CHAPTER XVIII.

OVER THE BELGIAN FRONTIER.

Our Clearing Hospital remained at Chocques for four or five days, and while here had a fair, but not a large, number of wounded. These were quickly sent off by hospital trains, which pulled on to a siding not far from us. The Indian Clearing Hospital was now also establishing itself in the small town, and the Indian hospital assistants were a source of great and wondering curiosity to the small boys and girls. Our Clearing Hospital was now ordered to a place farther north, and as I had only been temporarily attached to it during a time of great rush at Bethune, my place was now with my own Field Ambulance at the front, and somewhere near the Belgian frontier.

A motor-car going to Hazebrouck gave me a lift as far as there, and another driver brought me to Bailleul. Here, after I had reported my arrival, Surgeon-General Porter informed me of the exact location of my ambulance.

Bailleul is a town of considerable importance in the north of France, and has been the object of many visits from Taubes, a sure indication that there must be a church or a hospital in Bailleul. The church and the hospital were very close together, and the Taubes made many a gallant attempt to get them both. One evening one of them got the hospital—a bomb fell fair on the roof and into a ward full of wounded men, killing two and wounding again a man already grievously wounded. The old church has so far escaped. The square at Bailleul near the church was a busy place in those days, as the town was a Divisional Headquarters and a corps “poste commandement,” and where there are headquarters and “brass hats” there also are many rank and file. It was here that, some weeks later, I saw that fine battalion, the Liverpool Scottish, parade in the street and march out to the trenches. They were standing on parade in the street for about twenty minutes before moving off and the day was bitterly cold. The bare knees of the men looked blue and the kilt did not impress us as a good winter dress. Why Highlanders choose to expose their knees is quite beyond me. The knee joint is a big and complex anatomical structure, and is easily affected by sudden changes of temperature, so why cover up every other joint in the body and leave this bare?

Greatly daring though the ladies are to-day in their draping arrangements, they do not dare to walk about with bare knees. What prevents them must certainly be their appreciation of the delicacy of this joint—the delicate mechanism of an important articulation.

Twenty years hence, veterans of the Liverpool Scottish will tell their children how they got rheumatism in their knee joints from the cold mud of the Flanders trenches in the year of our Lord 1914.

I left Bailleul on a Red-Cross Wolseley car driven by a queer character who used to be with us on the Aisne doing transport work. He was thought to have been killed and duly buried, and I was therefore agreeably surprised to see my odd friend again. He was a wonderfully cheery pessimist. He usually had a long budget of most depressing news, of disasters by flood and field, and great disappointments, but he envisaged them all with a rosy hue and predicted a great to-morrow. He did not like the war, for although it had not changed his occupation—that of a chauffeur—it had seriously affected his emoluments. In the piping times of peace he would take small parties on touring journeys in France, Germany, and Switzerland—sometimes a honeymoon couple, sometimes an American millionaire, and he did exceedingly well in tips.

We had a rough passage up from Bailleul and were twice bogged in the mud beside the road, and had twice to be hauled out. The roads here, and right over the frontier into southern Belgium, were very bad in these days. Our men, when on the Aisne, said many hard words about the mud there, but the Aisne was an asphalt path compared with Belgium.

However, we slowly squelched and skidded our way over the Belgian frontier and reached Ouderdom, not very far from Ypres. For the last few miles we had been following Napoleon’s maxim to his Marshals: “Marching on the sound of the guns.” The heavy artillery, French, British, and German, was making a deafening roar.

This really completed the journey from the Aisne to Flanders. We were at our “farthest north,” and this journey impressed one with the length of the huge battle-line, although it only embraced, after all, a part of the great whole. From Switzerland to the Channel stretched a wavy line of trenches, across plains, spanning canals, through and around swamps, in front of great cities and small villages, traversing great forests and over mountain passes and peaks. At one end submerged country flooded by Alpine snow, sand dunes at the other; and in these trenches lined with soldiers, and swept by artillery, stern fighting was going on over practically every mile.

Our ambulance headquarters was about the most God-forsaken place that one could possibly imagine. The first impression one received was a dirty pond, full of fetid water and surrounded by heaped-up straw manure. The Belgian, like the Frenchman, loves to have a manure heap at his front door. Closely abutting on this putrefactive manure was the cottage itself, with one front room, a small side-room or box off this front room, a kitchen, a bedroom, and another box at the back. From the kitchen a rickety stair led up to a windy loft full of corn and hops and bags of potatoes.

Next the living quarters and part of the house came stalls for cattle, and the _tout ensemble_ was unlovely and smelly. Twelve medical officers, two chaplains, and a quartermaster lived in the tiny little front room, or crowded round a table in it. When the table was in the room there was barely space to pass between it and the wall. Six or seven officers slept on the floor of this den at night, and in the morning had to rise early, roll up their valises and pack them round the wall. The O.C. and a chaplain slept in the box off our only room, and the rest of us slept in the loft amidst the wheat and hops and the bitter cold draughts.

Our cooks lived, smoked, worked, and slept in the kitchen, and this apartment Madame invaded during the day to do her domestic cooking. Madame “with the terrible voice” gave our cooks a bad time, and frequently chased them out and took their pots and pans off the fire, utterly disorganising our meals.

Madame was not popular, and in my dreams I sometimes still hear her raucous voice.

The Flemish farmer, the proud owner of this very dirty and uninviting farm, had a family of three little children, and was besides the humble husband of the lady whose voice was more terrifying than the screech of bursting shrapnel.

Poor Madame, she did not look kindly on us, and we never even saw her smile—except once, and that story comes later.

At 4 a.m. her strident, penetrating tones would fill the cottage and wake us all to a world of cold and discomfort, of greasy bacon, muddy tea, and sodden mousy bread.

She was watchful and suspicious of our men, who slept with the poultry in the surrounding stables and out-houses, and openly accused them of stealing her straw.

What they could do with the straw after having stolen it Madame did not choose to say—perhaps she thought that they ate it!

We met many Flemish besides Madame and her family at this time, and although we sympathised greatly with them, we could not bring ourselves to like them. It was all so different with the French, whom we liked and who liked us. The Flemings did not seem to care for us; they certainly never made us any demonstrations of affection. Perhaps it was the difference in tongue. They spoke French with an Irish-Dutch brogue, and our accent was, of course, a pure Anglo-Parisian.

French officers told us here that they did not like the Flemings, and that the Flemings were not cordial with them. Belgian officers, it is well known, do not see eye to eye with the French officers, but pull amazingly well with the British, to whom they are warm and communicative.

Tommy Atkins as a rule likes every one, but he neither understood nor cared for the Flemings. This was quite noticeable. We found those round Ouderdom, Ypres, and Dickebusch sullen, dour, and suspicious. We were not welcomed, and their surly, heavy manner towards us was very apparent. There was no responsiveness, no _gaieté de cœur_, no cheerfulness.

Historical traditions and the likes and hates of centuries die hard. The Flemings and the English had often been friends in the past, but the French and Flemings had always been on opposite sides of the fence, and whenever the French came into the Flemish garden it was to fight, and not to play.

We wondered if Madame of our cottage knew her Belgian history. We were quite sure that she would have been more amiable and sweet had she known that Flanders had been England’s ally in the Hundred Years’ War, and that the bowmen of Mons were more than once ranged on England’s side; that Baldwin II., Count of Flanders, a former ruler of the land where stood Madame’s farm, was a son-in-law of Alfred the Great of England, and that Baldwin V., also a Count of Flanders, was father-in-law to William the Conqueror, and fitted out Flemish ships to convey Flemish men to Pevensey to kill Harold’s Anglo-Saxons.

The Flemings have long memories about the French, and never forget the “Battle of the Spurs” or the “Battle of Roosebeke,” for in these two epoch-making battles the French were the enemy.

The manifesto issued by the King of the Belgians to his people at the beginning of the war in August cited the Battle of the Spurs fought at Courtrai. At this famous encounter, a band of Flemish artisans and citizens, armed with billhooks, axes, and scythes, attacked with the maddest fury a disciplined French army of steel-clad knights and men-at-arms and utterly defeated it. This battle reference was hardly quite happy when Joffre was hurrying his Army Corps over the frontier to Namur.

At Roosebeke, in 1382, the French met another citizen army under Philip van Artevelde, and slew him and twenty-five thousand men. It is said that Flemish fathers and mothers handed down this bitter tale to their children for three centuries, and in later years told of Cassel, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet, Jemappes, and Waterloo—all glaring instances of French turbulence on peaceful Flanders land. So the Flemings were distrustful always of the Gallic cock, and had apparently forgotten about their connection with our Alfred the Great and our William of Normandy.

During our occupation of this mean farmhouse, situated behind its Flemish manure heap, the weather was bitingly cold. The rain of the first week was succeeded by a heavy snow and frost, and as we had no fire of any sort and were not able to take much physical exercise, we were all day and night chilled to our very marrow.

November 1914 in Flanders will be remembered by many thousands of Englishmen as a month of intense and bitter cold, when to the dangers and ever-present death of the trenches were added the miseries and tortures of frostbitten feet and legs, and a merciless cutting wind. This was the period when men, stiffened and paralysed with cold, had to be pulled out of the trenches and dragged or carried to the rear to bring back a slowing circulation to the affected limbs. This was also the period when men could not be spared from the firing line, when the Germans were making those formidable rushes in strong columns, and leaving thousands of dead to mark the place where the rush had been stayed and the column crumpled up.

The little town of Dickebusch was on the road to our left, and through it ran a highway to Ypres. Where the road turned to the right into Ypres was an advanced station of a Field Ambulance, and, as one of the medical officers of it was known to me, I walked along this highway one morning in order to hear the latest news. He was always a very safe man to call upon for news, for what he did not know authentically, he would invent. The road to this advanced station lay behind several batteries of French “seventy-fives,” the pride and glory of the French gunner. The road was quite close to these guns, but they were so wonderfully concealed with straw and branches of trees that an ordinary traveller would have passed them by until their presence was indicated by their mighty roar. The gunners were hard at it this morning, pouring an unending string of bursting shells on the German positions, and the din was terrible.

Suddenly the Germans got the range of the road. One shell burst far in front of me on the road, and one far behind about the same moment, and a bolt for cover was the immediate sequence. I got into a dug-out behind some French guns and then witnessed a wonderful display of artillery practice. Shell after shell fell with marvellous precision up and down the road, and one followed the other with a lightning speed. The road was excavated with volcanic craters, of flying stones and earth clouds, and mighty showers of _débris_ were sprayed tumultuously on every side. A French officer pointed out where the next shell would land; and he was always right—he knew the “general idea” possessing the mind of the German gunner, and correctly surmised that after the road had been systematically covered, the firing would cease. It was a big waste of ammunition, for nothing was damaged except the road, and the French gunners, as soon as the firing was over, ran to their pet “seventy-fives” and opened furiously back in order to show that their bark was as good as ever. The French batteries at this particular place did enormous damage to the Germans in their attacks south of Ypres, and as they are no longer at this roadside but somewhere farther on, no valuable information is being given away in relating the fact.

The French gunners, both at this critical phase of the war and on the Aisne, were wonderful fellows. Night and day, in rain, hail, sleet, or snow, their great guns never stopped. In the blackest night and in howling gales of sleety wind they could be heard near by and in the far distance, for ever pounding into the enemy. This policy of continuous fire is wonderfully heartening to the French troops in the trenches, and the moral effect is tremendous. On the Aisne the French guns were always busy, but the British, alas, were generally silent. I have heard men on the Aisne pathetically say, “Why don’t our guns fire?” “Why don’t they reply to the German fire?” and the questioning was not confined to soldiers, for it was a common topic of conversation amongst officers. On the Aisne we did not have enough artillery, and we had not enough ammunition for the artillery we did have. It was the same at this period at Ypres. England, the greatest engineering country of the world, the richest and most prosperous Empire of this or any other time, made a very poor showing on the Continent. Small as our army was, it was not equipped perfectly. Our army in France may have been the “best shooting army,” but if so it was with the rifle. In artillery we were entirely outclassed by the Germans and put to eternal shame by the French. On the Aisne the Germans had big 8-inch howitzers and we had nothing to meet them. Against the guns that had battered the forts of Maubeuge and crumpled up Namur what had we to offer? Nothing. The Germans had an unlimited supply of machine-guns on the Aisne and the Yser, and we had a paltry few. We were short of ammunition, but the Germans and the French had plenty.

When we required high explosive shells to beat down entrenchments and trenches we had nothing but shrapnel, which was absolutely useless for this purpose. Because shrapnel was effective in the South African War and high explosives unnecessary there, it was concluded that the same set of circumstances would be repeated in France and Belgium.

In September 1914 I saw the four 6-inch howitzer batteries arrive on the Aisne from England, and the news of their arrival spread like wildfire amongst our men, who thought that at last “mighty England was sending mighty guns.” They were mighty guns right enough, but there was not enough ammunition sent with them. As a nation we always muddle through, but it is rather pitiful to think that muddles mean the death of many brave men, and that our woeful lack of big guns and ammunition has meant many British graves in France and Flanders.

A ride through Ypres at this time was an interesting and exciting affair—interesting from the historic associations of the old Flemish capital, and exciting from the German “Black Marias” falling about. The old Cloth Hall was then still standing—only one corner and a door had been battered about, but Ypres itself was very mournful and desolate. A bombarded town, empty of all its people and with ruins all round where once was industry, wealth, and moving crowds, presents a very sad spectacle. I suppose Ypres, stormy as her history has been in the past, had never been so empty before. At one time 200,000 people were said to have lived in Ypres. That was in the days of her splendour as the ancient capital of Flanders, when the wonderful Cloth Hall was built by the cloth-workers of the thirteenth century, in that turbulent epoch when citizens and workpeople were fighting down and curbing the old feudal tyranny—for it was in Belgium that the common people established the first free city north of the Alps.

On the ride through this famous old city to our positions beyond, the terrible evidences of the German bombardment surrounded one in monumental impressiveness. Dead horses were lying in coagulated pools of blood in every street. Whole rows of old, closely-built Spanish and Flemish houses and shops were crumbled and shattered. The _pavé_ was ripped, torn, and covered with window glass shattered into millions of fine fragments; roofs had disappeared from some houses, and walls blown out of others. Tumbled masonry, smoking ashes, and excavated, torn-up roadways—all bore witness to the terrible character of the first German bombardment.

In one tobacconist’s shop in the square, just opposite the Cloth Hall, the large plate-glass window had been completely destroyed, but the shop stood otherwise uninjured and intact. One could easily have taken boxes of cigars and pipes by simply putting a hand through the window-frame in passing, but although the temptation was there, not one cigar was touched by a British soldier. Imagine the genial Saxon or the crucifying Bavarian letting such a chance slip!

I got off my horse and led it through the street, as it clearly did not like passing the dead horses on the roadway. After having tied it to a street-post in front of a fair-sized hotel or _estaminet_, I walked into the front bar-parlour, which was open to the street. The evidences of a hasty exit were ludicrously patent. A half-emptied glass of beer and a full one stood close together on the bar counter, and near them lay a good pipe full of tobacco which had not been lighted. On a small table in a corner of the café was a tray with two large empty clean glasses; on the same table stood a bottle of red wine, and close beside it a corkscrew, holding the impaled extracted cork. One light chair near this table lay overturned on the floor; the other had been hastily drawn back, as was shown by the tracks on the sawdust floor. I thought of Pompeii when old Vesuvius belched ashes and molten lava and buried the gay Roman pleasure-city as it stood. The Pompeian wine-bibbers and “mine host” could not escape from that engulfing darkness and the fiery cinders, and perforce died nobly standing by their bottles. But in that drinking-room at Ypres there was no dying the death beside the beer and the good red wine. No Sherlock Holmes was necessary to reconstruct the picture—the two cronies drinking their morning ale at the bar, and the two comfortable Yprian burghers waiting for the filling of their glasses from the bottle just uncorked, the burly “mine host” in white apron and with bottle in hand—all suddenly electrified by a sinister whistling overhead, and then the mighty explosion, the roar of falling masonry, the smashing of hundreds of window-panes, the concussion of air; then another earthquake smash, and then another, till the house and street were rocking with the shocks. This was no time to light a pipe, to drink amber beer and ruddy wine. It was time to get out of Ypres. So down went the forgotten pipe and bottle, back went the chairs, and out streamed our terrified quintet to the tormented street, leaving the room and its contents as I saw it.

On approaching the bridge on the far side of the town I saw the only remaining inhabitant. This was a middle-aged woman with a grey shawl over her head and shoulders, and she was looking out of a window of a partly shattered house. I felt sorry for her, she looked so very lonely in that broken house.

That afternoon she was arrested by the Belgians as a spy. My compassion had been utterly thrown away.

Near this same bridge on another occasion my arrival was providential. An Army Service Corps driver was speeding his motor towards the city when he was struck by enemy shrapnel. He had just sufficient strength to stop his lorry before fainting from the shock and the rush of blood from a grievous wound of the right thigh. Blood was pumping out of the wound, and it appeared as if the femoral artery had been torn. Fortunately it was not, and we were soon able to control the hæmorrhage, put the wounded man on his lorry, and drive him back to one of the ambulance stations in a cottage near the roadside.

The road from Ypres to our trenches was a busy but pathetic highway—busy with marching men, waggons, gallopers, generals, and staff officers, and pathetic from the many graves and small graveyards near the roadside and the many full ambulance waggons rumbling along on the uneven, jolty _pavé_.

The road was frequently visited with enemy shells, and no one travelled along it unless on business. “Trespassers will be prosecuted” was an unnecessary injunction on the Ypres roads.

The headquarter staff of the 15th Brigade beyond Ypres had a narrow escape one morning. A big shell burst in the grounds of the château occupied by the Brigadier and his staff. The staff, who were in the building at the time, went out to look at the hole it had made. Whilst looking at the pit, another shell landed on the château itself and burst into the room just vacated by them. A soldier servant was killed and one staff officer was wounded.

An advanced ambulance station, with wounded men and medical officers in it, was struck fairly by another shell and badly holed, causing loss of life. No place was safe from these long bowls of the enemy, and though artillery practice of this sort may not be of much military importance, it yet produces an air of uncertainty and caution and jumpiness.

The country surrounding Ypres and Ypres itself were very dismal. The old elm trees on the roads, and the silent, deserted streets were shrouded in a ghostly veil of melancholy.

On a subsequent visit to the site of the old Cloth Hall one saw little more than ruins, for the famous building had in the interval been correctly ranged by the enemy guns and duly shattered. Later on more destruction took place, and visitors of the year 2015 will be shown some stones and broken pillars, all that was left of a famous hall which had stood for seven centuries and had been destroyed “one hundred years ago.”

When peace comes again to Belgium, Ypres and its roads, its Hill 60 and its graves will be a place of holy pilgrimage to thousands of English, French, and Germans, for here fell and are buried their bravest dead.

But the curious tripper and the Cook’s tourist had better keep away from Ypres. Let the friends of the dead and the quiet country folk have the land in their possession for a season.

The railway station at Vlamertinge, near Ypres, frequently had a very fine armoured train in its sidings. The train was manned by Jack Tars with naval guns, and the engine and car looked very attractive in a wonderful coat of futurist colours—splashes of green and khaki and brown. This _H.M.S Chameleon_ was a very good cruiser and very nippy in moving across country. The sailors were very cheerful and seemed to like their ship amazingly.

On the roads near our headquarters running from Renninghelst to Vlamertinge, and hence along the main highway to Ypres, a large number of Belgian soldiers were at work repairing the _pavé_ and widening the road surface by laying prepared trunks of trees laid closely together in the mud at the sides. They were fine sturdy men and full of life and cheerfulness, a different type altogether from the countryfolk we met in the farms. These were the men who had fought from Liége to the Yser, and were still on Belgian soil. They were very bitter about the Germans. They said that they asked for no quarter and would give none in the fighting.

These Belgians on the roads were men who had been temporarily sent back to “recuperate,” and while at this work they enjoyed good food, warm quarters, and sleep. At eleven o’clock every morning a very fine motor kitchen would pass along the road. Each man had his canteen ready, the cook ladled out to him a good helping of mashed potatoes, boiled mutton, and thick gravy, and another cook handed him a big chunk of white bread. It was all done very expeditiously and in good order. After getting his share each man would sit on his rolled-up overcoat on the roadside and spoon the mutton and potatoes into his mouth with the bread. Knives and forks and spoons, after all, are really only luxuries.

The roads were in a frightful state during these November weeks. The narrow _pavé_ was full of ruts, deep and dangerous, and skirted on either side by a slope of boggy quagmire churned up by the wheels of hundreds of heavy motor transports, and beyond this again on either side was a deep ditch.

Any skidding motor would land in the ditch, and the righting of these embedded cars was at times a titanic task, productive of much loss of temper and bad language.

The narrow _pavé_ would not permit of two vehicles crossing abreast, and when two met, neither wished to surrender the “crown of the causeway.” It was a point of honour not to budge and to wear down the other side by abusive epithets. Uncle Toby used to say that our army swore horribly in Flanders, but the swearing in Toby’s day was not a patch on the rich vocabulary and full-blooded oaths of our London taxi-drivers in Flanders in 1914.

The London taxi-driver, always eloquent, reached his highest flights when addressing the quivering blancmange-like mud of a Belgian road.

I have seen old French non-commissioned officers who probably did not know a single word of what was said on these occasions, but who envisaged the situation perfectly, stand by with approving and admiring faces while the driver was embracing in his comprehensive abuse all things living and dead, the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth.

At Ouderdom we met Alphonse, soldier of France. Two medical officers were one morning sipping some red wine in an _estaminet_ in the village when in swaggered a very small French soldier.

He had a boy’s face and figure and voice, but bore the assured manner of a man of the world. He was small even for a French boy. A carbine was swung across his back, and his belt carried a bayonet and cartridges. He wore the French blue overcoat with the ends tucked up in the approved style and with the buttons polished and bright. His little legs were encased in the familiar red trousers tucked into heavy boots several sizes too large for him, and his _képi_ was placed on his small, closely cropped head at a jaunty angle. Such was Alphonse, the complete soldier of France, full private in a famous Parisian rifle battalion.

Alphonse swaggered into the café, ordered his glass of red wine with the _sang-froid_ and assurance of a veteran grenadier, and tossed it off as easily as a Falstaff.

“How old are you, Alphonse?” “But fourteen years, mon officier.” “Have you killed many Germans?” “But yes, perhaps thirteen, perhaps fifteen; who can tell when one is fighting every day? But certainly I kill many Bosches.” “And with what did you kill them, Alphonse?” “Avec mon carabine”—this with a smack of his hand on the barrel of the gun. A smart soldierly salute, and our gallant killer of thirteen, perhaps fifteen, peaceful, amiable German soldiers strode out of the café.

A corporal of Alphonse’s regiment told us that at the beginning of the war Alphonse was a young devil of a gamin in Paris. In his leisure moments he sold newspapers in the streets, and in his working hours he was up to some devilry.

When this regiment marched out of Paris towards the frontier Alphonse marched alongside it, a bright-eyed, hopeful, cheerful youth clad in ragged clothes and down-at-heel boots. He was told to go home, but said that he had no home and was going instead to kill Germans. So in the good French way the regiment adopted Alphonse, gave him a uniform and a gun, and a new pair of boots, and took him on the strength.

The little gamin turned out a very cunning soldier. He was a dead shot, and the corporal assured us that he had accounted for a good many of the enemy. At night Alphonse would crawl out of the trenches and scout well into the enemy lines. Frequently he brought back valuable information of preparations for a German surprise attack. He was so small and so cute that he escaped observation.

In December Alphonse was presented to President Poincaré on one of his many visits to the French front, and the President promised him a commission and the Legion d’Honneur when he should reach the age of twenty-one years. I have grave fears for the gallant, snub-nosed, blue-eyed Alphonse, young in years but old in sin. He is already too fond of the rich red wine of France, and scouting at night inside the enemy lines is a duty full of peril. But Alphonse can teach a lesson in patriotism that many a flower-socked, straw-hatted knut on a London promenade would do well to learn.

The Flemings are very devout Catholics, perhaps the most Catholic of all peoples to-day; so our ambulance was given the hall-mark of respectability because we had with it a Monsignor. The presence of a Catholic prelate with our ambulance, distinguished it in a notable degree from all other ambulances, and we tried to live up to our presumed reputation.

Whenever Monsignor appeared on the roads near Ouderdom the Belgian soldiers would immediately stop work and, carrying their pickaxes and shovels, crowd round him for a talk and the latest news. Monsignor was a good linguist and a cheerful optimist, and never handed on any bad news to the soldiers. One morning he was asked for news, and appealed to me what to say. We told them that the Russians had another victory, and that the German dead could be counted by thousands. This was very palatable and thoroughly appreciated. We were not asked to give any details of the victory, which was perhaps fortunate.

Monsignor would sometimes walk along this road with his hands behind his back and with two or three cigarettes sticking out prominently from between his fingers. The Belgian soldiers would then stalk after him, with broad grins on their faces, and pull away a cigarette. Monsignor never looked behind. That would not be playing the game at all, but his eyes would twinkle, and I have no doubt whatever that he hugely enjoyed the fun.

There were days when Monsignor had a wardrobe consisting of but one shirt and one pair of trousers—the other articles of apparel had all been given away. Then he would begin again to collect mufflers and socks when supplies came in, and hand them out almost immediately to some poor devils who had nothing. If our chaplain appeared any day to be more cheerful than usual, one could make quite sure that he had just given away his boots or his shirt or his towel to some poor French, Belgian, or British Tommy. The only thing he kept a tight hold on was his toothbrush.

One day Monsignor appeared with a cardboard box in his hand and told us that he was going to Renninghelst, a small town about two miles from our headquarters. Lieutenant X—— and myself asked leave to accompany him. We had to ask permission, for Monsignor was a senior chaplain and a lieutenant-colonel in rank, although he never said anything about that. We discovered it accidentally. Being a colonel interested him only in a vague impersonal sort of way. He told us once that a soldier is diffident and shy before a colonel, but is natural and communicative to his minister or priest who is not flagged and starred.

[Illustration: MONSIGNOR DISTRIBUTING MEDALS TO BELGIAN SOLDIERS AT THE ROADSIDE.]

On this lovely winter morning, when the whole countryside was white with frozen snow, we had a sharp bracing walk to the curious old town, then the headquarters of General B—— and his staff of a French Division. The village streets were packed full of French and Belgian soldiery, from Spahis to Alpine Chasseurs. We worked our way round the carts and through the jostling men to a little shop opposite the church. Monsignor was hailed joyfully by many of his old friends, who on this particular morning were not working on the roads.

The mystery of the cardboard box was then unravelled, for after cutting the string and throwing away the cover we saw that it was full of small religious medals and scapularies. There was a big rush for the medals, and we were all squeezed up together by the pressing soldiers, hundreds of whom were holding their grimy paws out for the metal discs. As Monsignor was hard at work I took a hand also and helped in the distribution. At last all were gone. Hundreds more men had come up with hands out, but had to leave unsatisfied. I asked Monsignor if the medals lost any virtue by having been handed out by me, a Protestant. He assured me that it was all right, as the Belgians and French must have thought I was a good Catholic.

Every Field Ambulance has two chaplains attached to it. Ours had a Church of England one and a Roman Catholic. Another ambulance would have perhaps a Wesleyan and a Catholic, or a Presbyterian and an Anglican. These chaplains were not designed for the spiritual needs of the ambulance men, but as each ambulance kept in touch with a brigade consisting of four battalions, the chaplain could also, by being with the ambulance headquarters, keep in touch with the brigade, and could also meet the wounded brought in from that brigade, administer the rites of the Church to those requiring it, and bury the dead. The chaplains did not restrict themselves to the men of their own faith, but helped and worked all they knew for all. After all, an ambulance station full of wounded men is not the place for religious exercises, and a wise chaplain helped in making the men as comfortable as possible, bringing round soup, taking off boots, distributing cigarettes and tobacco, writing letters and “gossiping”—the wounded like some one to talk to them and to talk to, and the chaplains could make a “cheery atmosphere” even in such a gloomy place as a barn full of recently wounded men. Most of the chaplains had a good sense of proportion. Some had not. One bleak, miserable day, I saw a well-meaning but mournful chaplain go up to a lorry full of wounded men packed close together on the straw, uncomfortable and shivering and miserable. He handed to each of them a small religious tract exhorting him to read it. The men took them with a polite “Thank you, sir,” but their faces displayed no enthusiasm. This was not the time for tracts. Shortly afterwards another chaplain, a man of the world, came up to the lorry with a “Cheer up, boys. You’ll soon be in warm comfortable quarters. Have you any smokes?” The men had none, and out came a dozen packets of Woodbine cigarettes from the chaplain’s pockets and two boxes of matches. The expression on the men’s faces altered at once. The atmosphere had altered, the sense of proportion had been restored.

Men in hospital like to hear good news. I knew one chaplain who managed never to go into a room full of wounded and sick men without bringing some cheery report for everybody. He never actually fabricated news, but he had a wonderful gift of exaggeration. If we were in the same position, we had “held the line against incredible odds.” If the French had taken an enemy trench, “they had driven a wedge into the German position and produced consternation.” If Russian cavalry had made a reconnaissance in the Masurian Lakes, “they were sweeping like locusts all over East Prussia, and had set fire to the Kaiser’s favourite hunting-lodge.”

The men never inquired about details, general statements were quite good enough.

This was better than telling men that the “war would be a terribly long one; that we would have to make great sacrifices; but, please God, we would win in the end.” I have heard a chaplain talk like this to wounded men, and I knew that he “wasn’t delivering the right goods.”

Renninghelst is a large village, or rather a very small town. It is situated close to the Franco-Belgian frontier, and at this period was of importance as an ambulance centre for wounded French and Belgians who were occupying the line of trenches in the front. The country all round is real Flanders land—flat, low-lying, damp, and uninviting. The renowned Mont de Cats can be seen from it, and round this _mont_ some hard fighting was taking place. The old village has a queer Dutch-looking church with a closely packed graveyard around it, planted thickly with stone and iron crosses to the memory of ancient departed burghers, whose Flemish-Dutch names are inscribed there to commemorate their ages and their virtues. Eighty, eighty-five, and ninety seemed to be the usual age of these old burghers for slipping off this mortal coil in this quiet sleepy old place in Southern Belgium. There are many new graves now round the Renninghelst countryside, and they are for men who have died young, suddenly, and in the springtime of their days. The interior of this old Flemish church is lofty, and has little in the way of adornment, for there are no millionaires in its congregation to give great stained-glass windows or carved pulpits.

On my first visit to the church it was full of French soldiers, some sleeping and others lolling round on the straw that thickly covered the stone floor. A big group were crowded round a charcoal brazier warming themselves and watching the progress of a savoury stew. The French soldiers are wonderful cooks, and the stew this day was to be a good one, for the _pièce de résistance_ was a fine fat hare which had been caught that morning near the front. The two cooks were exercising great care to make the stew a success, and the air of the place was a cheerful, expectant one.

Some days after this visit I was again at Renninghelst, and the church was now a temporary hospital. The floor was still covered with straw, but wounded men were lying close together on it. The charcoal brazier was still there and giving out a welcome heat on this cold wintry day. Ambulance waggons were in the street next the church full of wounded soldiers, and more were coming up the road.

French army surgeons were busy amongst the red-breeched men in the church, and three of them were engaged round an improvised operating table near the altar, where a man deeply under chloroform was having his jaw wired with silver wire for a bad fracture from a piece of shell.

The old white-haired, weary-looking priest of the parish was leaning over a dying man and bending his head low to catch the last faint whispers. Some women of the village were carrying round cups of hot broth to the men propped along the wall, and others were hurrying in with blankets and pillows.

One soldier I observed to be very blanched and tossing restlessly on his straw. Restlessness is always an important sign in wounded men, and on going up to this poor devil and turning down his rough blanket the cause of the trouble was apparent. He was bleeding freely through a bandaged wound of the leg. The dressings were soaked with blood, and as the French surgeons were occupied I broke a professional rule and treated this patient without asking his doctor’s permission. The bleeding was soon controlled, and the threatened death from hæmorrhage averted.

As I was completing the last turns of the bandage a voice murmured over my shoulder, “Vive l’entente cordiale.” The speaker was the chief surgeon, just released from his work on the operating table. He thanked me for helping, and said that he and his two assistants had been up all night, and had been very busy. Most of the men had been wounded by shrapnel. Shrapnel makes very bad wounds; it rips, tears, and lacerates the tissues, and repair is often impossible in face of the anatomical devastation. The French were having a great deal of trouble with their wounds, as we were also. All the wounds became septic. There is very little clean surgery in this war. The wounds rarely heal by first intention, and a fractured, splintered bone meant months of rest and painful dressings in hospital and a tardy convalescence.

The fighting all along this front had been extraordinarily severe. The French hospitals and the French medical staff were taxed to the utmost. Every available fighting man was in the trenches or waiting as supports. The German hammer was making mighty swings on the Allied anvil, and nowhere were the blows so heavy and so long sustained as on that famous Ypres salient. It was bent and dented, but not broken. The character of the fighting can be grasped from two incidents. One famous infantry regiment left England at full strength. All of its original officers were killed, wounded, or missing. Of the second lot of officers, all were killed, wounded, or missing. Its third supply of officers were now grimly up against the same chain of events.

One of the first British Divisions left England with 12,000 men and 400 officers. When it was withdrawn from the front to rest and refit, it could only muster 2336 men and 44 officers!

A famous French regiment with a long roll of battle honours went into action one frosty morning near Reims. It went forward a gleaming column of more than a thousand bayonets. Two days afterwards forty-nine men, led by an old bearded sergeant, marched back. These were all that were left. The sergeant had a bloody bandage across his forehead—he had lost an eye—but the French Brigadier-General embraced and kissed him on the cheek. The French officers standing near stood rigidly at the salute, and tears were running down their cheeks.

The losses on our side were heavy indeed, but on the German side I am glad to know that they were colossal. The annihilation of German battalions and brigades is an argument that the Germans fully understand, and the only thing that will convince the German that the game is up is heavy and continuous loss of fighting men and difficulty in filling their ranks. This sounds very brutal, but we are living in a hard age.

I was much struck by the splendid way the women of this small Belgian town rallied round to help the wounded. We found the same thing in France; no trouble was too great, and all was done so cheerfully and sympathetically. This is the “women’s day” in France. One cannot help admiring their courage and ability in France’s hour of trial. Husbands, sons, brothers, fathers—all are on the frontier, and the women carry on the business of France. They make the most stupendous sacrifices and exhibit a sublime patience. None are so joyful as the women when a French victory is announced, and none so pitiful as they when the wounded, the corollary to every victory, arrive at the towns and villages.

This war, which the German has carried on with an animal ferocity and a degenerate lust unequalled in history, has demonstrated to the world the unfaltering nobility of character of the French woman, and that her fervent soul can rise serene and cool in the midst of the most appalling troubles.

When our troops landed at Le Havre in August, it was noticed at once what a big part the women were taking in the business life of the place. There were women conductors on the trams, women in the tobacconist shops, women in the cafés as attendants, in the streets selling newspapers, and in all the big _magasins_.

In Rouen, women conducted coal and timber yards, vegetable and produce businesses, bakeries, butcheries, fishmongeries, grocers’ and ironmongers’ stores. Women drove carts and waggons, acted as tally clerks on wharves, did everything, in fact—and did it all soberly, quietly, and well. They were always tidy, smart, and cheerful, and did not stop work at eleven o’clock for a glass of beer, or spend many quarters of hours filling and lighting pipes of tobacco.

One woman I know—a rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed Norman dame—did the catering for a large officers’ mess in one of the camps at Rouen. At 5 a.m. she was at the mess tent with her pony-cart laden with wine, vegetables, preserves, and fruit. I have passed her shop at nine o’clock at night and have seen her then busily selling dried fish, pickles, and vinegar to her customers. She told me that she was too busy to sleep. This was in 1915, and she had been running the business with no other help than that of two small daughters since July 1914.

Her husband was on the Argonne front, and she was keeping the flag flying till his return. Incidentally, she was making money. Catering for an officers’ mess is fairly lucrative.

On the march from the Marne to the Aisne, and on the Aisne itself, women were to be seen doing ordinary farm work—building stacks, carting in the wheat, driving waggon-loads of hay and peas, milking the cows, making cider and butter, tilling the soil,—and tending the children into the bargain.

The most amazing thing of all was to see women working in the fields behind our batteries only a mile away.

At Venizel, on the Aisne bank, our Engineers were throwing a pontoon bridge across the river under a heavy shrapnel fire. Shells were bursting up and down the river’s bank and on the waters of the river, yet about a quarter of a mile behind three women were busily engaged cutting turnips for the cows.

On the march from the Aisne to La Bassée, our Field Ambulance bivouacked at the Château of Longpont. The Comte and Comtesse de M—— were in residence at the château, and we were told by the Comtesse that General von Kluck, commanding the right wing of the invading army, had in August stopped for a day and a night at the château with his _état-major_. We asked how Von Kluck had behaved, and the Comtesse said that he had been _très agréable_. When he arrived, she interviewed him and begged him to respect the old château and its old abbey, the pictures and the tapestries. The General promised that he would do so, and that he would give orders that the villagers in the hamlet near the château gates were not to be molested. It was the apple season, and the apple trees of Longpont were laden with delicious fruit. Von Kluck “asked permission” of the Comtesse for his soldiers to take some apples off the trees. This the Comtesse graciously permitted, and the dusty German soldiery helped themselves to the apples and did not break a branch off a single tree.

The Comtesse provided new eggs and butter and bread for the General’s breakfast, and he invited her to honour the meal with her presence. But the Comtesse sent a note that she would not break bread with her country’s enemy. This was one of the few châteaux and one of the few villages that the German Saligoth did not destroy or outrage before leaving.

Some German Generals approved of outrages and atrocities, to wit, Rupprecht of Bavaria. Some disapproved, and Von Kluck, it is said, was one of these—but I “hae ma doots.”

This leads to one of the blackest pictures of this war—a picture grim and loathsome. It is a subject which the women of France will discuss freely and openly and with a concentrated bitterness that one can readily understand. I have spoken to many educated French women on this subject, and have heard many curious and amazing tales and incidents. The subject is that of the women who have been ravished and outraged by the German soldiery.

Many of these victims, married women and young girls, are to-day pregnant to German fathers, and the burning question with the women of France is how best to help their unfortunate sisters, and what is to be done for the offspring.

In the French Chamber of Deputies the subject has been debated with equal freedom and openness. Leading French newspapers too, such as the _Figaro_, _Le Temps_, _Echo de Paris_, and others, have envisaged the position in powerful and appealing articles.

One journal advocated that in the exceptional circumstances it was perfectly justifiable to carry out abortion and interrupt the period of gestation. Opinions were sought from leading French physicians and from the Academy of Medicine. These unhesitatingly condemned such a course, pointing out that the mission of the medical profession was to save life; and also that the induction of premature labour was at all times a dangerous and risky operation to the mother, and in certain circumstances would be fatal.

The Catholic Church in France spoke strongly and certainly in the same direction, and condemned as utterly wrong and sinful any measure that had for its object the death of the unborn child.

The women of France, however, do not share these latter views.

Arrangements have now been completed for the reception of these pitiful expectant mothers into certain maternity homes, where they will be attended by skilled doctors and nurses at the State expense. After birth the child is to be brought up by the State at some place undeclared. The mother will not see the child at any time, and will know nothing of its future.

The clergy all over Northern France are attending to this matter, and everything will be done as secretly as possible in the unusual circumstances.

No wonder that the French woman speaks of the German soldier as a loathly thing.