Part 12 (1/2)
In our house, we cleaned vegetables. There was nothing romantic about our work in these first days. It was mostly cooking, peeling hundreds of potatoes, slicing bushels of onions, cutting up chunks of meat, until our arms were aching. These bits were boiled together in great black pots. Our job, when it wasn't to cook the stew, was to take buckets of it to the trenches. Here we ladled it out to each soldier. Always we went early, while mist still hung over the ground, for we could see the Germans on clear days. It was an adventure, tramping in the freezing cold of night to the outposts and in early morning to the trenches, back to the house to refill the buckets, back to the trenches. The mornings were bitterly cold. Very early in my career as a nurse, I rid myself of skirts. Boots, covered with rubber boots to the knees in wet weather, or bound with puttees in warm; breeches; a leather coat and as many jerseys as I could walk in--these were my clothes. But, as I slept in them, they didn't keep me very warm in the early morning.
We had one real luxury in the dressing station--a piano. While we cooked and scrubbed and pared potatoes, men from the lines played for us.
There were other things, necessities, that we lacked. Water, except for the stagnant green liquid that lay in the ditches where dead men and dead horses rotted, we went without--once for as long as three days.
During that time we boiled the ditch water and made tea of it. Even then, it was a deep purplish black and tasted bitter.
All we could do to help the wounded was to wash off mud and apply the simplest of first-aids, iodine and bandages. We burned b.l.o.o.d.y clothing and scoured mackintoshes and scrubbed floors. The odors were bad, a mixture of decaying matter and raw flesh and cooking food and disinfectant.
Pervyse was one more dear little Flemish village, with yawning holes in the houses, and through the holes you saw into the home, the precious intimate things which revealed how the household lived--the pump, m.u.f.fled for winter, the furniture placed for occupancy, a home lately inhabited. In the burgomaster's house, there were two old mahogany frames with rare prints, his store of medicines, the excellent piano which cheered us, in his attic a skeleton. So you saw him in his home life as a quiet, scholarly man of taste and education. You entered another gaping house, with two or three bits of inherited mahogany--clearly, the heirlooms of an old family. Another house revealed bran new commonplace trinkets. Always the status of the family was plain to see--their mental life, their tastes, and ambitions. You would peek in through a broken front and see a cupboard with crotched mahogany tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, one door splintered, the other perfect. You would catch a glimpse of a round center table with shapely legs, a sofa drawn up in front of a fireplace. When we went, Pervyse was still partly upstanding, but the steady sh.e.l.ling of the winter months slowly flattened it into a wreck. It is the sense of sight through which war makes its strongest impression on me.
The year falls into a series of pictures, evenings of song when a boy soldier would improvise verses to our head nurse; a fight between a Belgian corporal and an English nurse with seltzer bottles; the night when our soldiers were short of ammunition and we sat up till dawn awaiting the attack that might send us running for our lives; the black nights when some spy back of our lines flashed electric messages to the enemy and directed their fire on our ammunition wagons.
And deeper than those pictures is the consciousness of how adaptable is the human spirit. Human nature insists on creating something. Under hunger and danger, it develops a wealth of resource--in art and music, and carving, making finger-rings of shrapnel, playing songs of the Yser. Something artistic and playful comes to the rescue. Instead of war getting us as Andreieff's ”Red Laugh” says it does, making regiments of men mad, we ”got” war, and remained sane. If we hadn't conquered it by spells of laughing relief, we shouldn't have had nerve when the time came. Too much strain would break down the bravest Belgian and the gayest Fusilier Marin.
I came to feel I would rather get ”pinked” in Pervyse than retire to Furnes, seven miles back of the trenches. Pervyse seemed home, because we belonged there with necessary work to do. Then, too, there was a certain regularity in the German gun-fire. If they started sh.e.l.ling from the Chateau de Vicoigne, they were likely to continue sh.e.l.ling from that point. So we lived that day in the front bedroom. If they sh.e.l.led from Ramscappelle, the back kitchen became the better room, for we had a house in between. We were so near their guns, that we could plot the arc of flight. Pervyse seemed to visitors full of death, simply because it received a daily dose of sh.e.l.l-fire, like a little child sitting up and gulping its medicine. With what unconcern in those days we went out by ambulance to some tight angle, and waited for something to happen.
”We're right by a battery.” But the battery was interesting.
”If this is danger, all right. It's great to be in danger.” I have sat all day writing letters by our artillery. Every time a gun went off my pencil slid. The shock was so sudden, my nerves never took it on. Yet I was able to sleep a few yards in front of a battery. It would pound through the night, and I never heard it. The nervous equipment of an American would ravel out, if it were not for sound sleep. If sh.e.l.ls came no nearer than four hundred yards, we considered it a quiet day.
One day I learned the full meaning of fear. We had had several quiet safe hours. Night was coming on, and we were putting up the shutters, when a sh.e.l.l fell close by in the trench. Next, our floor was covered with dripping men, five of them unbandaged. Sh.e.l.ls and wounds were connected in my mind by that close succession.
No one was secure in that wrecked village of Pervyse. Along the streets, homeless dogs prowled, pigeons circled, hungry cats howled. Behind the trenches, the men had buried their dead and had left great mounds where they had tried to bury the horses. Sh.e.l.ls dropped every day, some days all day. I have seen men running along the streets, flattening themselves against a house whenever they heard the whirr of a sh.e.l.l.
It is not easy to eat, and sleep, and live together in close quarters, sometimes with rush work, sometimes through severer hours of aimless waiting. Again and again, we became weary of one another, impatient over trifles.
[Ill.u.s.tration: BELGIAN SOLDIERS TELEPHONING TO AN ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUN THE APPROACH OF A GERMAN TAUBE.
These lookout posts for observing and directing gun fire carry a portable telephone, adapted to sudden changes of position.]
What war does is to reveal human nature. It does not alter it. It heightens the brutality and the heroism. Selfishness s.h.i.+nes out nakedly and kindliness is seen clearer than in routine peace days. War brings out what is inside the person. Sentimental pacifists sit around three thousand miles away and say, ”War brutalizes men,” and when I hear them I think of the English Tommies giving me their little stock of cigarettes for the Belgian soldiers. Then I read the militarists and they say, ”Be hard. Live dangerously. War is beneficent,” and I see the wrecked villages of Belgium, with the homeless peasants and the orphaned babies. War enn.o.bles some men by sacrifice, by heroism. It debases other men by handing over the weak to them for torture and murder. What is in the man comes out under the supreme test, where there are no courts of appeal, no public opinion, no social restraint; only the soldier alone with helpless victims.
You can't share the chances of life and death with people, without feeling a something in common with them, that you do not have even with life-long friends. The high officer and the c.o.c.kney Tommy have that linking up. There was one person whom I couldn't grow to like. But with him I have shared a ticklish time, and there is that cord of connection.
Then, too, one is glad of a record of oneself. There is some one to verify what you say. You have pa.s.sed through an unbelievable thing together, and you have a witness.
Henri, our Belgian orderly, has that feeling for us, and we for him. It isn't respect, nor fondness, alone. Companions.h.i.+p meant for him new s.h.i.+rts, dry boots, more chocolate, a daily supply of cigarettes. It meant our seeing the picture of wife and child in Liege, hearing about his home. It was the sharing of danger, the facing together of the horror that underlies life, and which we try to forget in soft peace days. The friends.h.i.+ps of war are based on a more fundamental thing than the friends.h.i.+ps of safe living. In the supreme experience of motherhood, the woman goes down alone into the place of suffering, leaving the man, however dear, far away. But in this supreme experience of facing death to save life, you go together. The little Belgian soldier is at your side. Together you sit tight under fire, put the bandages on the wounded, and speed back to a safer place.
Once I went to the farthest outpost. A Belgian soldier stepped out of the darkness.
”Come along, miss, I've a good gun. I'll take you.”
Walking up the road, not in the middle where machine guns could rake us, but huddled up by the trees at the siding, we went. It will be a different thing to meet him one day in Antwerp, than it will be to greet again the desk-clerk of the La Salle Hotel in Chicago. It lies deeper than doing you favors, and a.s.signing a sunny room.
The men are not impersonal units in an army machine. They become individuals to us, with sharply marked traits. It is impossible to see them as cases. Out of the individuals, we built our types--we constructed our Belgian soldier, out of the hundreds who had told us of their work and home.
”You must have met so many you never came to know their stories.”
It was the opposite. Paul Collaer, who played beautifully; Gilson, the mystic; Henri of Liege; the son of Ysaye, they were all clear to us.
There was a splendid fat doctor who felt physical fear, but never s.h.i.+rked his job. He used to go and hide behind the barn, with his pipe, till there was work for him. His wasn't the fear that spreads disaster through a crowd. He was fat and funny. A fat man is comfortable to have around, at any time, even when he is unhappy. No one lost respect for this man. Every one enjoyed him thoroughly.
Commandant Gilson of the Belgian army was one of our firm friends. My introduction to him was when I heard a bit of a Liszt rhapsody floating into the kitchen from our piano, the fingers rapid and fluent, and long nails audible on the keys. I remember the first meal with him, a luncheon of fried sardines, fruit cake, bread and cheese. The doctor across the way had sent a bottle of champagne. After luncheon he received word of an attack. He kissed the hand of each of us, said good-by, and went out to clean his gun. We did not think we should see him again. He retook the outpost and had many more meals with us. He would rise from broken English into swift French--stories of the Congo, one night till 2 a.m. Always smoking a cigarette--his mustache sometimes singed from the fire of the diminis.h.i.+ng b.u.t.t. For orderly, he had a black fat Congo boy, in dark blue Belgian uniform, flat-nosed, with wrinkles down the forehead. He was Gilson's man, never looking at him in speaking, and using an open vowel dialect. Before one of the attacks, a soldier came to Gilson with his wife's picture, watch, ring, and money, and his home address.