As soon as a wounded man has been attended to and is able to be put on a stretcher again he is sent to Calais. We have to keep emptying the wards for other patients to come in, and besides, if the fighting comes this way, we shall have to fall back a little further.
We have a river between us and the Germans, so we shall always know when they are coming and get a start and be all right.
Your loving
S. Macnaughtan.
25 October.—A glorious day. Up in the blue even Taubes—those birds of prey—look beautiful, like eagles wheeling in their flight. It is all far too lovely to leave, yet men are killing each other painfully with every day that dawns.
I had a tiresome day in spite of the weather, because the hospital was evacuated suddenly owing to the nearness of the Germans, and I missed going with the ambulance, so I hung about all day.
26 October. My birthday.—This morning several women were brought in horribly wounded. One girl of sixteen had both legs smashed. I was taking one old woman to the civil hospital and I had to pass eighteen dead men; they were laid out beside some women who were washing clothes, and I noticed how tired even in death their poor dirty feet looked.
TO THE EDGE OF THE FIGHTING LINE
We started early in the ambulance to-day, and went to pick up the wounded. It was a wild gusty morning, one of those days when the sky takes up nearly all the picture and the world looks small. The mud was deep on the road, and a cyclist corps plunged heavily along through it. The car steered badly and we drove to the edge of the fighting-line.
First one comes to a row of ammunition vans, with men cooking breakfast behind them. Then come the long grey guns, tilted at various angles, and beyond are the shells bursting and leaving little clouds of black or white in the sky. We signalled to a gun not to fire down the road in much the same way as a bobby signals to a hansom. When we got beyond the guns they fired over us with a long streaky sort of sound. We came back to the road and picked up the wounded wherever we could find them.
The churches are nearly all filled with straw, the chairs piled anywhere, and the sacrament removed from the altar. In cottages and little inns it is the same thing—a litter of straw, and men lying on it in the chilly weather. Here and there through some little window one sees surgeons in their white coats dressing wounds. Half the world seems to be wounded and inefficient. We filled our ambulance, and stood about in curious groups of English men and women who looked as if they were on some shooting-party. When our load was complete we drove home.
Dr. Munro told me that last night he met a German prisoner quite naked being marched in, proudly holding his head up. Lots of the men fight naked in the trenches. In hospital we meet delightful German youths.
Amongst others who were brought in to-day was Mr. "Dick" Reading, the editor of a sporting paper. He was serving in the Belgian army, and was behind a gun-carriage when it was fired upon and started. Reading clung on behind with both his legs broken, and he stuck to it till the gun-carriage was pulled up! He came in on a stretcher as bright as a button, smoking a cigar and laughing.
POPERINGHE
Late this afternoon we had to turn out of Furnes and fly to Poperinghe. The drive was intensely interesting, through crowds of troops of every nationality, and the town seemed large and well lighted. It was crowded with people to see all our ambulances arrive. We went to a café, where there was a fire but nothing to eat, so some of the party went out and bought chops, and I cooked them in a stuffy little room which smelt of burnt fat.
After supper we went to a convent where the Queen of the Belgians had made arrangements for us to sleep. It was delightful. Each of us had a snowy white bed with white curtains in a long corridor, and there was a basin of water, cold but clean, and a towel for each of us. We thoroughly enjoyed our luxuries.
28 October.—The tide of battle seems to have swung away from us again and we were recalled to Furnes to-day. The hospital looked very bare and empty as all the patients had been evacuated, and there was nothing to do till fresh ones should come in. Three shells came over to-day and landed in a field near us. Some people say they were sent by our own naval guns firing wide. The souvenir grafters went out and got pieces of them.
DUNKIRK
2 November.—I have been spending a couple of nights in Dunkirk, where I went to meet Miss Fyfe. The Invicta got in late because the Hermes had been torpedoed and they had gone to her assistance. No doubt the torpedo was intended for the Invicta, which carries ammunition, and is becoming an unpopular boat in consequence. Forty of the Hermes men were lost.
Dunkirk is full of people, and one meets friends at every turn. I had tea at the Consulate one afternoon, and was rather glad to get away from the talk of shells and wounds, which is what one hears most of at Furnes.
I saw Lord Kitchener in the town one day; he had come to confer with Joffre, Sir John French, Monsieur Poincaré, and Mr. Churchill, at a meeting held at the Chapeau Rouge Hotel. Rather too many valuable men in one room, I thought—especially with so many spies about! Three men in English officers' uniforms were found to be Germans the other day and taken out and shot.
The Duchess of Sutherland has a hospital at our old Casino at Malo les Bains, and has made it very nice. I had a long chat with a Coldstream man who was there. He told me he was carried to a barn after being shot in the leg and the bone shattered. He lay there for six days before he was found, with nothing to eat but a few biscuits. He dressed his own wound.
"But," he said, "the string of my puttee had been driven in so far by the shot I couldn't find it to get the thing off, so I had to bandage over it."
I went down to the station one day to see if anything could be done for the wounded there. They are coming in at the rate of seven hundred a day, and are laid on straw in an immense goods-shed. They get nothing to eat, and the atmosphere is so bad that their wounds can't be dressed. They are all patient, as usual, only the groans are heartbreaking sometimes. We are arranging to have soup given to them, and a number of ambulance men arrived who will remove them to hospital ships and trains. But the goods-shed is a shambles, and let us leave it at that.[1]
[1] It must not be thought that in this and in subsequent passages referring to the sufferings of the wounded Miss Macnaughtan alludes to any hardships endured by British troops. Her time in Flanders was all spent behind the French and Belgian lines.—Ed.
Mrs. Knocker came into Dunkirk for a night's rest while I was staying there. She had been out all the previous day in a storm of wind and rain driving an ambulance. It was heavy with wounded, and shells were dropping very near. She—the most courageous woman that ever lived—was quite unnerved at last. The glass of the car she was driving was dim with rain and she could carry no lights, and with this swaying load of injured men behind her on the rutty road she had to stick to her wheel and go on.
Some one said to her, "There is a doctor in such-and-such a farmhouse, and he has no dressings. You must take him these."
She demurred (a most unusual thing for her), but men do not protect women in this war, and they said she had to take them. She asked one of the least wounded of the men to get down and see what was in front of her, and he disappeared altogether. The dark mass she had seen in the road was a huge hole made by a shell! After steering into dead horses and going over awful roads Mrs. Knocker came bumping into the yard, steering so badly that