Part 6 (1/2)
[_Wednesday, 30th._]
No Germans, nor sign of Germans yet.
Fighting is reported at Saint Nicolas, between Antwerp and Ghent. The Commandant has an idea. He says that if the Belgian Army has to meet the Germans at Saint Nicolas, so as to cut off their advance on Antwerp, the base hospital must be removed from Ghent to some centre or point which will bring the Ambulance behind the Belgian lines. He thinks that working from Ghent would necessarily bring it behind the German lines.
This is a.s.suming that the Germans coming up from the south-east will cut in between Saint Nicolas and Ghent.
He consults the President, who apparently thinks that the base hospital will do very well where it is.
[_2.30._]
Mrs. Torrence brought her Colonel in to lunch. He is battered and grizzled, but still a fine figure in the dark-green uniform of the Motor Cyclist Corps. He is very polite and gallant _a la belge_ and vows that he has taken on Mrs. Torrence _pour toujours, pour la vie_! She diverts the flow of urbanity adroitly.
Except the Colonel nothing noteworthy seems to have occurred to-day. The three hours at the Palais des Fetes were like the three hours last night.
[_Thursday, October 1st._]
It really isn't safe for the Commandant to go out with Ursula Dearmer.
For her luck in the matter of bombardments continues. (He might just as well be with Mrs. Torrence.) They have been at Termonde. What is more, it was Ursula Dearmer who got them through, in spite of the medical military officer whose vigorous efforts stopped them at the barrier. He seems at one point to have shown weakness and given them leave to go on a little way up the road; and the little way seems to have carried them out of his sight and onward till they encountered the Colonel (or it may have been a General) in command. The Colonel (or the General) seems to have broken down very badly, for the car and Ursula Dearmer and the Commandant went on towards Termonde. Young Haynes was with them this time, and on the way they had picked up Mr. G. L----, War Correspondent to the _Daily Mail_ and _Westminster_. They left the car behind somewhere in a safe place where the fire from the machine-guns couldn't reach it. There is a street or a road--I can't make out whether it is inside or outside the town; it leads straight to the bridge over the river, which is about as wide there as the Thames at Westminster. The bridge is the key to the position; it has been blown up and built again several times in the course of the War, and the Germans are now entrenched beyond it. The road had been raked by their _mitrailleuses_ the day before.
It seems to have struck the four simultaneously that it would be quite a good thing to walk down this road on the off-chance of the machine-guns opening fire again. The tale told by the Commandant evokes an awful vision of them walking down it, four abreast, the Commandant and Mr. G.
L---- on the outside, fairly under shelter, and Ursula Dearmer and young Haynes a little in front of them down the middle, where the fire comes, when it does come. This spectacle seems to have shaken the Commandant in his view of bombarded towns as suitable places of amus.e.m.e.nt for young girls. Young Haynes ought to have known better. You tell him that as long as the world endures young Haynes will be young Haynes, and if there is danger in the middle of the road, it is there that he will walk by preference. And as no young woman of modern times is going to let herself be outdone by young Haynes, you must expect to find Ursula Dearmer in the middle of the road too. You cannot suppress this compet.i.tive heroism of young people. The roots strike too deep down in human nature. In the modern young man and woman compet.i.tive heroism has completely forgotten its origin and is now an end in itself.
And if it comes to that--how about Alost?
At the mention of Alost the Commandant's face becomes childlike again in its utter simplicity and innocence and candour. Alost was a very different thing. Looking for sh.e.l.ls at Alost, you understand, was like looking for sh.e.l.ls on the seash.o.r.e. At Alost Ursula Dearmer was in no sort of danger. For at Alost she was under the Commandant's wing (young Haynes hasn't got any wings, only legs to walk into the line of fire on). He explains very carefully that he took her under his wing _because_ she is a young girl and he feels responsible for her to her mother.
(Which, oddly enough, is just how _I_ feel!)
As for young Haynes, I suppose he would plead that when he and Ursula Dearmer walked down the middle of the road there was no firing.
That seems to have been young Haynes's particular good fortune. I have now a perfect obsession of responsibility. I see, in one dreadful vision after another, the things that must happen to Ursula Dearmer under the Commandant's wing, and to young Haynes and the Commandant under Ursula Dearmer's.
No wounded were found, this time, at Termonde.
This little _contretemps_ with the Commandant has made me forget to record a far more notable event. Mrs. Torrence brought young Lieutenant G---- in to luncheon. He is the hero of the Belgian Motor Cyclist Corps.
He is said to have accounted for nine Germans with his own rifle in one morning. The Corps has already intimated that this is the first well-defined specimen of a man it has yet seen in Belgium. His dark-green uniform fits him exceedingly well. He is tall and handsome.
Drenched in the glamour of the greatest possible danger, he gives it off like a subtle essence. As he was led in he had rather the air, the slightly awkward, puzzled and embarra.s.sed air, of being on show as a fine specimen of a man. But it very soon wore off. In the absence of the Commandant he sat in the Commandant's place, so magnificent a figure that our mess, with gaps at every table, looked like a banquet given in his honour, a banquet whose guests had been decimated by some catastrophe.
Suddenly--whether it was the presence of the Lieutenant or the absence of the Commandant, or merely reaction from the strain of inactivity, I don't know, but suddenly madness came upon our mess. The mess-room was no longer a mess-room in a Military Hospital, but a British school-room.
Mrs. Torrence had changed her woollen cap for a grey felt wide-awake.
She was no longer an Arctic explorer, but the wild-western cowboy of British melodrama. She was the first to go mad. One moment she was seated decorously at the Lieutenant's right hand; the next she was strolling round the tables with an air of innocent abstraction, having armed herself in secret with the little hard round rolls supplied by order of the Commandant. Each little roll became a deadly _obus_ in her hand. She turned. Her innocent abstraction was intense as she poised herself to aim.
With a shout of laughter Dr. Bird ducked behind the cover of his table-napkin.
I had a sudden memory of Mrs. Torrence in command of the party at Ostend, a figure of austere duty, of inexorable propriety, rigid with the discipline of the ---- Hospital, restraining the criminal levity of the Red Cross volunteer who would look or dream of looking at Ostend Cathedral. Mrs. Torrence, like a seven-year-old child meditating mischief, like a baby panther at play, like a very young and very engaging demon let loose, is looking at Dr. Bird. He is not a Cathedral, but he suffered bombardment all the same. She got his range with a roll.
She landed her sh.e.l.l in the very centre of his waistcoat.