A Journal of Impressions in Belgium Part 15

When I came to him and the Commandant told him my name, he opened his eyes wide with a look of startled recognition. He said he knew me; he had seen me somewhere in England. He was so certain about it that he persuaded me that I had seen him somewhere. But we can neither of us remember where or when. They say he is not perfectly conscious all the time.

We stayed with him for a few minutes till he went off to sleep again.

None of the doctors think that he can live. He was wounded in front with mitrailleuse; eight bullets in his body. He has been operated on. How he survived the operation and the journey on the top of it I can't imagine.

And now general peritonitis has set in. It doesn't look as if he had a chance.

We have heard that all the War Correspondents have been sent out of Ghent.

Numbers of British troops came in to-day.

Went up to see Mr. Foster, who is in his room, ill. It is hard lines that he should have had this accident when he has been working so splendidly. And it wasn't his fault, either. One of the Belgian bearers slipped with his end of a stretcher when they were carrying a heavy man, and Mr. Foster got hurt in trying to right the balance and save his wounded man. He is very much distressed at having to lie up and be waited on.

Impossible to write a Journal or any articles while I am in the Hospital, and there is no table yet in my room at the Hotel Cecil.

The first ambulance car, with the chauffeur Bert and Mr. Riley, has come back from Melle, where they left Mrs. Torrence and Janet and Dr. Wilson.

They went back again in the afternoon.

They are all out now except poor Mr. Foster and Mrs. Lambert, who is somewhere with her husband.

I am the only available member of the Corps left in the Hospital!

[_3.30._]

No Germans have appeared yet.

I was sitting up in the mess-room, making entries in the Day-Book, when I was sent for. Somebody or something had arrived, and was waiting below.

On the steps of the Hospital I found two brand-new British chauffeurs in brand-new suits of khaki. Behind them, drawn up in the entry, were two brand-new Daimler motor-ambulance cars.

I thought it was a Field Ambulance that had lost itself on the way to France. The chauffeurs (they had beautiful manners, and were very spick and span, and one pleased me by his remarkable resemblance to the editor of the _English Review_)--the chauffeurs wanted to know whether they had come to the right place. And of course they hardly had, if all the British Red Cross ambulance cars were going into France.

Then they explained.

They were certainly making for Ghent. The British Red Cross Society had sent them there. They were only anxious to know whether they had come to the right Hospital, the Hospital where the English Field Ambulance was quartered.

Yes: that was right. They had been sent for us.

They had just come up from Ostend, and they had not been ten minutes in Ghent before orders came through for an ambulance to be sent at once to Melle.

The only available member of the Corps was its Secretary and Reporter.

To that utterly untrained and supremely inappropriate person Heaven sent this incredible luck.

When I think how easily I might have missed it! If I'd gone for a stroll in the town. If I'd sat five minutes longer with Mr. Foster. If the landlord of the Hotel Cecil had kept his word and given me a table, when I should, to a dead certainty, have been writing this wretched Journal at the ineffable moment when the chauffeurs arrived.

I am glad to think that I had just enough morality left to play fair with Mrs. Lambert. I did try to find her, so that she shouldn't miss it.

Somebody said she was in one of the restaurants on the _Place_ with her husband. I looked in all the restaurants and she wasn't in one of them.

The finger of Heaven pointed unmistakably to the Secretary and Reporter.

There was a delay of ten minutes, no more, while I got some cake and sandwiches for the hungry chauffeurs and took them to the bureau to have their bra.s.sards stamped. And in every minute of the ten I suffered tortures while we waited. I thought something _must_ happen to prevent my taking that ambulance car out. I thought my heart would leave off beating and I should die before we started (I believe people feel like this sometimes before their wedding night). I thought the Commandant would come back and send out Ursula Dearmer instead. I thought the Military Power would come down from its secret hiding-place and stop me.

But none of these things happened. At the last moment, I thought that M.

C----

M. C---- was the Belgian Red Cross guide who took us into Antwerp. To M.

C---- I said simply and firmly that I was going. The functions of the Secretary and Reporter had never been very clearly defined, and this was certainly not the moment to define them. M. C----, in his innocence, accepted me with confidence and a chivalrous gravity that left nothing to be desired.

The chauffeur Newlands (the leaner and darker one) declared himself ready for anything. All he wanted was to get to work. Poor Ascot, who was so like my friend the editor, had to be content with his vigil in the back yard.

At last we got off. I might have trusted Heaven. The getting off was a foregone conclusion, for we went along the south-east road, which had not worked its mysterious fascination for nothing.

At a fork where two roads go into Ghent we saw one of our old ambulance cars das.h.i.+ng into Ghent down the other road on our left. It was beyond hail. Heaven _meant_ us to go on uninterrupted and unchallenged.

I had not allowed for trouble at the barrier. There always is a barrier, which may be anything from a mile to four miles from the field or village where the wounded are. Yesterday on the way to Lokeren the barrier was at Z----. To-day it was somewhere half-way between Ghent and Melle.

None of us had ever quite got to the bottom of the trouble at the barrier. We know that the Belgian authorities wisely refused all responsibility. Properly speaking, our ambulances were not supposed to go nearer than a certain safe distance from the enemy's firing-line. For two reasons. First, it stood the chance of being sh.e.l.led or taken prisoner. Second, there was a very natural fear that it might draw down the enemy's fire on the Belgians. Our huge, lumbering cars, with their brand-new khaki hoods and flaming red crosses on a white ground, were an admirable mark for German guns. But as the Corps in this case went into the firing-line on foot, I do not think that the risk was to the Belgians. So, though in theory we stopped outside the barriers, in practice we invariably got through.

The new car was stopped at the barrier now by the usual Belgian Army Medical Officer. We were not to go on to Melle.

I said that we had orders to go on to Melle; and I meant to go on to Melle. The Medical Officer said again that we were not to go, and I said again that we were going.

Then that Belgian Army Medical Officer began to tell us what I imagine is the usual barrier tale.

There were any amount of ambulances at Melle.

There were no wounded at Melle.

And in any case this ambulance wouldn't be allowed to go there. And then the usual battle of the barrier had place.

It was one against three. For M. C---- went over to the enemy, and the chauffeur Newlands, confronted by two official adversaries in uniform, became deafer and deafer to my voice in his right ear.

First, the n.o.ble and chivalrous Belgian Red Cross guide, with an appalling treachery, gave the order to turn the car round to Ghent. I gave the counter order. Newlands wavered for one heroic moment; then he turned the car round.

I jumped out and went up to the Army Medical Officer and delivered a frontal attack, discharging execrable French.

"No wounded? You tell us that tale every day, and there are always wounded. Do you want any more of them to die? I mean to go on and I shall go on."

I didn't ask him how he thought he could stop one whom Heaven had predestined to go on to Melle.

M. C---- had got out now to see the fight.

The Army Medical Officer looked the Secretary and Reporter up and down, taking in that vision of inappropriateness and disproportion. There was a faint, a very faint smile under the ferocity of his moustache, the first sign of relenting. The Secretary and Reporter saw the advantage and followed, as you might follow a bend in the enemy's line of defence.