The Cellar House of Pervyse - Chapter 3 - The Field of Mercy

'The Cellar-House of Pervyse'

A Tale of Uncommon Things from The Journals and Letters of the Baroness t'Serclaes and Mairi Chisholm

A Story of Two British Volunteer Nurses on the Yser Front

Chapter III - The Field Of Mercy

In the midst of this whirlpool of madness and misery Melle was inhabited. There were old men and women and children whose homes were in those shot-torn houses, and they had cowered there while the shells hurtled overhead and the piercing bullets flew like arrows. After this fearful day there were a larger number of wounded civilians than usual. The nuns at the convent had their hands quite full. The dull dreamy current of their lives had dashed into a vortex, and in it they had had to stretch out hands of help and pity to those who were drowning beside them. As Gipsy came into the convent next morning, she was overwhelmed with pity at the spectacle of the wounded people there. Somehow it is so much worse to see civilians wounded than soldiers; soldiers, at all events, know what they are out for, but these poor sheep. She stepped over to one little girl of about eight, who was horribly torn in the stomach and lay gazing wide-eyed at Fear. At least that was what the expression in her eyes conveyed; she seemed to have seen "Fear" large and personified in front of her, and was unable to wrench her gaze from the grisly spectre. As Gipsy drew near she started and tried to pull away her hand with a little terrified moan, but after a moment nestled nearer to her, as if she wanted to shut out that awful sight that was burnt in all the while in her own poor brain. The village was a village of horrors; the dead were piled up in hundreds, friend and foe together, and there was no time to bury them while the danger was so imminent.

It was known that there must be lying around the town at no great distance hundreds of wounded and maimed, longing for aid, and desperate measures must be taken to get at them and shepherd them in. Gipsy and Mairi Chisholm, whose friendship had been cemented by the ghastly night, so that it was firmer than ever, walked out alone across three fields in the direction of the hottest fighting, and they climbed off the road to what looked like a peaceful turnip-field; and not until they reached it did they notice that among the turnips were many curious grey humps, and with a sudden thrill realized that here were the dead and the dying they had come to seek. Some doctors, in fact, were already at work crouching down, and seeing them, called out to them to come and help. Most of the bodies were in that cold grey-green uniform the colour of which seemed somehow to have got into the air and sky, and tinted them a cold grey-green too—a colour which will for ever after be associated in the mind of every Belgian with horrors unspeakable.

The very first man they saw lying by the hedge was stone-dead, shot through the jaw. Another not far off lay on his back, his face a bloody mask upturned to the frowning sky; he was still as marble, except for his right knee, which twitched regularly, ceaselessly, like a returning pulse. Gipsy hastened over to the help of the doctor who had called her, as Mairi fell on her knees beside this man, and at that moment, without warning or expectation, a salvo of German shells burst around them. They had been observed in their work of mercy and were being shot at! "Catch them, wipe them out! Good job too! Why bother with the wounded—our own or the others? What use is a wounded man any more? Let them die!" Thus spoke the batteries, and the shells fell faster.

If the wounded had been Belgians or French, it is probable that the devoted workers would not have left them even then; but to be fired at by Germans while succouring Germans was rather too much, and they fled for the time.

But the thought of those wretched wounded men, with broken and smashed bone and muscle, agonizing in thirst, their life-blood draining into the broad-leaved turnips, pulled at the warm hearts of the men and women from England, and once again later they tried to get at them. They took the ambulance, and left it at the nearest point on the road, and went off again across that stretch of field where dead cows with grotesquely inflated bodies lay in the corners. When they reached the turnip-field, they found some pigs rootling among those dead heaps of clothing, a sight that turned them sick for all their courage; but they went on, and had hardly gained their field of mercy, hardly had time to note that the awful pulsing movement of that right knee was still ceaselessly continuing without cessation or rest, when the guns were burst upon them again, and they had to withdraw once more.

They still stayed in the town, in the hope that somehow after dark they might reach that field of death and carry out a rescue. During the afternoon a car came in to Melle with three dead German officers and a chauffeur who had escaped with his life by the merest fraction. They had driven too near the Belgian lines, and three of the four had been wiped out by the Belgian armoured car.

When dusk fell at last Gipsy and Mairi made an urgent request to Dr. Munro that they might be allowed to go back to the turnip-field, for they would have risked their lives indifferently for friend or foe, so long as they were wounded and helpless. Dr. Munro, however, quite rightly refused. They had been twice driven off by the fire of the Germans—why jeopardize valuable lives and the precious ambulance? As they discussed the question a Belgian Red Cross car ran into the village, and the Two eagerly applied to the doctor in charge to help them. He could not resist their earnest pleading, and carried them along with him to the field.

It was almost dark when they worked softly into position as near to the scene of action as possible, and then stepped gently down, and thrusting aside the osier bushes that line the road, crept, holding their breath, out to those awfully still humped grey forms. They reached the man that the doctor and Gipsy had begun to bandage that day, but he was already dead, killed by the brutality of his own comrades when he might have had a chance of life. Then they instinctively drew nearer to each other as they glanced toward that other silent form, and there, regularly as the secondhand of a clock, that awful galvanic movement went on, as it had done for hour after hour: the twitching of the right knee up and down, up and down! They picked up the poor wretch, who seemed quite unconscious, on a stretcher and carried him back to the ambulance, but he died the same night.

When the wounded had been safely transferred to cars to go back to Ghent, yet once again the two women went out with the Belgian military doctor, past the French outposts, and waited there for him under a railway bridge while he and another man went off to reconnoitre. It was all so still it might have been the day after death and before resurrection, as indeed it was for many. A tense dead stillness surrounded them, hanging heavily on ears vibrating still with the hellish scream of the shells. There was no moon, but a kind of diffused greyness which conveyed a curious idea that it might any moment burst into brilliant and unearthly light.

The car went back to Melle and then to Ghent, and there Gipsy, hearing that someone was needed at Melle all night, went yet again back in it, leaving Main to go to bed. But hardly had Mairi been in bed an hour, and fallen asleep with the heavy overpowering sleep of a child, than a light flashed in her eyes and she was told to get up, as all the ambulances had been called out. No wonder each day seemed as if it had been a month! She went out in the big Daimler car with two of the men of the party, and half-way to Melle the big car bumped wildly and danced off the pave into the mud; a tyre was punctured! When everyone is dog-tired such incidents are bound to happen, but despair is a word unknown to members of ambulance corps of the right sort.

By great good luck another car came cautiously along in the dark, almost tumbling on the top of the first. It belonged to a Belgian doctor, who picked up the little Scottish girl and carried her on to Melle. Here she was greeted by her friend, white and worn, but quite cheery, and heard it was a false alarm, for after all they were not needed! So back they went to the Flandria in the same car, landing there about four in the morning.

No wonder Melle is written ineffaceably on their minds! It was here that they first saw the dead and wounded in masses. Here they found themselves in the thick of an actual battle. It was the chief centre of their activities in those days at Ghent, the village they saw first and last, and the name will always stand out in letters of flame.

The Cellar Hose of Pervyse - Chapter 2 - In the Thick of Battle

'The Cellar-House of Pervyse'

A Tale of Uncommon Things from The Journals and Letters of the Baroness t'Serclaes and Mairi Chisholm

A Story of Two British Volunteer Nurses on the Yser Front

Chapter II - In the Thick of a Battle

By September 29, three days after they had arrived in Ghent, Gipsy's vital energy had got too much for her, and she had to do something or explode; so she found a job in driving the car of the Belgian Colonel, whose own chauffeur had disappeared. She fell into this niche, which fitted her to a nicety, in the simplest and most feminine way possible, because she walked up to look at the Belgian trenches outside the town, and found the Colonel minus a coat button. Of course she sewed it on, and followed up the obvious opening by offering to fill the place as chauffeur. Though the Belgian Army was not nearly so much swathed about with red tape as some of the older countries, yet it was rather an innovation that the Colonel should accept a woman as chauffeur in war-time, and therefore certain formalities had to be faced. These were got through with the speed born of necessity, and the following day Gipsy took the Colonel on his rounds to various outposts, picking up a wounded man on the way. She had coffee with her new employer before he went on to the actual front, and she concluded that he was "a dear, so kind and considerate;" he had not taken any advantage of the unusual position.

Already it was beginning to be apparent that there was a fatal lack of organization in the ambulance corps. The men part of it were rushing hither and thither bravely enough, but in a most haphazard manner, wasting much precious petrol, and even joy-rides were not unknown, whereas much real ability and energy was running to waste.

Various signs of military activity were to be seen through Ghent from time to time. Some field-guns caused a diversion, and when numbers of sturdy plucky Belgian troops marched through, the lady members of the corps gave them cigarettes to express that sympathy which for the moment they seemed to have no other way of expressing.

The post of chauffeur, after all, took up very little time, and even this outlet was blocked, for Dr. Munro, rather naturally, objected to one of his corps being taken off for such work, and it had to be stopped. Gipsy and Mairi therefore amused themselves playing games with the convalescent soldiers, but all the while brain and heart were under a terrific strain; there is no strain quite so bad as waiting in the certainty that any moment you may be called upon to put forth all your resources and face scenes so horrible that you may fail, for even the best of us never knows his calibre until tried. "We mouched around," says Mairi miserably. "I felt bored with life. Another day of waiting! One must have patience beyond everything!" Then there swam into their ken the gay and gallant figure of a young Belgian officer; he was slim and tall, with fair hair, showing up in contrast with his well-fitting dark green uniform. They nicknamed him "Gilbert the Filbert." At that time he was with the Voluntary Cyclists Corps, and used to go out at nights on his motorcycle to pick off German outposts; he had accounted for forty- eight Germans in the weeks preceding, so his presence was inspiriting. He was to be very closely associated with them in their work, but at the time he was merely a passer-by.

The first serious work came when the trainloads of wounded men had to be met at the station at any hour of the night, and conveyed to the hospitals. In the dark and icy-cold station the friends waited hour after hour for the trains which never came when they were expected. They snatched hurried moments trying to rest in a railway carriage, but the cold was so intense that sleep was out of the question. Sometimes they talked to the men in charge of the solid, heart-cheering British omnibuses, straight from London, having their shiny sides painted with Clapham, Cricklewood, and other names which seemed more lovable and attractive than London suburbs ever did before. There was a dramatic moment when a trainload of terribly smashed and maimed Belgians came in at one platform of the station, just as a trainload of self-confident, clean, fresh British Tommies was going out from another. The little Belgians had not as yet seen such assurances of help, and one and all, exhausted and faint as they were, cheered and waved their poor bandaged hands; while, as the other train began to move, the Tommies looked at them in pleased shyness, not in the least knowing how to show they appreciated the welcome. "Give them a cheer, boys!" shouted Gipsy, letting loose the spring at the psychological moment, and the resounding shout in response echoed through the vaults of the gloomy station roof.

The girls worked with the strength of ten; when none of the men of the party were available they even did the heavy lifting, raising the dead weight of unconscious or helpless men on stretchers. They worked sometimes right through the night, so that when they got back to their quarters in the morning there was only time to wash and be ready again for what the day should bring forth, for they might be wanted at any moment. "I never felt so googly and utterly played out in my life," says Mairi after one such night. Still, they had comfortable rooms to go back to, and good food when they wanted it; this was child's-play to what came afterwards. The waiting, which had seemed so interminable to their eager hearts strung up to expectation, really endured for only a few days, and they soon began to range around the outlying villages to find wounded men. By the beginning of October they had learnt many things. They had seen the Belgians working busily at digging trenches, in absolute silence, so as not to attract the Germans, who were only a hundred yards away. They had run along in the open, expecting any moment to be noticed and made a target for shells. They had had the most discouraging of all experiences,  that of seeing their allies obliged to retreat. In one place they passed through one of those experiences which remain like a hurt on the heart. Fifty men had been left to guard the retreat of the rest, left to what was almost certain death. Theirs to hold up the flood-tide so long as they might before going under. There was a look on the faces of these men seen only on the faces of the dead who have died in peace. There was no uncertainty, no disquietude. They awaited their fate as if they had already met it, not lightly or discounting what it meant, but with the calm willingness of those who had seen all they loved in the world swept away. The clear blue eyes of every rough soldier had in them something of the light that comes from a vision of the beyond. There was no faltering, but no braggart conceit; they were invincible alive or dead.

And the fate that descended on them was not left only to the imagination of those who perhaps might have found it difficult to imagine, having had no previous experience of such things. For a few days later Gipsy, going out with some of the men of the ambulance, came upon what was left of just such another group, at Nazareth, not far from Zele. Twenty-six military police holding an outpost had been surrounded by about three hundred Germans, who had acted according to their kind and passed on.

The Belgians had resisted to the death, and the whole twenty-six lay there, pitched about in various attitudes. They had been shot at by a ring of their foes at a range of from ten to fifteen yards, but that was not all. Even this finished slaughter had not satiated the Germans' stomach for blood, and they had deliberately set to work to mutilate and rob the dead foe. That tiny plot of grass was rusty with blood. Every face was smashed in except that of the Captain, who had been shot through the heart and left as he was, to be identified, possibly with the cool intention of showing that the leader had not escaped. From the others everything had been stolen—boots, purses, stockings, and other clothes—so that the dead were nearly naked, and even their identification discs had been removed.

One of the first times Gipsy and Mairi were actually under fire was on October 5, and it was at Berleare, a little village about four miles west of Termonde and a good way east of Ghent. The account is best told in Gipsy's own simple wording, taken from one of her letters home, which was afterwards reproduced in a local paper:

"We went through busy lines of cavalry, and all the way along the firing got louder and louder."

“We ran into Berleare about 9.30 a.m., and about 9.45 a big shell fell on a neighbouring house and shattered the roof. I was able to get a large piece. While we were standing listening to the fearful noise of shell and rifle fire, the order came through that there were wounded at Appels to be fetched. Off we went, and we found that we were bound to leave the ambulance close to the main road and walk with the stretchers, as we had to go toward the river, and the Germans were the other side. We had to walk about three miles, and then came to the river (Dendre). The river was, I suppose, about fifty yards wide, with a high trench built on either side. We had to creep, bent double, all along the side, until we came to these wounded men. I will try and explain the position. The river bank had been highly trenched, and there was a pathway along the side of the trench, about five yards wide. There was a steep bank descent, and at the bottom a boggy water-meadow country, with only a small foot pathway, raised out of the water, across each field. At 2 p.m. it began to rain heavily, and it was difficult keeping one's feet on the muddy, wet ground, as it was thought safer to walk on the bottom of the bank in the water.”

"So our little band trudged on with four damp stretchers and our heavy box of dressings. At last, lying on the soaking grass and wet through, we discovered a Belgian Tommy almost exhausted and terribly wounded; his right foot carried away by shrapnel and also shot badly in the back. We did what we could for him, but we could only put him on a damp stretcher and leave him in charge of someone while we went on. No talking was allowed, as sounds carry over the river. All this time the shells were whizzing over our heads and rifle-fire was heard all round.”

"We crept along the bank, slipping and falling, until we saw on the river pathway, just behind the trench, the uniform of a Belgian Major. He was badly shot in the thigh, and had to be carefully attended. It was terribly difficult work, as the German patrol spotted us on the other side of the river, and it was not a pleasant moment. If you can imagine us exactly between the two firing-lines, you have some idea of our position. You can imagine those big shells whizzing over our heads, and with lives to save, it was not a moment to laugh. We had to carry the Major practically along the ground—that is, we had to be bent nearly double, so that our heads were below the level of the river trench. I wonder if anyone can realize what it means. I only ask them to put a heavy grown man on a stretcher and attempt to carry him by bending double; it is a terribly difficult and exhausting proceeding, and all the time that awful heavy fire. And it was getting so dark that it was hard to see. Suddenly everything was lit up by the firing of some houses in Berleare by the Germans.”

"We nearly got lost on the way home. We had to tramp over the fields those three miles back to rejoin the ambulances, resting every fifty yards to change arms and bearers. I shall never forget the evening. We could not light a match on account of being watched by the Germans. But we managed to find our ambulance and get the men home at last. How plucky these little Belgians are!"

To this account it may be added that the danger of getting back to Berleare was much emphasized by the great dykes full of water to be crossed somehow, and that the cheeriness of the whole expedition was enhanced by a steady downpour of rain.

One day came the news that Antwerp had been evacuated. Even if they had not heard it they would have known it by the flood of fugitives which poured into Ghent. The roads were choked by them, men and women and children, piled on carts or dragging handbarrows, some, who had lost all they loved—children, husbands, wives, or mothers, without much prospect of ever again discovering them—were still clinging grimly and quite unconsciously to a tawdry ornament or some such trifle, snatched up automatically and gripped with the grip that death does not loosen. Out of all this welter of horror one or two scenes stand out by reason of the pathetic touch. An old woman of the working classes was conveying a small cart dragged by a dog; in the cart sat two wee babes, probably her grandchildren. The dog had been wounded, for his fore-paw was bleeding, and he limped along painfully, but with great determination and full consciousness of his immense responsibility. Every now and then he turned his brown eyes on his mistress, as if asking permission, and then sank down on the roadside to lick his paw, while the stream of amazingly mixed traffic swept by on each side of him. The old granny looked at him mutely, but did not hurry him; she knew that in him lay the sole chance of her babies reaching safety, for she was too old and weak to carry them. If the dog failed they would die, and therefore she waited with feeble resignation until he himself, without being urged, took up the collar- work of his little living load and staggered on.

It was the sense of personal isolation which struck one most in these crowds. In normal life if one falls out by the way there are always any number of healthy and well-to-do folk to give a hand; but here, where each tiny group was tried to the utmost in struggling up out of their own avalanches of misfortune, there was no one who, however willing, could help. It was sink or swim for each family or individual, alone.

Most of the people in this crowd were Flemings, and they are a curious race. Nothing seems to disturb them. As they tramped along in hundreds it was rare to see a woman in tears. They seemed to accept the inevitable with a stoical patience; no questions were asked, no complaints made, and there was certainly not the least sign of panic. They trudged along, scarcely paying any attention to the troops they met, or those that passed them marching, also in retreat. Their absolute lack of emotion was almost uncanny; their faces were unnaturally calm. To an outsider it appeared as if it might be the calm of un-intelligence, but the look of pain in the eyes of some of them contradicted that theory. The Two could not help asking, "What lies behind that mask of indifference? Are there any feelings there at all?" It is difficult for one of another race to understand the Flamand. Is he only stupid, or is there a lack of frankness in his nature which forbids one to trust him entirely? Most of these people were agriculturists—the Flamand does not take kindly to mechanical work. These strong, thick-set men and women looked what they were, farm-labourers born and bred, without any streak of the vivacity of their fellow-countrymen the Walloons.

One day a message was brought to the ambulance corps that there was a wounded officer awaiting rescue in a shattered house at Lokeren, then on the very furthest fringe of the Belgian territory, up against the German lines. On the way out indeed, the ambulance in which Gipsy was, passed part of the Belgian Army in retreat. But this did not deter the party; on they went past those stained and worn men who were still unconquered and as resolute in retreat as in advance. Some of the last of them stopped a minute and pointed out the house where the wounded man was to be found, before they hurried after their comrades, and were lost in that dull-coloured mass of muddy clothes and torn uniforms. The place was a little cottage, which had received some battering, but was still comparatively whole; it looked utterly deserted. With tense expectation the rescuers pushed open the door, and stopped for a moment to get used to the gloom; there was a horribly eerie sound ringing through the emptiness, a drip, drip, steady and unexplained, like the drip of a kitchen tap. Then the cause was revealed, for on the table lay an officer, a young man in the prime of life, in a beautiful new uniform with brightly polished buttons and stars gleaming, and as he lay there his blood dropped slowly and steadily on to the floor, draining away his life. He was beyond help.

As the party left the house the German forces poured in at the other end of the village.

However, the ambulances had already picked up three other wounded soldiers, and they felt their perilous dash into danger had been worth while. When they were almost clear of the houses on the way back a blind man came slowly groping towards them, and they stopped for him, though they knew that the Germans were right behind them. He advanced, but his movements were slow, and he had only placed one foot on the step when a burst of rifle-fire told them that they were fully in range, and were being deliberately made a target of. It was a choice between the life of one civilian and three wounded soldiers, and they decided for the latter, and went off at full speed. It is, however, satisfactory to hear that the blind man was afterwards brought in safely by an armoured car.

The party had hardly returned to Ghent when a call came for them to go to Melle, a little village about six miles off on the main road running southeast from Ghent. Here the Two were to have one of the greatest experiences of their lives—one of those experiences which scores a deep mark across consciousness, so that the "after" can never again be quite as the "before."

When they arrived at Melle at about 8 o'clock at night they were told by soldiers who were dodging round the houses that the main street was "cleared for action," and that they must on no account go there; so the ambulance was drawn up in a side-street right in the heart of the battle, for close behind it was the Belgian artillery. Wounded men soon began to require aid, and the car was quickly filled and ran back to Ghent, to return again just as the Germans made a rush and swept down the main street. Unimaginable uproar and confusion resulted. Shells were not actually bursting in the town, because neither side could be sure of not hitting their own men, but the artillery were hard at work sky-rocketing their missiles at one another overhead to prevent reinforcements coming up, and in among the houses a perfect storm of bullets hissed like deadly hail, rebounding off the houses or lodging in the crevices of the woodwork. It cannot have been given to many women, especially those of another race than the combatants, to have been in the thick of such a battle.

The French marines were helping the Belgians, and both together were resisting in a desperate fight, the most deadly fighting of all, hand-to-hand combats hemmed in by houses. It was quite dark, for there was no moon, and all around the ambulance party were little groups of French marines awaiting the word of command to spring into action. Some of them brought up a stretcher, whispering about the blessé who was on it, hit in the leg. Groping to feel the horrible wound, Gipsy leant over him and began bandaging, and then some inertness made her aware she could do nothing. At her request a match was struck, and she saw her surmise was true, the man was already dead. Then there were sudden shouts and the jangle of field equipment and a hideous scuffle, and all in the dark, right around the car, Belgians and French and Germans inextricably mixed in bayonet-fighting swept past. The car held already one badly wounded man, and it was about time to move, so when the tense moment was past they worked their way out of the town to go back. But in doing so they naturally came under shell-fire, and hardly had they started than shells burst within fifty yards of them, crashing into the ground and exploding with volumes of sickening smoke, leaving great pits.

It was mere touch-and-go whether one would not land on the top of the ambulance and exterminate the whole party, but they escaped injury as by a miracle, and arriving at the hospital, left their precious burden and actually returned once more through the deadly fire- zone. The scene had changed; the combined Belgians and French had thrust back the invaders, and the town was saved, the line being where it had been before. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the whole episode was the coolness of Mairi. This girl of eighteen, who had so little experience to prepare her, had been under fire the whole afternoon and through this awful turmoil; and in her diary, written with no intention of anyone ever seeing it, but merely as a personal record, she writes: "It was most interesting; the shrapnel was screaming overhead the whole time—a most fascinating sound."

Gipsy's comment is: "We got more than we wanted: we nearly lost the ambulance. Mairi and I were on the step under heavy fire, and I saw a German soldier with a good eye taking deliberate aim at us."

One would feel instinctively that he had a good eye!

She too, ends up on a note of exultation: "It was a wonderful and grand day, and I would not have missed it for anything."

The Cellar House at Pervyse - Chapter 1 - The Start

'The Cellar-House of Pervyse'

A Tale of Uncommon Things from The Journals and Letters of the Baroness t'Serclaes and Mairi Chisholm

A Story of Two British Volunteer Nurses on the Yser Front

Chapter I - The Start

I shall never forget them as I saw them first, a little oddly mixed group. They might have been a party of Cook's tourists going for a week-end across the Channel as they stood there in Victoria Station; but it was more than a week-end trip they had to face. At first I thought that some of them were merely seeing the others off, especially the lady with cherries in her hat. In fact, there were only two who looked real sportswomen, and they were Mrs. Knocker and Mairi Chisholm. They were dressed in big khaki overcoats, but as these were flung open one could see the high boots and tunics underneath, and there was no manner of doubt that they were wearing knickerbocker khaki suits in London! The others were slightly scandalized—one could see it in their furtive glances, and the way they obviously avoided looking just where the khaki knickers were. We are so funny, we English; there is nothing so deeply ingrained in us as a horror of any sort of attitudinizing, and we are so much afraid of it that we will not get ready for the moment lest the moment should not come. It was little more than a month then since war had broken out, and still we were rather shamefaced about it, most of us; even the recruits felt a little foolish doing those queer exercises in public, as if they might be ridiculous and not really wanted at the front after all. Thus, of course, it was difficult for these gentle ladies, who wore correct costumes and picture hats, to think there could really be any need for stepping right outside the conventional lines, at all events until they got to the war zone. The question how it was to be done afterwards had not come within their horizon.

Then there were the men of the party. One, a most heroic padre, had gone in for the whole thing. He never considered for a moment whether he looked ridiculous or not; he was a most single-minded, upright gentleman, as he proved many a time afterwards; but the clergy are not as a rule notorious for the cut of their clothes, and he had not been able to afford the expense of an officer's khaki suit, so his was a ready-made rough Tommy's costume, serviceable enough, and it fell into the picture very completely when he "got there."

Men's clothes have this advantage over women's, they are at all events more practical, and the two clever London doctors who were going out for the sake of the experience looked very comfortable in their loose-fitting tweeds—the suits they wore when golfing at the week-ends. As for the leader of the party himself, well, he was different from anyone; he never had cared a button about his clothes, and would have handled wounded men in a frock-coat and top-hat without a care in the world. His hat was as often on wrong side as not, for his excessive carelessness about dress seemed to culminate in his headgear, and a cheap cyclist's check cap would do for him as well as a Belgian officer's gold-tasselled cap. What matter? He was a visionary, full of enthusiasm, and but for him this group of people, some of whom at least were to distinguish themselves in self-sacrificing and noble work with the Belgian Army, would never have been able to go out at all. That the doctor did not combine in himself opposite virtues was no fault of his—who does? He had a positively heroic disregard for detail; it was all one to him if his corps consisted of two members or of fifteen, as it actually did. I verily believe if I, a Londoner, with no experience whatever of medicine or surgery, had stepped forward at the minute the engine- whistle sounded, and said, "May I also come with you as a member of your corps?" he would have hauled me into the gathering speed of the train by one arm, and said, "Dear friend, yes, certainly; by all means!"

It was characteristic of him that he had managed to start the corps by a fluke. He had seen Mrs. Knocker on a motor-cycle doing despatch work for the Women's Emergency Corps, and with a stroke of genius had recognized that she was the one woman who could help him in the ambulance work he burned to do in Belgium. He was quite right about that. A more highly efficient woman could hardly have been found. Most women do difficult technical things now, but few did them before the war. Mrs. Knocker was a fully trained nurse, an excellent mechanic and chauffeur; she spoke French and German, and with all that it hardly needs adding she was a capable woman; but the genius of Dr. Munro lay in recognizing it, because she doesn't look like this, or at any rate not like the stereo typed notion of a woman who can do all these things. She is a little above medium height, very slightly built, with a beautiful profile, clear complexion, and singularly bright hazel eyes. When you look at her eyes you see at once that she is full of sensibility and very easily hurt—in fact, she is the kind of woman who would really take it to heart if, in a great emergency, you swore at her! She minds very much what her relations to her fellow-beings are, and this constitutes just the difference between the woman who can communicate vital energy to wounded men so as to set them on their feet again and the woman who, however efficient as a nurse she may be, remains outside the personality of her patients.

To Mrs. Knocker Dr. Munro had confided the choosing of the rest of the corps, and the first member of it she had selected was a capital Scottish girl called Mairi Chisholm. Though Mairi hailed from Inverness originally, she had recently lived in Devon near Mrs. Knocker. They had been friends before the war, and ridden motor- cycles together, and it was shrewd Mairi who had christened her friend "Gipsy," a name which suits her down to the ground, and is so much more suitable than her own hard married name (which, however, she no longer possesses) that I shall henceforth use it.

When the war began Gipsy and Mairi had immediately come up to London and offered their services to the War Office as despatch- riders. You see, Gipsy has vision, and though at that time the idea that women could do men's work seemed utterly ludicrous to most people, she had the courage of her convictions. The War Office, of course, was too dignified to scoff, but its contemptuous indifference was quite as bad. After many hopeless attempts the two friends gave it up and got a job as despatch-riders for the Women's Emergency Corps, which also had the faculty of seeing ahead. Mairi had had no training as a nurse, and was only eighteen, but she had the fundamental qualities of balance, common sense, and loyalty, and so, when the idea of the corps was mooted, Gipsy chose her at once to belong to it. Mairi had no money, but possessed with a burning fervour to help, she sold her beloved motor-cycle to provide the funds for her expenses. The next selection was a golden-haired American lady, also untrained, but very willing and eager; she turned out to be a beautiful pianist. Miss May Sinclair, the novelist, heard of the project and decided to go too, not as an ambulance helper, but to be useful in any capacity. She offered herself as secretary, and the difficulties she surmounted during her three weeks in Belgium have been ably told in her book A Journal of Impressions in Belgium. When the party was thus nearly made up Dr. Munro accepted Lady Dorothie Feilding, whose name became very well known in connection with her work for the corps. The British Red Cross had scoffed at this amateur band, but the Belgian Red Cross was willing enough to accept their useful services; and when the British one found this out it actually rose at length to giving them two cars, which necessitated the addition of two working chauffeurs to the party, and furthermore it eventually gave them their passages to Belgium. Thus when they set out from Victoria for Ostend on that momentous day at the end of September, 1914, the corps had a field of useful work open to them.

There was not one heart among them that was not thrilled as they steamed across the sea amid numerous ships of our own, which gave a cheer when they recognized the Red Cross. All that lay ahead was utterly unknown even to the most experienced of the party, for what likeness does the ordinary healing work in sickness bear to the violent wounds and unnatural smashes of the human body in the grip of war?

Antwerp had not then fallen; the Germans had certainly got a grip on Belgium, but it was not a strangle-hold. The horrible monster was advancing, reaching out with his claws to deal red death to soldier and civilian alike if they lay in his path; and this incomparable little company of gallant people, with a reckless disregard of danger and a divine carelessness as to how they were to be supported, advanced across the water to meet the monster and to rescue from his jaws, it might be, "two legs or a piece of an ear."

In September, 1913, the crude blues and reds and yellows of the bathing-machines on the yellow plage at Ostend had been almost lost amid the still more gaily-hued paddlers and merry-makers who considered that to dip one toe in the water was bathing sufficiently and delightfully. In September, 1914, the bathing-machines were still there, but the crowd was gone. The melancholy-looking crudely painted wooden erections stood up forlornly like huge fungi, and no one used them.

Until a day or so before the ambulance corps arrived in Ostend the place had been fairly full, certainly, but with a different crowd from the gay crowd of holiday-makers. No one believed that the Germans would ever get so far as this, but the shadow of the Hun was over the land, rising up ominously on the eastern horizon, and the chill of it cut off the gaiety from a nation which, in one of its sections, was the most pleasure-loving on earth. Then, only the night before, a message had come from the Germans in the shape of a bomb dropped on the principal hotel adjoining the railway-station. A great exodus of the people occurred at once. The bomb had fallen in the garden and there made a great hole, and one of the first things the party of English people did on arrival was to go out to look at it with awe and excitement—a wonderful thing, a hole made by a bomb, the first any of them had seen! Most of them were to gain so much familiarity with shell-holes that they were heartily sickened of them. "Shells, shells, shells!" writes Gipsy in one of her home letters later. "How I wish I could never see them again!"

Except for the hole, it was certainly not much like war-time in Ostend, for the huge hotel, with its luxurious bath-rooms provided en suite to every bedroom, was still just as usual; but the message that all lights were to be out by 8.30 gave a touch of novelty—it was long before lights had been lowered in England.

The next morning the members of the corps awoke to face a wild scramble and much running to and fro, arising from lack of adequately-thought-out detail.

The party were to go to Ghent, to make their headquarters there for the present. But how were they to get there? There were two cars certainly, one a 42 h.p. Daimler, with pneumatic tyres, for passenger service, and the other a 40 h.p. Fiat, with solid tyres, suitable for carrying baggage. There were the cars and there were the chauffeurs, but where was the motive power—the petrol? No one had thought of this, apparently, and at first, it was suggested that as petrol seemed unprocurable in Ostend, the cars should be put on a truck and taken by rail to Ghent; but after a weary delay even this was found to be impracticable, for the cars, being very large, refused to go on the trucks. At length, after endless skirmishing up and down and a good deal of irritation, due to pent-up excitement among the members of the party, the military authorities lent them enough petrol to carry them on to Bruges, and about 1.30 they got off, after what seemed an interminable morning, for they had been up by 6.

The road to Bruges runs almost due east, straight into the jaws of that devouring monster which, like the dragon of the old fairy-stories, was scorching up the country-side with his breath. The road, like all the main roads in Belgium, had stones in the middle, the pavé sloping down a little at each side, and it was bordered by a ditch and a line of poplar-trees, straight and sentinel-like. There were very few signs of war. Even the guns could not be heard; the ambulance corps motored, as many a hundred parties had motored before them, in perfect serenity; and if it had not been for the sentries whom they had to pass occasionally when passports were demanded, it might have seemed an ordinary holiday. They were all very innocent of what it was they were going to face.

How little did those two bright-eyed girls—for Gipsy herself was little more than a girl—foresee the weeks of cramped quarters, hardly a minute without danger, the horrors of sights and sounds beyond thought, the horrors of want of baths and change of clothes, the horrors of creeping things they had never yet encountered, the icy cold, the continual strain, the rough food and lack of all the refinements of civilization

As they ran through the villages, little children in wooden clogs and women with apple-red faces or wrinkled nut-brown skins, came out to watch and smile and wave. The very sight of the cars brought hope to them, for were not these British the vanguard of those powerful forces which were coming to save Belgium? Poor souls! They were later to know what German rule meant, with grinding torture when the iron-shod heel of the Hun pressed down upon their daily lives, and screwed as they writhed; for all the good-will in the world could not manufacture troops in time to stop the Hun before he reached them.

In the generosity of her heart Gipsy showered the cigarettes she had with her on every man she saw; but Mairi, with a characteristic touch, held back hers, knowing that when her friend's ran out and she had no more there would be woe and wailing.

Bruges looked totally undisturbed. The glorious belfry reared itself in all its delicate glory, straight and slender, peeping over the roofs to greet them as the cars thumped over the vile pavé. A woman with a little cross-over shawl wrapped round her shoulders was delivering milk from a tiny cart drawn by a patient square-built dog, just as she had done every day for years. The cows must be milked and people must have milk—and there, well, the Germans wouldn't come to Bruges, they would be stopped long before that! It was difficult even for educated people to picture beforehand the destruction and misery which swept like an avalanche on these peaceful towns, and much more so for the uneducated, who had never been anywhere else, and to whom these towns were the world.

Bruges is encircled by a canal, and the cars had to cross it to enter, and then ran on to the Grand Place, pulling up before the Post Office. A Belgian trooper was standing outside, and the untried French of the party was quite sufficient to make him understand that petrol was the chief need; he came to show where it might be bought, and then, with no further delay, out and on they went to Ghent. They were all so incredibly keen to get there, to fling themselves into the red zone of war, to begin to bind up wounds, that the intense stillness of this flat country was almost unendurable.

In the flatness of the calmest sea there is movement and ceaseless stir; the sea is for ever whispering some tale to those who have ears to hear. The flatness of the prairie is full of anticipation; no one knows what may not be revealed as each roll of the land is surmounted. The flatness of the desert conceals an infinite mystery, for no human eye, unless it be that of a Bedouin, can sort out into definiteness the shining gradations of lilac and grey and biscuit colour. But all these are as nothing to the flatness of parts of Belgium, which merely waits. And the numb tension of it settled on the hearts of those who were longing for action.

Ghent was reached at about 5.30, and here indeed, everything woke up vividly; about a thousand people were collected in the Grand Place shouting and waving; upper windows were opened and many leaned out; handkerchiefs were flourished, and the cars had to go cautiously in the crowded streets, making a kind of triumphal progress. The whole aspect of the city was as if it had been eagerly awaiting just these two little carloads of English.

There were two military hospitals in Ghent, and it was to the second, which had received about a hundred wounded men, that the English ambulance was attached. It was really the Flandria Palace Hotel, and the ambulance members were to live there and to have their meals in a great stately room, waited on by two orderlies, Jean and Max, little Belgian soldiers who had been to the front and were convalescing from wounds. No hardship here. For one moment in the evening a thrill of excitement burst out, when the party heard that some of them might be wanted to go out to fetch some wounded, and thus would come in contact with the real thing, and "begin." But it was a false alarm; only one wounded man came in3 and he was brought by a horse ambulance. Mairi, indeed, went to see him, thinking in her young zeal she could not begin too soon; she was rewarded by a sight of the bullet which had just been taken from his leg.

The next morning all sorts of tiresome formalities about passports were again necessary, and up and down the crowded streets they passed. Broad clean streets they are—or were—with electric trams running along them, a very different place from sleepy Bruges! Canals run here and there throughout the whole town, cutting it up into slices and chunks, and at almost every street corner there is a view of a quaint bridge and some motionless barges. Down one of the narrow back streets an old woman was sitting by her wooden door; she wore a frilled granny-cap and worked away with heavily knuckled fingers upon a piece of the pillow lace by which she earned her bread. At her feet, jumping endlessly up and down the sunk step of the doorway, was a hideous tiny tortoise-shell kitten, quite pleased with itself and its prospects in life; it would have been hard to say which was the most unmoved by the gathering of the great cataclysm, the kitten of a few weeks, or the old grandmother who had long left behind the romance of her life. Possibly her grandsons were now among the hundreds of sturdily built, ruddy- cheeked young men who faced the terrific blasts of the German artillery.

In the Béguinage de Mont St. Armand lived nuns, in immense flapping white headgear. For years they had been within those sheltering walls, praying and fasting and doing a little lace-making, and now they were soon to be suddenly thrust into a world running red with blood, with every vestige of the curtain concealing the fierce realities of life torn away. Not far from their wall, which was still intact and seemed to radiate something of the somnolence from within, as bricks radiate the heat when the sun has passed on, stood a German car, captured and brought in by the great armoured car that stood beside it—a conscious conqueror. The German car shrieked of the force that had been used in its destruction, which had riddled its radiator with holes, smashed its screen to powder, and crushed its vital power. Across the twisted steering-wheel were smears of half-dried blood, and wavering over the driving-seat hung a torn and ghastly rag.

The next two days were dreadfully trying to Gipsy Knocker and Mairi Chisholm, for here they were "on the spot," but, as they phrased it, "nothing doing." They could not help in nursing the wounded, for there were plenty of nurses— besides, that was not their job; their part was to go out to the firing-line to fetch the wounded and render first-aid, and bring them in, but no one had sent for them and they had no permission to go.

They visited the refugees who had come in from the country-side, escaping from under the fringe of the great cloud that rolled ever westward. There were as many as eight thousand at that time in Ghent, and they had been housed, by a strange irony, in the Palais des Fêtes! Straw had been heaped up round some of the halls, and here they lay, whole families together, robbed by shock of all power of initiative, stunned by the earthquake that had flung them up and out of the places where they had lived their simple lives. All links with the past, every treasured household remembrance, had been wrenched from them, and the future was an utter blank. Something of that bewilderment, amounting to agony, which overtakes one occasionally when one awakes after a deep dream and cannot regain the everyday self was theirs in terrible measure. In the spacious storey above mothers were even now bringing forth babies, with no country, no place in the world, no prospects.

The feeding of all these people was an enormous task, and it is to the credit of Ghent that it was so well tackled. Some of the ambulance party helped, cutting up huge chunks of bread, setting out bowls of soup, and working till their backs ached, on the principle of doing anything that might be useful; but even this was denied them, for they were recalled by authority, for fear they might carry germs to the wounded when they handled them.