Chapter III (1)

Nous sommes tous heureux d'avoir le costume des Anglais
Seul'ment ce qu'il fallait,
Pour que ça soit complet.
Et je suis certain si l'armée veut nous mettre à l'aise
C'est d'nous donner la solde Anglaise.
Le jour qu'nous aurions ça, ah! quell' affaire
Nous n' serions plus jamais dans la misère.

REFRAIN

Vous les verriez nos p'tits soldats,
J'vous assure qu'ils seraient un peu là,
Habilles,
D'la tête jusqu'aux pieds,
En khaki, en khaki,
Ils seraient fiers de repartir,
Pour le front avec plaisir,
Si les quatre poches étaient bien games
De billets bleus couleur khaki.

FLIES: A FANTASY

Outside the window stretched the village street, flat, with bits of dust and dung rising on the breaths of wind and volleying into rooms upon the tablecloth and into pages of books. It was a street of small yellow brick houses, a shapeless church, a convent school--freckled buildings, dingy. Up and down the length of it, it was without one touch of beauty. It gave back dust in the eyes. It sounded with thunder of transports, rattle of wagons, soft whirr of officers' speed cars, yelp of motor horns, and the tap-tap of wooden shoes on tiny peasants, boys and girls. A little sick black dog slunk down the pavement, smelling and staring. A cart bumped over the cobbles, the horse with a great tumor in its stomach, the stomach as if blown out on the left side, and the tumor with a rag upon it where it touched the harness.

Inside the window, a square room with a litter of six-penny novels in a corner, fifty or sixty books flung haphazard, some of them open with the leaves crushed back by the books above. In another corner, a heap of commissariat stuff, tins of bully beef, rabbit, sardines, herring, and glasses of jam, and marmalade. On the center table, a large jug of marmalade, ants busy in the yellow trickle at the rim. Filth had worked its way into the red table-cover. Filth was on every object in the room, like a soft mist, blurring the color and outlines of things. In the corners, under books and tins, insects moved, long, thin, crawling. A hot noon sun came dimly through the dirty glass of the closed window, and slowly baked a sleeping man in the large plush armchair. Around the chair, as if it were a promontory in a heaving sea, were billows of stale crumpled newspapers, some wadded into a ball, others torn across the page, all flung aside in _ennui_.

The face of the man was weary and weak. It showed all of his forty-one years, and revealed, too, a great emptiness. Flies kept rising and settling again on the hands, the face, and the head of the man--moist flies whose feet felt damp on the skin. They were slow and languid flies which wanted to settle and stay. It was his breathing that made them restless, but not enough to clear them away, only enough to make a low buzzing in the sultry room. Across the top of his head a bald streak ran from the forehead, and it was here they returned to alight, after each twitching and heave of the sunken body.

In the early months he had fought a losing fight with them. The walls and ceiling and panes of glass were spotted with the marks of his long battle. But his foes had advanced in ever-fresh force, clouds and swarms of them beyond number. He had gone to meet them with a wire-killer, and tightly rolled newspapers. He had imported fly paper from Dunkirk. But they could afford to sacrifice the few hundreds, which his strokes could reach, and still overwhelm him. Lately, he had given up the struggle, and let them take possession of the room. They harassed him when he read, so he gave up reading. They got into the food, so he ate less. Between his two trips to the front daily at 8 A.M. and 2 P.M., he slept. He found he could lose himself in sleep. Into that kingdom of sleep, they could not enter. As the weeks rolled on, he was able to let himself down more and more easily into silence. That became his life. A slothfulness, a languor, even when awake, a half-conscious forcing of himself through the routine work, a looking forward to the droning room, and then the settling deep into the old plush chair, and the blessed unconsciousness.

He drove a Red Cross ambulance to the French lines at Nieuport, collected the sick and wounded soldiers and brought them to the Poste de Secours, two miles back of the trenches. He lived a hundred feet from the Poste, always within call. But the emergency call rarely came. There were only the set runs, for the war had settled to its own regularity. A wonderful idleness hung over the lines, where millions of men were unemployed, waiting with strange patience for some unseen event. Only the year before, these men were chatting in cafés, and busy in a thousand ways. Now, the long hours of the day were lived without activity in thoughtless routine. Under the routine there was always the sense of waiting for a sudden crash and horror.

The man was an English gentleman. It was his own car he had brought, paid for by him, and he had offered his car and services to the Fusiliers Marins. They had been glad of his help, and for twelve months he had performed his daily duty and returned to his loneliness. The men under whom he worked were the French doctors of the Poste--the chief doctor, Monsieur Claude-Marie Le Bot, with four stripes on his arm, and the courteous, grave administrator, Eustache-Emmanuel Couillandre, a three-stripes man, and a half dozen others, of three stripes and two. They had welcomed him to their group when he came to them from London. They had found him lively and likable, bringing gossip of the West End with a dash of Leicester Square. Then slowly a change had come on him. He went moody and silent.

"What's the matter with you?" asked Doctor Le Bot one day.

"Nothing's the matter with me," answered the man. "It's war that's the matter."

"What do you mean by that?" put in one of the younger doctors.

"The trouble with war," began the man slowly, "isn't that there's danger and death. They are easy. The trouble with war is this. It's dull, damned deadly dull. It's the slowest thing in the world. It wears away at your mind, like water dripping on a rock. The old Indian torture of letting water fall on your skull, drop by drop, till you went raving crazy, is nothing to what war does to the mind of millions of men. They can't think of anything else but war, and they have no thoughts about that. They can't talk of another blessed thing, and the result is they have nothing to say at all."

As he talked a flush came into his face. He gathered speed, while he spoke, till his words came with a rush, as if he were relieving himself of inner pain.

"Have you ever heard the true inside account of an Arctic expedition?" he went on. "There's a handful of men locked up inside a little ship for thirteen or fourteen months. Nothing to look out on but snow and ice, one color and a horizonful of it. Nothing to dream of but arriving at a Pole--and that is a theoretical point in infinite space. There's no such thing. The midnight sun and the frozen stuff get on their nerves--same old sun in the same old place, same kind of weather. What happens? The natural thing, of course. They get so they hate each other like poison. They go around with a mad on. They carry hate against the commander and the cook and the fellow whose berth creaks every time he shifts. Each man thinks the shipload is the rottenest gang ever thrown together. He wonders why they didn't bring somebody decent along. He gets to scoring up grudges against the different people, and waits his chance to get back."

He stopped a minute, and looked around at the doctors, who were giving him close attention. Then he went on with the same intensity.

"Now that's war, only war is more so. Here you are in one place for sixteen months. You shovel yourself into a stinking hole in the ground. At seven in the morning, you boil yourself some muddy coffee that tastes like the River Thames at Battersea Bridge. You take a knife that's had knicks hacked out of it, and cut a hunk of dry bread that chews like sand. You eat some 'bully beef out of a tin, same tinned stuff as you've been eating ever since your stomach went on strike a year ago. Once a week for a treat, you cut a steak off the flank of a dead horse. That tastes better, because it's fresh meat. When you're sent back a few miles, _en 'piquet_, you sleep in a village that looks like Sodom after the sulphur struck it. Houses singed and tumbled, dead bodies in the ruins, a broken-legged dog, trailing its hind foot, in front of the house where you are. Tobacco--surely. You'd die if you didn't have a smoke. But the rotten little cigarettes with no taste to them that smoke like chopped hay. And the cigars made out of rags and shredded toothpicks--"

"Here, have a cigarette," suggested the youngest doctor.

But the man was too busy in working out his own thoughts.

"The whole thing," he continued, "is a mixture of a morgue and a hospital--only those places have running water, and people in white aprons to tidy things up. And a battle--Three days under bombardment, living in the cellar. The guns going off five, six times to the minute, and then waiting a couple of hours and dropping one in, next door. The crumpling noise when a little brick house caves in, like a man when you hit him in the stomach, just going all together in a heap. And the sick smell that comes out of the mess from plaster and brick dust.

"And getting wounded, that's jolly, isn't it? Rifle ball through your left biceps. Dick walks you back to the dressing station. Doctor busy at luncheon with a couple of visiting officers. Lie down in the straw. Straw has a pleasant smell when it's smeared with iodine and blood. Wait till the doctor has had his bottle of wine.

"'Nothing very much,' he says, when he gets around to you. Drops some juice in, ties the white rag around, and you go back to your straw. Three, four hours, and along come the body snatchers--the chauffeur chap doesn't know how to drive, bumps into every shell hole for seven miles. Every half mile, drive down into the ditch mud, to get out of the way of some ammunition wagons going to the front. The wheel gets stuck. Put on power, in jumps, to bump the car out. Every jerk tears at your open sore, as if the wheel had got stuck in your arm and was being pulled out. Two hours to do the seven miles. Get to the field hospital. No time for you. Lie on your stretcher in the court, where the flies swarm on you. Always flies. Flies on the blood of the wounded, glued to the bandage. Flies on the face of the dead."

So he had once spoken and left them wondering. But that whirling burst of words was long before, in those earlier days of his work. Nothing like that had happened in weeks. No such vivid pictures lighted him now. The man slept on.

There was a scratching at the window, then a steady tapping, then a resounding fist on the casement. Gradually, the sleeping man came up through the deep waters of unconsciousness. His eyes were heavy. He sat a moment, brooding, then turned toward the insistent noise.

"Monsieur Watts!" said a voice.

"Yes," answered the man. He stretched himself, and raised the sash. A brisk little French Marin was at the window.

"The doctors are at luncheon. They are waiting for you," the soldier said in rapid Breton French; "today you are their guest."

"Of course," replied the man, "I had forgotten. I will come at once."

He stretched his arms over his head--a tall figure of a man, but bent at the shoulders, as if all the dreariness of his surroundings had settled there. He had the stoop of an old man, and the walk. He stepped out of his room, into the street, and stood a moment in the midday sunshine, blinking. Then he walked down the village street to the Poste, and pushed through the dressing-rooms to the dining-room at the rear. The doctors looked up as he entered. He nodded, but gave no speech back for their courteous, their cordial greeting. In silence he ate the simple relishes of sardines and olives. Then the treat of the luncheon was brought in by the orderly. It was a duckling, taken from a refugee farm, and done to a brown crisp. The head doctor carved and served it.

"See here," said Watts loudly. He lifted his wing of the duckling where a dead fly was cooked in with the gravy. He pushed his chair back. It grated shrilly on the stone floor. He rose.

"Flies," he said, and left the room.

* * * * *

Watts was the guest at the informal trench luncheon. The officers showed him little favors from time to time, for he had served their wounded faithfully for many months. It is the highest honor they can pay when they admit a civilian to the first line of trenches. Shelling from Westend was mild and inaccurate, going high overhead and falling with a mutter into the seven-times wrecked and thoroughly deserted houses of Nieuport village. But the sound of it gave a gentle tingle to the act of eating. There was occasional rifle fire, the bullet singing close.

"They're improving," said the Commandant, "a fellow reached over the trench this morning for his Billy-can, and they got him in the hand."

Two Marins cleared away the plank on which bread and coffee and tinned meat had been served.

The hot August sun cooked the loose earth, and heightened the smells of food. A swarm of flies poured over the outer rim and dropped down on squatting men and the scattered commissariat. Watts was sitting at a little distance from the group. He closed his eyes, but soon began striking methodically at the settling flies. He fought them with the right arm and the left in long heavy strokes, patiently, without enthusiasm. The soldiers brought out a pack of cards, and leaned forward for the deal. Suddenly Watts rose, lifted his arms above the trench, and deliberately stretched. Three faint cracks sounded from across the hillock, and he tumbled out at full length, as if some one had flung him away. The men hastened to him, coming crouched over but swiftly.

"Got him in the right arm," said the Commandant.

"Thank God," muttered Watts, sleepily.

* * * * *

It was the Convent Hospital of Furnes. There was quiet in the ward of twenty-five beds, where side by side slept the wounded of France and Germany and Belgium and England. Suddenly, a resounding whack rang through the ward. A German boy jumped up sitting in his cot. The sound had awakened memories. He looked over to the tall Englishman in the next cot, who had struck out at one of the heavy innumerable flies, who hover over wounded men, and pry down under bandages.

"Let me tell you," said the youth eagerly, "I have a preparation--I'm a chemist, you know--I've worked out a powder that kills flies."

Watts looked up from his pillow. His face was weary.

"It's sweet, you know, and attracts them," went on the boy, "then the least sniff of it finishes them. They trail away, and die in a few minutes. You can clear a room in half an hour. Then all you have to do is to sweep up."

"See here," he said, "I'll show you. Sister," he called. The nurse hurried to his side.

"Sister? You were kind enough to save my kit. May I have it a moment?"

He took out a tin flask, and squeezed it--a brown powder puffed through the pin-point holes at the mouth. It settled in a dust on the white coverlet.

"Please be very quiet," he said. He settled back, as if for sleep, but his half-shut eyes were watchful. A couple of minutes passed, then a fly circled his head, and made for the spot on the spread. It nosed its way in, crawled heavily a few inches up the coverlet, and turned its legs up. Two more came, alighted, sniffed and died.

"You see," he said.

* * * * *

Next day, the head of the Coxyde Poste motored over to Furnes for a call on his wounded helper.

"Where does all that chatter come from?" he asked.

Sister Teresa smiled.

"It's your silent friend," she said. "He is the noisiest old thing in the ward."

"Talking to himself?" inquired the doctor.

"Have a look for yourself," urged the nurse. They stepped into the ward, and down the stone floor, till they came to the supply table. Here they pretended to busy themselves with lint.

"Most interesting," Watts was saying. "That is a new idea to me. Here they've been telling me for a year that there's no way but the slow push, trench after trench--"

"Let me say to you," interrupted the Saxon lad.

"You will pardon me, if I finish what I am saying," went on Watts in full tidal flow. "What was it I was saying? Oh, yes, I remember--that slow hard push is not the only way, after all. You tell me--"

"That's the way it is all day long," explained the sister. "Chatter, chatter, chatter. They are telling each other all they know. You would think they would get fed up. But as fast as one of them says something, that seems to be a new idea to the other. Mr. Watts acts like a man who has been starved."

Watts caught sight of his friend.

"We've killed all the flies," he shouted.

WOMEN UNDER FIRE

This war has been a revelation of womanhood. To see one of these cool, friendly creatures, American and English, shove her motor car into shell-fire, make her rescue of helpless crippled men, and steam back to safety, is to watch a resourceful and disciplined being. They may be, they are, "ministering angels," but there is nothing meek in their demeanor. They have stepped to a vantage from which nothing in man's contemptuous philosophy will ever dislodge them. They have always existed to astonish those who knew them best, and have turned life into a surprise party from Eden to the era of forcible feeding. But assuredly it would make the dogmatists on the essentially feminine nature, like Kipling, rub their eyes, to watch modern women at work under fire. They haven't the slightest fear of being killed. Give them a job under bombardment, and they unfold the stretcher, place the pillow and tuck in the blanket, without a quiver of apprehension. That, too, when some of the men are scampering for cover, and ducking chance pellets from the woolly white cloud that breaks overhead. The women will eat their luncheon with relish within three hundred feet of a French battery in full blaze. Is there a test left to the pride of man that the modern woman does not take lightly and skilfully? Gone are the Victorian nerves and the eighteenth-century fainting. All the old false delicacies have been swamped. She has been held back like a hound from the hunting, till we really believed we had a harmless household pet, who loved security. We had forgotten the pioneer women who struck across frontiers with a hardihood that matched that of their mates. And now the modern woman emerges from her protected home, and pushes forward, careless and curious.

"What are women going to do about this war?" That question my wife and I asked each other at the outbreak of the present conflict. There were several attitudes that they might take. They could deplore war, because it destroyed their own best products. They could form peace leagues and pass resolutions against war. They could return to their ancient job of humble service, and resume their familiar location in the background. They did all these things and did them fervently; but they did something else in this war--they stepped out into the foreground, where the air was thick with danger, and demonstrated their courage. The mother no longer says: "Return, my gallant one, with your shield or on it," and goes back to her baking. She packs her kit and jumps into a motor ambulance headed for the dressing station.

We have had an excellent chance to watch women in this war. Our corps have had access to every line from Nieuport on the sea, down for twenty miles. We were able to run out to skirmishes, to reach the wounded where they had fallen. We have gone where the fighting had been at such close range that in one barnyard in Ramscappelle lay thirteen dead--Germans, French and Belgians. We brought back three wounded Germans from the stable. We were in Dixmude on the afternoon when the Germans destroyed the town by artillery fire. We were in Ypres on November first, the day after the most terrible battle in history, when fifty thousand English out of a hundred and twenty thousand fell. For three months my wife lived in Pervyse, with two British women. Not one house in the town itself is left untouched by shell-fire. The women lived in a cellar for the first weeks. Then they moved into a partially demolished house, and a little later a shell exploded in the kitchen. The women were at work in the next room. We have had opportunity for observing women in war, for we have seen several hundred of them--nurses, helpers, chauffeurs, writers--under varying degrees of strain and danger.

The women whom I met in Belgium were all alike. They refused to take "their place." They were not interested in their personal welfare. There have been individual men, a few of them--English, French and Belgian, soldiers, chauffeurs and civilians--who have turned tail when the danger was acute. But the women we have watched are strangely lacking in fear. I asked a famous war writer, whose breast was gay with the ribbons of half a dozen campaigns, what was the matter with all these women, that they did not tremble and go green under fire, as some of us did. He said:

"They don't belong out here. They have no business to be under fire. They ought to be back at the hospitals down at Dunkirk. They don't appreciate danger. That's the trouble with them; they have no imagination."

That's an easy way out. But the real reasons lie deeper than a mental inferiority. These women certainly had quite as good an equipment in mentality as the drivers and stretcher bearers. They could not bear to let immense numbers of men lie in pain. They wished to bring their instinct for help to the place where it was needed.

The other reason is a product of their changed thinking under modern conditions. "I want to see the shells," said a discontented lady at Dunkirk. She was weary of the peace and safety of a town twenty miles back from the front. Women suddenly saw their time had come to strip man of one more of his monopolies. For some thousand years he had been bragging of his carriage and bearing in battle. He had told the women folks at home how admirable he had been under strain, and he went on to claim special privileges as the reward for his gallant behavior. He posed as their protector. He assumed the right to tax them because they did not lend a hand when invasion came. Now women are campaigning in France and Belgium to show that man's much-advertised quality of courage is a race possession.

They had already shown it while peace was still in the land, but their demonstration met with disfavor. Just before the war broke out I saw a woman suffragist thrown into a pond of water at Denmark Hill. I saw another mauled and bruised by a crowd of men in Hyde Park. They were the same sort of women as these hundreds at the front, who are affirming a new value. The argument is hotly contended whether women belong in the war zone. Conservative Englishmen deem them a nuisance, and wish them back in London. Meanwhile, they come and stay. English officials tried to send home the three of our women who had been nursing within thirty yards of the trenches at Pervyse. But the King of the Belgians, and Baron de Broqueville, Prime minister of Belgium, had been watching their work, and refused to move them.

One morning we came into the dining-room of our Convent Hospital at Furnes, and there on a stretcher on the floor was a girl sleeping profoundly. We thought at first we had one more of our innumerable wounded who overflowed the beds and wards during those crowded days. She rested through the morning and through the noon meal. The noise about did not disturb her. She did not stir in her heavy sleep, lying under the window, her face of olive skin, with a touch of red in the right cheek, turned away from the light. She awoke after twenty hours. Silently, she had come in the evening before, wearied to exhaustion after a week of nursing in the Belgian trenches.

That was the thing you were confronted with--woman after woman hurling herself at the war till spent. They wished to share with men the hardship and peril. If risks were right for the men, then they were right for women. If the time had come for nations to risk death, these women refused to claim the exemptions of sex difference. If war was unavoidable, then it was equally proper for women to be present and carry on the work of salvage.

Of a desire to kill they have none. A certain type of man under excitement likes to shoot and reach his mark. I have had soldiers tell me with pride of the number of enemies they have potted. It sounds very much like an Indian score-card of scalps or a grouse hunter's bag of game. Our women did not talk in these terms, nor did they act so. They gave the same care to German wounded as to Belgian, French and English wounded, and that though they knew they would not receive mercy if the enemy came across the fields and stormed the trenches. A couple of machine guns placed on the trench at Pervyse could have raked the ruined village and killed our three nurses. They shared the terms of peril with the soldiers; but they had no desire for retaliation, no wish to wreak their will on human life. Their instinct is to help. The danger does not excite them to a nervous explosion where they grab for a gun and shoot the other fellow.

I was with an English physician one day before he was seasoned. We were under the bank at Grembergen, just across the river from Termonde. The enemy were putting over shells about one hundred yards from where we were crawling toward a machine-shop sheltering wounded men. The _obus_ were noisy and the dirt flew high. Scattered bits of metal struck the bank. As we heard the shell moaning for that second of time when it draws close, we would crawl into one of the trenches scooped out in the green bank, an earthen cave with a roof of boughs.

"Let's get out of this," said the doctor. "It's too hot for our kind of work. If I had a rifle and could shoot back I shouldn't mind it. But this waiting round and doing nothing in return till you are hit, I don't like it."

But that is the very power that women possess. They can wait round without wishing to strike back. Saving life gives them sufficient spiritual resource to stand up to artillery. They have no wish to relieve their nervousness by sighting an alien head and cracking it.

One of our corps was the daughter of an earl. She had all the characteristics of what we like to think is the typical American girl. She had a bonhomie that swept class distinctions aside. Her talk was swift and direct. She was pretty and executive, swift to act and always on the go.

One day, as we were on the road to the dressing stations, the noise of guns broke out. The young Belgian soldier who was driving her stopped his motor and jumped out.

"I do not care to go farther," he said.

Lady ----, who is a skilful driver, climbed to the front seat, drove the car to the dressing station and brought back the wounded. I have seen her drive a touring car, carrying six wounded men, from Nieuport to Furnes at eight o'clock on a pitch-dark night, no lights allowed, over a narrow, muddy road on which the car skidded. She had to thread her way through silent marching troops, turn out for artillery wagons, follow after tired horses.

She was not a trained nurse, but when Dr. Hector Munro was working over a man with a broken leg she prepared a splint and held the leg while he set it and bound it. She drove a motor into Nieuport when the troops were marching out of it. Her guest for the afternoon was a war correspondent.

"This is a retreat," he said. "It is never safe to enter a place when the troops are leaving it. I have had experience."

"We are going in to get the wounded," she replied. They went in.

At Ypres she dodged round the corner because she saw a captain who doesn't believe in women at the front. A shell fell in the place where she had been standing a moment before. It blew the arm from a soldier. Her nerve was unbroken, and she continued her work through the morning.

Her notion of courage is that people have a right to feel frightened, but that they have no right to fail to do the job even if they are frightened. They are entitled to their feelings, but they are not entitled to shirk the necessary work of war. She believes that cowardice is not like other failings of weakness, which are pretty much man's own business. Cowardice is dangerous to the group.

Lady ----'s attitude at a bombardment was that of a child seeing a hailstorm--open-eyed wonder. She was the purest exhibit of careless fearlessness, carrying a buoyancy in danger. Generations of riding to hounds and of big game shooting had educated fear out of her stock. Her ancestors had always faced uncertainty as one of the ingredients of life: they accepted danger in accepting life. The savage accepted fear because he had to. With the English upper class, danger is a fine art, a cult. It is an element in the family honor. One cannot possibly shrink from the test. The English have expressed themselves in sport. People who are good sportsmen are, of course, honorable fighters. The Germans have allowed their craving for adventure to seethe inside themselves, and then have aimed it seriously at human life. But the English have taken off their excess vitality by outdoor contests.

What Lady ---- is the rest of the women are. Miss Smith, an English girl nurse, jumped down from the ambulance that was retreating before the Germans, and walked back into Ghent, held by the Germans, to nurse an English officer till he died. A few days later she escaped, by going in a peasant's cart full of market vegetables, and rejoined us at Furnes.

Sally Macnaughtan is a gray-haired gentlewoman of independent means who writes admirable fiction. She has laid aside her art and for months conducted a soup kitchen in the railway station at Furnes. She has fed thousands of weakened wounded men, working till midnight night after night. She remained until the town was thoroughly shelled.

The order is strict that no officer's wife must be near the front. The idea is that she will divert her husband's mind from the work in hand. He will worry about her safety. But Mrs. B----, a Belgian, joined our women in Pervyse, and did useful work, while her husband, a doctor with the rank of officer, continued his work along the front. She is a girl of twenty-one years.

Recently the Queen of the Belgians went into the trenches at a time when there was danger of artillery and rifle fire breaking loose from the enemy. She had to be besought to keep back where the air was quieter, as her life was of more value to the Belgian troops and the nation than even a gallant death.

One afternoon most of the corps were out on the road searching for wounded. Mairi Chisholm, a Scotch girl eighteen years old, and a young American woman had been left behind in the Furnes Hospital. With them was a stretcher bearer, a man of twenty-eight. A few shells fell into Furnes. The civilian population began running in dismay. The girls climbed up into the tower of the convent to watch the work of the shells. The man ordered the women to leave the town with him and go to Poperinghe. The two girls refused to go.

For weeks Furnes was under artillery fire from beyond Nieuport. One of our hospital nurses was killed as she was walking in the Grand Place.

I saw an American girl covered by the pistol of an Uhlan officer. She did not change color, but regarded the incident as a lark. I happened to be watching her when she was sitting on the front seat of an ambulance at Oudecappelle, eating luncheon. A shell fell thirty yards from her in the road. The roar was loud. The dirt flew high. The metal fragments tinkled on the house walls. The hole it dug was three feet deep. She laughed and continued with her luncheon.

I saw the same girl stand out in a field while this little drama took place: The French artillery in the field were well covered by shrubbery. They had been pounding away from their covert till the Germans grew irritated. A German Taube flew into sight, hovered high overhead and spied the hidden guns. It dropped three smoke bombs. These puffed out their little clouds into the air, and gave the far-away marksmen the location for firing. Their guns broke out and shrapnel shells came overhead, burst into trailing smoke and scattered their hundreds of bullets. The girl stood on the arena itself. Of concern for her personal safety she had none. It was all like a play on the stage to her. You watch the blow and flash but you are not a part of the action.

Each night the Furnes Hospital was full with one hundred wounded. In the morning we carried out one or two or one-half dozen dead. The wounds were severe, the air of the whole countryside was septic from the sour dead in the fields, who kept working to the surface from their shallow burial. There was a morning when we had gone early to the front on a hurry call. In our absence two girl nurses carried out ten dead from the wards into the convent lot, to the edge of the hasty graves made ready for their coming.

There is one woman whom we have watched at work for twelve months. She is a trained nurse, a certified midwife, a licensed motor-car driver, a veterinarian and a woman of property. Her name is Mrs. Elsie Knocker, a widow with one son. She helped to organize our corps. I was with her one evening when a corporal ordered her to go up a difficult road. He was the driver of a high-power touring car which could rise on occasion to seventy miles an hour. He carried a rifle in his car, and told us he had killed over fifty Germans since Liège. He dressed in bottle green, the uniform of a cyclist, and he looked like a rollicking woodlander of the Robin Hood band. It was seven o'clock of the evening. The night was dark. He pitched a bag of bandages into the motor ambulance.

"Take those to the dressing station that lies two miles to the west of Caeskerke," he ordered Mrs. Knocker. I cranked up the machine; Mrs. Knocker sat at the wheel. We were at Oudecappelle. The going was halfway decent as far as the crossroads of Caeskerke. Here we turned west on a road through the fields which had been intermittently shelled for several days. The road had shell holes in it from one to three feet deep. We could not see them because we carried no lights and the sky overhead was black. A mile to our right a village was burning. There were sheets of flame rising from the lowland, and the flame revealed the smoke that was thick over the ruins. We bumped in and out of the holes. All roads in Belgium were scummy with mud. It is like butter on bread. The big brown-canopied ambulance skidded in this paste.

We reached the dressing station and delivered one bag of bandages. In return we received three severely wounded men, who lay at length on the stretched canvas and swung on straps. Then we started back over the same mean road. This was the journey that tested Mrs. Knocker's driving, because now she had helpless men who must not be jerked by the swaying car. Motion tore at their wounds. Above all, they must not be overturned. An overturn would kill a man who was seriously wounded. Driving meant drawing all her nervous forces into her directing brain and her two hands. A village on fire at night is an eerie sight. A dark road, pitted with shell holes and slimy with mud, is chancy. The car with its human freight, swaying, bumping, sliding, is heavy on the wrist. The whole focused drive of it falls on the muscles of the forearm. And when on the skill of that driver depends the lives of three men the situation is one that calls for nerve. It was only luck that the artillery from beyond the Yser did not begin tuning up. The Germans had shelled that road diligently for many days and some evenings. Back to the crossroads Mrs. Knocker brought her cargo, and on to Oudecappelle, and so to the hospital at Furnes, a full ten miles. Safely home in the convent yard, the journey done, the wounded men lifted into the ward, she broke down. She had put over her job, and her nerves were tired. Womanlike she refused to give in till the work was successfully finished.

How would a man have handled such a strain? I will tell you how one man acted. Our corporal drove his touring car toward Dixmude one morning. He ordered Tom, the cockney driver, to follow with the motor ambulance. In it were Mrs. Knocker and Miss Chisholm, sitting with Tom on the front of the car. Things looked thick. The corporal slowed up, and so did Tom just behind him. Now there is one sure rule for rescue work at the front--when you hear the guns close, always turn your car toward home, away from the direction of the enemy. Turn it before you get your wounded, even though they are at the point of death, and leave your power on, even when you are going to stay for a quarter of an hour. Pointed toward safety, and under power, the car can carry you out of range of a sudden shelling or a bayonet charge. The enemy's guns began to place shrapnel over the road. The cloud puffs were hovering about a hundred feet overhead a little farther down the way. The bullets clicked on the roadbed. The corporal jumped out of his touring car.

Throughout this Yser district British nurses drove their ambulances and rescued the wounded.]

"Turn my car," he shouted to Tom. Tom climbed from the ambulance, boarded the touring car and turned it. The corporal peered out from his shelter, behind the ambulance, saw the going was good and ran to his own motor. He jumped in and sped out of range at full tilt. The two women sat quietly in the ambulance, watching the shrapnel. Tom came to them, turned the car and brought them beyond the range of fire.

But the steadiest and most useful piece of work done by the women was that at Pervyse. Mrs. Knocker and two women helpers, one Scotch and one American, fitted up a miniature hospital in the cellar of a house in ruined Pervyse. They were within three minutes of the trenches. Here, as soon as the soldiers were wounded, they could be brought for immediate treatment. A young private had received a severe lip wound. Unskilful army medical handling had left it gangrened, and it had swollen. His face was on the way to being marred for life. Mrs. Knocker treated him every few hours for ten days--and brought him back to normal. A man came in with his hand a pulp from splintered shell. The glove he had been wearing was driven into the red flesh. Mrs. Knocker worked over his hand for half an hour, picking out the shredded glove bit by bit.

Except for a short walk in the early morning and another after dark, these women lived immured in their dressing station, which they moved from the cellar to a half-wrecked house. They lived in the smell of straw, blood and antiseptic. The Germans have thrown shells into the wrecked village almost every day. Some days shelling has been vigorous. The churchyard is choked with dead. The fields are dotted with hummocks where men and horses lie buried. Just as I was sailing for America in March, 1915, the house where the women live and work was shelled. They came to La Panne, but later Mrs. Knocker and Miss Chisholm returned to Pervyse to go on with their work, which is famous throughout the Belgian army.

As regiment after regiment serves its turn in the trenches of Pervyse it passes under the hands of these women. "The women of Pervyse" are known alike to generals, colonels and privates who held steady at Liège and who have struggled on ever since. For many months these nurses have endured the noise of shell fire and the smells of the dead and the stricken. The King of the Belgians has with his own hands pinned upon them the Order of Leopold II. The King himself wears the Order of Leopold I. They have eased and saved many hundreds of his men.

"No place for a woman," remarked a distinguished Englishman after a flying visit to their home.

"By the law of probabilities, your corps will be wiped out sooner or later," said a war correspondent.

Meantime the women will go on with their cool, expert work. The only way to stop them is to stop the war.

HOW WAR SEEMS TO A WOMAN

(BY MRS. ARTHUR GLEASON)

Life at the front is not organized like a business office, with sharply defined duties for each worker. War is raw and chaotic, and you take hold wherever you can lock your grip. We women that joined the Belgian army and spent a year at the front, did duty as ambulance riders, "dirty nurses," in a Red Cross rescue station at the Yser trenches, in relief work for refugees, and in the commissariat department. We tended wounded soldiers, sick soldiers, sick peasants, wounded peasants, mothers, babies, and colonies of refugees.

This war gave women one more chance to prove themselves. For the first time in history, a few of us were allowed through the lines to the front trenches. We needed a man's costume, steady masculine nerves, physical strength. But the work itself became the ancient work of woman--nursing suffering, making a home for lonely, hungry, dirty men. This new thrust of womanhood carried her to the heart of war. But, once arriving there, she resumed her old job, and became the nurse and cook and mother to men. Woman has been rebelling against being put into her place by man. But the minute she wins her freedom in the new dramatic setting, she finds expression in the old ways as caretaker and home-maker. Her rebellion ceases as soon as she is allowed to share the danger. She is willing to make the fires, carry the water, and do the washing, because she believes the men are in the right, and her labor frees them for putting through their work.

It all began for me in Paris. I was studying music, and living in the American Art Students' Club, in the summer of 1914. That war was declared meant nothing to me. There was I in a comfortable room with a delightful garden, the Luxembourg, just over the way. That was the first flash of war. I went down to the Louvre to see the Venus, and found the building "Fermé." I went over to the Luxembourg Galleries--"Fermé," again--and the Catacombs. Then it came into my consciousness that all Paris was closed to me. The treasures had been taken away from me. The things planned couldn't be done. War had snatched something from me personally.

Next, I took solace in the streets. I had to walk. Paris went mad with official speed--commandeered motors flashed officers down the boulevards under martial law. They must get a nation ready, and Paris was the capital. War made itself felt, still more, because we had to go through endless lines,--_permis de sejours_ at little police stations--standing on line all day, dismissed without your paper, returning next morning. Friends began to leave Paris for New York. I was considered queer for wishing to stay on. The chance to study in Paris was the dream of a lifetime. But, now, the sound of the piano was forbidden in the city, and that made the desolation complete. Work and recreation had been taken away, and only war was left. And when Marie, our favorite maid in the club, sent her husband, our doorkeeper, to the front, that brought war inside our household.

As the Germans drew near Paris, many of the club girls thought that they would be endangered. Every one was talking about the French Revolution. People expected the horrors of the Revolution to be repeated. Jaures had just been shot, the syndicalists were wrecking German milk shops, and at night the streets had noisy mobs. People were fearing revolution inside Paris, more than the enemy outside the city gates. War was going to let loose that terrible thing which we believed to be subliminal in the French nature.

Women had to be off the streets before nine o'clock. By day we went up the block to the Boulevard, and there were the troops--a band, the tricolor, the officers, the men in sky blue. Their sweethearts, their wives and children went marching hand in hand with them, all singing the "Marseillaise." In a time like that, where there is song, there is weeping. The marching, singing women were sometimes sobbing without knowing it, and we that were watching them in the street crowd were moved like them.

When I crossed to England, I found that I wanted to go back and have more of the wonder of war, which I had tasted in Paris. The wonder was the sparkle of equipment. It was plain curiosity to see troops line up, to watch the military pageant. There I had been seeing great handsome horses, men in shining helmets with the horsehair tail of the casque flowing from crest to shoulder, the scarlet breeches, the glistening boots with spurs. It was pictures of childhood coming true. I had hardly ever seen a man in military uniform, and nothing so startling as those French cuirassiers. And I knew that gay vivid thing was not a passing street parade, but an array that was going into action. What would the action be? It is what makes me fond of moving pictures--variety, color, motion, and mystery. The story was just beginning. How would the plot come out?

Those pictures of troops and guns, grouping and dissolving, during all the twelve months in Flanders, never failed to grip. But rarely again did I see that display of fine feathers. For the fighting men with whom I lived became mud-covered. Theirs was a dug-in and blown-out existence, with the spatterings of storm and black nights on them. Their clothing took on the soberer colors and weather-worn aspect of the life itself which was no sunny boulevard affair, but an enduring of wet trenches and slimy roads. Those people in Paris needed that high key to send them out, and the early brilliance lifted them to a level which was able to endure the monotony.

I went to the war because those whom I loved were in the war. I wished to go where they were.

Finally, there was real appeal in that a little unprotected lot of people were being trampled.

I crossed in late September to Ostend as a member of the Hector Munro Ambulance Corps. With us were two women, Elsie Knocker, an English trained nurse, and Mairi Chisholm Gooden-Chisholm, a Scotch girl. There were a round dozen of us, doctors, chauffeurs, stretcher bearers. Our idea of what was to be required of women at the front was vague. We thought that we ought to know how to ride horseback, so that we could catch the first loose horse that galloped by and climb on him. What we were to do with the wounded wasn't clear, even in our own minds. We bought funny little tents and had tent practice in a vacant yard. The motor drive from Ostend to Ghent was through autumn sunshine and beauty of field flowers. It was like a dream, and the dream continued in Ghent, where we were tumbled into the Flandria Palace Hotel with a suite of rooms and bath, and two convalescing soldiers to care for us. We looked at ourselves and smiled and wondered if this was war. My first work was the commissariat for our corps.

Then came the English Naval Reserves and Marines _en route_ to Antwerp. They had been herded into the cars for twelve hours. They were happy to have great hunks of hot meat, bread, and cigarettes. Just across the platform, a Belgian Red Cross train pulled in--nine hundred wounded men, bandaged heads with only the eyes showing, stumps of arms flapping a welcome. The Belgians had been shot to pieces, holding the line. And, now, here were the English come to save them.

This looked more like war to us. From the Palace windows we hung out over the balcony to see the Taubes. I knew that at last we were on the fringes of war. Later, we were to be at the heart of it. It was at Melle that I learned I was on the front lines.

We went up the road from Ghent to Melle in blithe ignorance, we three women. The day before, the enemy had held the corner with a machine gun.

"Let's go on foot, and see where the Germans were," suggested "Scotch." We came to burned peasants' houses. Inside the wreckage, soldiers crouched with rifles ready at the peek-holes. A Reckitt's bluing factory was burning, and across the field were the Germans. The cottages without doors and windows were like toothless old women. Piles of used cartridges were strewed around. There stood a gray motor-car, a wounded German in the back seat, his hands riddled, the car shot through, with blood in the bottom from two dead Germans. I realized the power of the bullet, which had penetrated the driver, the padded seat, the sheet metal and splintered the wood of the tonneau. We saw a puff of white smoke over the field from a shrapnel. That was the first shell I had seen close. It meant nothing to me. In those early days, the hum of a shell seemed no more than the chattering of sparrows. That was the way with all my impressions of war--first a flash, a spectacle; later a realization, and experience.

I went into Alost during a mild bombardment. The crashing of timbers was fascinating. It is in human nature to enjoy destruction. I used to love to jump on strawberry boxes in the woodshed and hear them crackle. And with the plunge of the shells, something echoed back to the delight of my childhood. I enjoyed the crash, for something barbaric stirred. There was no connection in my mind between the rumble and wounded men. The curiosity of ignorance wanted to see a large crash. Shell-fire to me was a noise.