Furnes. 5 November.—The hospital is beginning to fill up again, and the nurses are depressed because only those cases which are nearly hopeless are allowed to stay, so it is death on all sides and just a hell of suffering. One man yelled to me to-night to kill him. I wish I might have done so. The tragedy of war presses with a fearful weight after being in a hospital, and wherever one is one hears the infernal sound of the guns. On Sunday about forty shells came into Furnes, but I was at Dunkirk. This morning about five dropped on to the station.
NIEUPORT
To-day I went out to Nieuport. It is like some town one sees in a horrible nightmare. Hardly a house is left standing, but that does not describe the scene. Nothing can fitly describe it except perhaps such a pen as Victor Hugo's. The cathedral at Nieuport has two outer walls left standing. The front leans forward helplessly, the aisles are gone. The trees round about are burnt up and shot away. In the roadway are great holes which shells have made. The very cobbles of the street are scattered by them. Not a window remains in the place; all are shattered and many hang from their frames. The fronts of the houses have fallen out, and one sees glimpses of wretched domestic life: a baby's cradle hangs in mid-air, some tin boxes have fallen through from the box-room in the attic to the ground floor. Shops are shivered and their contents strewn on all sides; the interiors of other houses have been hollowed out by fire. There is a toy-shop with dolls grinning vacantly at the ruins or bobbing brightly on elastic strings.
In a wretched cottage some soldiers are having breakfast at a fine-carved table. In one house, surrounded by a very devastation of wreckage, some cheap ornaments stand intact on a mantelpiece. From another a little ginger-coloured cat strolls out unconcernedly! The bedsteads hanging midway between floors look twisted and thrawn—nothing stands up straight. Like the wounded, the town has been rendered inefficient by war.
6 November.—Furnes always seems to me a weird tragic place. I cannot think why this is so, but its influence is to me rather curious. I feel as if all the time I was living in some blood-curdling ghost story or a horrid dream. Every day I try to overcome the feeling, but I can't succeed. This afternoon I made up my mind to return to our villa and write my diary. The day was lovely, and I meant to enjoy a rest and a scribble, but so strong was the horrid influence of the place that I couldn't settle to anything. I can't describe it, but it seemed to stifle me, and I can only compare it to some second sight in which one sees death. I sat as long as I could doing my writing, but I had to give in at last, and I tucked my book under my arm and walked back to the hospital, where at least I was with human beings and not ghosts.
Our life here is made up of many elements and many people, all rather incongruous, but the average of human nature is good. A villa belonging to a Dr. Joos was given to our staff. It is a pretty little house, with three beds in it, and we are eighteen people, so most of us sleep on the floor. It wouldn't be a bad little place (except for the drains) if only there wasn't this horrid influence about it all. I always particularly dislike toddling after people like a little lost dog, but here I find that unless I am with somebody the ghosts get the better of me.
The villa is being ruined by us I fear, but I have a woman to clean it, and I am trying to keep it in order. It is a cold little place for we have no fires. We can, by pumping, get a little very cold water, and there is a tap in the bath-room and one basin at which everyone tries to wash and shave at the same time. We get our meals at a butcher's shop, where there is a large room which we more than fill. The lights of the town are all out by 6 o'clock, so we grope about, but there is a lamp in our dining-room. When we come out we have to pass through the butcher's shop, and one may find oneself running into the interior of a sheep.
We get up about 7 o'clock and fight for the basin. Then we walk round to the butcher's shop and have breakfast at 7.30. Most people think they start off for the day's work at 8, but it is generally quite 10 o'clock before all the brown-hooded ambulances with their red crosses have moved out of the yard. We do not as a rule meet again till dinner-time, and even then many of the party are absent. They come in at all times, very dirty and hungry, and the greeting is always the same, "Did you get many?"—i.e., "Have you picked up many wounded?"
One night Dr. Munro got bowled over by the actual air force created by a shell, which however did not hit him. Yesterday Mr. Secher was shot in the leg. I am amazed that not more get hit. They are all very cheery about it.
To-day we heard that a jolly French boy with white teeth, who has been very good at making coffee at our picnic lunches, was put up against a tree and shot at daybreak. Someone had made him drunk the night before, and he had threatened an officer with a revolver.
A DRAMATIC INCIDENT
7 November. St. Malo les Bains.—Lady Bagot turned up here to-day, and I lunched with her at the Hôtel des Arcades. Just before lunch a bomb was dropped from a Taube overhead, and hardly had we sat down to lunch when a revolver shot rang through the room. A French officer had discharged his pistol by mistake, and he lay on the floor in his scarlet trews. The scene was really the Adelphi, and as the man had only slightly hurt himself one was able to appreciate the scenic effect and to notice how well staged it was. A waiter ran for me. I ran for dressings to one of our ambulances, and we knelt in the right attitude beside the hero in his scarlet clothes, while the "lady of the bureau" begged for the bullet!
In the evening Lady Bagot and I worked at the railway-sheds till 3 a.m. One immense shed had 700 wounded in it. The night scene, with its inevitable accompaniment of low-turned lamps and gloom, was one I shall not forget. The railway-lines on each side of the covered platform were spread with straw, and on this wounded men, bedded down like cattle, slept. There were rows of them sleeping feet to feet, with straw over them to make a covering. I didn't hear a grumble, and hardly a groan. Most of them slept heavily.
Near the door was a row of Senegalese, their black faces and gleaming eyes looking strange above the straw; and further on were some Germans, whom the French authorities would not allow our men to touch; then rows of men of every colour and blood; Zouaves, with their picturesque dress all grimed and colourless; Turcos, French, and Belgians. Nearly all had their heads and hands bound up in filthy dressings. We went into the dressing-station at the far end of the great shed and dressed wounds till about 3 o'clock, then we passed through the long long lines of sleeping wounded men again and went home.
To Lady Clémentine Wearing.
8 November.
My dearest Clemmie,
I have a big job for you. Will you do it? I know you are the person for it, and you will be prompt and interested.
The wounded are suffering from hunger as much as from their wounds. In most places, such as dressing-stations and railway-stations, nothing is provided for them at all, and many men are left for two or three days without food.
I wish I could describe it all to you! These wounded men are picked up after a fight and taken anywhere—very often to some farmhouse or inn, where a Belgian surgeon claps something on to the wounds or ties on a splint, and then our (Dr. Munro's) ambulances come along and bring the men into the Field Hospital if they are very bad, or if not they are taken direct to a station and left there. They may, and often do, have to wait for hours till a train loads up and starts. Even those who are brought to the Field Hospital have to turn out long before they can walk or sit, and they are carried to the local station and put into covered horse-boxes on straw, and have to wait till the train loads up and starts. You see everything has to be done with a view to sudden evacuation. We are so near to the firing-line that the Germans may sweep on our way at any time, and then every man has to be cleared out somehow (we have a heap of ambulances), and the staff is moved off to some safer place. We did a bolt of this sort to Poperinghe one day, but after being there two days the fighting swayed the other way and we were able to come back.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту