Part 7 (1/2)
When I tried to be logical, I became emotional. Instead of reason I found in myself only a deep resentment.
I could see only that blue-eyed German in his bed, those cheery and cold and ill-equipped Belgians drilling on the sands at La Panne.
But on one point I was clear. Away from all the imminent questions that filled the day, the changing ethics of war, its brutalities, its hideous necessities, one point stood out clear and distinct. That the real issue is not the result, but the cause of this war. That the world must dig deep into the mire of European diplomacy to find that cause, and having found it must destroy it. That as long as that cause persists, be it social or political, predatory or ambitious, there will be more wars. Again it will be possible for a handful of men in high place to overthrow a world.
And one of the first results of the discovery of that cause will be a demand of the people to know what their representatives are doing.
Diplomacy, instead of secret whispering, a finger to its lips, must shout from the housetops. Great nations cannot be governed from cellars. Diplomats are not necessarily conspirators. There is such a thing as walking in the sunlight.
There is no such thing in civilisation as a warlike people. There are peaceful people, or aggressive people, or military people. But there are none that do not prefer peace to war, until, inflamed and roused by those above them who play this game of empires, they must don the panoply of battle and go forth.
CHAPTER VII
THE STORY WITH AN END
In its way that hospital at La Panne epitomised the whole tragedy of the great war. Here were women and children, innocent victims when the peaceful nearby market town of Furnes was being sh.e.l.led; here was a telegraph operator who had stuck to his post under furious bombardment until both his legs were crushed. He had been decorated by the king for his bravery. Here were Belgian aristocrats without extra clothing or any money whatever, and women whose whole lives had been s.h.i.+elded from pain or discomfort. One of them, a young woman whose father is among the largest landowners in Belgium, is in charge of the villa where the uniforms of wounded soldiers are cleaned and made fit for use again. Over her white uniform she wore, in the bitter wind, a thin tan raincoat. We walked together along the beach. I protested.
”You are so thinly clad,” I said. ”Surely you do not go about like that always!”
She shrugged her shoulders.
”It is all I have,” she said philosophically. ”And I have no money--none. None of us has.”
A t.i.tled Belgian woman with her daughter had just escaped from Brussels. She was very sad, for she had lost her only boy. But she smiled a little as she told me of their having nothing but what they wore, and that the night before they had built a fire in their room, washed their linen, and gone to bed, leaving it until morning to dry.
Across the full width of the hospital stretched the great drawing-room of the hotel, now a recreation place for convalescent soldiers. Here all day the phonograph played, the nurses off duty came in to write letters, the surgeons stopped on their busy rounds to speak to the men or to watch for a few minutes the ever-changing panorama of the beach, with its background of patrolling gunboats, its engineers on rest playing football, its occasional aeroplanes, carrying each two men--a pilot and an observer.
The men sat about. There were boys with the stringy beards of their twenty years. There were empty sleeves, many crutches, and some who must be led past the chairs and tables--who will always have to be led.
They were all cheerful. But now and then, when the bombardment became more insistent, some of them would raise their heads and listen, with the strained faces of those who see a hideous picture.
The young woman who could not buy a heavy coat showed me the villa adjoining the hospital, where the clothing of wounded soldiers is cared for. It is placed first in a fumigating plant in the bas.e.m.e.nt and thoroughly sterilised. After that it is brushed of its encrusted mud and blood stains are taken out by soaking in cold water. It is then dried and thoroughly sunned. Then it is ready for the second floor.
Here tailors are constantly at work mending garments apparently unmendable, pressing, steaming, patching, sewing on b.u.t.tons. The ragged uniforms come out of that big bare room clean and whole, ready to be tied up in new burlap bags, tagged, and placed in racks of fresh white cedar. There is no odour in this room, although innumerable old garments are stored in it.
In an adjoining room the rifles and swords of the injured men stand in racks, the old and unserviceable rifles with which Belgium was forced to equip so many of her soldiers side by side with the new and scientific German guns. Along the wall are officers' swords, and above them, on shelves, the haversacks of the common soldiers, laden with the things that comprise their whole comfort.
I examined one. How few the things were and how worn! And yet the haversack was heavy. As he started for the trenches, this soldier who was carried back, he had on his shoulders this haversack of hide tanned with the hair on. In it he had two pairs of extra socks, worn and ragged, a tattered and dirty unders.h.i.+rt, a photograph of his wife, rags for cleaning his gun, a part of a loaf of dry bread, the remnant of what had been a pair of gloves, now fingerless and stiff with rain and mud, a rosary, a pair of shoes that the woman of the photograph would have wept and prayed over, some extra cartridges and a piece of leather. Perhaps he meant to try to mend the shoes.
And here again I wish I could finish the story. I wish I could tell whether he lived or died--whether he carried that knapsack back to battle, or whether he died and its pitiful contents were divided among those of his comrades who were even more needy than he had been. But the veil lifts for a moment and drops again.
Two incidents stand out with distinctness from those first days in La Panne, when, thrust with amazing rapidity into the midst of war, my mind was a chaos of interest, bewilderment and despair.
One is of an old abbe, talking earnestly to a young Belgian n.o.blewoman who had recently escaped from Brussels with only the clothing she wore.
The abbe was round of face and benevolent. I had met him before, at Calais, where he had posed me in front of a statue and taken my picture. His enthusiasm over photography was contagious. He had made a dark room from a closet in an old convent, and he owned a little American camera. With this carefully placed on a tripod and covered with a black cloth, he posed me carefully, making numerous excursions under the cloth. In that cold courtyard, under the marble figure of Joan of Arc, he was a warm and human and most alive figure, in his flat black shoes, his long black soutane with its woollen sash, his woollen m.u.f.fler and spectacles, with the eternal cigarette, that is part and parcel of every Belgian, dangling loosely from his lower lip.
The surgeons and nurses who were watching the operation looked on with affectionate smiles. They loved him, this old priest, with his boyishness, his enthusiasms, his tiny camera, his cigarette, his beautiful faith. He has promised me the photograph and what he promises he fulfils. But perhaps it was a failure. I hope not. He would be so disappointed--and so would I.