the Bavarian-born Queen of the Belgians? What of this royal woman who has lost the land of her nativity through the same war that has cost her the country of her adoption; who must see her husband go each day to the battle line; who must herself live under the shadow of hostile aeroplanes, within earshot of the enemy's guns? What was she thinking of during those fateful hours when, all night long, King Albert and his Ministers debated the course of Belgium—a shameful immunity, or a war? What does she think now, when, before the windows of her villa at La Panne, the ragged and weary remnant of the brave Belgian Army lines up for review? What does she hope for and pray for—this Queen without a country?

What she thinks we cannot know. What she hopes for we may guess—the end of war; the return of her faithful people to their homes; the reunion of families; that the guns will cease firing, so the long lines of ambulances will no longer fill the roads; that the wounded will recover; and that those that grieve may be comforted.

She has pawned her jewels. When I saw her she wore a thin gold chain round her neck, and on it a tiny gold heart. I believe she has sacrificed everything else. Royal jewels have been pawned before this—to support extravagant mistresses or to bolster a crumbling throne; but Elisabeth of Belgium has pawned her jewels to buy supplies for wounded soldiers. Battle-scarred old Belgium has not always had a clean slate; but certainly this act of a generous and devoted queen should mark off many scores.

The Queen is living at La Panne, a tiny fishing village and resort on the coast—an ugly village, robbed of quaintness by its rows of villas owned by summer visitors. The villas are red and yellow brick, built chateau fashion and set at random on the sand. Efforts at lawns have proved abortive. The encroaching dunes gradually cover the grass. Here and there are streets; and there is one main thoroughfare, along which is a tramway that formerly connected the town with other villages.

On one side the sea; on the other the dunes, with little shade and no beauty—such is the location of the new capital of Belgium. And here, in one of the six small villas that house the court, the King and Queen of Belgium, with the Crown Prince, are living. They live very quietly, walking together along the sands at those times when King Albert is not with his troops, faring simply, waiting always—as all Belgium is waiting to-day. Waiting for the end of this terrible time.

I asked a member of the royal household what they did during those long winter evenings, when the only sounds in the little village were the wash of the sea and the continual rumble of the artillery at Nieuport.

"What can we do?" he replied. "My wife and children are in Brussels. It is not possible to read, and it is not wise to think too much. We wait."

But waiting does not imply inaction. The members of His Majesty's household are all officers in the army. I saw only one gentleman in civilian dress, and he was the King's secretary, M. Ingenbleek. The King heads this activity, and the Queen of the Belgians is never idle. The Ocean Ambulance, the great Belgian base hospital, is under her active supervision, and its location near the royal villa makes it possible for her to visit it daily. She knows the wounded soldiers, who adore her. Indeed, she is frankly beloved by the army. Her appearance is always the signal for a demonstration; and again and again I saw copies of her photograph nailed up in sentry huts, in soldiers' billets, in battered buildings that were temporary headquarters for divisions of the army.

In return for this devotion the young Queen regards the welfare of the troops as her especial charge. She visits them when they are wounded, and many tales are told of her keen memory for their troubles. One, a wounded Frenchman, had lost his pipe when he was injured. As he recovered he mourned his pipe. Other pipes were offered, but they were not the same. There had been something about the curve of the stem of the old one, or the shape of the bowl—whatever it was, he missed it. And it had been his sole possession.

At last the Queen of the Belgians had him describe the old pipe exactly. I believe he made a drawing—and she secured a duplicate of it for him. He told me the story himself.

The Queen had wished to go to the trenches to see the wretchedness of conditions at the front, and to discover what she could do to ameliorate them. One excursion she had been permitted at the time I saw her, to the great anxiety of those who knew of the trip. She was quite fearless, and went into one of the trenches at the railroad embankment of Pervyse. I saw that trench afterward. It was proudly decorated with a sign that said: Repose de la Reine. And above the board was the plaster head of a saint, from one of the churches. Both sign and head, needless to say, were carefully protected from German bullets.

Everywhere I went I found evidences of devotion to this girlish and tender-hearted Queen. I was told of her farewell to the leading officials of the army and of the court, when, having remained to the last possible moment, King Albert insisted on her departure from Brussels. I was told of her incognito excursions across the dangerous Channel to see her children in England. I was told of her single-hearted devotion to the King; her belief in him; her confidence that he can do no wrong.

So, when a great and bearded individual, much given to bowing, presented himself at the door of my room in the hotel at Dunkirk, and extended to me a notification that the Queen of the Belgians would receive me the next day at the royal villa at La Panne, I was keenly expectant.

I went over my wardrobe. It was exceedingly limited and more than a little worn. Furs would cover some of the deficiencies, but there was a difficulty about shoe buttons. Dunkirk apparently laces its shoes. After a period of desperation, two top buttons were removed and sewed on lower down, where they would do the most good. That and much brushing was all that was possible, my total war equipment comprising one small suitcase, two large notebooks and a fountain pen.

I had been invited to lunch at a town on my way to La Panne, but the luncheon was deferred. When I passed through my would-be entertainer was eating bully beef out of a tin, with a cracker or two; and shells were falling inhospitably. Suddenly I was not hungry. I did not care for food. I did not care to stop to talk about food. It was a very small town, and there were bricks and glass and plaster in the streets. There were almost no people, and those who were there were hastily preparing for flight.

It was a wonderful Sunday afternoon, brilliantly sunny. A German aeroplane hung overhead and called the bull's-eyes. From the plain near they were firing at it, but the shells burst below. One could see how far they fell short by the clouds of smoke that hung suspended beneath it, floating like shadowy balloons.

I felt that the aeroplane had its eyes on my car. They drop darts—do the aeroplanes—two hundred and more at a time; small pencil-shaped arrows of steel, six inches long, extremely sharp and weighted at the point end. I did not want to die by a dart. I did not want to die by a shell. As a matter of fact, I did not want to die at all.

So the car went on; and, luncheonless, I met the Queen of the Belgians.

The royal villa at La Panne faces the sea. It is at the end of the village and the encroaching dunes have ruined what was meant to be a small lawn. The long grass that grows out of the sand is the only vegetation about it; and outside, half-buried in the dune, is a marble seat. A sentry box or two, and sentries with carbines pacing along the sand; the constant swish of the sea wind through the dead winter grass; the half-buried garden seat—that is what the Queen of the Belgians sees as she looks from the window of her villa.

The villa itself is small and ugly. The furnishing is the furnishing of a summer seaside cottage. The windows fit badly and rattle in the gale. In the long drawing room—really a living room—in which I waited for the Queen, a heavy red curtain had been hung across the lower part of the long French windows that face the sea, to keep out the draft. With that and an open coal fire the room was fairly comfortable.

As I waited I looked about. Rather a long room this, which has seen so many momentous discussions, so much tragedy and real grief. A chaotic room too; for, in addition to its typical villa furnishing of chintz-covered chairs and a sofa or two, an ordinary pine table by a side window was littered with papers.

On a centre table were books—H.G. Wells' "The War in the Air"; two American books written by correspondents who had witnessed the invasion of Belgium; and several newspapers. A hideous marble bust on a pedestal occupied a corner, and along a wall was a very small cottage piano. On the white marble mantel were a clock and two candlesticks. Except for a great basket of heather on a stand—a gift to Her Majesty—-the room was evidently just as its previous owners had left it. A screen just inside the door, a rather worn rug on the floor, and a small brocade settee by the fireplace completed the furnishing.

The door opened and the Queen entered without ceremony. I had not seen her before. In her simple blue dress, with its white lawn collar and cuffs, she looked even more girlish than I had anticipated. Like Queen Mary of England, she had suffered from the camera. She is indeed strikingly beautiful, with lovely colouring and hair, and with very direct wide eyes, set far apart. She is small and slender, and moves quickly. She speaks beautiful English, in that softly inflected voice of the Continent which is the envy of all American women.

I bowed as she entered; and she shook hands with me at once and asked me to sit down. She sat on the sofa by the fireplace. Like the Queen of England, like King Albert, her first words were of gratitude to America.

It is not my intention to record here anything but the substance of my conversation with Queen Elisabeth of Belgium. Much that was said was the free and unrestricted speech of two women, talking over together a situation which was tragic to them both; for Queen Elisabeth allowed me to forget, as I think she had ceased to remember, her own exalted rank, in her anxiety for her people.

A devoted churchwoman, she grieved over the treatment accorded by the invading German Army to the priests and nuns of Belgium. She referred to her own Bavarian birth, and to the confidence both King Albert and she had always felt in the friendliness of Germany.

"I am a Bavarian," she said. "I have always, from my childhood, heard this talk that Germany must grow, must get to the sea. I thought it was just talk—a pleasantry!"

She had seen many of the diaries of German soldiers, had read them in the very room where we were sitting. She went quite white over the recollection and closed her eyes.

"It is the women and children!" she said. "It is terrible! There must be killing. That is war. But not this other thing."

And later on she said, in reference to German criticism of King Albert's course during the early days of the war:

"Any one who knows the King knows that he cannot do a wrong thing. It is impossible for him. He cannot go any way but straight."

And Queen Elisabeth was right. Any one who knows King Albert of Belgium knows that "he cannot go any way but straight."

The conversation shifted to the wounded soldiers and to the Queen's anxiety for them. I spoke of her hospital as being a remarkable one—practically under fire, but moving as smoothly as a great American institution, thousands of miles from danger. She had looked very sad, but at the mention of the Ocean Ambulance her face brightened. She spoke of its equipment; of the difficulty in securing supplies; of the new surgery, which has saved so many limbs from amputation. They were installing new and larger sterilisers, she said.

"Things are in as good condition as can be expected now," she said. "The next problem will come when we get back into our own country. What are the people to do? So many of the towns are gone; so many farms are razed!"

The Queen spoke of Brand Whitlock and praised highly his work in Brussels. From that to the relief work was only a step. I spoke of the interest America was taking in the relief work, and of the desire of so many American women to help.

"We are grateful for anything," she said. "The army seems to be as comfortable as is possible under the circumstances; but the people, of course, need everything."

Inevitably the conversation turned again to the treatment of the Belgian people by the Germans; to the unnecessary and brutal murders of noncombatants; to the frightful rapine and pillage of the early months of the war. Her Majesty could not understand the scepticism of America on this point. I suggested that it was difficult to say what any army would do when it found itself in a prostrate and conquered land.

"The Belgian Army would never have behaved so," said Her Majesty. "Nor the English; nor the French. Never!"

And the Queen of the Belgians is a German! True, she has suffered much. Perhaps she is embittered; but there was no bitterness in her voice that afternoon in the little villa at La Panne—only sadness and great sorrow and, with it, deep conviction. What Queen Elisabeth of Belgium says, she believes; and who should know better? There, to that house on the sea front, in the fragment of Belgium that remains, go all the hideous details that are war. She knows them all. King Albert is not a figure-head; he is the actual fighting head of his army. The murder of Belgium has been done before his very eyes.

In those long evenings when he has returned from headquarters; when he and Queen Elisabeth sit by the fire in the room that overlooks the sea; when every blast that shakes the windows reminds them both of that little army, two-thirds gone, shivering in the trenches only a mile or two away, or of their people beyond the dead line, suffering both deprivation and terror—what pictures do they see in the glowing coals?

It is not hard to know. Queen Elisabeth sees her children, and the puzzled, boyish faces of those who are going down to the darkness of death that another nation may find a place in the sun.

What King Albert sees may not all be written; but this is certain: Both these royal exiles—this Soldier-King who has won and deserved the admiration of the world; this Queen who refuses to leave her husband and her wounded, though day after day hostile aeroplanes are overhead and the roar of German guns is in her ears—these royal exiles live in hope and in deep conviction. They will return to Belgium. Their country will be theirs again. Their houses will be restored; their fields will be sown and yield harvest—not for Germany, but for Belgium. Belgium, as Belgium, will live again!



CHAPTER XXXIII

THE RED BADGE OF MERCY

Immediately on the declaration of war by the Powers the vast machinery of mercy was put in the field. The mobilisation of the Red Cross army began—that great army which is of no nation, but of all nations, of no creed but of all faiths, of one flag for all the world and that flag the banner of the Crusaders.

The Red Cross is the wounded soldier's last defence. Worn as a brassard on the left arm of its volunteers, it conveys a higher message than the Victoria Cross of England, the Iron Cross of Germany, or the Cross of the Legion of Honour of France. It is greater than cannon, greater than hate, greater than blood-lust, greater than vengeance. It triumphs over wrath as good triumphs over evil. Direct descendant of the cross of the Christian faith, it carries on to every battlefield the words of the Man of Peace: "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy."

* * * * *

The care of the wounded in war has been the problem of the ages. Richard the Lion-Hearted took a hospital ship to the coast of Palestine. The German people of the Middle Ages had their wounded in battle treated by their wives, who followed the army for that purpose. It remained for Frederick the First of Prussia to establish a military service in connection with a standing army.

With the invention of firearms battlefield surgery faced new problems, notably hemorrhage, and took a step forward to meet these altered conditions. It was a French surgeon who solved the problem of hemorrhage by tying the torn blood vessels above the injury. To England goes the credit for the prevention of sepsis, as far as it may be prevented on a battlefield.

As far as it may be prevented on a battlefield! For that is the question that confronts the machinery of mercy to-day. Transportation to the hospitals has been solved, to a large extent, by motor ambulances, by hospital trains, by converted channel steamers connecting the Continent with England. Hospitals in the western field of war are now plentiful and some are well equipped. The days of bedding wounded men down on straw are largely in the past, but how to prevent the ravages of dirt, the so-called "dirt diseases" of gaseous gangrene, blood poisoning, tetanus, is the problem.

I did not see the first exchange of hopelessly wounded prisoners that took place at Flushing, while I was on the Continent. It must have been a tragic sight. They lined up in two parties at the railroad station, German surgeons and nurses with British prisoners, British surgeons and nurses with German prisoners.

Then they were counted off, I am told. Ten Germans came forward, ten British, in wheeled chairs, on crutches, the sightless ones led. The exchange was made. Then ten more, and so on. What a sight! What a horror! No man there would ever be whole again. There were men without legs, without arms, blind men, men twisted by fearful body wounds. Two hundred and sixteen British officers and men, and as many Germans, were exchanged that day.

"They were, however, in the best of spirits," said the London Times of the next day!

At Folkestone a crowd was waiting on the quay, and one may be sure that heads were uncovered as the men limped, or were led or wheeled, down the gang-plank. Kindly English women gave them nosegays of snowdrops and violets.

And then they went on—to what? For a few weeks, or months, they will be the objects of much kindly sympathy. In the little towns where they live visitors will be taken to see them. The neighbourhood will exert itself in kindness. But after a time interest will die away, and besides, there will be many to divide sympathy. The blind man, or the man without a leg or an arm, will cease to be the neighbourhood's responsibility and will become its burden.

What then? For that is the problem that is facing each nation at war—to make a whole life out of a fragment, to teach that the spirit may be greater than the body, to turn to usefulness these sad and hopeless by-products of battlefields.

The ravages of war—to the lay mind—consist mainly of wounds. As a matter of fact, they divide themselves into several classes, all different, all requiring different care, handling and treatment, and all, in their several ways, dependent for help on the machinery of mercy. In addition to injuries on the battlefield there are illnesses contracted on the field, septic conditions following even slight abrasions or minor wounds, and nervous conditions—sometimes approximating a temporary insanity—due to prolonged strain, to incessant firing close at hand, to depression following continual lack of success, to the sordid and hideous conditions of unburied dead, rotting in full view for weeks and even months.

During the winter frozen feet, sometimes requiring amputation, and even in mild cases entailing great suffering, took thousands of men out of the trenches. The trouble resulted from standing for hours and even days in various depths of cold water, and was sometimes given the name "waterbite." Soldiers were instructed to rub their boots inside and out with whale oil, and to grease their feet and legs. Unluckily, only fortunately situated men could be so supplied, and the suffering was terrible. Surgeons who have observed many cases of both frost and water bite say that, curiously enough, the left foot is more frequently and seriously affected than the right. The reason given is that right-handed men automatically use the right foot more than the left, make more movements with it. The order to remove boots twice a day, for a few moments while in the trenches, had a beneficial effect among certain battalions.

The British soldier who wraps tightly a khaki puttee round his leg and thus hampers circulation has been a particular sufferer from frostbite in spite of the precaution he takes to grease his feet and legs before going into the trenches.

The presence of septic conditions has been appalling.

This is a dirty war. Men are taken back to the hospitals in incredible states of filth. Their stiffened clothing must frequently be cut off to reveal, beneath, vermin-covered bodies. When the problem of transportation is a serious one, as after a great battle, men must lie in sheds or railway stations, waiting their turn. Wounds turn green and hideous. Their first-aid dressing, originally surgically clean, becomes infected. Lucky the man who has had a small vial of iodine to pour over the gaping surface of his wound. For the time, at least, he is well off.

The very soil of Flanders seems polluted. British surgeons are sighing for the clean dust of the Boer war of South Africa, although they cursed it at the time. That it is not the army occupation which is causing the grave infections of Flanders and France is shown by the fact that the trouble dates from the beginning of the war. It is not that living in a trench undermines the vitality of the men and lays them open to infection. On the contrary, with the exception of frost bite, there is a curious absence of such troubles as would ordinarily result from exposure, cold and constant wetting.

The open-air life has apparently built up the men. Again and again the extraordinary power of resistance shown has astonished the surgeons. It is as if, in forcing men to face overwhelming hardships, a watchful Providence had granted them overwhelming vitality.

Perhaps the infection of the soil, the typhoid-carrying waters that seep through and into the trenches, the tetanus and gangrene that may infect the simplest wounds, are due to the long intensive cultivation of that fertile country, to the fertilisation by organic matter of its fields. Doubtless the vermin that cover many of the troops form the connecting link between the soil and the infected men. In many places gasoline is being delivered to the troopers to kill these pests, and it is a German army joke that before a charge on a Russian trench it is necessary to send ahead men to scatter insect powder! So serious is the problem in the east indeed that an official order from Berlin now requires all cars returning from Russia to be placarded "Aus Russland! Before using again thoroughly sterilise and unlouse!" And no upholstered cars are allowed to be used.

Generally speaking, a soldier is injured either in his trench or in front of it in the waste land between the confronting armies. In the latter case, if the lines are close together the situation is still further complicated. It may be and often is impossible to reach him at all. He must lie there for hours or even for days of suffering, until merciful death overtakes him. When he can be rescued he is, and many of the bravest deeds of this war have been acts of such salvage. In addition to the work of the ambulance corps and of volunteer soldiers who often venture out into a rain of death to bring in fallen officers and comrades in the western field, some five hundred ambulance dogs are being used by the Allies to locate the wounded.

When a man is injured in the trenches his companions take care of him until night, when it is possible to move him. His first-aid packet is opened, a sterilised bandage produced, and the dressing applied to the wound. Frequently he has a small bottle of iodine and the wound is first painted with that. In cases where iodine is used at once, chances of infection are greatly lessened. But often he must lie in the trench until night, when the ambulances come up. His comrades make him as comfortable as they can. He lies on their overcoats, his head frequently on his own pack.

Fighting goes on about him, above him. Other comrades fall in the trench and are carried and laid near him. In the intervals of fighting, men bring the injured men water. For that is the first cry—a great and insistent need—water. When they cannot get water from the canteens they drink what is in the bottom of the trench.

At last night falls. The evening artillery duel, except when a charge is anticipated, is greatly lessened at night, and infantry fire is only that of "snipers." But over the trench and over the line of communication behind the trench hang always the enemy's "starlights."

The ambulances come up. They cannot come as far as the trenches, but stretchers are brought and the wounded men are lifted out as tenderly as possible.

Many soldiers have tried to tell of the horrors of a night journey in an ambulance or transport; careful driving is out of the question. Near the front the ambulance can have no lights, and the roads everywhere have been torn up by shells.

Men die in transit, and, dying, hark back to early days. They call for their mothers, for their wives. They dictate messages that no one can take down. Unloaded at railway stations, the dead are separated from the living and piled in tiers on trucks. The wounded lie about on stretchers on the station floor. Sometimes they are operated on there, by the light of a candle, it may be, or of a smoking lamp. When it is a well-equipped station there is the mercy of chloroform, the blessed release of morphia, but more times than I care to think of at night, there has been no chloroform and no morphia.

France has sixty hospital trains, England twelve, Belgium not so many.

I have seen trains drawing in with their burden of wounded men. They travel slowly, come to a gradual stop, without jolting or jarring; but instead of the rush of passengers to alight, which usually follows the arrival of a train, there is silence, infinite quiet. Then, somewhere, a door is unhurriedly opened. Maybe a priest alights and looks about him. Perhaps it is a nurse who steps down and takes a comprehensive survey of conditions. There is no talking, no uproar. A few men may come up to assist in lifting out the stretchers, an ambulance driver who salutes and indicates with a gesture where his car is stationed. There are no onlookers. This is business, the grim business of war. The line of stretchers on the station platform grows. The men lie on them, impassive. They have waited so long. They have lain on the battlefield, in the trench, behind the line at the dressing shed, waiting, always waiting. What is a little time more or less, now?

The patience of the injured! I have been in many hospitals. I have seen pneumonia and typhoid patients lying in the fearful apathy of disease. They are very sad to see, very tragic, but their patience is the lethargy of half consciousness. Their fixed eyes see visions. The patience of the wounded is the resignation of alert faculties.

Once I saw a boy dying. He was a dark-haired, brown-eyed lad of eighteen. He had had a leg shattered the day before, and he had lain for hours unattended on the battlefield. The leg had been amputated, and he was dying of loss of blood.

He lay alone, in a small room of what had once been a girls' school. He had asked to be propped up with pillows, so that he could breathe. His face was grey, and only his eyes were alive. They burned like coals. He was alone. The hospital was crowded, and there were others who could be saved. So he lay there, propped high, alone, and as conscious as I am now, and waited. The nurse came back at last, and his eyes greeted her.

There seemed to be nothing that I could do. Before his conscious eyes I was an intruder, gazing at him in his extremity. I went away. And now and then, when I hear this talk of national honour, and am carried away with a hot flame of resentment so that I, too, would cry for war, I seem to see that dying boy's eyes, looking through the mists that are vengeance and hatred and affronted pride, to war as it is—the end of hope, the gate of despair and agony and death.

After my return I received these letters. The woman who wrote them will, I know, forgive me for publishing extracts from them. She is a Belgian, married to an American. More clearly than any words of mine, they show where falls the burden of war:

"I have just learned that my youngest brother has been killed in action in Flanders. King Albert decorated him for conspicuous bravery on April 22d, and my poor boy went to his reward on April 26th. In my leaden heart, through my whirling brain, your words keep repeating themselves: 'For King and Country!' Yes, he died for them, and died a hero! I know only that his regiment, the Grenadiers, was decimated. My poor little boy! God pity us all, and save martyred Belgium!"

In a second letter:

"I enclose my dear little boy's obituary notice. He died at the head of his company and five hundred and seventy-four of his Grenadiers went down with him. Their regiment effectively checked the German advance, and in recognition General Joffre pinned the Cross of the Legion of Honour to his regimental colours. But we are left to mourn—though I do no begrudge my share of sorrow. The pain is awful, and I pray that by the grace of God you may never know what it means."

For King and Country!

The only leaven in this black picture of war as have seen it, as it has touched me, has been the scarlet of the Red Cross. To a faith that the terrible scene at the front had almost destroyed, came every now and then again the flash of the emblem of mercy Hope, then, was not dead. There were hands to soothe and labour, as well as hands to kill. There was still brotherly love in the world. There was a courage that was not of hate. There was a patience that was not a lying in wait. There was a flag that was not of one nation, but of all the world; a flag that needed no recruiting station, for the ranks it led were always full to overflowing; a flag that stood between the wounded soldier and death; that knew no defeat but surrender to the will of the God of Battles.

And that flag I followed. To the front, to the field hospitals behind the trenches, to railway stations, to hospital trains and ships, to great base hospitals. I watched its ambulances on shelled roads. I followed its brassards as their wearers, walking gently, carried stretchers with their groaning burdens. And, whatever may have failed in this war—treaties, ammunition, elaborate strategies, even some of the humanities—the Red Cross as a symbol of service has never failed.

I was a critical observer. I am a graduate of a hospital training-school, and more or less for years I have been in touch with hospitals. I myself was enrolled under the Red Cross banner. I was prepared for efficiency. What I was not prepared for was the absolute self-sacrifice, the indifference to cost in effort, in very life itself, of a great army of men and women. I saw English aristocrats scrubbing floors; I found American surgeons working day and night under the very roar and rattle of guns. I found cultured women of every nation performing the most menial tasks. I found an army where all are equal—priests, surgeons, scholars, chauffeurs, poets, women of the stage, young girls who until now have been shielded from the very name of death—all enrolled under the red badge of mercy.



CHAPTER XXXIV

IN TERMS OF LIFE AND DEATH

One of the first hospitals I saw was in Calais. We entered a muddy courtyard through a gate, and the building loomed before us. It had been a girls' convent school, and was now a military hospital for both the French and British armies, one half the building being used by each. It was the first war hospital I had seen, and I was taken through the building by Major S——, of the Royal Army Medical Corps. It was morning, and the corridors and stairs still bore the mud of the night, when the ambulances drive into the courtyard and the stretchers are carried up the stairs. It had been rather a quiet night, said Major S——. The operations were already over, and now the work of cleaning up was going on.

He opened a door, and we entered a long ward.

I live in a great manufacturing city. Day by day its mills take their toll in crushed bodies. The sight of broken humanity is not new to me. In a general way, it is the price we pay for prosperity. Individually, men so injured are the losers in life's great struggle for food and shelter.

I had never before seen men dying of an ideal.

There is a terrible sameness in war hospitals. There are rows of beds, and in them rows of unshaven, white-faced men. Some of them turn and look at visitors. Others lie very still, with their eyes fixed on the ceiling, or eternity, or God knows what. Now and then one is sleeping.

"He has slept since he came in," the nurse will say; "utter exhaustion."

Often they die. If there is a screen, the death takes place decently and in order, away from the eyes of the ward. But when there is no screen, it makes little difference. What is one death to men who have seen so many?

Once men thought in terms of a day's work, a night's sleep, of labour and play and love. But all over Europe to-day, in hospital and out, men are learning to think in terms of life and death. What will be the result? A general brutalising? The loss of much that is fine? Perhaps. There are some who think that it will scourge men's souls clean of pettiness, teach them proportion, give them a larger outlook. But is it petty to labour and love? Is the duty of the nation greater than the duty of the home? Is the nation greater than the individual? Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?

Ward after ward. Rows of quiet men. The occasional thump of a convalescent's crutch. The swish of a nurse's starched dress. The strangled grunt of a man as the dressing is removed from his wound. The hiss of coal in the fireplace at the end of the ward. Perhaps a priest beside a bed, or a nun. Over all, the heavy odour of drugs and disinfectants. Brisk nurses go about, cheery surgeons, but there is no real cheer. The ward is waiting.

I saw a man who had been shot in the lungs. His lungs were filled with jagged pieces of steel. He was inhaling oxygen from a tank. There was an inhaler strapped over his mouth and nostrils, and the oxygen passed through a bottle of water, to moisten it before it entered his tortured lungs.

The water in the bottle seethed and bubbled, and the man lay and waited.

He was waiting for the next breath. Above the mask his eyes were fixed, intent. Would it come? Ah, that was not so bad. Almost a full breath that time. But he must have another, and another.

They are all waiting; for death, maybe; for home; for health again, or such travesty of health as may come, for the hospital is not an end but a means. It is an interval. It is the connecting link between the trenches and home, between war and peace, between life and death.

That one hospital had been a school. The children's lavatory is now the operating room. There are rows of basins along one side, set a trifle low for childish hands. When I saw them they were faintly rimmed with red. There was a locker room too. Once these lockers had held caps, no doubt, and overshoes, balls and other treasures. Now they contained torn and stained uniforms, weapons, knapsacks,

Does it matter how many wards there were, or how many surgeons? Do figures mean anything to us any more? When we read in the spring of 1915 that the British Army, a small army compared with the others, had lost already in dead, wounded and missing more than a quarter of a million men we could not visualise it Multiply one ward by infinity, one hospital by thousands, and then try to realise the terrible by-products of war!

In that Calais hospital I saw for the first time the apparatus for removing bits of shell and shrapnel directly under the X-ray. Four years ago such a procedure would have been considered not only marvelous but dangerous.

At that time, in Vienna and Berlin, I saw men with hands hopelessly burned and distorted as the result of merely taking photographic plates with the X-ray. Then came in lead-glass screens—screens of glass made with a lead percentage.

Now, as if science had prepared for this great emergency, operators use gloves saturated with a lead solution, and right-angled instruments, and operate directly in the ray. For cases where immediate extraction is inadvisable or unnecessary there is a stereoscopic arrangement of plates on the principle of our familiar stereoscope, which shows an image with perspective and locates the foreign body exactly.

One plate I saw had a story attached to it.

I was stopping in a private house where a tall Belgian surgeon lived. In the morning, after breakfast, I saw him carefully preparing a tray and carrying it upstairs. There was a sick boy, still in his teens, up there. As I passed the door I had seen him lying there, gaunt and pale, but plainly convalescent.

Happening to go up shortly after, I saw the tall surgeon by the side of the bed, the tray on his knees. And later I heard the story:

The boy was his son. During the winter he had been injured and taken prisoner. The father, in Calais, got word that his boy was badly injured and lying in a German hospital in Belgium. He was an only son.

I do not know how the frenzied father got into Belgium. Perhaps he crept through the German lines. He may have gone to sea and landed on the sand dunes near Zeebrugge. It does not matter how, for he found his boy. He went to the German authorities and got permission to move him to a private house. The boy was badly hurt. He had a bullet in the wall of the carotid artery, for one thing, and a fractured thigh. The father saw that his recovery, if it occurred at all, would be a matter of skillful surgery and unremitting care, but the father had a post at Calais and was badly needed.

He took a wagon to the hospital and got his boy. Then he drove, disguised I believe as a farmer, over the frontier into Holland. The boy was covered in the bottom of the wagon. In Holland they got a boat and went to Calais. All this, with that sharp-pointed German bullet in the carotid artery! And at Calais they took the plate I have mentioned and got out the bullet.

The last time I saw that brave father he was sitting beside his son, and the boy's hand was between both of his.

Nearly all the hospitals I saw had been schools. In one that I recall, the gentle-faced nuns, who by edict no longer exist in France, were still living in a wing of the school building. They had abandoned their quaint and beautiful habit for the ugly dress of the French provinces—odd little bonnets that sat grotesquely on the tops of their heads, stuffy black dresses, black cotton gloves. They would like to be useful, but they belonged to the old regime.

Under their bonnets their faces were placid, but their eyes were sad. Their schoolrooms are hospital wards, the tiny chapel is piled high with supplies; in the refectory, where decorous rows of small girls were wont to file in to the convent meals, unthinkable horrors of operations go on all day and far into the night. The Hall of the Holy Rosary is a convalescent room, where soldiers smoke and play at cards. The Room of the Holy Angels contains a steriliser. Through the corridors that once re-echoed to the soft padding of their felt shoes brisk English nurses pass with a rustle of skirts.

Even the cross by which they lived has turned red, the colour of blood.



CHAPTER XXXV

THE LOSING GAME

I saw a typhoid hospital in charge of two women doctors. It was undermanned. There were not enough nurses, not enough orderlies.

One of the women physicians had served through the Balkan war.

"There was typhoid there," she said, "but nothing to compare with this in malignancy. Nearly all the cases have come from one part of Belgium."

Some of the men were wounded, in addition to the fever. She told me that it was impossible to keep things in proper order with the help they had.

"And food!" she said. "We cannot have eggs. They are prohibitive at twenty-five centimes—five cents—each; nor many broths. Meat is dear and scarce, and there are no chickens. We give them stewed macaroni and farinaceous things. It's a terrible problem."

The charts bore out what she had said about the type of the disease. They showed incredible temperatures, with the sudden drop that is perforation or hemorrhage.

The odour was heavy. Men lay there, far from home, babbling in delirium or, with fixed eyes, picking at the bed clothes. One was going to die that day. Others would last hardly longer.

"They are all Belgians here," she said. "The British and French troops have been inoculated against typhoid."

So here again the Belgians were playing a losing game. Perhaps they are being inoculated now. I do not know. To inoculate an army means much money, and where is the Belgian Government to get it? ft seems the tragic irony of fate that that heroic little army should have been stationed in the infested territory. Are there any blows left to rain on Belgium?

In a letter from the Belgian lines the writer says:

"This is just a race for life. The point is, which will get there first, disease and sickness caused by drinking water unspeakably contaminated, or sterilising plants to avoid such a disaster."

Another letter from a different writer, also in Belgium at the front, says:

"A friend of mine has just been invalided home with enteritis. He had been drinking from a well with a dead Frenchman in it!"

The Belgian Soldiers' Fund in the spring of 1915 sent out an appeal, which said:

"The full heat of summer will soon be upon the army, and the dust of the battlefield will cause the men to suffer from an intolerable thirst."

This is a part of the appeal:

"It is said that out of the 27,000 men who gave their lives in the South African war 7000 only were killed, whilst 20,000 died of enteritis, contracted by drinking impure water.

"In order to save their army from the fatal effects of contaminated water, the Belgian Army medical authorities have, after careful tests, selected the following means of sterilisation—boiling, ozone and violet rays—as the most reliable methods for obtaining large supplies of pure water rapidly.

"Funds are urgently needed to help the work of providing and distributing a pure water supply in the following ways:

"1. By small portable sterilising plants for every company to produce and distribute from twenty to a hundred gallons of pure cold water per hour.

"2. By sterilisers easy of adjustment for all field hospitals, convalescent homes, medical depots, and so forth.

"3. By large sterilising plants, capable of producing from 150 gallons upward per hour, to provide a pure water supply for all the devastated towns through which the army must pass.

"4. By the sterilisation of contaminated pools and all surface water, under the direction of leading scientific experts who have generously offered their services.

"5. By pocket filters for all who may have to work out of reach of the sterilising plants, and so forth.

"6. By two hundred field kitchens on the battlefield to serve out soup, coffee or other drinks to the men fighting in the trenches or on the march."

Everywhere, at the front, I found the gravest apprehension as to water supply in case the confronting armies remained in approximately the same position. Sir John French spoke of it, and the British are providing a system of sterilised water for their men. Merely providing so many human beings with water is a tremendous problem. Along part of the line, quite aside from typhoid contamination, the water is now impregnated with salt water from the sea. If even wells contain dead bodies, how about the open water-courses? Wounded men must have water. It is their first and most insistent cry.

People will read this who have never known the thirst of the battlefield or the parched throat that follows loss of blood; people who, by the turning of a tap, may have all the water they want. Perhaps among them there are some who will face this problem of water as America has faced Belgium's problem of food. For the Belgian Army has no money at all for sterilisers, for pocket filters; has not the means to inoculate the army against typhoid; has little of anything. The revenues that would normally support the army are being collected—in addition to a war indemnity—by Germany.

Any hope that conditions would be improved by a general spring movement into uncontaminated territory has been dispelled. The war has become a gigantic siege, varied only by sorties and assaults. As long ago as November, 1914, the situation as to drinking water was intolerable. I quote again from the diary taken from the body of a German officer after the battle of the Yser—a diary published in full in an earlier chapter.

"The water is bad, quite green, indeed; but all the same we drink it—we can get nothing else. Man is brought down to the level of the brute beast."

There is little or no typhoid among the British troops. They, too, no doubt, have realised the value of conservation, and to inoculation have added careful supervision of wells and of watercourses. But when I was at the front the Belgian Army of fifty thousand trained soldiers and two hundred thousand recruits was dependent on springs oozing from fields that were vast graveyards; on sluggish canals in which lay the bodies of men and horses; and on a few tank wagons that carried fresh water daily to the front.

A quarter of a million dollars would be needed to install a water supply for the Belgian Army and for the civilians—residents and refugees—gathered behind the lines. To ask the American people to shoulder this additional burden is out of the question. But perhaps, somewhere among the people who will read this, there is one great-hearted and wealthy American who would sleep better of nights for having lifted to the lips of a wounded soldier the cup of pure water that he craves; for having furnished to ten thousand wounds a sterile and soothing wet compress.

Dunkirk was full of hospitals when I was there. Probably the subsequent shelling of the town destroyed some of them. I do not know. A letter from Calais, dated May 21st, 1915, says:

"I went through Dunkirk again. Last time I was there it was a flourishing and busy market day. This time the only two living souls I saw were the soldiers who let us in at one gate and out at the other. In the interval, as you know, the town had been shelled by fifteen-inch guns from a distance of twenty-three miles. Many buildings in the main streets had been reduced to ruins, and nearly all the windows in the town had been smashed."

There is, or was, a converted Channel steamer at Dunkirk that is now a hospital. Men in all stages of mutilation are there. The salt winds of the Channel blow in through the open ports. The boat rises and falls to the swell of the sea. The deck cabins are occupied by wounded officers, and below, in the long saloon, are rows of cots.

I went there on a bright day in February. There was a young officer on the deck. He had lost a leg at the hip, and he was standing supported by a crutch and looking out to sea. He did not even turn his head when we approached.

General M——, the head of the Belgian Army medical service, who had escorted me, touched him on the arm, and he looked round without interest.

"For conspicuous bravery!" said the General, and showed me the medal he wore on his breast.

However, the young officer's face did not lighten, and very soon he turned again to the sea. The time will come, of course, when the tragedy of his mutilation will be less fresh and poignant, when the Order of Leopold on his breast will help to compensate for many things; but that sunny morning, on the deck of the hospital ship, it held small comfort for him.

We went below. At our appearance at the top of the stairs those who were convalescent below rose and stood at attention. They stood in a line at the foot of their beds, boys and grizzled veterans, clad in motley garments, supported by crutches, by sticks, by a hand on the supporting back of a chair. Men without a country, where were they to go when the hospital ship had finished with them? Those who were able would go back to the army, of course. But what of that large percentage who will never be whole again? The machinery of mercy can go so far, and no farther. France cannot support them. Occupied with her own burden, she has persistently discouraged Belgian refugees. They will go to England probably—a kindly land but of an alien tongue. And there again they will wait.

The waiting of the hospital will become the waiting of the refugee. The Channel coast towns of England are full of human derelicts who stand or sit for hours, looking wistfully back toward what was once home.

The story of the hospitals is not always gloomy. Where the surroundings are favourable, defeat is sometimes turned to victory. Tetanus is being fought and conquered by means of a serum. The open treatment of fractures—that is, by cutting down and exposing the jagged edges of splintered bones, and then uniting them—has saved many a limb. Conservation is the watchword of the new surgery, to save whenever possible. The ruthless cutting and hacking of previous wars is a thing of the past.

I remember a boy in a French hospital whose leg bones had been fairly shattered. Eight pieces, the surgeon said there had been. Two linear incisions, connected by a centre one, like a letter H, had been made. The boy showed me the leg himself, and a mighty proud and happy youngster he was. There was no vestige of deformity, no shortening. The incisions had healed by first intention, and the thin, white lines of the H were all that told the story.

As if to offset the cheer of that recovery, a man in the next bed was dying of an abdominal injury. I saw the wound. May the mother who bore him, the wife he loved, never dream of that wound!

I have told of the use of railway stations as temporary resting places for injured soldiers. One is typical of them all. As my visit was made during a lull in the fighting, conditions were more than usually favourable. There was no congestion.

On a bright afternoon early in March I went to the railway station three miles behind the trenches at E——. Only a mile away a town was being shelled. One could look across the fields at the changing roof line, at a church steeple that had so far escaped. But no shells were falling in E——.

The station was a small village one. In the room corresponding to our baggage-room straw had been spread over the floor, and men just out of the trenches lay there in every attitude of exhaustion. In a tiny room just beyond two or three women were making soup. As fast as one kettle was ready it was served to the hungry men. There were several kettles—all the small stove would hold. Soup was there in every state, from the finished product to the raw meat and vegetables on a table.

Beyond was a waiting-room, with benches. Here were slightly injured men, bandaged but able to walk about. A few slept on the benches, heads lolled back against the whitewashed wall. The others were paying no attention to the incessant, nearby firing, but were watching a boy who was drawing.

He had a supply of coloured crayons, and the walls as high as he could reach were almost covered. There were priests, soldier types, caricatures of the German Emperor, the arms of France and Belgium—I do not remember what all. And it was exceedingly well done. The boy was an artist to his finger tips.

At a clever caricature of the German Emperor the soldiers laughed and clapped their hands. While they were laughing I looked through an open door.

Three men lay on cots in an inner room—rather, two men and a boy. I went in.

One of the men was shot through the spine and paralysed. The second one had a bullet in his neck, and his face already bore the dark flush and anxious look of general infection. The boy smiled.

They had been there since the day before, waiting for a locomotive to come and move the hospital train that waited outside. In that railway station the boy had had his leg taken off at the knee.

They lay there, quite alone. The few women were feeding starving men. Now and then one would look in to see if there was any change. There was nothing to be done. They lay there, and the shells burst incessantly a mile away, and the men in the next room laughed and applauded at some happy stroke of the young artist.

"I am so sorry," I said to the boy. The others had not roused at my entrance, but he had looked at me with quick, intelligent eyes.

"It is nothing!" was his reply.

Outside, in the village, soldiers thronged the streets. The sun was shining with the first promise of spring. In an area way regimental butchering was going on, and a great sow, escaping, ran frenzied down the street, followed by a throng of laughing, shouting men. And still the shells fell, across a few fields, and inside the station the three men lay and waited.

That evening at dusk the bombardment ceased, and I went through the shelled town. It was difficult to get about. Walls had fallen across the way, interiors that had been homes gaped open to the streets. Shattered beds and furnishings lay about—kitchen utensils, broken dishes. On some of the walls holy pictures still hung, grouped about a crucifix. There are many to tell how the crucifix has escaped in the wholesale destruction of towns.

A shoemaker had come back into the village for the night, and had opened his shop. For a time he seemed to be the only inhabitant of what I had known, a short time before, as a prosperous and thriving market town. Then through an aperture that had been a window I saw three women sitting round a candle. And in the next street I found a man on his knees on the pavement, working with bricks and a trowel.

He explained that he had closed up a small cellar-way. His family had no place else to go and were coming in from the fields, where they had sought safety, to sleep in the cellar for the night. He was leaving a small aperture, to be closed with bags of sand, so that if the house was destroyed over them in the night they could crawl out and escape.

He knelt on the bricks in front of the house, a patient, resigned figure, playing no politics, interested not at all in war and diplomacy, in a way to the sea or to a place in the sun—one of the millions who must adapt themselves to new and fearsome situations and do their best.

That night, sitting at dinner in a hotel, I saw two pretty nurses come in. They had been relieved for a few hours from their hospital and were on holiday.

One of them had a clear, although musical voice. What she said came to me with great distinctness, and what she was wishing for was a glass of American soda water!

Now, long months before I had had any idea of going to the war I had read an American correspondent's story of the evacuation of Antwerp, and of a tall young American girl, a nurse, whom the others called Morning Glory. He never knew the rest of her name. Anyhow, Morning Glory leaped into my mind and stayed there, through soup, through rabbit, which was called on the menu something entirely different, through hard cakes and a withered orange.

So when a young lieutenant asked permission to bring them over to meet me, I was eager. It was Morning Glory! Her name is really Glory, and she is a Southern girl Somewhere among my papers I have a snapshot of her helping to take a wounded soldier out of an ambulance, and if the correspondent wants it I shall send it to him. Also her name, which he never knew. And I will verify his opinion that it is better to be a Morning Glory in Flanders than to be a good many other things that I can think of.



CHAPTER XXXVI

HOW AMERICANS CAN HELP

With the possible exception of Germany, which seems to have anticipated everything, no one of the nations engaged appears to have expected the fearful carnage of this war. The destructive effect of the modern, high-explosive shell has been well known, but it is the trench form of warfare which, by keeping troops in stationary positions, under grilling artillery fire, has given such shells their opportunity. Shrapnel has not been so deadly to the men in the trenches.

The result of the vast casualty lists has been some hundreds of isolated hospitals scattered through France, not affiliated with any of the Red Cross societies, unorganised, poverty-stricken, frequently having only the services of a surgeon who can come but once a week. They have no dressings, no nurses save peasants, no bedding, no coal to cook even the scanty food that the villagers can spare.

No coal, for France is facing a coal famine to-day. Her coal mines are in the territory held by the Germans. Even if she had the mines, where would she get men to labour in them, or trains to transport the coal?

There are more than three hundred such hospitals scattered through isolated French villages, hospitals where everything is needed. For whatever else held fast during the first year of the war, the nursing system of France absolutely failed. Some six hundred miles of hospital wards there are to-day in France, with cots so close together that one can hardly step between. It is true that with the passing of time, the first chaos is giving way to order. But France, unlike England, has the enemy within her boundaries, on her soil. Her every resource is taxed. And the need is still great.

The story of the town of D——, in Brittany, is very typical of what the war has brought into many isolated communities.

D—— is a little town of two thousand inhabitants, with a thirteenth-century church, with mediaeval houses with quaint stone porticoes and outside staircases. There is one street, shaped like a sickle, with a handle that is the station road.

War was declared and the men of D—— went away. The women and children brought in the harvest, and waited for news. What little came was discouraging.

One day in August one of the rare trains stopped at the station, and an inspector got off and walked up the sickle-handle to the schoolhouse. He looked about and made the comment that it would hold eighty beds. Whereupon he went away, and D—— waited for news and gathered the harvest.

On the fifth of September, 1914, the terrific battle of the Marne commenced. The French strategic retreat was at an end, and with her allies France resumed the offensive. What happened in the little village of D——?

And remember that D—— is only one of hundreds of tiny interior towns. D—— has never heard of the Red Cross, but D—— venerated, in its thirteenth-century church, the Cross of Christ.

This is what happened:

One day in the first week of September a train drew up at the box-like station, a heterogeneous train—coaches, luggage vans, cattle and horse cars. The doors opened, and the work of emptying the cars began. The women and children, aghast and bewildered, ran down the sickle-handle road and watched. Four hundred wounded men were taken out of the cars, laid prone on the station platform, and the train went on.

There were no surgeons in D——, but there was a chemist who knew something of medicine and who, for one reason or another, had not been called to the ranks. There were no horses to draw carts. There was nothing.

The chemist was a man of action. Very soon the sickle and the old church saw a curious sight. They saw women and children, a procession, pushing wounded men to the school in the hand carts that country people use for milk cans and produce. They saw brawny peasant women carrying chairs in which sat injured men with lolling heads and sunken eyes.

Bales of straw were brought into the school. Tender, if unaccustomed, hands washed fearful wounds, but there were no dressings, no bandages.

Any one who knows the French peasant and his poverty will realise the plight of the little town. The peasant has no reserves of supplies. Life is reduced to its simplest elements. There is nothing that is not in use.

D—— solved part of its problem by giving up its own wooden beds to the soldiers. It tore up its small stock of linen, its towels, its dusters; but the problem of food remained.

There was a tiny stove, on which the three or four teachers of the school had been accustomed to cook their midday meal. There was no coal, only wood, and green wood at that. All day, and all day now, D—— cooks the pot-a-feu for the wounded on that tiny stove. Pot-a-feu is good diet for convalescents, but the "light diets" must have eggs, broth, whatever can be found.

So the peasant woman of D—— comes to the hospital, bringing a few eggs, the midday meal of her family, who will do without.

I have spoken mainly in the past tense, but conditions in D—— are not greatly changed to-day. An old marquise, impoverished by the war, darns the pathetic socks of the wounded men and mends their uniforms. At the last report I received, the corridors and schoolrooms were still filled—every inch of space—with a motley collection of beds, on which men lay in their uniforms, for lack of other clothing. They were covered with old patchwork quilts, with anything that can be used. There were, of course, no sheets. All the sheets were used long ago for dressings. A friend of mine there recently saw a soldier with one leg, in the kitchen, rolling wretched scraps and dusters for bandages. There was no way to sterilise them, of course. Once a week a surgeon comes. When he goes away he takes his instruments with him.

This is not an isolated case, nor an exaggerated one. There are things I do not care to publish. Three hundred and more such hospitals are known. The French Government pays, or will pay, twenty-five cents a day to keep these men. Black bread and pot-a-feu is all that can be managed on that amount.

Convalescents sit up in bed and painfully unravel their tattered socks for wool. They tie the bits together, often two or three inches in length, and knit new feet in old socks, or—when they secure enough—new socks. For the Germans hold the wool cities of France. Ordinarily worsted costs eighteen and nineteen francs in Dinard and Saint Malo, or from three dollars and sixty cents to three dollars and eighty cents a pound. Much of the government reserves of woollen underwear for the soldiers was in the captured towns, and German prisoners have been found wearing woollens with the French Government stamp.

Every sort of building is being used for these isolated hospitals—garages, town halls, private dwellings, schools. At first they had no chloroform, no instruments. There are cases on record where automobile tools were used in emergency, kitchen knives, saws, anything. In one case, last spring, two hundred convalescents, leaving one of these hospitals on a cold day in March, were called back, on the arrival of a hundred freshly wounded men, that every superfluous bandage on their wounds might be removed, to be used again.

Naturally, depending entirely on the unskilled nursing of the village women, much that we regard as fundamental in hospital practice is ignored. Wounded men, typhoid and scarlet fever cases are found in the same wards. In one isolated town a single clinical thermometer is obliged to serve for sixty typhoid and scarlet fever patients.[F]

[Footnote F: Written in June, 1915.]

Sometimes the men in these isolated and ill-equipped refuges realise the horror and hopelessness of their situation. The nights are particularly bad. Any one who knows hospitals well, knows the night terrors of the wards; knows, too, the contagion of excitement that proceeds from a hysterical or delirious patient.

In some of these lonely hospitals hell breaks loose at night. The peasant women must sleep. Even the tireless nuns cannot labour forever without rest. The men have come from battlefields of infinite horror. A frenzied dream, a delirious soldier calling them to the charge, and panic rages.

To offset these horrors of the night the peasants have, here and there, resorted to music. It is naive, pathetic. Where there is a piano it is moved into the school, or garage, or whatever the building may be, and at twilight a nun or a volunteer musician plays quietly, to soothe the men to sleep. In one or two towns a village band, or perhaps a lone cornetist, plays in the street outside.

So the days go on, and the nights. Supplies are begged for and do not always come. Dressings are washed, to be used again and again.

An attempt is now being made to better these conditions. A Frenchwoman helping in one of these hospitals, and driven almost to madness by the outcries of men and boys undergoing operations without anaesthetics, found her appeals for help unanswered. She decided to go to England to ask her friends there for chloroform, and to take it back on the next boat. She was successful. She carried back with her, on numerous journeys, dressings, chloroform, cotton, even a few instruments. She is still doing this work. Others interested in isolated hospitals, hearing of her success, appealed to her; and now regular, if small, shipments of chloroform and dressings are going across the Channel.

Americans willing to take their own cars, and willing to work, will find plenty to do in distributing such supplies over there. A request has come to me to find such Americans. Surgeons who can spare a scalpel, an artery clip or two, ligatures—catgut or silk—and forceps, may be certain of having them used at once. Bandages rolled by kindly American hands will not lie unclaimed on the quay at Havre or Calais.

So many things about these little hospitals of France are touching, without having any particular connection. There was a surgeon in one of these isolated villages, with an X-ray machine but no gloves or lead screen to protect himself. He worked on, using the deadly rays to locate pieces of shell, bullets and shrapnel, and knowing all the time what would happen. He has lost both hands.

Since my return to America the problems of those who care for the sick and wounded have been further complicated, among the Allies, by the inhuman use of asphyxiating gases.

Sir John French says of these gases:

"The effect of this poison is not merely disabling, or even painlessly fatal, as suggested in the German press. Those of its victims who do not succumb on the field and who can be brought into hospitals suffer acutely and, in a large proportion of cases, die a painful and lingering death. Those who survive are in little better case, as the injury to their lungs appears to be of a permanent character and reduces them to a condition that points to their being invalids for life."

I have received from the front one of the respirators given out to the troops to be used when the gas clouds appear.

"It is prepared with hypophosphite of soda," wrote the surgeon who sent it, "and all they have to do before putting it on is to dip it in the water in the trenches. They are all supplied in addition with goggles, which are worn on their caps,"

This is from the same letter:

"That night a German soldier was brought in wounded, and jolly glad he was to be taken. He told us he had been turned down three times for phthisis—tuberculosis—and then in the end was called up and put into the trenches after eight weeks' training. All of which is very significant. Another wounded German told the men at the ambulance that they must move on as soon as they could, as very soon the Germans would be in Calais.

"All the German soldiers write home now on the official cards, which have Calais printed on the top of them!"

Not all. I have before me a card from a German officer in the trenches in France. It is a good-natured bit of raillery, with something of grimness underneath.

"Dear Madame:

"'I nibble them'—Joffre. See your article in the Saturday Evening Post of May 29th, 1915. Really, Joffre has had time! It is September now, and we are not nibbled yet. Still we stand deep in France. Au revoir a Paris, Madame."

He signs it "Yours truly," and then his name.

Not Calais, then, but Paris!



CHAPTER XXXVII

AN ARMY OF CHILDREN

It is undeniably true that the humanities are failing us as the war goes on. Not, thank God, the broad humanity of the Red Cross, but that individual compassion of a man for his wounded brother, of which the very fabric of mercy is woven. There is too much death, too much suffering. Men grow calloused. As yet the loss is not irretrievable, but the war is still only a matter of months. What if it is to be of years?

France and Belgium were suffering from a wave of atheism before the war. But there comes a time in the existence of nations, as in the lives of individuals, when human endeavour seems useless, when the world and the things thereof have failed. At such time nations and individuals alike turn at last to a Higher Power. France is on her knees to-day. Her churches are crowded. Not perhaps since the days of chivalry, when men were shriven in the churches before going out to battle, has France so generally knelt and bowed her head—but it is to the God of Battles that she prays.

On her battlefields the priests have most signally distinguished themselves. Some have exchanged the soutane for the uniform, and have fought bravely and well. Others, like the priests who stood firm in the midst of Jordan, have carried their message of hope to the dying into the trenches.

No article on the work of the Red Cross can be complete without a reference to the work of these priests, not perhaps affiliated with the society, but doing yeoman work of service among the wounded. They are everywhere, in the trenches or at the outposts, in the hospitals and hospital trains, in hundreds of small villages, where the entire community plus its burden of wounded turns to the cure for everything, from advice to the sacrament.

In prostrate Belgium the demands on the priests have been extremely heavy. Subjected to insult, injury and even death during the German invasion, where in one diocese alone thirteen were put to death—their churches destroyed, or used as barracks by the enemy—that which was their world has turned to chaos about them. Those who remained with their conquered people have done their best to keep their small communities together and to look after their material needs—which has, indeed, been the lot of the priests of battle-scarred Flanders for many generations.

Others have attached themselves to the hospital service. All the Belgian trains of wounded are cared for solely by these priests, who perform every necessary service for their men, and who, as I have said before, administer the sacrament and make coffee to cheer the flagging spirits of the wounded, with equal courage and resource.

Surgeons, nurses, priests, nuns, volunteer workers who substitute for lack of training both courage and zeal, these are a part of the machinery of mercy. There is another element—the boy scouts.

During the early days of the war the boy scouts of England, then on school holiday, did marvellous work. Boys of fourteen made repeated trips across the Channel, bringing back from France children, invalids, timorous women. They volunteered in the hospitals, ran errands, carried messages, were as useful as only willing boys can be. They did scout service, too, guarding the railway lines and assisting in watching the Channel coast; but with the end of the holiday most of the English boy scouts were obliged to go back to school. Their activities were not over, but they were largely curtailed.

There were five thousand boy scouts in Belgium at the beginning of the war. I saw them everywhere—behind the battle lines, on the driving seats of ambulances, at the doors of hospitals. They were very calm. Because I know a good deal about small boys I smothered a riotous impulse to hug them, and spoke to them as grown-up to grown-up. Thus approached, they met my advances with dignity, but without excitement.

And after a time I learned something about them from the Chief Scout of Belgium; perhaps it will show the boy scouts of America what they will mean to the country in time of war. Perhaps it will make them realise that being a scout is not, after all, only camping in the woods, long hikes, games in the open. The long hikes fit a boy for dispatch carrying, the camping teaches him to care for himself when, if necessity arises, he is thrown on the country, like his older brother, the fighting man.

A small cog, perhaps, in the machinery of mercy, but a necessary one. A vital cog in the vast machinery of war—that is the boy scout to-day.

The day after the declaration of war the Belgian scouts were mobilised, by order of the minister of war—five thousand boys, then, ranging in age from twelve to eighteen, an army of children. What a sight they must have been! How many grown-ups can think of it with dry eyes? What a terrible emergency was this, which must call the children into battle!

They were placed at the service of the military authorities, to do any and every kind of work. Some, with ordinary bicycles or motorcyles, were made dispatch riders. The senior scouts were enlisted in the regular army, armed, and they joined the soldiers in barracks. The younger boys, between thirteen and sixteen, were letter-carriers, messengers in the different ministries, or orderlies in the hospitals that were immediately organised. Those who could drive automobiles were given that to do.

Others of the older boys, having been well trained in scouting, were set to watch points of importance, or given carbines and attached to the civic guard. During the siege of Liege between forty and fifty boy scouts were constantly employed carrying food and ammunition to the beleaguered troops.

The Germans finally realised that every boy scout was a potential spy, working for his country. The uniform itself then became a menace, since boys wearing it were frequently shot. The boys abandoned it, the older ones assuming the Belgian uniform and the younger ones returning to civilian dress. But although, in the chaos that followed the invasion and particularly the fall of Liege, they were virtually disbanded, they continued their work as spies, as dispatch riders, as stretcher-bearers.

There are still nine boy scouts with the famous Ninth Regiment, which has been decorated by the king.

One boy scout captured, single-handed, two German officers. Somewhere or other he had got a revolver, and with it was patrolling a road. The officers were lost and searching for their regiments. As they stepped out of a wood the boy confronted them, with his revolver levelled. This happened near Liege.

Trust a boy to use his wits in emergency! Here is another lad, aged fifteen, who found himself in Liege after its surrender, and who wanted to get back to the Belgian Army. He offered his services as stretcher-bearer in the German Army, and was given a German Red Cross pass. Armed with this pass he left Liege, passed successfully many sentries, and at last got to Antwerp by a circuitous route. On the way he found a dead German and, being only a small boy after all, he took off the dead man's stained uniform and bore it in his arms into Antwerp!

There is no use explaining about that uniform. If you do not know boys you will never understand. If you do, it requires no explanation.

Here is a fourteen-year-old lad, intrusted with a message of the utmost importance for military headquarters in Antwerp. He left Brussels in civilian clothing, but he had neglected to take off his boy scout shirt—boy-fashion! The Germans captured him and stripped him, and they burned the boy scout shirt. Then they locked him up, but they did not find his message.

All day he lay in duress, and part of the night. Perhaps he shed a few tears. He was very young, and things looked black for him. Boy scouts were being shot, remember! But it never occurred to him to destroy the message that meant his death if discovered.

He was clever with locks and such things, after the manner of boys, and for most of the night he worked with the window and shutter lock. Perhaps he had a nail in his pocket, or some wire. Most boys have. And just before dawn he got window and shutter opened, and dropped, a long drop, to the ground. He lay there for a while, getting his breath and listening. Then, on his stomach, he slid away into the darkest hour that is just before the dawn.

Later on that day a footsore and weary but triumphant youngster presented himself at the headquarters of the Belgian Army in Antwerp and insisted on seeing the minister of war. Being at last admitted, he turned up a very travel-stained and weary little boy's foot and proceeded to strip a piece of adhesive plaster from the sole.

Underneath the plaster was the message!

* * * * *

War is a thing of fearful and curious anomalies. It has shown that humane units may comprise a brutal whole; that civilisation is a shirt over a coat of mail. It has shown that hatred and love are kindred emotions, boon companions, friends. It has shown that in every man there are two men, devil and saint; that there are two courages, that of the mind, which is bravest, that of the heart, which is greatest.

It has shown that government by men only is not an appeal to reason, but an appeal to arms; that on women, without a voice to protest, must fall the burden. It is easier to die than to send a son to death.

It has shown that a single hatred may infect a world, but it has shown that mercy too may spread among nations. That love is greater than cannon, greater than hate, greater than vengeance; that it triumphs over wrath, as good triumphs over evil.

Direct descendant of the cross of the Christian faith, the Red Cross carries onto every battlefield the words of the Man of Mercy:

"Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy."

On a day in March I went back to England. March in England is spring. Masses of snowdrops lined the paths in Hyde Park. The grass was green, the roads hard and dry under the eager feet of Kitchener's great army. They marched gayly by. The drums beat. The passers-by stopped. Here and there an open carriage or an automobile drew up, and pale men, some of them still in bandages, sat and watched. In their eyes was the same flaming eagerness, the same impatience to get back, to be loosed against the old lion's foes.

All through England, all through France, all through the tragic corner of Belgium that remains to her, were similar armies drilling and waiting, equally young, equally eager, equally resolute. And the thing that they were going to I knew. I had seen it in that mysterious region that had swallowed up those who had gone before; in the trenches, in the operating rooms of field hospitals, at outposts where the sentries walked hand in hand with death.

War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy carried on a stretcher, looking up at God's blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorosa for the son she has given.

For King and Country!

THE END