Read Ebook: Roger Williams Prophet and Pioneer of Soul-Liberty by Strickland Arthur Barsazou

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Ebook has 447 lines and 40238 words, and 9 pages

Some of our own troops came through the town in London omnibuses to-day. It was quite a Moment, and we felt that all was well. We went to the gate and shook hands with them as they passed, and they made jokes and did us all good. We cheered and waved handkerchiefs.

They say the town will be shelled to-morrow. All these last two days bleeding men have been brought in. To-day three of them died, and I suppose none of them was more than 23. We have to keep up all the time and show a good face, and meals are quite cheery. To-day, Tuesday, was our last chance of leaving, and only two went.

The guns boom by day as well as by night, and as each one is heard one thinks of more bleeding, shattered men. It is calm, nice autumn weather; the trees are yellow in the garden and the sky is blue, yet all the time one listens to the cries of men in pain. To-night I meant to go out for a little, but a nurse stopped me and asked me to sit by a dying man. Poor fellow, he was twenty-one, and looked like some brigand chief, and he smiled as he was dying. The horror of these two days will last always, and there are many more such days to come. Everyone is behaving well, and that is all I care about.

The guns go all day and all night. They are so close that the earth shakes with them. Last night in the infernal darkness we were turning wounded men away from the door. There was no room for them even on the floor. The Belgians scream terribly. Our own men suffer quite quietly. One of them died to-day.

The news is still the same--"very bad"; sometimes I walk to the gate and ask returning soldiers how the battle goes, but the answer never varies. At lunch-time to-day firing ceased, and I heard it was because the German guns were coming up. We got orders to send away all the wounded who could possibly go, and we prepared beds in the cellars for those who cannot be moved. The military authorities beg us to remain as so many hospitals have been evacuated.

The wounded continue to come in. One sees one car in the endless stream moving slowly , and one knows by the pace that more wounded are coming. Inside one sees the horrible six shelves behind the canvas curtain, and here and there a bound-up limb or head. One of our men had his leg taken off to-day, and is doing well. Nothing goes on much behind the scenes. The yells of the men are plainly heard, and to-day, as I sat beside the lung man who was taking so long to die, someone brought a sack to me, and said, "This is for the leg." All the orderlies are on duty in the hospital now. We can spare no one for rougher work. We can all bandage and wash patients. There are wounded everywhere, even on straw beds on the platform of the hall.

Darkness seems to fall early, and it is the darkness that is so baffling. At 5 p.m. we have to feed everyone while there is a little light, then the groping about begins, and everyone falls over things. There is a clatter of basins on the floor or an over-turned chair. Any sudden noise is rather trying at present because of the booming of the guns. At 7 last night they were much louder than before, with a sort of strange double sound, and we were told that these were our "Long Toms," so we hope that our Naval Brigade has come up.

We know very little of what is going on except when we run out and ask some returning English soldiers for news. Yesterday it was always the same reply "Very bad." One of the Marines told me that Winston Churchill was "up and down the road amongst the shells," and I was also told that he had given orders that Antwerp was not to be taken till the last man in it was dead.

The Marines are getting horribly knocked about. Yesterday Mrs. O'Gormon went out in her own motor-car and picked wounded out of the trenches. She said that no one knew why they were in the trenches or where they were to fire--they just lay there and were shot and then left.

I think I have seen too much pain lately. At Walworth one saw women every day in utter pain, and now one lives in an atmosphere of bandages and blood. I asked some of the orderlies to-day what it was that supported them most at a crisis of this sort. The answers varied, and were interesting. I myself am surprised to find that religion is not my best support. When I go into the little chapel to pray it is all too tender, the divine Mother and the Child and the holy atmosphere. I begin to feel rather sorry for myself, I don't know why; then I go and move beds and feel better; but I have found that just to behave like a well-bred woman is what keeps me up best. I had thought that the Flag or Religion would have been stronger incentives to me.

Our own soldiers seem to find self-respect their best asset. It is amazing to see the difference between them and the Belgians, who are terribly poor hands at bearing pain, and beg for morphia all the time. An officer to-day had to have a loose tooth out. He insisted on having cocaine, and then begged the doctor to be careful!

The staff are doing well. They are generally too busy to be frightened, but one has to speak once or twice to them before they hear.

At midnight the first shell came over us with a shriek, and I went down and woke the orderlies and nurses and doctors. We dressed and went over to help move the wounded at the hospital. The shells began to scream overhead; it was a bright moonlight night, and we walked without haste--a small body of women--across the road to the hospital. Here we found the wounded all yelling like mad things, thinking they were going to be left behind. The lung man has died.

Nearly all the moving to the cellars had already been done--only three stretchers remained to be moved. One wounded English sergeant helped us. Otherwise everything was done by women. We laid the men on mattresses which we fetched from the hospital overhead, and then Mrs. Stobart's mild, quiet voice said, "Everything is to go on as usual. The night nurses and orderlies will take their places. Breakfast will be at the usual hour." She and the other ladies whose night it was to sleep at the convent then returned to sleep in the basement with a Sister.

We came in for some most severe shelling at first, either because we flew the Red Cross flag or because we were in the line of fire with a powder magazine which the Germans wished to destroy. We sat in the cellars with one night-light burning in each, and with seventy wounded men to take care of. Two of them were dying. There was only one line of bricks between us and the shells. One shell fell into the garden, making a hole six feet deep; the next crashed through a house on the opposite side of the road and set it on fire. The danger was two-fold, for we knew our hospital, which was a cardboard sort of thing, would ignite like matchwood, and if it fell we should not be able to get out of the cellars. Some people on our staff were much against our making use of a cellar at all for this reason. I myself felt it was the safest place, and as long as we stayed with the wounded they minded nothing. We sat there all night.

The English sergeant said that at daybreak the firing would probably cease, as the German guns stopped when daylight came in order to conceal the guns. We just waited for daybreak. When it came the firing grew worse. The sergeant said, "It is always worse just before they stop," but the firing did not stop. Two hundred guns were turned on Antwerp, and the shells came over at the rate of four a minute. They have a horrid screaming sound as they come. We heard each one coming and wondered if it would hit us, and then we heard the crashing somewhere else and knew another shell was coming.

The worst cases among the wounded lay on the floor, and these wanted constant attention. The others were in their great-coats, and stood about the cellar leaning on crutches and sticks. We wrapped blankets round the rheumatism cases and sat through the long night. Sometimes when we heard a crash near by we asked "Is that the convent?" but nothing else was said. All spoke cheerfully, and there was some laughter in the further cellar. One little red-haired nurse enjoyed the whole thing. I saw her carry three wounded men in succession on her back down to the cellar. I found myself wishing that for me a shot would come and finish the horrible night. Still we all chatted and smiled and made little jokes. Once during that long night in the cellar I heard one wounded man say to another as he rolled himself round on his mattress, "Que les anglais sont comme il faut."

At six o'clock the convent party came over and began to prepare breakfast. The least wounded of the men began to steal away, and we were left with between thirty and forty of them. The difficulty was to know how to get away and how to remove the wounded, two of whom were nearly dead. Miss Benjamin went and stood at the gate, while the shells still flew, and picked up an ambulance. In this we got away six men, including the two dying ones. Mrs. Stobart was walking about for three hours trying to find anything on wheels to remove us and the wounded. At last we got a motor ambulance, and packed in twenty men--that was all it would hold. We told them to go as far as the bridge and send it back for us. It never came. Nothing seemed to come.

We got dinner for the men, and then the strain began to be much worse. We had seven wounded and ourselves and not a thing in which to get out of Antwerp. I told Mrs. Stobart we must leave the wounded at the convent in charge of the Sisters, and this we did, telling them where to take them in the morning. The gay young nurses fetched them across on stretchers.

About 5 o'clock the shelling became more violent, and three shells came with only an instant between each. Presently we heard Mrs. Stobart say, "Come at once," and we went out and found three English buses with English drivers at the door. They were carrying ammunition, and were the last vehicles to leave Antwerp. We got into them and lay on the top of the ammunition, and the girls began to light cigarettes! The noise of the buses prevented our hearing for a time the infernal sound of shells and our cannons' answering roar.

As we drove to the bridge many houses and sometimes a whole street was burning. No one seemed to care. No one was there to try and save anything. We drove through the empty streets and saw the burning houses, and great holes where shells had fallen, and then we got to the bridge and out of the line of fire.

We set out to walk towards Holland, but a Belgian officer got us some Red Cross ambulances, and into these we got, and were taken to a convent at St. Gilles, where we slept on the floor till 3 a.m. At 3 a message was brought, "Get up at once--things are worse." Everyone seemed to be leaving, and we got into the Red Cross ambulances and went to the station.

Miss Donnisthorpe and I got decent rooms at the Littoral Hotel, and brought our luggage there, and had baths, which we much needed. Dr. Hanson had got out of the train at Bruges to bandage a wounded man, and she was left behind, and is still lost. I suppose she has gone home. She is the doctor I like best, and she is one of the few whose nerves are not shattered. It was a sorry little party which Mrs. Stobart took back to England.

WITH DR. HECTOR MUNRO'S FLYING AMBULANCE CORPS

The noises and racket in Ostend are deafening, and there is panic everywhere. The boats go to England packed every time. I called on the Villiers yesterday, and heard that she is leaving on Tuesday. But they say that the British Minister dare not leave or the whole place would go wild with fear. Some ships lie close to us on the grey misty water, and the troops are passing along all day.

I am trying to discover what courage really consists in. It isn't only a lack of imagination. In some people it is transcendent, in others it is only a sort of stupidity. If proper precautions were taken the need for courage would be much reduced--the "tight place" is so often the result of sheer muddle.

This evening Dr. Hector Munro came in from Ghent with his oddly-dressed ladies, and at first one was inclined to call them masqueraders in their knickerbockers and puttees and caps, but I believe they have done excellent work. It is a queer side of war to see young, pretty English girls in khaki and thick boots, coming in from the trenches, where they have been picking up wounded men within a hundred yards of the enemy's lines, and carrying them away on stretchers. Wonderful little Walk?res in knickerbockers, I lift my hat to you!

Dr. Munro asked me to come on to his convoy, and I gladly did so: he sent home a lady whose nerves were gone, and I was put in her place.

I began to make out of whom our party consists. There is Lady Dorothy Fielding--probably 22, but capable of taking command of a ship, and speaking French like a native; Mrs. Decker, an Australian, plucky and efficient; Miss Chisholm, a blue-eyed Scottish girl, with a thick coat strapped around her waist and a haversack slung from her shoulder; a tall American, whose name I do not yet know, whose husband is a journalist; three young surgeons, and Dr. Munro. It is all so quaint. The girls rule the company, carry maps and find roads, see about provisions and carry wounded.

We could not get rooms at Dunkirk and so came on to St. Malo les Bains, a small bathing-place which had been shut up for the winter. The owner of an hotel there opened up some rooms for us and got us some ham and eggs, and the evening ended very cheerily. Our party seems, to me, amazingly young and unprotected.

To-night, as we sat at dinner, a message was brought that a woman outside had been run over and was going to have a baby immediately in a tram-way shelter, so out we went and got one of our ambulances, and a young doctor with his fianc?e went off with her. There was a lot of argument about where the woman lived, until one young man said, "Well, get in somehow, or the baby will have arrived." There is a simplicity about these tragic times, and nothing matters but to save people.

Yesterday I heard a man--a man in a responsible position--say to a girl, "Tell me, please, how far we are from the firing-line." It was one of the most remarkable speeches I ever heard. I go to these girls for all my news. Lady Dorothy Fielding is our real commander, and everyone knows it. One hears on all sides, "Lady Dorothy, can you get us tyres for the ambulances? Where is the petrol?" "Do you know if the General will let us through?" "Have you been able to get us any stores?" "Ought we to have 'laissez-passer's' or not?" She goes to all the heads of departments, is the only good speaker of French, and has the only reliable information about anything. All the men acknowledge her position, and they say to me, "It's very odd being run by a woman; but she is the only person who can do anything." In the firing-line she is quite cool, and so are the other women. They seem to be interested, not dismayed, by shots and shrapnel.

What struck me most about these men was the way in which they blew their own trumpets in full retreat and while flying from the enemy. We travelled all day in the train with them, and had long conversations with them all. They were all saying, "We will bring you the Kaiser's head, miss"; to which I replied, "Well, you had better turn round and go the other way." Some people like this "English" spirit. I find the conceit of it most trying. Belgium is in the hands of the enemy, and we flee before him singing our own praises loudly as we do so. The Marines lost their kit, spent one night in Antwerp, and went back to England, where they had an amazing reception amid scenes of unprecedented enthusiasm! The Government will give them a fresh kit, and the public will cheer itself hoarse!

I could not help thinking, when I read the papers to-day, of our tired little body of nurses and doctors and orderlies going back quietly and unproclaimed to England to rest at Folkestone for three days and then to come out here again. They had been for eighteen hours under heavy shell fire without so much as a rifle to protect them, and with the immediate chance of a burning building falling about them. The nurses sat in the cellars tending wounded men, whom they refused to leave, and then hopped on to the outside of an ammunition bus "to see the fun," and came home to buy their little caps and aprons out of their own slender purses and start work again.

I shall believe in Britishers to the day of my death, and I hope I shall die before I cease to believe in them, but I do get some disillusions. At Antwerp not a man remained with us, and the worst of it was they made elaborate excuses for leaving. Even our sergeant, who helped during the night, took a comrade off in the morning and disappeared. Both were wounded, but not badly, and two young English Tommies, very slightly wounded, left us as soon as the firing began. We saw them afterwards at the bridge, and they looked pretty mean.

To-night at dinner some officers came in when the food was pretty well finished, and only some drumsticks of chicken and bits of ham were left. I am always slow at beginning to eat, and I had a large wing of chicken still on my plate. I offered this to an officer, who accepted it and ate it, although he asked me to have a little bit of it. I do hope I shall meet some cases of chivalry soon.

Firing ceased about 5 o'clock this afternoon, but we are short of news. The English papers rather annoy one with their continual victories, of which we see nothing. Everyone talks of the German big guns as if they were some happy chance. But the Germans were drilling and preparing while we were making speeches at Hyde Park Corner. Everything had been thought out by them. People talk of the difficulty they must have had in preparing concrete floors for their guns. Not a bit of it. There were innocent dwelling-houses, built long ago, with floors in just the right position and of just the right stuff, and when they were wanted the top stories were blown off and the concrete gun-floors were ready. There were local exhibitions, too, to which firms sent exhibition guns, which they "forgot" to remove! While we were going on strike they were making an army, and as we have sown so must we reap.

One almost wonders whether it might not be possible to eliminate the personal element in war, so constant is the talk about victorious guns. If guns decide everything, then let them be trained on other guns. Let the gun that drives farthest and goes surest win. If every siege is decided by the German 16-inch howitzers, then let us put up brick and mortar or steel against them, but not men. The day for the bleeding human body seems to be over now that men are mown down by shells fired eight miles away. War used to be splendid because it made men strong and brave, but now a little German in spectacles can stand behind a Krupp gun and wipe out a regiment.

I suppose women will always try to protect life because they know what it costs to produce it, and men will always try to protect property because that is what they themselves produce. At Antwerp our wounded men were begging us to go up to the hospital to fetch their purses from under their pillows! At present women are only repairers, darning socks, cleaning, washing up after men, bringing up reinforcements in the way of fresh life, and patching up wounded men, but some day they must and will have to say, "The life I produce has as much right to protection as the property you produce, and I claim my right to protect it."

There seems to me a lack of connection between one man's desire to extend the area he occupies and young men in their teens lying with their lungs shot through or backs blown off.

Yesterday I went to church in an empty little building, but a few of our hospital men turned up and made a small congregation. In the afternoon one or two people came to tea in my bedroom as we could not make our usual expedition to de Poorter's bunshop. The pastry habit is growing on us all.

We went to the arsenal to-day to see about some repairs to our ambulances. I saw a German omnibus which had been captured, and the eagles on it had been painted out with stripes of red paint and the French colours put in their place. The omnibus was one mass of bullet-holes. I have seen waggons at Paardeberg, but I never saw anything so knocked about as that grey motor-bus. The engines and sides were shattered and the chauffeur, of course, had been killed. We went on by motor to the "Champs des Aviateurs." We saw one naval aeroplane man, who told us that he had been hit in his machine when it was 4,000 feet up in the air. His jacket was torn by a bullet and his machine dropped, but he was uninjured, and got away on a bicycle.

The more I see of war the more I am amazed at the courage and nerve which are shown. Death or the chance of death is everywhere, and we meet it not as fatalists do or those who believe they can earn eternal glory with a sacrifice, but lightly and with a song. An English girl at Antwerp was horribly ashamed of some Belgians who skulked behind a wall when the firing was hottest. She herself remained in the open.

It has been a great comfort to me that I have had a room to myself so far on this campaign. I find the communal spirit is not in me. The noisy meals, the heavy bowls of soup, the piles of labelled dinner-napkins, give me an unexpected feeling of oppressive seclusion and solitude, and only when I get away by myself do I feel that my soul is restored.

Mr. Gleeson, an American, joined his wife here a couple of days ago: it was odd to have a book talk again.

Firing has begun again. We hear that our ships are shelling Ostend from the sea. The news that reaches us is meagre, but I prefer that to the false reports that are circulated at home.

This afternoon we came out in motors and ambulances to establish ourselves at Furnes in an empty Ecclesiastical College. Nothing was ready, and everything was in confusion. The wounded from the fighting near by had not begun to come in, but the infernal sound of the guns was quite close to us, and gave one the sensation of a blow on the ear. Night was falling as we came back to Dunkirk to sleep , and we passed many motor vehicles of every description going out to Furnes. Some of them were filled with bread, and one saw stacks of loaves filling to the roof some once beautifully appointed motor. Now all was dust and dirt.

All my previous ideas of men marching to war have had a touch of heroism, crudely expressed by quick-step and smart uniforms. To-day I see tired dusty men, very hungry looking and unshaved, slogging along, silent and tired, and ready to lie down whenever chance offers. They keep as near their convoy as they can, and are keen to stop and cook something. God! what is heroism? It baffles me.

A French officer called Gilbert took us out to Furnes in his Brooklands racing-car, so that was a bit of an experience too, for we sat curled up on some luggage, and were told to hang on by something. The roads were empty and level, the little seats of the car were merely an appendage to its long big engines. When we got our breath back we asked Gilbert what his speed had been, and he told us 75 miles an hour.

There was a crowd of motors in the yard of the Ecclesiastical College at Furnes, engines throbbing and clutches being jerked, and we were told that all last night the fighting had gone on and the wounded had been coming in. There are three wards already fairly full, nothing quite ready, and the inevitable and reiterated "where" heard on every side.

"Where are the stretchers?" "Where are my forceps?" "Where are we to dine?" "Where are the dead to be put?" "Where are the Germans?"

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