Chapter VIII - The Great Idea
The brilliant idea which Gipsy had conceived the day she met Dr. Van der Ghinst grew like Jack's beanstalk, one night at Oudecappelle, when for the first time the two friends together slept among the soldiers in the fire-zone. They had been up and down, up and down, under the direction of Gilbert, almost all day, and when they heard their services would possibly be required at night too, it seemed the obvious thing to do to sleep at this tiny village instead of going back that long, weary way to Fumes. The French marines were occupying a wee café, and as one of them advanced to ask the ladies to share it with them, they thought for the moment he was suffering from some new and horrible kind of wound, because he never looked the same for two seconds together; as a matter of fact, he had a face of the gutta-percha variety, and in his civilian days had earned many a penny by displaying this eccentricity, of which he was obviously proud. He did not want to let his talent rust for want of use, and so as he came forward he displayed one moment a large, flat, vacant-looking visage, with two tiny eyes like currants, and the next it was shrunk and wizened up as if he had lived to the end of all time. They watched, fascinated, until he turned and led the way to shelter. This was a very low, dirty little Flemish house with a filthy stained wooden table, greasy soiled chairs, and a floor which might have belonged to a cow-byre. Two chairs were pulled out and put in a corner, and here the two friends sat together, while, as dusk gathered, the gloom was lightened by a guttering candle stuck in a wine-bottle. Just behind them was a Belgian battery, and the heavy guns sent out a roar every few seconds which shook the tumble-down place, so that it was marvellous it did not fall in a heap. Every scrap of glass in the small window-panes had long since vanished. The French soldiers were sitting in the filthy damp straw on the ground, smoking and chatting, spitting, and playing cards with a pack on which the stains looked like a weird new variety of suits. The place was fairly stuffy, but every now and then the door opened to let in an icy draught. "Rubber Face," as they had christened him, noticed that his guests had nothing with them in the way of food, and in his large-hearted generosity immediately did his best to provide for them. He produced an egg from his pocket with the air of doing a conjuring trick-as indeed it was, for Heaven alone knew how he had managed to keep that egg unbroken since he had obtained it. One would have thought the concussion of the guns would have been enough to shatter it. He promised an omelette, and finding an old tin plate, which he assured them had "déjà de la graisse," he broke the egg on to it, holding it over an improvised fire. He would have probably died of a broken heart if they had refused it, and being out to heal and not to break, they had to go through with it.
They wondered what would happen when sleeping-time came. It would be a weary performance to sit upright all night, and yet to fall upon that wet and fetid straw, among the French soldiers, many of whom were heartily asleep already, seemed equally impossible. But Gilbert, by exploring, discovered a small inner room and managed to procure a certain amount of fairly clean straw, and there they retired. It was indeed to Mairi not the first experience of such a kind, because a night or two before, when Gipsy had gone over to Dunkirk, she had slept here alone among the men with the fearless freedom of a child. She had had her own pile of straw in the corner, and was hedged in by Gilbert and Tom, the trustworthy chauffeur. They had had some cushions from the car as pillows, and a couple of rugs, and she says, "I was well protected, for Gilbert had his revolver under his pillow, and lay between me and the soldiers."
It speaks highly indeed for the men that her confidence was justified. And in all the most difficult circumstances arising out of the crude conditions these two women encountered, there is never once a hint that they were annoyed in any way. Main had lain down now with her knitted khaki wool cap pulled well down to prevent the straw from tickling her ears, and she was asleep within five minutes. Like the soldiers, she had become so much accustomed to the thunder of the guns that she hardly heard it. But Gipsy was more highly strung, and she found sleep impossible. There was a faint gleam from the candle, which burnt all night, and though she tried hard to sleep, at first she found it out of the question; her imagination was too active.
"The place was so eerie and small, and the rats worried me. I thought of all sorts of stories of rats eating one's nose and nibbling one's finger-nails. The men through the doorway snored, too, horribly. I wondered what would happen if the Germans came suddenly, as they might quite easily do. The springing to life of those slumbering men, and the awful carnage there would be in that tiny space!" It was only when there was a lull in the firing for a moment that the snores could be heard; they were ordinarily drowned in the hullabaloo. When there was a louder crash than usual, so that Gipsy started up thinking the whole house was coming down to bury them, not one of the sleepers stirred. So she sat up and wrote her diary, the little green book that accompanied her everywhere, and was stained and soiled with the weather, matching the red one that Mairi faithfully carried and looked upon as an inestimable confidant. To have the privilege of seeing those two diaries is to get a peep into two uncommonly fine souls, of very different and in many ways complementary characteristics.
At 2.30 Gipsy got up to creep outside to see if anything was happening, and as she moved her girl companion stirred, turned, and flung back the cap from her fair hair and opened her sleepy eyes; so they crept out together. There they stood, feeling very, very small under the arch of that immense plain, with the flashes on the horizon, the red glare over devastated Dixmude, and a bitter wind sweeping around. It was impossible not to recall the solemn words of the prophet Isaiah: "Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence."
The solemnity of the night, with Death stalking close at hand ready to spring upon them at any second, impressed them. What was going to happen in the future? Were they prepared to go on with this work in spite of all the dirt and rats and smells? Were they able to say to each other fearlessly and confidently, "I will go through with it; I will devote myself to helping the little soldier in the trenches, whatever comes. No more will I think of myself. I will sleep whenever and wherever I can. I will live, if need be, under fire as he lives. I will carry my life lightly if I can succour, help, and comfort him." The glamour had all evaporated; they knew what such a vow involved, but quite steadily they both agreed to take it. There were no heroics; there was no romance; there, in that bitter wind, standing in front of the poor little house full of snoring soldiers, with that horrible glare in their eyes, and the thunder of the guns shaking the ground they stood on, they held each other's hands, and determined to thrust away all idea of fears, nerves, or feminine weaknesses. In the early grey light of the morning they consummated that heroic resolve with a real sacrifice. They saw it must be; there was no escaping it. So, with a pair of surgical scissors, Mairi cut and hacked and chopped until she had shorn her friend's dark silky hair to a length of about two inches all round, and then Gipsy did the same for the strong fair crop so unlike her own. They looked at it, laughing queerly, the fair and the dark, before they knotted the tresses together and sent them floating down the canal. When one is grown up, hair completely cut off can never grow quite the same again. Later on, recounting how little one member of the party had really done for the cause, Mairi remarks significantly, "She never cut off her hair."
They pulled down their woolly caps well over their shorn heads, so that the men should not notice anything, and returned to the hut. Gipsy says, "With that little bundle of hair went all our nervousness, all our fear of rats, our dislike of dirty food, and our ideas of home comforts. We became soldiers from that hour."
It was very shortly after this that they met Dr. Van der Ghinst again. He had stuck to his wounded in Dixmude until the Germans actually came into the town and took him prisoner; but he was allowed to continue his work, which he did for three days, and then, when he went out to the German trenches under escort to collect the wounded, he managed to give his captors the slip, and, after it was dark, got clear away.
During the many hours of waiting since they had first met him, Mrs. Knocker had thought out many things. It seemed to her that a great deal of the ambulance work was running to waste; there was too much careering backwards and forwards, with too little result. Huge ambulances, consuming a great deal of petrol, were sent on trivial errands. One night she and Main had been ordered miles away with a great car merely to carry a bundle of bandages. At another time she had actually been asked to take out "sight-seers" from England in one of the cars!
It was after the wounded were collected that the shaking up over the vile roads, and the long interval before they could be properly attended to, often resulted in death. There must surely be some way of preventing this. It seemed to Gipsy that a poste de secours right up as near to the firing-line as possible, where the men could be treated for shock, and restored somewhat before they had to undergo the awful journey, would be the means of saving many. The question was whether such a poste was feasible. Dr. Van der Ghinst warmly approved the idea, but he stood alone, for when it was mooted to the rest of the Corps it met with disapproval all round. Dr. Munro, indeed, told Mrs. Knocker plainly that if she did this she would do it in disobedience to his orders, and all funds would cease—she must finance herself. Ambulance work had the cachet of respectability; everyone knew what it was, and approved of it; but this other— whoever in their senses had heard of women living right up among the actual fighting soldiers, miles from any hospital? It had never been done, and therefore, of course, it was useless to try it—so argued the official mind. The other members of the Corps had had the same experiences as Gipsy, but though they saw they did not perceive as she did.
Yet Gipsy never wavered for one moment in her determination. She had the sense and foresight to see that in this original idea lay a field of mighty usefulness; she had the courage to look out over the edge of the rut of custom and convention. She knew instinctively where her own strength lay; she could put through a big thing where others might fail. Opposition only hardened her determination. She began to piece out this great idea, to fit it together. Practical points must be considered. In the first place, she could not run the poste herself, and who so suitable to help her as Mairi, the brave little assistant who had been her right hand all along? It was not because Mairi had been her friend in that far-away, almost forgotten life in England that she chose her, but because she had proved herself the possessor of the right kind of qualities, and in spite of her age had a steadiness far removed from that excitable feminine love of rushing about which many women think displays their enthusiasm. It was tolerably certain that she and Mairi together could do more for the lives of the Belgian soldiers than had heretofore been done by all the ambulances together.
A night or two later (November 7) Furnes was shelled in earnest, forty or fifty shells falling into the town. Gipsy and Mairi were still in their disused house, and slept peacefully through it all. One doctor, who occupied the room above them, had a cheerful habit of walking about on the parquet flooring in his thick boots at unearthly hours, so when Gipsy heard of the shelling she expressed surprise at not having been wakened by it; but added: "Though, to be sure, I should never have known the difference between the shells and the doctor's boots, even if I had!" So are the small, near things and the great, far-away things merged into one size by our human limitations.
As the German advance seemed imminent, the time was ripe for the new experiment, and the place chosen must, of course, be approved by the military authorities. Dr. Van der Ghinst was himself now established at Pervyse, which he considered suitable. A road from Dixmude runs westward, and bifurcates at Pervyse. From here the roads form a sort of isosceles triangle, with the base on the sea- coast, one branch running through Furnes and the other to Nieuport. Pervyse therefore lies roughly about half-way between Dixmude and either Furnes or Nieuport. Gipsy, who never let go of anything which she had determined to carry through, one day took out Dr. Van der Ghinst in a car to Pervyse to survey the place and to consider its suitability.
It was obvious that this part of the country was being bludgeoned to death. A week earlier there had been some houses still standing at the sides of the road, but now there was little, not even an upright ruin, only heaps of stones; while the road, which had once boasted a shell-pit here and there, was now pock-marked with them, converted into black cauldrons filled with water by the incessant rain. Driving a car resolved itself into a perpetual gamble, with the odds against one.
All along the road were abandoned motor-cars dashed to pieces even as they ran along, or smashed by a collision with a heavier waggon, which had sent them hurtling into the deep ditch. The prodigal waste of it all was appalling! There was plenty of evidence that the passengers had not always escaped the fate of the cars. In one of them the charred body of the chauffeur was mixed up in grisly fashion with the wrenched and distorted wheel. The air was tainted by the revolting charnel smell, not to be imagined by those who have not experienced it, nor to be forgotten by those who have. The first challenge of it is unmistakable, carrying certainty as to its origin, and it seems to curdle the very blood with its loathsomeness.
Bloated cows like inflated balloons, humped sheep, and horses looking terribly clumsy in grotesque attitudes, lay in the fields; and when they drove into Pervyse, Gipsy exclaimed with conviction: "There is not a house one could even pig it in!"
She little foresaw how long it would be her home!
Dr. Van der Ghinst promised to look out and find, if possible, a shelter for her head among the ruined houses. He advised her, however, to take a rest and go over to England before starting on this new work, as she and Mairi had now been under almost continuous strain, in very trying conditions, for over six weeks. She agreed, and resolved to arrange it. When she returned to the house in Furnes, which she had now grown to look upon as quite her own, to tell her comrade and pack a few clothes, she found Mairi standing speechless before a furiously enraged bonne, who was pouring out upon her, in the dialect of her particular native part of France, what she thought of thieves and robbers in general, and of these Two in particular. Even Gipsy's French, which was better than the average Englishwoman's, was unequal to the situation. The woman flew at them like a hornet, and refused to admit them. She had cautiously returned to collect some clothes for her mistress, and the first glad surprise at finding Furnes still standing, had turned to wrath in her frugal soul when she found evidences of occupation; and they were bound to admit that she was not unjustified from her point of view. They had to fetch the Belgian on whose authority they had established themselves, to explain and set matters right before they could collect their things.
Then away to that glad, strange England, which seemed almost like a foreign country after such amazing experiences. It is hardly to be wondered at that fair-haired Mairi, in her well-worn khaki and knitted soldier's cap, carrying part of a Uhlan's lance given to her as a trophy, created quite a sensation in Waterloo Station.
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