[Illustration: MARY ROBERTS RINEHART RETURNING FROM THE WAR-ZONEAND CAPTAIN FINCH ON S. S. "ARABIC. "]

 KINGS, QUEENS AND PAWNS

 _An American Woman at the Front_

 BY MARY ROBERTS RINEHART AUTHOR OF "K"

 NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 1915

CONTENTS

 FOR KING AND COUNTRY

 I. TAKING A CHANCE

 II. "SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE"

 III. LA PANNE

 IV. "'TWAS A FAMOUS VICTORY"

 V. A TALK WITH THE KING OF THE BELGIANS

 VI. THE CAUSE

 VII. THE STORY WITH AN END

 VIII. THE NIGHT RAID ON DUNKIRK

 IX. NO MAN'S LAND

 X. THE IRON DIVISION

 XI. AT THE HOUSE OF THE BARRIER

 XII. NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES

 XIII. "WIPERS"

 XIV. LADY DECIES' STORY

 XV. RUNNING THE BLOCKADE

 XVI. THE MAN OF YPRES

 XVII. IN THE LINE OF THE "MITRAILLEUSE"

 XVIII. FRENCH GUNS IN ACTION

 XIX. "I NIBBLE THEM"

 XX. DUNKIRK: FROM MY JOURNAL

 XXI. TEA WITH THE AIR-FIGHTERS

 XXII. THE WOMEN AT THE FRONT

 XXIII. THE LITTLE "SICK AND SORRY" HOUSE

 XXIV. FLIGHT

 XXV. VOLUNTEERS AND PATRIOTS

 XXVI. A LUNCHEON AT BRITISH HEADQUARTERS

 XXVII. A STRANGE PARTY

XXVIII. SIR JOHN FRENCH

 XXIX. ALONG THE GREAT BETHUNE ROAD

 XXX. THE MILITARY SECRET

 XXXI. QUEEN MARY OF ENGLAND

 XXXII. THE QUEEN OF THE BELGIANS

XXXIII. THE RED BADGE OF MERCY

 XXXIV. IN TERMS OF LIFE AND DEATH

 XXXV. THE LOSING GAME

 XXXVI. HOW AMERICANS CAN HELP

XXXVII. AN ARMY OF CHILDREN

KINGS, QUEENS AND PAWNS

KINGS, QUEENS AND PAWNS

FOR KING AND COUNTRY

March in England is spring. Early in the month masses of snowdropslined the paths in Hyde Park. The grass was green, the roads hard anddry under the eager feet of Kitchener's great army. For months theyhad been drilling, struggling with the intricacies of a new career, working and waiting. And now it was spring, and soon they would beoff. Some had already gone. 

"Lucky beggars!" said the ones who remained, and counted the days. 

And waiting, they drilled. Everywhere there were squads: Scots inplaid kilts with khaki tunics; less picturesque but equally imposingregiments in the field uniform, with officers hardly distinguishablefrom their men. Everywhere the same grim but cheerful determination toget over and help the boys across the Channel to assist in holdingthat more than four hundred miles of battle line against the invadinghosts of Germany. 

Here in Hyde Park that spring day was all the panoply of war: bandsplaying, the steady tramp of numberless feet, the muffled clatter ofaccoutrements, the homage of the waiting crowd. And they deservedhomage, those fine, upstanding men, many of them hardly more thanboys, marching along with a fine, full swing. There is somethingmagnificent, a contagion of enthusiasm, in the sight of a greatvolunteer army. The North and the South knew the thrill during our owngreat war. Conscription may form a great and admirable machine, but itdiffers from the trained army of volunteers as a body differs from asoul. But it costs a country heavy in griefs, does a volunteer army;for the flower of the country goes. That, too, America knows, andEngland is learning. 

They marched by gaily. The drums beat. The passers-by stopped. Hereand there an open carriage or an automobile drew up, and pale men, some of them still in bandages, sat and watched. In their eyes was thesame flaming eagerness, the same impatience to get back, to be loosedagainst the old lion's foes. 

For King and Country!

All through England, all through France, all through that tragiccorner of Belgium which remains to her, are similar armies, drillingand waiting, equally young, equally eager, equally resolute. And thething they were going to I knew. I had seen it in that mysteriousregion which had swallowed up those who had gone before; in thetrenches, in the operating, rooms of field hospitals, at outpostsbetween the confronting armies where the sentries walked hand in handwith death. I had seen it in its dirt and horror and sordidness, thisthing they were going to. 

War is not two great armies meeting in a clash and frenzy of battle. It is much more than that. War is a boy carried on a stretcher, looking up at God's blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon toclose; war is a woman carrying a child that has been wounded by ashell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waitingfor death; war is the flower of a race, torn, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in icy water; war is an old woman burning acandle before the Mater Dolorosa for the son she has given. For Kingand Country!

CHAPTER I

TAKING A CHANCE

I started for the Continent on a bright day early in January. I wassearched by a woman from Scotland Yard before being allowed on theplatform. The pockets of my fur coat were examined; my one piece ofbaggage, a suitcase, was inspected; my letters of introduction wereopened and read. 

"Now, Mrs. Rinehart, " she said, straightening, "just why are yougoing?"

I told her exactly half of why I was going. I had a shrewd idea thatthe question in itself meant nothing. But it gave her a good chance tolook at me. She was a very clever woman. 

And so, having been discovered to be carrying neither weapons norseditious documents, and having an open and honest eye, I was allowedto go through the straight and narrow way that led to possibledestruction. Once or twice, later on, I blamed that woman for lettingme through. I blamed myself for telling only half of my reasons forgoing. Had I told her all she would have detained me safely inEngland, where automobiles sometimes go less than eighty miles anhour, and where a sharp bang means a door slamming in the wind and nota shell exploding, where hostile aeroplanes overhead with bombs andunpleasant little steel darts, were not always between one's eyes andheaven. She let me through, and I went out on the platform. 

The leaving of the one-o'clock train from Victoria Station, London, isan event and a tragedy. Wounded who have recovered are going back;soldiers who have been having their week at home are returning to thatmysterious region across the Channel, the front. 

Not the least of the British achievements had been to transport, during the deadlock of the first winter of the war, almost the entirearmy, in relays, back to England for a week's rest. It had been donewithout the loss of a man, across a channel swarming with hostilesubmarines. They came in thousands, covered with mud weary, eager, their eyes searching the waiting crowd for some beloved face. Andthose who waited and watched as the cars emptied sometimes wept withjoy and sometimes turned and went away alone. 

Their week over, rested, tidy, eyes still eager but now turned towardFrance, the station platform beside the one-o'clock train was filledwith soldiers going back. There were few to see them off; there werenot many tears. Nothing is more typical of the courage and patriotismof the British women than that platform beside the one-o'clock trainat Victoria. The crowd was shut out by ropes and Scotland Yard menstood guard. And out on the platform, saying little because words areso feeble, pacing back and forth slowly, went these silent couples. They did not even touch hands. One felt that all the unselfishstoicism and restraint would crumble under the familiar touch. 

The platform filled. Sir Purtab Singh, an Indian prince, with hissuite, was going back to the English lines. I had been a neighbour ofhis at Claridge's Hotel in London. I caught his eye. It was filledwith cold suspicion. It said quite plainly that I could put nothingover on him. But whether he suspected me of being a newspaper writeror a spy I do not know. 

Somehow, considering that the train was carrying a suspicious andturbaned Indian prince, any number of impatient officers and soldiers, and an American woman who was carefully avoiding the war office andtrying to look like a buyer crossing the Channel for hats, the whistlefor starting sounded rather inadequate. It was not martial. It wasthin, effeminate, absurd. And so we were off, moving slowly past thatline on the platform, where no one smiled; where grief and tragedy, inthat one revealing moment, were written deep. I shall never forget thefaces of the women as the train crept by. 

And now the train was well under way. The car was very quiet. Thememory of those faces on the platform was too fresh. There was a brownand weary officer across from me. He sat very still, looking straightahead. Long after the train had left London, and was moving smoothlythrough the English fields, so green even in winter, he still sat inthe same attitude. 

I drew a long breath, and ordered luncheon. I was off to the war. Imight be turned back at Folkstone. There was more than a chance that Imight not get beyond Calais, which was under military law. But atleast I had made a start. 

This is a narrative of personal experience. It makes no pretensions, except to truth. It is pure reporting, a series of pictures, many ofthem disconnected, but all authentic. It will take a hundred years topaint this war on one canvas. A thousand observers, ten thousand, mustrecord what they have seen. To the reports of trained men must beadded a bit here and there from these untrained observers, who withoutmilitary knowledge, ignorant of the real meaning of much that theysaw, have been able to grasp only a part of the human significance ofthe great tragedy of Europe. 

I was such an observer. 

My errand was primarily humane, to visit the hospitals at or near thefront, and to be able to form an opinion of what supplies were needed, of conditions generally. Rumour in America had it that the medical andsurgical situation was chaotic. Bands of earnest and well-intentionedpeople were working quite in the dark as to the conditions they hopedto relieve. And over the hospital situation, as over the military, brooded the impenetrable silence that has been decreed by the Alliessince the beginning of the war. I had met everywhere in America talesfrom both the German and the Allies' lines that had astounded me. Itseemed incredible that such conditions could exist in an age ofsurgical enlightenment; that, even in an unexpected and unprepared-forwar, modern organisation and efficiency should have utterly failed. 

On the steamer crossing the Atlantic, with the ship speeding on herswift and rather precarious journey windows and ports carefully closedand darkened, one heard the same hideous stories: of tetanus inuncounted cases, of fearful infections, of no bandages--worst of all, of no anæsthetics. 

I was a member of the American Red Cross Association, but I knew thatthe great work of the American Red Cross was in sending supplies. Thecomparatively few nurses they had sent to the western field of warwere not at the front or near it. The British, French, Belgian andDutch nursing associations were in charge of the field hospitals, sofar as I could discover. 

To see these hospitals, to judge and report conditions, then, was apart of my errand. Only a part, of course; for I had another purpose. I knew nothing of strategy or tactics, of military movements and theirsignificance. I was not interested in them particularly. But I meantto get, if it was possible, a picture of this new warfare that wouldshow it for the horror that it is; a picture that would give pause tothat certain percentage of the American people that is always so eagerto force a conservative government into conflict with other nations. 

There were other things to learn. What was France doing? The greatsister republic had put a magnificent army into the field. BetweenFrance and the United States were many bonds, much reciprocal goodfeeling. The Statue of Liberty, as I went down the bay, bespoke thekindly feeling between the two republics. I remembered Lafayette. Battle-scarred France, where liberty has fought so hard for life--whatwas France doing? Not saying much, certainly. Fighting, surely, as theFrench have always fought. For certainly England, with her gallant butat that time meagre army, was not fighting alone the great war. 

But there were three nations fighting the allied cause in the west. What had become of the heroic Belgian Army? Was it resting on itslaurels? Having done its part, was it holding an honorary position inthe great line-up? Was it a fragment or an army, an entity or amemory?

The newspapers were full of details that meant nothing: names ofstrange villages, movements backward and forward as the long battleline bent and straightened again. But what was really happening beyondthe barriers that guarded the front so jealously? How did the men liveunder these new and strange conditions? What did they think? Or fear?Or hope?

Great lorries and transports went out from the French coast towns anddisappeared beyond the horizon; motor ambulances and hospital trainscame in with the grim harvest. Men came and, like those who had gonebefore, they too went out and did not come back. "Somewhere inFrance, " the papers said. Such letters as they wrote came from"somewhere in France. " What was happening then, over there, beyond thehorizon, "somewhere in France"?

And now that I have been beyond the dead line many of these questionshave answered themselves. France is saying nothing, and fightingmagnificently, Belgium, with two-thirds of her army gone, has stillfifty thousand men, and is preparing two hundred thousand more. 

Instead of merely an honorary position, she is holding tenaciously, against repeated onslaughts and under horrible conditions, the floodeddistrict between Nieuport and Dixmude. England, although holding onlythirty-two miles of front, beginning immediately south of Ypres, isholding that line against some of the most furious fighting of thewar, and is developing, at the same time, an enormous fighting machinefor the spring movement. [A]

[Footnote A: This is written of conditions in the early spring of1915. Although the relative positions of the three armies are thesame, the British are holding a considerably longer frontage. ]

The British soldier is well equipped, well fed, comfortablytransported. When it is remembered that England is also assisting toequip all the allied armies, it will be seen that she is doing muchmore than holding the high seas. 

To see the wounded, then; to follow the lines of hospital trains tothat mysterious region, the front; to see the men in the trenches andin their billets; to observe their _morale_, the conditions underwhich they lived--and died. It was too late to think of the cause ofthe war or of the justice or injustice of that cause. It will never betoo late for its humanities and inhumanities, its braveries and itsoccasional flinchings, its tragedies and its absurdities. 

It was through the assistance of the Belgian Red Cross that I got outof England and across the Channel. I visited the Anglo-BelgianCommittee at its quarters in the Savoy Hotel, London, and told them ofmy twofold errand. They saw at once the point I made. America wassending large amounts of money and vast quantities of supplies to theBelgians on both sides of the line. What was being done in internedBelgium was well known. But those hospital supplies and other thingsshipped to Northern France were swallowed up in the great silence. Thewar would not be ended in a day or a month. 

"Let me see conditions as they really are, " I said. "It is no usetelling me about them. Let me see them. Then I can tell the Americanpeople what they have already done in the war zone, and what they maybe asked to do. "

Through a piece of good luck Doctor Depage, the president, had comeacross the Channel to a conference, and was present. A huge man, inthe uniform of a colonel of the Belgian Army, with a great militarycape, he seemed to fill and dominate the little room. 

They conferred together in rapid French. 

"Where do you wish to go?" I was asked. 

"Everywhere. "

"Hospitals are not always cheerful to visit. "

"I am a graduate of a hospital training-school. Also a member of theAmerican Red Cross. "

They conferred again. 

"Madame will not always be comfortable--over there. "

"I don't want to be comfortable, " I said bravely. 

Another conference. The idea was a new one; it took some mentalreadjustment. But their cause was just, and mingled with their desireto let America know what they were doing was a justifiable pride. Theyknew what I was to find out--that one of the finest hospitals in theworld, as to organisation, equipment and results, was situated almostunder the guns of devastated Nieuport, so close that the roar ofartillery is always in one's ears. 

I had expected delays, a possible refusal. Everyone had encountereddelays of one sort and another. Instead, I found a most courteous andagreeable permission given. I was rather dazed. And when, a day or solater, through other channels, I found myself in possession of lettersto the Baron de Broqueville, Premier and Minister of War for Belgium, and to General Melis, Inspector General of the Belgian Army MedicalCorps, I realised that, once in Belgian territory, my troubles wouldprobably be at an end. 

For getting out of England I put my faith in a card given me by theBelgian Red Cross. There are only four such cards in existence, andmine was number four. 

From Calais to La Panne! If I could get to Calais I could get to thefront, for La Panne is only four miles from Nieuport, where theconfronting lines of trenches begin. But Calais was under militarylaw. Would I be allowed to land?

Such writers as reached there were allowed twenty-four hours, and werethen shipped back across the Channel or to some innocuous destinationsouth. Yet this little card, if all went well, meant the privilege ofgoing fifty miles northeast to the actual front. True, it gave nochance for deviation. A mile, a hundred feet off the straight andtree-lined road north to La Panne, and I should be arrested. But thetime to think about that would come later on. 

As a matter of fact, I have never been arrested. Except in thehospitals, I was always practically where I had no business to be. Ihad a room in the Hôtel des Arcades, in Dunkirk, for weeks, where, just round the corner, the police had closed a house for a month as apunishment because a room had been rented to a correspondent. Thecorrespondent had been sentenced to five years' imprisonment, but hadbeen released after five weeks. I was frankly a writer. I was almostaggressively a writer. I wrote down carefully and openly everything Isaw. I made, but of course under proper auspices and with thenecessary permits, excursions to the trenches from Nieuport to the LaBassée region and Béthune, along Belgian, French and English lines, always openly, always with a notebook. And nothing happened!

As my notebook became filled with data I grew more and more anxious, while the authorities grew more calm. Suppose I fell into the hands ofthe Germans! It was a large notebook, filled with much information. Icould never swallow the thing, as officers are supposed to swallow thepassword slips in case of capture. After a time the general spy alarmgot into my blood. I regarded the boy who brought my morning coffeewith suspicion, and slept with my notes under my pillow. And nothinghappened!

I had secured my passport _visé_ at the French and Belgian Consulates, and at the latter legation was able also to secure a letter asking thecivil and military authorities to facilitate my journey. The letterhad been requested for me by Colonel Depage. 

It was almost miraculously easy to get out of England. It was almostsuspiciously easy. My passport frankly gave the object of my trip as"literary work. " Perhaps the keen eyes of the inspectors who passed meonto the little channel boat twinkled a bit as they examined it. 

The general opinion as to the hopelessness of my trying to get nearerthan thirty miles to the front had so communicated itself to me thathad I been turned back there on the quay at Folkstone, I would havebeen angry, but hardly surprised. 

Not until the boat was out in the channel did I feel sure that I wasto achieve even this first leg of the journey. 

Even then, all was not well. With Folkstone and the war office wellbehind, my mind turned to submarines as a sunflower to the sun. Afterward I found that the thing to do is not to think aboutsubmarines. To think of politics, or shampoos, or of people one doesnot like, but not of submarines. They are like ghosts in that respect. They are perfectly safe and entirely innocuous as long as one thinksof something else. 

And something went wrong almost immediately. 

It was imperative that I get to Calais. And the boat, which hadintended making Calais, had had a report of submarines and headed forBoulogne. This in itself was upsetting. To have, as one may say, one'steeth set for Calais, and find one is biting on Boulogne, is notagreeable. I did not want Boulogne. My pass was from Calais. I hadvisions of waiting in Boulogne, of growing old and grey waiting, or oftrying to walk to Calais and being turned back, of being locked in acow stable and bedded down on straw. For fear of rousing hopes thatmust inevitably be disappointed, again nothing happened. 

There were no other women on board: only British officers and theturbaned and imposing Indians. The day was bright, exceedingly cold. The boat went at top speed, her lifeboats slung over the sides andready for lowering. There were lookouts posted everywhere. I did notthink they attended to their business. Every now and then one liftedhis head and looked at the sky or at the passengers. I felt that Ishould report him. What business had he to look away from the sea? Iwent out to the bow and watched for periscopes. There were blackthings floating about. I decided that they were not periscopes, butmines. We went very close to them. They proved to be buoys marking theChannel. 

I hated to take my eyes off the sea, even for a moment. If you haveever been driven at sixty miles an hour over a bad road, and felt thatif you looked away the car would go into the ditch, and if you willmultiply that by the exact number of German submarines and then addthe British Army, you will know how I felt. 

Afterward I grew accustomed to the Channel crossing. I made it fourtimes. It was necessary for me to cross twice after the eighteenth ofFebruary, when the blockade began. On board the fated Arabic, latersunk by a German submarine, I ran the blockade again to return toAmerica. It was never an enjoyable thing to brave submarine attack, but one develops a sort of philosophy. It is the same with being underfire. The first shell makes you jump. The second you speak of, commenting with elaborate carelessness on where it fell. This is again over shell number one, when you cannot speak to save your life. The third shell you ignore, and the fourth you forget about--if youcan. 

Seeing me alone the captain asked me to the canvas shelter of thebridge. I proceeded to voice my protest at our change of destination. He apologised, but we continued to Boulogne. 

"What does a periscope look like?" I asked. "I mean, of course, fromthis boat?"

"Depends on how much of it is showing. Sometimes it's only about thesize of one of those gulls. It's hard to tell the difference. "

I rather suspect that captain now. There were many gulls sitting onthe water. I had been looking for something like a hitching poststicking up out of the water. Now my last vestige of pleasure andconfidence was gone. I went almost mad trying to watch all the gullsat once. 

"What will you do if you see a submarine?'

"Run it down, " said the captain calmly. "That's the only chance we'vegot. That is, if we see the boat itself. These little Channel steamersmake about twenty-six knots, and the submarine, submerged, only abouthalf of that. Sixteen is the best they can do on the surface. Run themdown and sink them, that's my motto. "

"What about a torpedo?"

"We can see them coming. It will be hard to torpedo this boat--shegoes too fast. "

Then and there he explained to me the snowy wake of the torpedo, awhite path across the water; the mechanism by which it is kept true toits course; the detonator that explodes it. From nervousness I shiftedto enthusiasm. I wanted to see the white wake. I wanted to see theChannel boat dodge it. My sporting blood was up. I was willing to takea chance. I felt that if there was a difficulty this man would escapeit. I turned and looked back at the khaki-coloured figures on the deckbelow. 

Taking a chance! They were all taking a chance. And there was one, anofficer, with an empty right sleeve. And suddenly what for anenthusiastic moment, in that bracing sea air, had seemed a game, became the thing that it is, not a game, but a deadly and cruel war. Inever grew accustomed to the tragedy of the empty sleeve. And as if toaccentuate this thing toward which I was moving so swiftly, theBritish Red Cross ship, from Boulogne to Folkstone, came in sight, hurrying over with her wounded, a great white boat, garnering dailyher harvest of wounded and taking them "home. "

Land now--a grey-white line that is the sand dunes at Ambleteuse, north of Boulogne. I knew Ambleteuse. It gave a sense of strangenessto see the old tower at the water's edge loom up out of the sea. Thesight of land was comforting, but vigilance was not relaxed. Theattacks of submarines have been mostly made not far outside theharbours, and only a few days later that very boat was to make asensational escape just outside the harbour of Boulogne. 

All at once it was twilight, the swift dusk of the sea. The boatwarped in slowly. I showed my passport, and at last I was on Frenchsoil. North and east, beyond the horizon, lay the thing I had come tosee. 

CHAPTER II

"SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE"

Many people have seen Boulogne and have written of what they haveseen: the great hotels that are now English hospitals; the crowding oftransport wagons; the French signs, which now have English signs addedto them; the mixture of uniforms--English khaki and French blue; thewhite steamer waiting at the quay, with great Red Crosses on her snowyfunnels. Over everything, that first winter of the war, hung the dampchill of the Continental winter, that chill that sinks in and neverleaves, that penetrates fur and wool and eats into the spirit like anacid. 

I got through the customs without much difficulty. I had a largepackage of cigarettes for the soldiers, for given his choice, food ora smoke, the soldier will choose the latter. At last after much talk Igot them in free of duty. And then I was footfree. 

Here again I realise that I should have encountered greatdifficulties. I should at least have had to walk to Calais, or to haveslept, as did one titled Englishwoman I know, in a bathtub. I didneither. I took a first-class ticket to Calais, and waited round thestation until a train should go. 

And then I happened on one of the pictures that will stand out alwaysin my mind. Perhaps it was because I was not yet inured to suffering;certainly I was to see many similar scenes, much more of the flotsamand jetsam of the human tide that was sweeping back and forward overthe flat fields of France and Flanders. 

A hospital train had come in, a British train. The twilight haddeepened into night. Under the flickering arc lamps, in that cold anddismal place, the train came to a quiet stop. Almost immediately itbegan to unload. A door opened and a British nurse alighted. Thenslowly and painfully a man in a sitting position slid forward, pushinghimself with his hands, his two bandaged feet held in the air. He satat the edge of the doorway and lowered his feet carefully until theyhung free. 

"Frozen feet from the trenches, " said a man standing beside me. 

The first man was lifted down and placed on a truck, and his place wasfilled immediately by another. As fast as one man was taken anothercame. The line seemed endless. One and all, their faces expressed keenapprehension, lest some chance awkwardness should touch or jar thetortured feet. Ten at a time they were wheeled away. And still theycame and came, until perhaps two hundred had been taken off. But nowsomething else was happening. Another car of badly wounded was beingunloaded. Through the windows could be seen the iron framework onwhich the stretchers, three in a tier, were swung. 

Halfway down the car a wide window was opened, and two talllieutenants, with four orderlies, took their places outside. It wasvery silent. Orders were given in low tones. The muffled rumble of thetrucks carrying the soldiers with frozen feet was all that broke thequiet, and soon they, too, were gone; and there remained only the sixmen outside, receiving with hands as gentle as those of women thestretchers so cautiously worked over the window sill to them. One byone the stretchers came; one by one they were added to the lengtheningline that lay prone on the stone flooring beside the train. There wasnot a jar, not an unnecessary motion. One great officer, very young, took the weight of the end as it came toward him, and lowered it withmarvellous gentleness as the others took hold. He had a trick of thewrist that enabled him to reach up, take hold and lower the stretcher, without freeing his hands. He was marvellously strong, marvellouslytender. 

The stretchers were laid out side by side. Their occupants did notspeak or move. It was as if they had reached their limit of endurance. They lay with closed eyes, or with impassive, upturned faces, swathedin their brown blankets against the chill. Here and there a knittedneck scarf had been loosely wrapped about a head. All over Americawomen were knitting just such scarfs. 

And still the line grew. The car seemed inexhaustible of horrors. Andstill the young lieutenant with the tender hands and the strong wriststook the onus of the burden, the muscles of his back swelling underhis khaki tunic. If I were asked to typify the attitude of the BritishArmy and of the British people toward their wounded, I should point tothat boy. Nothing that I know of in history can equal the care theEnglish are taking of their wounded in this, the great war. They have, of course, the advantage of the best nursing system in Europe. 

France is doing her best, but her nursing had always been in the handsof nuns, and there are not nearly enough nuns in France to-day to copewith the situation. Belgium, with some of the greatest surgeons in theworld, had no organised nursing system when war broke out. She islargely dependent apparently on the notable work of her priests, andon English and Dutch nurses. 

When my train drew out, the khaki-clad lieutenant and his assistantswere still at work. One car was emptied. They moved on to a second. Other willing hands were at work on the line that stretched along thestone flooring, carrying the wounded to ambulances, but the lineseemed hardly to shrink. Always the workers inside the train broughtanother stretcher and yet another. The rumble of the trucks hadceased. It was very cold. I could not look any longer. 

It took three hours to go the twenty miles to Calais, from six o'clockto nine. I wrapped myself in my fur coat. Two men in my compartmentslept comfortably. One clutched a lighted cigarette. It burned downclose to his fingers. It was fascinating to watch. But just when itshould have provided a little excitement he wakened. It wasdisappointing. 

We drifted into conversation, the gentleman of the cigarette and I. Hewas an Englishman from a London newspaper. He was counting on his luckto get him into Calais and his wit to get him out. He told me hisname. Just before I left France I heard of a highly philanthropic andtalented gentleman of the same name who was unselfishly going throughthe hospitals as near the front as he could, giving a moving-pictureentertainment to the convalescent soldiers. I wish him luck; hedeserves it. And I am sure he is giving a good entertainment. His withad got him out of Calais!

Calais at last, and the prospect of food. Still greater comfort, heremy little card became operative. I was no longer a refugee, fleeingand hiding from the stern eyes of Lord Kitchener and the British WarOffice. I had come into my own, even to supper. 

I saw no English troops that night. The Calais station was filled withFrench soldiers. The first impression, after the trim English uniform, was not particularly good. They looked cold, dirty, unutterably weary. Later, along the French front, I revised my early judgment. But I havenever reconciled myself to the French uniform, with its ratherslovenly cut, or to the tendency of the French private soldier toallow his beard to grow. It seems a pity that both French andBelgians, magnificent fighters that they are, are permitted thisslackness in appearance. There are no smarter officers anywhere thanthe French and Belgian officers, but the appearance of their troops_en masse_ is not imposing. 

Later on, also, a close inspection of the old French uniform revealedit as made of lighter cloth than the English, less durable, assuredlyless warm. The new grey-blue uniform is much heavier, but its colouris questionable. It should be almost invisible in the early morningmists, but against the green of spring and summer, or under themagnesium flares--called by the English "starlights"--with which theGermans illuminate the trenches of the Allies during the night, itappeared to me that it would be most conspicuous. 

I have before me on my writing table a German fatigue cap. Under theglare of my electric lamp it fades, loses colour and silhouette, iseclipsed. I have tried it in sunlight against grass. It does the samething. A piece of the same efficient management that has distributedwhite smocks and helmet covers among the German troops fighting in therigours of Poland, to render them invisible against the snow!

Calais then, with food to get and an address to find. For DoctorDepage had kindly arranged a haven for me. Food, of a sort, I got atlast. The hotel dining room was full of officers. Near me sat fourteenmembers of the aviation corps, whose black leather coats bore, eitheron left breast or left sleeve, the outspread wings of the flyingdivision. There were fifty people, perhaps, and two waiters, one apale and weary boy. The food was bad, but the crisp French bread wasdelicious. Perhaps nowhere in the world is the bread average higherthan in France--just as in America, where fancy breads are at theirbest, the ordinary wheat loaf is, taking the average, exceedinglypoor. 

Calais was entirely dark. The Zeppelin attack, which took place fouror five weeks later, was anticipated, and on the night of my arrivalthere was a general feeling that the birthday of the German Emperorthe next day would produce something spectacular in the way of an airraid. That explained, possibly, the presence so far from thefront--fifty miles from the nearest point--of so many flying men. 

As my French conversational powers are limited, I had some difficultyin securing a vehicle. This was explained later by the discovery thenext day that no one is allowed on the streets of Calais after teno'clock. Nevertheless I secured a hack, and rode blithely andunconsciously to the house where I was to spend the night. I have lostthe address of that house. I wish I could remember it, for I leftthere a perfectly good and moderately expensive pair of field glasses. I have been in Calais since, and have had the wild idea of drivingabout the streets until I find it and my glasses. But a close scrutinyof the map of Calais has deterred me. Age would overtake me, and Ishould still be threading the maze of those streets, seeking an oldhouse in an old garden, both growing older all the time. 

A very large house it was, large and cold. I found that I wasexpected; but an air of unreality hung over everything. I met three orfour most kindly Belgian people of whom I knew nothing and who knewnothing of me. I did not know exactly why I was there, and I am surethe others knew less. I went up to my room in a state of bewilderment. It was a huge room without a carpet, and the tiny fire refused tolight. There was a funeral wreath over the bed, with the picture ofthe deceased woman in the centre. It was bitterly cold, and there wasa curious odor of disinfectants in the air. 

By a window was a narrow black iron bed without a mattress. It lookedsinister. Where was the mattress? Had its last occupant died and themattress been burned? I sniffed about it; the odour of disinfectantunmistakably clung to it. I do not yet know the story of that room orof that bed. Perhaps there is no story. But I think there is. I put onmy fur coat and went to bed, and the lady of the wreath came in thenight and talked French to me. 

I rose in the morning at seven degrees Centigrade and dressed. Atbreakfast part of the mystery was cleared up. The house was being usedas a residence by the chief surgeon of the Ambulance Jeanne d'Arc, theBelgian Red Cross hospital in Calais, and by others interested in theRed Cross work. It was a dormitory also for the English nurses fromthe ambulance. This explained, naturally, my being sent there, thesomewhat casual nature of the furnishing and the odour ofdisinfectants. It does not, however, explain the lady of the wreath orthe black iron bed. 

After breakfast some of the nurses came in from night duty at theambulance. I saw their bedroom, one directly underneath mine, withfour single beds and no pretence at comfort. It was cold, icy cold. 

"You are very courageous, " I said. "Surely this is not verycomfortable. I should think you might at least have a fire. "

"We never think of a fire, " a nurse said simply. "The best we can doseems so little to what the men are doing, doesn't it?"

She was not young. Some one told me she had a son, a boy of nineteen, in the trenches. She did not speak of him. But I have wondered sincewhat she must feel during those grisly hours of the night when theambulances are giving up their wounded at the hospital doors. No doubtshe is a tender nurse, for in every case she is nursing vicariouslythat nineteen-year-old boy of hers in the trenches. 

That morning I visited the various Calais hospitals. It was a brightmorning, sunny and cold. Lines of refugees with packs and bundles wereon their way to the quay. 

The frightful congestion of the autumn of 1914 was over, but thehospitals were all full. They were surgical hospitals, typhoidhospitals, hospitals for injured civilians, hospital boats. One andall they were preparing as best they could for the mighty conflict ofthe spring, when each side expected to make its great onward movement. 

As it turned out, the terrible fighting of the spring failed to breakthe deadlock, but the preparations made by the hospitals were none toogreat for the sad by-products of war. 

The Belgian hospital question was particularly grave. To-day, severalmonths later, it is still a matter for anxious thought. In case theGermans retire from Belgium the Belgians will find themselves in theirown land, it is true, but a land stripped of everything. It is forthis contingency that the Allies are preparing. In whichever directionthe line moves, the arrangements that have served during the impasseof the past year will no longer answer. Portable field hospitalpavilions, with portable equipment, will be required. The destructiveartillery fire, with its great range, will leave no buildings intactnear the battle line. 

One has only to follow the present line, fringed as it is withdestroyed or partially destroyed towns, to realise what the situationwill be if a successful offensive movement on the part of the Alliesdrives the battle line back. Artillery fire leaves no buildingsstanding. Even the roads become impassable, --masses of broken stonewith gaping holes, over which ambulances travel with difficulty. 

CHAPTER III

LA PANNE

From Calais to La Panne is fifty miles. Calais is under military law. It is difficult to enter, almost impossible to leave in the directionin which I wished to go. But here again the Belgian Red Cross achievedthe impossible. I was taken before the authorities, sharplyquestioned, and in the end a pink slip was passed over to the officialof the Red Cross who was to take me to the front. I wish I could havesecured that pink slip, if only because of its apparent fragility andits astounding wearing qualities. All told, between Calais and LaPanne it was inspected--texture, weight and reading matter, front andreverse sides, upside down and under glass--by some several hundredsentries, officials and petty highwaymen. It suffered everything butattack by bayonet. I found myself repeating that way to madness ofMark Twain's:

 _Punch, brothers, punch with care, Punch in the presence of the passenjaire, A pink trip slip for a five-cent fare_--

and so on. 

Northeast then, in an open grey car with "Belgian Red Cross" on eachside of the machine. Northeast in a bitter wind, into a desolate andalmost empty country of flat fields, canals and roads bordered byendless rows of trees bent forward like marching men. Northeastthrough Gravelines, once celebrated of the Armada and now amanufacturing city. It is curious to think that a part of the Armadawent ashore at Gravelines, and that, by the shifting of the EnglishChannel, it is now two miles inland and connected with the sea by aship canal. Northeast still, to Dunkirk. 

From Calais to Gravelines there had been few signs of war--anoccasional grey lorry laden with supplies for the front; greatambulances, also grey, and with a red cross on the top as a warning toaëroplanes; now and then an armoured car. At Gravelines the countrytook on a more forbidding appearance. Trenches flanked the roads, which were partly closed here and there by overlapping earthworks, sothat the car must turn sharply to the left and then to the right toget through. At night the passage is closed by barbed wire. In oneplace a bridge was closed by a steel rope, which a sentry loweredafter another operation on the pink slip. 

The landscape grew more desolate as the daylight began to fade, moredesolate and more warlike. There were platforms for lookouts here andthere in the trees, prepared during the early days of the war beforethe German advance was checked. And there were barbed-wireentanglements in the fields. I had always thought of a barbed-wireentanglement as probably breast high. It was surprising to see themonly from eighteen inches to two feet in height. It was odd, too, tothink that most of the barbed wire had been made in America. Barbedwire is playing a tremendous part in this war. The English say thatthe Boers originated this use for it in the South African War. Certainly much tragedy and an occasional bit of grim humour attach toits present use. 

With the fortified town of Dunkirk--or Dunkerque--came the realcongestion of war. The large square of the town was filled withsoldiers and marines. Here again were British uniforms, Britishtransports and ambulances. As a seaport for the Allied Armies in thenorth, it was bustling with activity. The French and Belgianspredominated, with a sprinkling of Spahis on horseback and Turcos. Anair of activity, of rapid coming and going, filled the town. Despatchriders on motor cycles, in black leather uniforms with black leatherhoods, flung through the square at reckless speed. Batteredautomobiles, their glass shattered by shells, mud guards crumpled, coated with clay and riddled with holes, were everywhere, coming andgoing at the furious pace I have since learned to associate with war. 

And over all, presiding in heroic size in the centre of the Square, the statue of Jean Bart, Dunkirk's privateer and pirate, now come intohis own again, was watching with interest the warlike activities ofthe Square. Things have changed since the days of Jean Bart, however. The cutlass that hangs by his side would avail him little now. Theaeroplane bombs that drop round him now and then, and the processionsof French "seventy-five" guns that rumble through the Square, mustpuzzle him. He must feel rather a piker in this business of modernwar. 

Dunkirk is generally referred to as the "front. " It is not, however. It is near enough for constant visits from German aeroplanes, and hasbeen partially destroyed by German guns, firing from a distance ofmore than twenty miles. But the real line begins fifteen miles fartheralong the coast at Nieuport. 

So we left Dunkirk at once and continued toward La Panne. A drawbridgein the wall guards the road out of the city in that direction. Andhere for the first time the pink slip threatened to fail us. The RedCross had been used by spies sufficiently often to cover us with coldsuspicion. And it was worse than that. Women were not allowed, underany circumstances, to go in that direction--a new rule, being enforcedwith severity. My little card was produced and eyed with hostility. 

My name was assuredly of German origin. I got out my passport andpointed to the picture on it. It had been taken hastily in Washingtonfor passport purposes, and there was a cast in the left eye. I have nocast in the left eye. Timid attempts to squint with that eye failed. 

But at last the officer shrugged his shoulders and let us go. The twosentries who had kept their rifles pointed at me lowered them to amore comfortable angle. A temporary sense of cold down my back retiredagain to my feet, whence it had risen. We went over the ancientdrawbridge, with its chains by which it may be raised, and were free. But our departure was without enthusiasm. I looked back. Some eightsentries and officers were staring after us and muttering amongthemselves. 

Afterward I crossed that bridge many times. They grew accustomed tome, but they evidently thought me quite mad. Always they protested andcomplained, until one day the word went round that the American ladyhad been received by the King. After that I was covered with themantle of royalty. The sentries saluted as I passed. I was of theelect. 

There were other sentries until the Belgian frontier was passed. Afterthat there was no further challenging. The occasional distant roar ofa great gun could be heard, and two French aeroplanes, winging homeafter a reconnaissance over the German lines, hummed overhead. Wherebetween Calais and Dunkirk there had been an occasional peasant's cartin the road or labourer in the fields, now the country was deserted, save for long lines of weary soldiers going to their billets, linesthat shuffled rather than marched. There was no drum to keep them instep with its melancholy throbbing. Two by two, heads down, laden withintrenching tools in addition to their regular equipment, grumbling asthe car forced them off the road into the mud that bordered it, swathed beyond recognition against the cold and dampness, in thetwilight those lines of shambling men looked grim, determined, sinister. 

"We are going through Furnes, " said my companion. "It has been shelledall day, but at dusk they usually stop. It is out of our way, but youwill like to see it. "

I said I was perfectly willing, but that I hoped the Germans wouldadhere to their usual custom. I felt all at once that, properlyconserved, a long and happy life might lie before me. I mentioned thatI was a person of no importance, and that my death would be of nomilitary advantage. And, as if to emphasise my peaceful fireside athome, and dinner at seven o'clock with candles on the table, the firere-commenced. 

"Artillery, " I said with conviction, "seems to me barbarous andunnecessary. But in a moving automobile--"

It was a wrong move. He hastened to tell me of people riding alongcalmly in automobiles, and of the next moment there being nothing buta hole in the road. Also he told me how shrapnel spread, scatteringdeath over large areas. If I had had an idea of dodging anything I sawcoming it vanished. 

We went into the little town of Furnes. Nothing happened. Only oneshell was fired, and I have no idea where it fell. The town was a deadtown, its empty streets full of brick and glass. I grew quite calm andexpressed some anxiety about the tires. Although my throat was dry, Iwas able to enunciate clearly! We dared not light the car lamps, andour progress was naturally slow. 

Furnes is not on the coast, but three miles inland. So we turned sharpto the left toward La Panne, our destination, a small seaside resortin times of peace, but now the capital of Belgium. It was dark now, and the roads were congested with the movements of troops, some goingto the trenches, those out of the trenches going back to their billetsfor twenty-four hours' rest, and the men who had been on rest movingup as pickets or reserves. Even in the darkness it was easy to tellthe rested men from the ones newly relieved. Here were mostlyBelgians, and the little Belgian soldier is a cheery soul. He asksvery little, is never surly. A little food, a little sleep--on straw, in a stable or a church--and he is happy again. Over and over, as Isaw the Belgian Army, I was impressed with its cheerfulness underunparalleled conditions. 

Most of them have been fighting since Liege. Of a hundred and fiftythousand men only fifty thousand remain. Their ration is meagrecompared with the English and the French, their clothing worn andragged. They are holding the inundated district between Nieuport andDixmude, a region of constant struggle for water-soaked trenches, where outposts at the time I was there were being fought for throughlakes of icy water filled with barbed wire, where their wounded falland drown. And yet they are inveterately cheerful. A brave lot, theBelgian soldiers, brave and uncomplaining! It is no wonder that theKing of Belgium loves them, and that his eyes are tragic as he looksat them. 

La Panne at last, a straggling little town of one street and rows ofvillas overlooking the sea. La Panne, with the guns of Nieuportconstantly in one's ears, and the low, red flash of them along thesandy beach; with ambulances bringing in their wounded now that nightcovers their movements; with English gunboats close to the shore and asearchlight playing over the sea. La Panne, with just over the sanddunes the beginning of that long line of trenches that extends southand east and south again, four hundred and fifty miles of death. 

It was two weeks and four days since I had left America, and less thanthirty hours since I boarded the one-o'clock train at VictoriaStation, London. Later on I beat the thirty-hour record twice, oncegoing from the Belgian front to England in six hours, and another timeleaving the English lines at Béthune, motoring to Calais, and arrivingin my London hotel the same night. Cars go rapidly over the Frenchroads, and the distance, measured by miles, is not great. Measured bydifficulties, it is a different story. 

CHAPTER IV

"'TWAS A FAMOUS VICTORY"

FROM MY JOURNAL:

LA PANNE, January 25th, 10 P. M. 

I am at the Belgian Red Cross hospital to-night. Have had supper andhave been given a room on the top floor, facing out over the sea. 

This is the base hospital for the Belgian lines. The men come herewith the most frightful injuries. As I entered the building to-nightthe long tiled corridor was filled with the patient and quiet figuresthat are the first fruits of war. They lay on portable cots, waitingtheir turn in the operating rooms, the white coverings and bandagesnot whiter than their faces. 

11 P. M. The Night Superintendent has just been in to see me. She saysthere is a baby here from Furnes with both legs off, and a nun wholost an arm as she was praying in the garden of her convent. The babywill live, but the nun is dying. 

She brought me a hot-water bottle, for I am still chilled from my longride, and sat down for a moment's talk. She is English, as are most ofthe nurses. She told me with tears in her eyes of a Dutch Red Crossnurse who was struck by a shell in Furnes, two days ago, as shecrossed the street to her hospital, which was being evacuated. She wasbrought here. 

"Her leg was shattered, " she said. "So young and so pretty she was, too! One of the surgeons was in love with her. It seemed as if hecould not let her die. "

How terrible! For she died. 

"But she had a casket, " the Night Superintendent hastened to assureme. "The others, of course, do not. And two of the nurses wererelieved to-day to go with her to the grave. "

I wonder if the young surgeon went. I wonder--

The baby is near me. I can hear it whimpering. 

Midnight. A man in the next room has started to moan. Good God, what aplace! He has shell in both lungs, and because of weakness had to beoperated on without an anæsthetic. 

2 A. M. I cannot sleep. He is trying to sing "Tipperary. "

English battleships are bombarding the German batteries at Nieuportfrom the sea. The windows rattle all the time. 

6 A. M. A new day now. A grey and forbidding dawn. Sentries everyhundred yards along the beach under my window. The gunboats are movingout to sea. A number of French aeroplanes are scouting overhead. 

The man in the next room is quiet. 

 * * * * *

Imagine one of our great seaside hotels stripped of its bands, its gaycrowds, its laughter. Paint its many windows white, with a red crossin the centre of each one. Imagine its corridors filled with woundedmen, its courtyard crowded with ambulances, its parlours occupied byconvalescents who are blind or hopelessly maimed, its card room achapel trimmed with the panoply of death. For bathchairs and batherson the sands substitute long lines of weary soldiers drilling in therain and cold. And over all imagine the unceasing roar of great guns. Then, but feebly, you will have visualised the Ambulance Ocean at LaPanne as I saw it that first winter of the war. 

The town is built on the sand dunes, and is not unlike Ostend ingeneral situation; but it is hardly more than a village. Such trees asthere are grow out of the sand, and are twisted by the winds from thesea. Their trunks are green with smooth moss. And over the dunes islong grass, then grey and dry with winter, grass that was beaten underthe wind into waves that surge and hiss. 

The beach is wide and level. There is no surf. The sea comes in inlong, flat lines of white that wash unheralded about the feet of thecavalry horses drilling there. Here and there a fisherman's boat closeto the line of villas marks the limit of high tide; marks more thanthat; marks the fisherman who has become a soldier; marks the end ofthe peaceful occupations of the little town; marks the change from asea that was a livelihood to a sea that has become a menace and ahidden death. 

The beach at La Panne has its story. There are guns there now, waiting. The men in charge of them wait, and, waiting, shiver in thecold. And just a few minutes away along the sands there was a housebuilt by a German, a house whose foundation was a cemented site for agun. The house is destroyed now. It had been carefully located, strategically, and built long before the war began. A gun on thatfoundation would have commanded Nieuport. 

Here, in six villas facing the sea, live King Albert and QueenElisabeth and their household, and here the Queen, grief-stricken atthe tragedy that has overtaken her innocent and injured people, visitsthe hospital daily. 

La Panne has not been bombarded. Hostile aëroplanes are alwaysoverhead. The Germans undoubtedly know all about the town; but it hasnot been touched. I do not believe that it will be. For one thing, itis not at present strategically valuable. Much more important, QueenElisabeth is a Bavarian princess by birth. Quite aside from bothreasons, the outcry from the civilised world which would result frominjury to any member of the Belgian royal house, with the presentworld-wide sympathy for Belgium, would make such an attackinadvisable. 

And yet who knows? So much that was considered fundamental in theethics of modern warfare has gone by the board; so certainly is thiswar becoming one of reprisals, of hate and venom, that before this ispublished La Panne may have been destroyed, or its evacuation by theroyal family have been decided. 

The contrast between Brussels and La Panne is the contrast betweenBelgium as it was and as it is. The last time I was in Belgium, beforethis war, I was in Brussels. The great modern city of three-quartersof a million people had grown up round the ancient capital of Brabant. Its name, which means "the dwelling on the marsh, " dates from thetenth century. The huge Palais de Justice is one of the mostremarkable buildings in the world. 

Now in front of that great building German guns are mounted, and thecapital of Belgium is a fishing village on the sand dunes. The King ofBelgium has exchanged the magnificent Palais du Roi for a small andcheaply built house--not that the democratic young King of Belgiumcares for palaces. But the contrast of the two pictures was impressedon me that winter morning as I stood on the sands at La Panne andlooked at the royal villa. All round were sentries. The wind from thesea was biting. It set the long grey grass to waving, and blew thefine sand in clouds about the feet of the cavalry horses filing alongthe beach. 

I was quite unmolested as I took photographs of the stirring scenesabout. It was the first daylight view I had had of the Belgiansoldiers. These were men on their twenty-four hours' rest, with a partof the new army that was being drilled for the spring campaign. TheBelgian system keeps a man twenty-four hours in the trenches, giveshim twenty-four hours for rest well back from the firing line, andthen, moving him up to picket or reserve duty, holds him anothertwenty-four hours just behind the trenches. The English system isdifferent. Along the English front men are four days in the trenchesand four days out. All movements, of course, are made at night. 

The men I watched that morning were partly on rest, partly in reserve. They were shabby, cold and cheery. I created unlimited surprise andinterest. They lined up eagerly to be photographed. One group I tookwas gathered round a sack of potatoes, paring raw potatoes and eatingthem. For the Belgian soldier is the least well fed of the threearmies in the western field. When I left, a good Samaritan had sent acase or two of canned things to some of the regiments, and a favouredfew were being initiated into the joys of American canned baked beans. They were a new sensation. To watch the soldiers eat them was a joyand a delight. 

I wish some American gentleman, tiring of storing up his treasuresonly in heaven, would send a can or a case or a shipload of bakedbeans to the Belgians. This is alliterative, but earnest. They canheat them in the trenches in the cans; they can thrive on them andfight on them. And when the cans are empty they can build fires inthem or hang them, filled with stones, on the barbed-wireentanglements in front of the trenches, so that they ring like bellson a herd of cows to warn them of an impending attack. 

And while we are on this subject, I wish some of the women who areknitting scarfs would stop, [B] now that winter is over, and make jellyand jam for the brave and cheerful little Belgian army. I am awarethat it is less pleasant than knitting. It cannot be taken to lecturesor musicales. One cannot make jam between the courses of a luncheon ora dinner party, or during the dummy hand at bridge. But the men haveso little--unsweetened coffee and black bread for breakfast; a stew ofmeat and vegetables at mid-day, taken to them, when it can be taken, but carried miles from where it is cooked, and usually cold. They pouroff the cold liquor and eat the unpalatable residue. Supper is likebreakfast with the addition of a ration of minced meat and potatoes, also cold and not attractive at the best. 

[Footnote B: This was written in the spring. By the time this book ispublished knitted woollens will be again in demand. Socks and mittens, abdominal belts and neck scarfs are much liked. A soldier told me heliked his scarf wide, and eight feet long, so he can carry it aroundhis body and fasten it in the back. ]

Sometimes they have bully beef. I have eaten bully beef, which is acooked and tinned beef, semi-gelatinous. The Belgian bully beef isdrier and tougher than the English. It is not bad; indeed, it is quitegood. But the soldier needs variety. The English know this. Theirsoldiers have sugar, tea, jam and cheese. 

If I were asked to-day what the Belgian army needs, now that winter isover and they need no longer shiver in their thin clothing, I shouldsay, in addition to the surgical supplies that are so terriblynecessary, portable kitchens, to give them hot and palatable food. Such kitchens may be bought for two hundred and fifty dollars, with ahorse to draw them. They are really sublimated steam cookers, with thehot water used to make coffee when they reach the trenches. I shouldsay, then, surgical supplies and hospital equipment, field kitchens, jams of all sorts, canned beans, cigarettes and rubber boots! A numberof field kitchens have already been sent over. A splendid Englishmanattached to the Belgian Army has secured funds for a few more. Butmany are needed. I have seen a big and brawny Belgian officer, with along record of military bravery behind him, almost shed tears over theprospect of one of these kitchens for his men. 

I took many pictures that morning--of dogs, three abreast, hauling_mitrailleuse_, the small and deadly quick-firing guns, from the word_mitraille_, a hail of balls; of long lines of Belgian lancers ontheir undipped and shaggy horses, each man carrying an eight-footlance at rest; of men drilling in broken boots, in wooden shoesstuffed with straw, in carpet slippers. I was in furs from head tofoot--the same fur coat that has been, in turn, lap robe, bed clothingand pillow--and I was cold. These men, smiling into my camera, werethinly dressed, with bare, ungloved hands. But they were smiling. 

Afterward I learned that many of them had no underclothing, that theblue tunics and trousers were all they had. Always they shivered, butoften also they smiled. Many of them had fought since Liège; most ofthem had no knowledge of their families on the other side of the lineof death. When they return to their country, what will they go backto? Their homes are gone, their farm buildings destroyed, their horsesand cattle killed. 

But they are a courageous people, a bravely cheery people. Flor everyone of them that remained there, two had gone, either to death, captivity or serious injury. They were glad to be alive that morningon the sands of La Panne, under the incessant roaring of the guns. Thewind died down; the sun came out. It was January. In two months, orthree, it would be spring and warm. In two months, or three, theyconfidently expected to be on the move toward their homes again. 

What mattered broken boots and the mud and filth of their trenches?What mattered the German aëroplane overhead? Or cold and insufficientfood? Or the wind? Nothing mattered but death, and they still lived. And perhaps, beyond the line--

That afternoon, from the Ambulance Ocean, a young Belgian officer wasburied. 

It was a bright, sunny afternoon, but bitterly cold. Troops were linedup before the hospital in the square; a band, too, holding itsinstruments with blue and ungloved fingers. 

He had been a very brave officer, and very young. The story of what hehad done had been told about. So, although military funerals are many, a handful of civilians had gathered to see him taken away to thecrowded cemetery. The three English gunboats were patrolling the sea. Tall Belgian generals, in high blue-and-gold caps and great capeovercoats, met in the open space and conferred. 

The dead young officer lay in state in the little chapel of thehospital. Ten tall black standards round him held burning candles, thelights of faith. His uniform, brushed of its mud and neatly folded, lay on top of the casket, with his pathetic cap and with the swordthat would never lead another charge. He had fought very hard to live, they said at the hospital. But he had died. 

The crowd opened, and the priest came through. He wore a purple velvetrobe, and behind him came his deacons and four small acolytes insurplices. Up the steps went the little procession. And the doors ofthe hospital closed behind it. 

The civilians turned and went away. The soldiers stood rigid in thecold sunshine, and waited. A little boy kicked a football over thesand. The guns at Nieuport crashed and hammered. 

After a time the doors opened again. The boy picked up his footballand came closer. The musicians blew on their fingers to warm them. Thedead young officer was carried out. His sword gleamed in the sun. Theycarried the casket carefully, not to disorder the carefully foldedtunic or the pathetic cap. The body was placed in an ambulance. At asignal the band commenced to play and the soldiers closed in round theambulance. 

The path of glory, indeed!

But it was not this boyish officer's hope of glory that had broughtthis scene to pass. He died fighting a defensive war, to save what wasleft to him of the country he loved. He had no dream of empire, novision of commercial supremacy, no thrill of conquest as an invadedand destroyed country bent to the inevitable. For months since Liègehe had fought a losing fight, a fight that Belgium knew from thebeginning must be a losing fight, until such time as her allies couldcome to her aid. Like the others, he had nothing to gain by this warand everything to lose. 

He had lost. The ambulance moved away. 

I was frequently in La Panne after that day. I got to know well theroad from Dunkirk, with its bordering of mud and ditch, its heavytransports, its grey gunboats in the canals that followed it on oneside, its long lines of over-laden soldiers, its automobiles thattravelled always at top speed. I saw pictures that no artist will everpaint--of horrors and beauties, of pathos and comedy; of soldierswashing away the filth of the trenches in the cold waters of canalsand ditches; of refugees flying by day from the towns, and returningat night to their ruined houses to sleep in the cellars; of longprocessions of Spahis, Arabs from Algeria, silhouetted against theflat sky line against a setting sun, their tired horses moving slowly, with drooping heads, while their riders, in burnoose and turban, rodewith loose reins; of hostile aëroplanes sailing the afternoon breezelike lazy birds, while shells from the anti-aircraft guns burstharmlessly below them in small balloon-shaped clouds of smoke. 

But never in all that time did I overcome the sense of unreality, andalways I was obsessed by the injustice, the wanton waste and cost andinjustice of it all. The baby at La Panne--why should it go throughlife on stumps instead of legs? The boyish officer--why should he havedied? The little sixteen-year-old soldier who had been blinded and whosat all day by the phonograph, listening to Madame Butterfly, Tipperary, and Harry Lauder's A Wee Deoch-an'-Doris--why should henever see again what I could see from the window beside him, thewinter sunset over the sea, the glistening white of the sands, theflat line of the surf as it crept in to the sentries' feet? Why? Why?

All these wrecks of boys and men, where are they to go? What are theyto do? Blind and maimed, weak from long privation followed by greatsuffering, what is to become of them when the hospital has fulfilledits function and they are discharged "cured"? Their occupations, theirhomes, their usefulness are gone. They have not always even clothingin which to leave the hospital. If it was not destroyed by the shellor shrapnel that mutilated them it was worn beyond belief andredemption. Such ragged uniforms as I have seen! Such tragedies oftrousers! Such absurd and heart-breaking tunics!

When, soon after, I was presented to the King of the Belgians, thesevery questions had written lines in his face. It is easy to believethat King Albert of Belgium has buried his private anxieties in thecommon grief and stress of his people. 

CHAPTER V

A TALK WITH THE KING OF THE BELGIANS

The letter announcing that I was to have an audience with the King ofthe Belgians reached me at Dunkirk, France, on the evening of the daybefore the date set. It was brief and to the effect that the Kingwould receive me the next afternoon at two o'clock at the Belgian Armyheadquarters. 

The object of my visit was well known; and, because I wished anauthoritative statement to give to America, I had requested that thenotes of my conversation with His Majesty should be officiallyapproved. This request was granted. The manuscript of the interviewthat follows was submitted to His Majesty for approval. It ispublished as it occurred, and nothing has been added to the record. 

A general from the Ministry of War came to the Hôtel des Arcades, inDunkirk, and I was taken in a motor car to the Belgian Armyheadquarters some miles away. As the general who conducted me hadinfluenza, and I was trying to keep my nerves in good order, it wasrather a silent drive. The car, as are all military cars--and thereare no others--was driven by a soldier-chauffeur by whose side sat thegeneral's orderly. Through the narrow gate, with its drawbridgeguarded by many sentries, we went out into the open country. 

The road, considering the constant traffic of heavy transports andguns, was very fair. It is under constant repair. At first, duringthis severe winter, on account of rain and snow, accidents werefrequent. The road, on both sides, was deep in mud and prolific ofcatastrophe; and even now, with conditions much better, there arenumerous accidents. Cars all travel at frightful speed. There are norestrictions, and it is nothing to see machines upset and abandoned inthe low-lying fields that border the road. 

Conditions, however, are better than they were. Part of theconservation system has been the building of narrow ditches at rightangles to the line of the road, to lead off the water. Every ten feetor so there is a gutter filled with fagots. 

I had been in the general's car before. The red-haired Fleming withthe fierce moustache who drove it was a speed maniac, and passing thefrequent sentries was only a matter of the password. A signal to slowdown, given by the watchful sentry, a hoarse whisper of the passwordas the car went by, and on again at full speed. There was no botheringwith papers. 

On each side of the road were trenches, barbed-wire entanglements, earthen barriers, canals filled with barges. And on the road werelines of transports and a file of Spahis on horseback, picturesque intheir flowing burnouses, bearded and dark-skinned, riding theirunclipped horses through the roads under the single rows of trees. Werode on through a village where a pig had escaped from aslaughterhouse and was being pursued by soldiers--and then, at last, army headquarters and the King of the Belgians. 

There was little formality. I was taken in charge by the King'sequerry, who tapped at a closed door. I drew a long breath. 

"Madame Rinehart!" said the equerry, and stood aside. 

There was a small screen in front of the door. I went round it. Standing alone before the fire was Albert I, King of the Belgians. Ibowed; then we shook hands and he asked me to sit down. 

It was to be a conversation rather than an interview; but as it was tobe given as accurately as possible to the American people, I waspermitted to make careful notes of both questions and answers. It wasto be, in effect, a statement of the situation in Belgium as the Kingof the Belgians sees it. 

I spoke first of a message to America. 

"I have already sent a message to America, " he informed me; "quite along message. We are, of course, intensely appreciative of whatAmericans have done for Belgium. "

"They are anxious to do what they can. The general feeling is one ofgreat sympathy. "

"Americans are both just and humane, " the King replied; "and theirsystem of distribution is excellent. I do not know what we should havedone without the American Relief Committees. "

"Is there anything further Your Majesty can suggest?"

"They seem to have thought of everything, " the King said simply. "Thefood is invaluable--particularly the flour. It has saved many fromstarvation. "

"But there is still need?"

"Oh, yes--great need. "

It was clear that the subject was a tragic one. The King of theBelgians loves his people, as they love him, with a devotion that iscompletely unselfish. That he is helpless to relieve so much that theyare compelled to endure is his great grief. 

His face clouded. Probably he was seeing, as he must always see, thedejected figures of the peasants in the fields; the long files of hissoldiers as they made their way through wet and cold to the trenches;the destroyed towns; the upheaval of a people. 

"What is possible to know of the general condition of affairs in thatpart of Belgium occupied by the Germans?" I asked. "I do not mean inregard to food only, but the general condition of the Belgian people. "

"It is impossible to say, " was the answer. "During the invasion it wasvery bad. It is a little better now, of course; but here we are on thewrong side of the line to form any ordered judgment. To gain a realconception of the situation it would be necessary to go through theoccupied portions from town to town, almost from house to house. Haveyou been in the other part of Belgium?"

"Not yet; I may go. "

"You should do that--see Louvain, Aerschot, Antwerp--see the destroyedtowns for yourself. No one can tell you. You must see them. "

I was not certain that I should be permitted to make such a journey, but the King waved my doubts aside with a gesture. 

"You are an American, " he said. "It would be quite possible and youwould see just what has happened. You would see open towns that werebombarded; other towns that were destroyed after occupation! You wouldsee a country ruthlessly devastated; our wonderful monumentsdestroyed; our architectural and artistic treasures sacrificed withoutreason--without any justification. "

"But as a necessity of war?" I asked. 

"Not at all. The Germans have saved buildings when it suited theirconvenience to do so. No military necessity dictated the destructionof Louvain. It was not bombarded. It was deliberately destroyed. But, of course, you know that. "

"The matter of the violation of Belgium's neutrality still remains anopen question, " I said. "I have seen in American facsimile copies ofdocuments referring to conversations between staff officers of theBritish and Belgian armies--documents that were found in theministerial offices at Brussels when the Germans occupied that citylast August. Of course I think most Americans realise that, had theybeen of any real importance, they would have been taken away. Therewas time enough. But there are some, I know, who think themsignificant. "

The King of the Belgians shrugged his shoulders. 

"They were of an unofficial character and entirely without importance. The German Staff probably knew all about them long before thedeclaration of war. They themselves had, without doubt, discussed andrecorded similar probabilities in case of war with other countries. Itis a common practice in all army organisations to prepare againstdifferent contingencies. It is a question of military routine only. "

"There was no justification, then, for the violation of Belgianneutrality?" I inquired. 

"None whatever! The German violation of Belgian neutrality was wrong, "he said emphatically. "On the fourth of August their own chancelloradmitted it. Belgium had no thought of war. The Belgians are apeace-loving people, who had every reason to believe in the friendshipof Germany. "

The next question was a difficult one. I inquired as to the behaviourof the Germans in the conquered territory; but the King made nosweeping condemnation of the German Army. 

"Fearful things have been done, particularly during the invasion, " hesaid, weighing his words carefully; "but it would be unfair to condemnthe whole German Army. Some regiments have been most humane; butothers behaved very badly. Have you seen the government report?"

I said I had not seen it, though I had heard that a carefulinvestigation had been made. 

"The government was very cautious, " His Majesty said. "Theinvestigation was absolutely impartial and as accurate as it could bemade. Doubts were cast on all statements--even those of the mostdependable witnesses--until they could be verified. "

"They were verified?"

"Yes; again and again. "

"By the victims themselves?"

"Not always. The victims of extreme cruelty do not live to tell of it;but German soldiers themselves have told the story. We have had heremany hundreds of journals, taken from dead or imprisoned Germans, furnishing elaborate details of most atrocious acts. The government iskeeping these journals. They furnish powerful and incontrovertibletestimony of what happened in Belgium when it was swept over by abrutal army. That was, of course, during the invasion--such things arenot happening now so far as we know. "

He had spoken quietly, but there was a new note of strain in hisvoice. The burden of the King of the Belgians is a double one. To thehorror of war has been added the unnecessary violation and death ofnoncombatants. 

The King then referred to the German advance through Belgianterritory. 

"Thousands of civilians have been killed without reason. The executionof noncombatants is not war, and no excuse can be made for it. Suchdeeds cannot be called war. "

"But if the townspeople fired on the Germans?" I asked. 

"All weapons had been deposited in the hands of the town authorities. It is unlikely that any organised attack by civilians could have beenmade. However, if in individual cases shots were fired at the Germansoldiers, this may always be condoned in a country suffering invasion. During an occupation it would be different, naturally. No excuse canbe offered for such an action in occupied territory. "

"Various Belgian officers have told me of seeing crowds of men, womenand children driven ahead of the German Army to protect the troops. This is so incredible that I must ask whether it has any foundation oftruth. "

"It is quite true. It is a barbarous and inhuman system of protectingthe German advance. When the Belgian soldiers fired on the enemy theykilled their own people. Again and again innocent civilians of bothsexes were sacrificed to protect the invading army during attacks. Aterrible slaughter!"

His Majesty made no effort to conceal his great grief and indignation. And again, as before, there seemed to be nothing to say. 

"Even now, " I said, "when the Belgians return the Grerman artilleryfire they are bombarding their own towns. "

"That is true, of course; but what can we do? And the civilianpopulation is very brave. They fear invasion, but they no longer payany attention to bombs. They work in the fields quite calmly, withshells dropping about. They must work or starve. "

He then spoke of the morale of the troops, which is excellent, and ofhis sympathy for their situation. 

"Their families are in Belgium, " he said. "Many of them have heardnothing for months. But they are wonderful. They are fighting for lifeand to regain their families, their homes and their country. Christmaswas very sad for them. "

"In the event of the German Army's retiring from Belgium, do youbelieve, as many do, that there will be more destruction of cities?Brussels, for instance?"

"I think not. "

I referred to my last visit to Belgium, when Brussels was the capital;and to the contrast now, when La Panne a small seaside resort hardlymore than a village, contains the court, the residence of the King andQueen, and of the various members of his household. It seemed to meunlikely that La Panne would be attacked, as the Queen of the Belgiansis a Bavarian. 

"Do you think La Panne will be bombarded?" I asked. 

"Why not?"

"I thought that possibly, on account of Your Majesty and the Queenbeing there, it would be spared. 

"They are bombarding Furnes, where I go every day, " he replied. "Andthere are German aëroplanes overhead all the time. "

The mention of Furnes brought to my mind the flooded district nearthat village, which extends from Nieuport to Dixmude. 

"Belgium has made a great sacrifice in flooding her lowlands, " I said. "Will that land be as fertile as before?"

"Not for several years. The flooding of the productive land in theYser district was only carried out as a military necessity. The wateris sea water, of course, and will have a bad effect on the soil. Haveyou seen the flooded district?"

I told His Majesty that I had been to the Belgian trenches, and thenacross the inundated country to one of the outposts; a remarkableexperience--one I should never forget. 

The conversation shifted to America and her point of view; to Americanwomen who have married abroad. His Majesty mentioned especially LadyCurzon. Two children of the King were with Lord Curzon, in England, atthe time. The Crown Prince, a boy of fourteen, tall and straight likehis father, was with the King and Queen. 

The King had risen and was standing in his favourite attitude, hiselbow on the mantelpiece. I rose also. 

"I was given some instructions as to the ceremonial of this audience, "I said. "I am afraid I have not followed them!"

"What were you told to do?" said His Majesty, evidently amused. Then, without waiting for a reply;

"We are very democratic--we Belgians, " he said. "More democratic thanthe Americans. The President of the United States has greatpower--very great power. He is a czar. "

He referred to President Wilson in terms of great esteem--not only asthe President but as a man. He spoke, also, with evident admiration ofMr. Roosevelt and Mr. McKinley, both of whom he had met. 

I looked at the clock. It was after three and the interview had begunat two. I knew it was time for me to go, but I had been given noindication that the interview was at an end. Fragments of the coachingI had received came to my mind, but nothing useful; so I stated mydifficulty frankly, and again the King's serious face lighted up witha smile. 

"There is no formality here; but if you are going we must find thegeneral for you. "

So we shook hands and I went out; but the beautiful courtesy of thesoldier King of the Belgians brought him out to the doorstep with me. 

That is the final picture I have of Albert I, King of the Belgians--atall young man, very fair and blue-eyed, in the dark blue uniform of alieutenant-general of his army, wearing no orders or decorations, standing bareheaded in the wind and pointing out to me the directionin which I should go to find the general who had brought me. 

He is a very courteous gentleman, with the eyes of one who loves thesea, for the King of the Belgians is a sailor in his heart; a tragicand heroic figure but thinking himself neither--thinking of himselfnot at all, indeed; only of his people, whose griefs are his to sharebut not to lighten; living day and night under the rumble of Germanartillery at Nieuport and Dixmude in that small corner of Belgiumwhich remains to him. 

He is a King who, without suspicion of guilt, has lost his country;who has seen since August of 1914 two-thirds of his army lost, hisbeautiful and ancient towns destroyed, his fertile lands thrown opento the sea. 

I went on. The guns were still at work. At Nieuport, Dixmude, Furnes, Pervyse--all along that flat, flooded region--the work of destructionwas going on. Overhead, flying high, were two German aëroplanes--theeyes of the war. 

 * * * * *

Not politically, but humanely, it was time to make to America anauthoritative statement as to conditions in Belgium. 

The principle of non-interference in European politics is one ofnational policy and not to be questioned. But there can be nojustification for the destruction of property and loss of innocentlives in Belgium. Germany had plead to the neutral nations hernecessity, and had plead eloquently. On the other hand, the Englishand French authorities during the first year of the war had preserveda dignified silence, confident of the justice of their cause. 

And official Belgium had made no complaint. She had bowed to thejudgment of her allies, knowing that a time would come, at the endof the war, to speak of her situation and to demand justifiableredress. 

But a million homeless Belgians in England and Holland proclaimed andstill proclaim their wretchedness broadcast. The future may bringredress, but the present story of Belgium belongs to the world. America, the greatest of the neutral countries, has a right to knownow the suffering and misery of this patient, hard-working people. 

This war may last a long time; the western armies are at a deadlock. Since November of 1914 the line has varied only slightly here andthere; has been pushed out or back only to straighten again. 

Advances may be counted by feet. From Nieuport to Ypres attacks arewaged round solitary farms which, by reason of the floods, have becometiny islands protected by a few men, mitrailleuses, and entanglementsof barbed wire. Small attacking bodies capture such an outpost, wadingbreast-deep--drowning when wounded--in the stagnant water. There areno glorious charges here, no contagion of courage; simply a dogged anddesperate struggle--a gain which the next day may see forfeited. Theonly thing that goes on steadily is the devastating work of the heavyguns on each side. 

Meantime, both in England and in France, there has been a growingsentiment that the government's policy of silence has been a mistake. The cudgel of public opinion is a heavy one. The German propaganda inAmerica has gone on steadily. There is no argument where one side onlyis presented. That splendid and solid part of the American people, theGerman population, essentially and naturally patriotic, keeping theirfaith in the Fatherland, is constantly presenting its case; andagainst that nothing official has been offered. 

England is fighting heroically, stoically; but her stoicism is a vitalmistake. This silence has nothing whatever to do with militarymovements, their success or their failure. It is more fundamental, aninherent characteristic of the English character, founded onreserve--perhaps tinged with that often misunderstood conviction ofthe Britisher that other persons cannot be really interested in whatis strictly another's affairs. 

The Allies are beginning to realise, however, that this war is nottheir own affair alone. It affects the world too profoundly. Mentally, morally, spiritually and commercially, it is an upheaval in which allmust suffer. 

And the English people, who have sent and are sending the very flowerof their country's manhood to the front, are beginning to regret theerror in judgment that has left the rest of the English-speaking worldin comparative ignorance of the true situation. 

They are sending the best they have--men of high ideals, who, asvolunteers, go out to fight for what they consider a just cause. Theold families, in which love of country and self-sacrifice aretraditions, have suffered heavily. 

The crux of the situation is Belgium--the violation of her neutrality;the conduct of the invading army; her unnecessary and unjustifiablesuffering. And Belgium has felt that the time to speak has come. 

CHAPTER VI

THE CAUSE

The Belgian Red Cross may well be proud of the hospital at La Panne. It is modern, thoroughly organised, completely equipped. Within twoweeks of the outbreak of the war it was receiving patients. It was notat the front then. But the German tide has forced itself along untilnow it is almost on the line. 

Generally speaking, order had taken the place of the early chaos inthe hospital situation when I was at the front. The British hospitalswere a satisfaction to visit. The French situation was not so good. The isolated French hospitals were still in need of everything, evenof anæsthetics. The lack of an organised nursing system was beingkeenly felt. 

But the early handicaps of unpreparedness and overwhelming numbers ofpatients had been overcome to a large extent. Scientific managementand modern efficiency had stepped in. Things were still capable ofimprovement. Gentlemen ambulance drivers are not always to be dependedon. Nurses are not all of the same standard of efficiency. Supplies ofone sort exceeded the demand, while other things were entirelylacking. Food of the kind that was needed by the very ill was scarce, expensive and difficult to secure at any price. 

But the things that have been done are marvellous. Surgery has notfailed. The stereoscopic X-ray and antitetanus serum are playing theiractive part. Once out of the trenches a soldier wounded at the fronthas as much chance now as a man injured in the pursuit of a peacefuloccupation. 

Once out of the trenches! For that is the question. The ambulancesmust wait for night. It is not in the hospitals but in the ghastlyhours between injury and darkness that the case of life or death isdecided. That is where surgical efficiency fails against the brutalityof this war, where the Red Cross is no longer respected, where it isnot possible to gather in the wounded under the hospital flag, wherethere is no armistice and no pity. This is war, glorious war, whichthose who stay at home say smugly is good for a nation. 

But there are those who are hurt, not in the trenches but in front ofthem. In that narrow strip of No Man's Land between the confrontingarmies, and extending four hundred and fifty miles from the seathrough Belgium and France, each day uncounted numbers of men fall, and, falling, must lie. The terrible thirst that follows loss of bloodmakes them faint; the cold winds and snows and rains of what has beena fearful winter beat on them; they cannot have water or shelter. Thelucky ones die, but there are some that live, and live for days. Thistoo is war, glorious war, which is good for a nation, which makes itsboys into men, and its men into these writhing figures that die soslowly and so long. 

I have seen many hospitals. Some of the makeshifts would be amusingwere they not so pathetic. Old chapels with beds and supplies piledhigh before the altar; kindergarten rooms with childish mottoes on thewalls, from which hang fever charts; nuns' cubicles thrown open todoctors and nurses as living quarters. 

At La Panne, however, there are no makeshifts. There are no wards, socalled. But many of the large rooms hold three beds. All the rooms areairy and well lighted. True, there is no lift, and the men must becarried down the staircases to the operating rooms on the lower floor, and carried back again. But the carrying is gently done. 

There are two operating rooms, each with two modern operating tables. The floors are tiled, the walls, ceiling and all furnishings white. Attached to the operating rooms is a fully equipped laboratory and anX-ray room. I was shown the stereoscopic X-ray apparatus by which thefigure on the plate stands out in relief, like any stereoscopicpicture. Every large hospital I saw had this apparatus, which isinvaluable in locating bullets and pieces of shell or shrapnel. Underthe X-ray, too, extraction frequently takes place, the operators usinglong-handled instruments and gloves that are soaked in a solution oflead and thus become impervious to the rays so destructive to thetissues. 

Later on I watched Doctor DePage operate at this hospital. I was putinto a uniform, and watched a piece of shell taken from a man's brainand a great blood clot evacuated. Except for the red cross on eachwindow and the rattle of the sash under the guns, I might have been inone of the leading American hospitals and war a century away. Therewere the same white uniforms on the surgeons; the same white gauzecovering their heads and swathing their faces to the eyes; the samesilence, the same care as to sterilisation; the same orderly rows ofinstruments on a glass stand; the same nurses, alert and quiet; thesame clear white electric light overhead; the same rubber gloves, thesame anæsthetists and assistants. 

It was twelve minutes from the time the operating surgeon took theknife until the wound was closed. The head had been previously shavedby one of the assistants, and painted with iodine. In twelve minutesthe piece of shell lay in my hand. The stertorous breathing waseasier, bandages were being adjusted, the next case was beinganæsthetised and prepared. 

I wish I could go further. I wish I could follow that peasant-soldierto recovery and health. I wish I could follow him back to his wife andchildren, to his little farm in Belgium. I wish I could even say herecovered. But I cannot. I do not know. The war is a series ofincidents with no beginning and no end. The veil lifts for a momentand drops again. 

I saw other cases brought down for operation at the Ambulance Ocean. One I shall never forget. Here was a boy again, looking up withhopeful, fully conscious eyes at the surgeons. He had been shotthrough the spine. From his waist down he was inert, helpless. Hesmiled. He had come to be operated on. Now all would be well. Thegreat surgeons would work over him, and he would walk again. 

When after a long consultation they had to tell him they could notoperate, I dared not look at his eyes. 

Again, what is he to do? Where is he to go? He is helpless, in astrange land. He has no country, no people, no money. And he willlive, think of it!

I wish I could leaven all this with something cheerful. I wish I couldsmile over the phonograph playing again and again A WeeDeoch-an'-Doris in that room for convalescents that overlooks the sea. I wish I could think that the baby with both legs off will grow upwithout missing what it has never known. I wish I could be reconciledbecause the dead young officer had died the death of a patriot and asoldier, or that the boy I saw dying in an upper room, from shock andloss of blood following an amputation, is only a pawn in the greatchess game of empires. I wish I could believe that the two women onthe floor below, one with both arms gone, another with one arm off andher back ripped open by a shell, are the legitimate fruits of a holywar. I cannot. I can see only greed and lust of battle and ambition. 

In a bright room I saw a German soldier. He had the room to himself. He was blue eyed and yellow haired, with a boyish and contagioussmile. He knew no more about it all than I did. It must havebewildered him in the long hours that he lay there alone. He did nothate these people. He never had hated them. It was clear, too, thatthey did not hate him. For they had saved a gangrenous leg for himwhen all hope seemed ended. He lay there, with his white coverletdrawn to his chin, and smiled at the surgeon. They were evidently onthe best of terms. 

"How goes it?" asked the surgeon cheerfully in German. 

"_Sehr gut_, " he said, and eyed me curiously. 

He was very proud of the leg, and asked that I see it. It was in acast. He moved it about triumphantly. Probably all over Germany, asover France and this corner of Belgium, just such little scenes occurdaily, hourly. 

The German peasant, like the French and the Belgian, is a peaceableman. He is military but not militant. He is sentimental rather thanimpassioned. He loves Christmas and other feast days. He is notambitious. He fights bravely, but he would rather sing or make agarden. 

It is over the bent shoulders of these peasants that the greatContinental army machines must march. The German peasant is poor, because for forty years he has been paying the heavy tax of endlessarmament. The French peasant is poor, because for forty years he hasbeen struggling to recover from the drain of the huge war indemnitydemanded by Germany in 1871. The Russian peasant toils for a remotegovernment, with which his sole tie is the tax-gatherer; toils withchildish faith for The Little Father, at whose word he may be sent tobattle for a cause of which he knows nothing. 

Germany's militarism, England's navalism, Russia's autocracy, France, graft-ridden in high places and struggling for rehabilitation after acentury of war--and, underneath it all, bearing it on bent shoulders, men like this German prisoner, alone in his room and puzzling it out!It makes one wonder if the result of this war will not be a great andoverwhelming individualism, a protest of the unit against the mass; ifSocialism, which has apparently died of an ideal, will find this idealbut another name for tyranny, and rise from its grave a living force. 

Now and then a justifiable war is fought, for liberty perhaps, or likeour Civil War, for a great principle. There are wars that areinevitable. Such wars are frequently revolutions and have theirorigins in the disaffection of a people. 

But here is a world war about which volumes are being written todiscover the cause. Here were prosperous nations, building wealth andculture on a basis of peace. Europe was apparently more in danger ofrevolution than of international warfare. It is not only war without aknown cause, it is an unexpected war. Only one of the nations involvedshowed any evidence of preparation. England is not yet ready. Russiahas not yet equipped the men she has mobilised. 

Is this war, then, because the balance of power is so nicely adjustedthat a touch turns the scale, whether that touch be a Kaiser's dreamof empire or the eyes of a Czar turned covetously toward the South?

I tried to think the thing out during the long nights when the soundof the heavy guns kept me awake. It was hard, because I knew solittle, nothing at all of European politics, or war, or diplomacy. When I tried to be logical, I became emotional. Instead of reason Ifound in myself only a deep resentment. 

I could see only that blue-eyed German in his bed, those cheery andcold and ill-equipped Belgians drilling on the sands at La Panne. 

But on one point I was clear. Away from all the imminent questionsthat filled the day, the changing ethics of war, its brutalities, itshideous necessities, one point stood out clear and distinct. That thereal issue is not the result, but the cause of this war. That theworld must dig deep into the mire of European diplomacy to find thatcause, and having found it must destroy it. That as long as that causepersists, be it social or political, predatory or ambitious, therewill be more wars. Again it will be possible for a handful of men inhigh place to overthrow a world. 

And one of the first results of the discovery of that cause will be ademand of the people to know what their representatives are doing. Diplomacy, instead of secret whispering, a finger to its lips, mustshout from the housetops. Great nations cannot be governed fromcellars. Diplomats are not necessarily conspirators. There is such athing as walking in the sunlight. 

There is no such thing in civilisation as a warlike people. There arepeaceful people, or aggressive people, or military people. But thereare none that do not prefer peace to war, until, inflamed and rousedby those above them who play this game of empires, they must don thepanoply of battle and go forth. 

CHAPTER VII

THE STORY WITH AN END

In its way that hospital at La Panne epitomised the whole tragedy ofthe great war. Here were women and children, innocent victims when thepeaceful nearby market town of Furnes was being shelled; here was atelegraph operator who had stuck to his post under furious bombardmentuntil both his legs were crushed. He had been decorated by the kingfor his bravery. Here were Belgian aristocrats without extra clothingor any money whatever, and women whose whole lives had been shieldedfrom pain or discomfort. One of them, a young woman whose father isamong the largest landowners in Belgium, is in charge of the villawhere the uniforms of wounded soldiers are cleaned and made fit foruse again. Over her white uniform she wore, in the bitter wind, a thintan raincoat. We walked together along the beach. I protested. 

"You are so thinly clad, " I said. "Surely you do not go about likethat always!"

She shrugged her shoulders. 

"It is all I have, " she said philosophically. "And I have nomoney--none. None of us has. "

A titled Belgian woman with her daughter had just escaped fromBrussels. She was very sad, for she had lost her only boy. But shesmiled a little as she told me of their having nothing but what theywore, and that the night before they had built a fire in their room, washed their linen, and gone to bed, leaving it until morning to dry. 

Across the full width of the hospital stretched the great drawing-roomof the hotel, now a recreation place for convalescent soldiers. Hereall day the phonograph played, the nurses off duty came in to writeletters, the surgeons stopped on their busy rounds to speak to the menor to watch for a few minutes the ever-changing panorama of the beach, with its background of patrolling gunboats, its engineers on restplaying football, its occasional aëroplanes, carrying each two men--apilot and an observer. 

The men sat about. There were boys with the stringy beards of theirtwenty years. There were empty sleeves, many crutches, and some whomust be led past the chairs and tables--who will always have to beled. 

They were all cheerful. But now and then, when the bombardment becamemore insistent, some of them would raise their heads and listen, withthe strained faces of those who see a hideous picture. 

The young woman who could not buy a heavy coat showed me the villaadjoining the hospital, where the clothing of wounded soldiers iscared for. It is placed first in a fumigating plant in the basementand thoroughly sterilised. After that it is brushed of its encrustedmud and blood stains are taken out by soaking in cold water. It isthen dried and thoroughly sunned. Then it is ready for the secondfloor. 

Here tailors are constantly at work mending garments apparentlyunmendable, pressing, steaming, patching, sewing on buttons. Theragged uniforms come out of that big bare room clean and whole, readyto be tied up in new burlap bags, tagged, and placed in racks of freshwhite cedar. There is no odour in this room, although innumerable oldgarments are stored in it. 

In an adjoining room the rifles and swords of the injured men stand inracks, the old and unserviceable rifles with which Belgium was forcedto equip so many of her soldiers side by side with the new andscientific German guns. Along the wall are officers' swords, and abovethem, on shelves, the haversacks of the common soldiers, laden withthe things that comprise their whole comfort. 

I examined one. How few the things were and how worn! And yet thehaversack was heavy. As he started for the trenches, this soldier whowas carried back, he had on his shoulders this haversack of hidetanned with the hair on. In it he had two pairs of extra socks, wornand ragged, a tattered and dirty undershirt, a photograph of his wife, rags for cleaning his gun, a part of a loaf of dry bread, the remnantof what had been a pair of gloves, now fingerless and stiff with rainand mud, a rosary, a pair of shoes that the woman of the photographwould have wept and prayed over, some extra cartridges and a piece ofleather. Perhaps he meant to try to mend the shoes. 

And here again I wish I could finish the story. I wish I could tellwhether he lived or died--whether he carried that knapsack back tobattle, or whether he died and its pitiful contents were divided amongthose of his comrades who were even more needy than he had been. Butthe veil lifts for a moment and drops again. 

Two incidents stand out with distinctness from those first days in LaPanne, when, thrust with amazing rapidity into the midst of war, mymind was a chaos of interest, bewilderment and despair. 

One is of an old abbé, talking earnestly to a young Belgian noblewomanwho had recently escaped from Brussels with only the clothing shewore. 

The abbé was round of face and benevolent. I had met him before, atCalais, where he had posed me in front of a statue and taken mypicture. His enthusiasm over photography was contagious. He had made adark room from a closet in an old convent, and he owned a littleAmerican camera. With this carefully placed on a tripod and coveredwith a black cloth, he posed me carefully, making numerous excursionsunder the cloth. In that cold courtyard, under the marble figure ofJoan of Arc, he was a warm and human and most alive figure, in hisflat black shoes, his long black soutane with its woollen sash, hiswoollen muffler and spectacles, with the eternal cigarette, that ispart and parcel of every Belgian, dangling loosely from his lower lip. 

The surgeons and nurses who were watching the operation looked on withaffectionate smiles. They loved him, this old priest, with hisboyishness, his enthusiasms, his tiny camera, his cigarette, hisbeautiful faith. He has promised me the photograph and what hepromises he fulfils. But perhaps it was a failure. I hope not. Hewould be so disappointed--and so would I. 

So I was glad to meet him again at La Panne--glad and surprised, forhe was fifty miles north of where we had met before. But the abbé waschanged. He was without the smile, without the cigarette. And he wasspeaking beseechingly to the smiling young refugee. This is what hewas saying:

"I am glad, daughter, to help you in every way that I can. I havebought for you in Calais everything that you requested. But I imploreyou, daughter, do not ask me to purchase any more ladies' underlinen. It is most embarrassing. "

"But, father--"

"No underlinen, " he repeated firmly. But it hurt him to refuse. Onecould see that. One imagined, too, that in his life of service therewere few refusals. I left them still debating. The abbé's eyes weredesperate but his posture firm. One felt that there would be nosurrender. 

Another picture, and I shall leave La Panne for a time. 

I was preparing to go. A telephone message to General Melis, of theBelgian Army, had brought his car to take me to Dunkirk. I was aboutto leave the protection of the Belgian Red Cross and place myself inthe care of the ministry of war. I did not know what the future wouldbring, and the few days at La Panne and the Ambulance Ocean had madefriends for me there. Things move quickly in war time. Theconventions with which we bind up our souls in ordinary life are cutaway. La Panne was already familiar and friendly territory. 

I went down the wide staircase. An ambulance had stopped and itsburden was being carried in. The bearers rested the stretcher gentlyon the floor, and a nurse was immediately on her knees beside it. 

"Shell!" she said. 

The occupant was a boy of perhaps nineteen--a big boy. Some mothermust have been very proud of him. He was fully conscious, and helooked up from his stained bandages with the same searching glancethat now I have seen so often--the glance that would read its chancesin the faces of those about. With his uninjured arm he threw back theblanket. His right arm was wounded, broken in two places, but notshattered. 

"He'll do nicely, " said the nurse. "A broken jaw and the arm. "

His eyes were on me, so I bent over. 

"The nurse says you will do nicely, " I assured him. "It will taketime, but you will be very comfortable here, and--"

The nurse had been making further investigation. Now she turned backthe other end of the blanket His right leg had been torn off at thehip. 

That story has an end; for that boy died. 

The drive back to Dunkirk was a mad one. Afterward I learned to knowthat red-headed Flemish chauffeur, with his fiercely upcurledmoustache and his contempt of death. Rather, perhaps, I learned toknow his back. It was a reckless back. He wore a large army overcoatwith a cape and a cap with a tassel. When he really got under way atanything from fifty miles an hour to the limit of the speedometer, which was ninety miles, the gilt tassel, which in the Belgian caphangs over and touches the forehead, had a way of standing up; thecape overcoat blew out in the air, cutting off my vision and my lasthope. 

I regard that chauffeur as a menace on the high road. Certainly he isnot a lady's chauffeur. He never will be. Once at night he tookme--and the car--into an iron railroad gate, and bent the gate into aV. I was bent into the whole alphabet. 

The car was a limousine. After that one cold ride from Calais to LaPanne I was always in a limousine--always, of course, where a carcould go at all. There may be other writers who have been equallyfortunate, but most of the stories are of frightful hardships. I wasnot always comfortable. I was frequently in danger. But to and fromthe front I rode soft and warm and comfortable. Often I had a bottleof hot coffee and sandwiches. Except for the two carbines strapped tothe speedometer, except for the soldier-chauffeur and the orderly whosat together outside, except for the eternal consulting of maps andshowing of passes, I might have been making a pleasure tour of thetowns of Northern France and Belgium. In fact, I have toured abroadduring times of peace and have been less comfortable. 

I do not speak Flemish, so I could not ask the chauffeur to desist, slow down, or let me out to walk. I could only sit tight as themachine flew round corners, elbowed transports, and threw a warningshriek to armoured cars. I wondered what would happen if we skiddedinto a wagon filled with high explosives. I tried to remember theconditions of my war insurance policy at Lloyd's. Also I recalled theunpleasant habit the sentries have of firing through the back of anycar that passes them. 

I need not have worried. Except that once we killed a brown chicken, and that another time we almost skidded into the canal, the journeywas uneventful, almost calm. One thing cheered me--all the othermachines were going as fast as mine. A car that eased up its pacewould be rammed from behind probably. I am like the English--I prefera charge to a rearguard engagement. 

My pass took me into Dunkirk. 

It was dusk by that time. I felt rather lost and alone. I figured outwhat time it was at home. I wished some one would speak English. And Ihated being regarded as a spy every mile or so, and depending on aslip of paper as my testimonial of respectability. The people I knewwere lunching about that time, or getting ready for bridge or thematinée. I wondered what would happen to me if the pass blew out ofthe orderly's hands and was lost in the canal. 

The chauffeur had been instructed to take me to the _Mairie_ a greatdark building of stone halls and stairways, of sentries everywhere, ofelaborate officers and much ceremony. But soon, in a great hall of theold building piled high with army supplies, I was talking to GeneralMelis, and my troubles were over. A kindly and courteous gentleman, heput me at my ease at once. More than that, he spoke some English. Hehad received letters from England about me, and had telegraphed thathe would meet me at Calais. He had, indeed, taken the time out of hisbusy day to go himself to Calais, thirty miles by motor, to meet me. 

I was aghast. "The boat went to Boulogne, " I explained. "I had noidea, of course, that you would be there. "

"Now that you are here, " he said, "it is all right. But--exactly whatcan I do for you?"

So I told him. He listened attentively. A very fine and gallantsoldier he was, sitting in that great room in the imposing uniform ofhis rank; a busy man, taking a little time out of his crowded day tosee an American woman who had come a long way alone to see thistragedy that had overtaken his country. Orderlies and officers cameand went; the _Mairie_ was a hive of seething activities. But helistened patiently. 

"Where do you want to go?" he asked when I had finished. 

"I should like to stay here, if I may. And from here, of course, Ishould like to get to the front. "

"Where?"

"Can I get to Ypres?"

"It is not very safe. "

I proclaimed instantly and loudly that I was as brave as a lion; thatI did not know fear. He smiled. But when the interview was over it wasarranged that I should have a _permis de séjour_ to stay in Dunkirk, and that on the following day the general himself and one of hisofficers having an errand in that direction would take me to Ypres. 

That night the town of Dunkirk was bombarded by some eighteen Germanaëroplanes. 

CHAPTER VIII

THE NIGHT RAID ON DUNKIRK

I found that a room had been engaged for me at the Hotel des Arcades. It was a very large room looking out over the public square and thestatue of Jean Bart. It was really a princely room. No wonder theyshowed it to me proudly, and charged it to me royally. It was anupholstered room. Even the doors were upholstered. And because it wasupholstered and expensive and regal, it enjoyed the isolation ofgreatness. The other people in the hotel slept above or underneath. 

There were times when I longed for neighbours, when I yearned for someone to occupy the other royal apartment next door. But except for aRussian prince who stayed two days, and who snored in Russian and kepttwo _valets de chambre_ up all night in the hall outside my doorpolishing his boots and cleaning his uniform, I was always alone inthat part of the hotel. 

At my London hotel I had been lodged on the top floor, and twice inthe night the hall porter had telephoned me to say that GermanZeppelins were on their way to London. So I took care to find that inthe Hotel des Arcades there were two stories and two layers of Belgianand French officers overhead. 

I felt very comfortable--until the air raid. The two stories seemedabsurd, inadequate. I would not have felt safe in the subcellar of theWoolworth Building. 

There were no women in the hotel at that time, with the exception of ahysterical lady manager, who sat in a boxlike office on the lowerfloor, and two chambermaids. A boy made my bed and brought me hotwater. For several weeks at intervals he knocked at the door twice aday and said: "Et wat. " I always thought it was Flemish for "May Icome in?" At last I discovered that he considered this the English for"hot water. " The waiters in the café were too old to be sent to war, but I think the cook had gone. There was no cook. Some one put thefood on the fire, but he was not a cook. 

Dunkirk had been bombarded several times, I learned. 

"They come in the morning, " said my informant. "Every one is orderedoff the streets. But they do little damage. One or two machines comeand drop a bomb or two. That is all. Very few are killed. "

I protested. I felt rather bitter about it. I expected trouble alongthe lines, I explained. I knew I would be quite calm when I wasactually at the front, and when I had my nervous system prepared fortrouble. But in Dunkirk I expected to rest and relax. I needed sleepafter La Panne. I thought something should be done about it. 

My informant shrugged his shoulders. He was English, and entirelyfair. 

"Dunkirk is a fortified town, " he explained. "It is quite legitimate. But you may sleep to-night. The raids are always daylight ones. "

So I commenced dinner calmly. I do not remember anything about thatdinner. The memory of it has gone. I do recall looking about thedining room, and feeling a little odd and lonely, being the onlywoman. Then a gun boomed somewhere outside, and an alarm bellcommenced to ring rapidly almost overhead. Instantly the officers inthe room were on their feet, and every light went out. 

The _maître d'hôtel_, Emil, groped his way to my table and struck amatch. 

"Aëroplanes!" he said. 

There was much laughing and talking as the officers moved to the door. The heavy velvet curtains were drawn. Some one near the door lighted acandle. 

"Where shall I go?" I asked. 

Emil, unlike the officers, was evidently nervous. 

"Madame is as safe here as anywhere, " he said. "But if she wishes tojoin the others in the cellar--"

I wanted to go to the cellar or to crawl into the office safe. But Ifelt that, as the only woman and the only American about, I held thereputation of America and of my sex in my hands. The waiters had goneto the cellar. The officers had flocked to the café on the groundfloor underneath. The alarm bell was still ringing. Over the candle, stuck in a saucer, Emil's face looked white and drawn. 

"I shall stay here, " I said. "And I shall have coffee. "

The coffee was not bravado. I needed something hot. 

The gun, which had ceased, began to fire again. And then suddenly, notfar away, a bomb exploded. Even through the closed and curtainedwindows the noise was terrific. Emil placed my coffee before me withshaking hands, and disappeared. 

Another crash, and another, both very close!

There is nothing that I know of more hideous than an aërialbombardment. It requires an entire mental readjustment. The sky, whichhas always symbolised peace, suddenly spells death. Bombardment by thebig guns of an advancing army is not unexpected. There is time forflight, a chance, too, for a reprisal. But against these raiders ofthe sky there is nothing. One sits and waits. And no town is safe. Onemoment there is a peaceful village with war twenty, fifty miles away. The next minute hell breaks loose. Houses are destroyed. Sleepingchildren die in their cradles. The streets echo and reëcho with thedin of destruction. The reply of the anti-aircraft guns is feeble, andat night futile. There is no bustle of escape. The streets are emptyand dead, and in each house people, family groups, noncombatants, folkwho ask only the right to work and love and live, sit and wait withblanched faces. 

More explosions, nearer still. They were trying for the _Mairie_, which was round the corner. 

In the corridor outside the dining room a candle was lighted, and theEnglish officer who had reassured me earlier in the evening came in. 

"You need not be alarmed, " he said cheerfully. "It is really nothing. But out in the corridor it is quite safe and not so lonely. "

I went out. Two or three Belgian officers were there, gathered round atable on which was a candle stuck in a glass. They were having theirafter-dinner liqueurs and talking of many things. No one spoke of whatwas happening outside. I was given a corner, as being out of thedraft. 

The explosion were incessant now. With each one the landladydownstairs screamed. As they came closer, cries and French adjectivescame up the staircase beside me in a nerve-destroying staccato ofterror. 

At nine-thirty, when the aëroplanes had been overhead forthree-quarters of an hour, there came a period of silence. There wereno more explosions. 

"It is over, " said one of the Belgian officers, smiling. "It is over, and madame lives!"

But it was not over. 

I took advantage of the respite to do the forbidden thing and look outthrough one of the windows. The moon had come up and the square wasflooded with light. All around were silent houses. No ray of lightfiltered through their closed and shuttered windows. The street lampswere out. Not an automobile was to be seen, not a hurrying humanfigure, not a dog. No night prowler disturbed that ghastly silence. The town lay dead under the clear and peaceful light of the moon. Thewhite paving stones of the square gleamed, and in the centre, saturnine and defiant, stood uninjured the statue of Jean Bart, privateer and private of Dunkirk. 

Crash again! It was not over. The attack commenced with redoubledfury. If sound were destructive the little town of Dunkirk would beoff the map of Northern France to-day. Sixty-seven bombs were droppedin the hour or so that the Germans were overhead. 

The bombardment continued. My feet were very cold, my head hot. Thelady manager was silent; perhaps she had fainted. But Emil reappearedfor a moment, his round white face protruding above the staircasewell, to say that a Zeppelin was reported on the way. 

Then at last silence, broken soon by the rumble of ambulances as theystarted on their quest for the dead and the wounded. And Emil waswrong. There was no Zeppelin. The night raid on Dunkirk was history. 

The lights did not come on again. From that time on for several weeksDunkirk lay at night in darkness. Houses showing a light were fined bythe police. Automobiles were forbidden the use of lamps. One creptalong the streets and the roads surrounding the town in a mysteriousand nerve-racking blackness broken only by the shaded lanterns of thesentries as they stepped out with their sharp command to stop. 

The result of the raid? It was largely moral, a part of that campaignof terrorisation which is so strangely a part of the German system, which has set its army to burning cities, to bombarding theunfortified coast towns of England, to shooting civilians in conqueredBelgium, and which now sinks the pitiful vessels of small traders andfishermen in the submarine-infested waters of the British Channel. Itgained no military advantage, was intended to gain no militaryadvantage. Not a soldier died. The great stores of military supplieswere not wrecked. The victims were, as usual, women and children. Thehouses destroyed were the small and peaceful houses of noncombatants. Only two men were killed. They were in a side street when the firstbomb dropped, and they tried to find an unlocked door, an open house, anything for shelter. It was impossible. Built like all French towns, without arcades or sheltering archways, the flat façades of the closedand barricaded houses refused them sanctuary. The second bomb killedthem both. 

Through all that night after the bombardment I could hear each hourthe call of the trumpet from the great overhanging tower, a doublenote at once thin and musical, that reported no enemy in sight in thesky and all well. From far away, at the gate in the wall, came thereply of the distant watchman's horn softened by distance. 

"All well here also, " it said. 

Following the trumpets the soft-toned chimes of the church rang out ahymn that has chimed from the old tower every hour for generations, extolling and praising the Man of Peace. 

The ambulances had finished their work. The dead lay with foldedhands, surrounded by candles, the lights of faith. And under thefading moon the old city rested and watched. 

CHAPTER IX

NO MAN'S LAND

FROM MY JOURNAL:

I have just had this conversation with the little French chambermaidat my hotel. "You have not gone to mass, Mademoiselle?"

"I? No. "

"But here, so near the lines, I should think--"

"I do not go to church. There is no God. " She looked up withred-rimmed, defiant eyes. "My husband has been killed, " she said. "There is no God. If there was a God, why should my husband be killed?He had done nothing. "

This afternoon at three-thirty I am to start for the front. I am tosee everything. The machine leaves the _Mairie_ at three-thirty. 

 * * * * *

Do you recall the school map on which the state of Texas was alwayspink and Rhode Island green? And Canada a region without colour, andtherefore without existence?

The map of Europe has become a battle line painted in three colours:yellow for the Belgian Army, blue for the British and red for theFrench. It is really a double line, for the confronting German Army isdrawn in black. It is a narrow line to signify what it does--not onlydeath and wanton destruction, but the end of the myth of civilisation;a narrow line to prove that the brotherhood of man is a dream, thatmodern science is but an improvement on fifth-century barbarity; thatright, after all, is only might. 

It took exactly twenty-four hours to strip the shirt off the diplomacyof Europe and show the coat of mail underneath. 

It will take a century to hide that coat of mail. It will take athousand years to rebuild the historic towns of Belgium. But notyears, nor a reclothed diplomacy, nor the punishment of whichevertraitor to the world brought this thing to pass, nor anything butGod's great eternity, will ever restore to one mother her uselesslysacrificed son; will quicken one of the figures that lie rotting alongthe battle line; will heal this scar that extends, yellow and blue andred and black, across the heart of Western Europe. 

It is a long scar--long and irregular. It begins at Nieuport, on theNorth Sea, extends south to the region of Soissons, east to Verdun, and then irregularly southeast to the Swiss border. 

The map from which I am working was coloured and marked for me byGeneral Foch, commander of the French Army of the North, at hisheadquarters. It is a little map, and so this line, which crossesempires and cuts civilisation in half, is only fourteen inches long, although it represents a battle line of over four hundred miles. Ofthis the Belgian front is one-half inch, or approximatelyone-twenty-eighth. The British front is a trifle more than twice aslong. All the rest of that line is red--French. 

That is the most impressive thing about the map, the length of theFrench line. 

With the arrival of Kitchener's army this last spring the blue portiongrew somewhat. The yellow remained as it was, for the Belgiancasualties have been two-thirds of her army. There have been manytragedies in Belgium. That is one of them. 

In the very north then, yellow; then a bit of red; below that blue;then red again in that long sweeping curve that is the French front. Occasionally the line moves a trifle forward or back, like theshifting record of a fever chart; but in general it remains the same. It has remained the same since the first of November. A movement tothrust it forward in any one place is followed by a counter-attack inanother place. The reserves must be drawn off and hurried to thethreatened spot. Automatically the line straightens again. 

The little map is dated the twenty-third of February. All through thespring and summer the line has remained unchanged. There will be nochange until one side or the other begins a great offensive movement. After that it will be a matter of the irresistible force and theimmovable body, a question not of maps but of empires. 

Between the confronting lines lies that tragic strip of No Man's Land, which has been and is the scene of so much tragedy. No Man's Land isof fixed length but of varying width. There are places where it isvery narrow, so narrow that it is possible to throw across a handgrenade or a box of cigarettes, depending on the nearness of anofficer whose business is war. Again it is wide, so that friendlyrelations are impossible, and sniping becomes a pleasure as well as anart. 

It was No Man's Land that I was to visit the night of the entry in myjournal. 

From the neighbourhood of Ypres to the Swiss border No Man's Landvaries. The swamps and flat ground give way to more rolling country, and this to hills. But in the north No Man's Land is a series ofshallow lakes, lying in flat, unprotected country. 

For Belgium, in desperation, last October opened the sluices and letin the sea. It crept in steadily, each high tide advancing the floodfarther. It followed the lines of canal and irrigation ditches mileafter mile till it had got as far south as Ypres, beyond Ypres indeed. To the encroachment of the sea was added the flooding resulting froman abnormally rainy winter. Ordinarily the ditches have carried offthe rain; now even where the inundation does not reach it lies ingreat ponds. Belgium's fertile sugar-beet fields are under salt water. 

The method was effectual, during the winter, at least, in retardingthe German advance. Their artillery destroyed the towns behind theopposing trenches of the Allies, but their attempts to advance throughthe flood failed. 

Even where the floods were shallow--only two feet or so--they servedtheir purpose in masking the character of the land. From a wadingdepth of two feet, charging soldiers stepped frequently into a deepditch and drowned ignominiously. 

It is a noble thing, war! It is good for a country. It unites itspeople and develops national spirit!

Great poems have been written about charges. Will there ever be anygreat poems about these men who have been drowned in ditches? Or aboutthe soldiers who have been caught in the barbed wire with which theseinland lakes are filled? Or about the wounded who fall helpless intothe flood?

The inland lakes that ripple under the wind from the sea, or gleamsilver in the light of the moon, are beautiful, hideous, filled withbodies that rise and float, face down. And yet here and there thesituation is not without a sort of grim humour. Brilliant engineers onone side or the other are experimenting with the flood. Occasionallytrenches hitherto dry and fairly comfortable find themselvesunexpectedly filling with water, as the other side devises some cleverscheme for turning the flood from a menace into a military asset. 

In No Man's Land are the outposts. 

The fighting of the winter has mystified many noncombatants, with itsadvances and retreats, which have yet resulted in no definite changeof the line. In many instances this sharp fighting has been a matterof outposts, generally farms, churches or other isolated buildings, sometimes even tiny villages. In the inundated portion of Belgiumthese outposts are buildings which, situated on rather higher land, afoot or two above the flood, have become islands. Much of the fightingin the north has been about these island outposts. Under theconditions, charges must be made by relatively small bodies of men. The outposts can similarly house but few troops. 

They are generally defended by barbed wire and a few quick-firingguns. Their purpose is strategical; they are vantage points from whichthe enemy may be closely watched. They change sides frequently; arewon and lost, and won again. 

Here and there the side at the time in command of the outpost buildsout from its trenches through the flood a pathway of bags of earth, topped by fascines or bundles of fagots tied together. Such a pathpays a tribute of many lives for every yard of advance. It is builtunder fire; it remains under fire. It is destroyed and reconstructed. 

When I reached the front the British, Belgian and French troops in thenorth had been fighting under these conditions for four months. Myfirst visit to the trenches was made under the auspices of the BelgianMinistry of War. The start was made from the _Mairie_ in Dunkirk, accompanied by the necessary passes and escorted by an attaché of theMilitary Cabinet. 

I was taken in an automobile from Dunkirk to the Belgian ArmyHeadquarters, where an officer of the headquarters staff, CaptainF----, took charge. The headquarters had been a brewery. 

Stripped of the impedimenta of its previous occupation, it now housedthe officers of the staff. 

Since that time I have frequently visited the headquarters staffs ofvarious armies or their divisions. I became familiar with the long, bare tables stacked with papers, the lamps, the maps on the walls, thetelephones, the coming and going of dispatch riders in black leather. I came to know something of the chafing restlessness of these men whomust sit, well behind the firing line, and play paper battles on whichlives and empires hang. 

But one thing never ceased to puzzle me. 

That night, in a small kitchen behind the Belgian headquarters rooms, a French peasant woman was cooking the evening meal. Always, at allthe headquarters that were near the front, somewhere in a back roomwas a resigned-looking peasant woman cooking a meal. Children hungabout the stove or stood in corners looking out at the strange newlife that surrounded them. Peasants too old for war, their occupationsgone, sat listlessly with hanging hands, their faces the faces ofbewildered children; their clean floors were tracked by the muddyboots of soldiers; their orderly lives disturbed, uprooted; their oncetidy farmyards were filled with transports; their barns with armyhorses; their windmills, instead of housing sacks of grain, wereoccupied by _mitrailleuses_. 

What were the thoughts of these people? What are they thinkingnow?--for they are still there. What does it all mean to them? Do theyever glance at the moving cord of the war map on the wall? Is this warto them only a matter of a courtyard or a windmill? Of mud and theupheaval of quiet lives? They appear to be waiting--for spring, probably, and the end of hostilities; for spring and the planting ofcrops, for quiet nights to sleep and days to labour. 

The young men are always at the front. They who are left expressconfidence that these their sons and husbands will return. And yet inthe spring many of them ploughed shallow over battlefields. 

It had been planned to show me first a detail map of the places I wasto visit, and with this map before me to explain the present positionof the Belgian line along the embankment of the railroad from Nieuportto Dixmude. The map was ready on a table in the officers' mess, a bareroom with three long tables of planks, to which a flight of half adozen steps led from the headquarters room below. 

Twilight had fallen by that time. It had commenced to rain. I couldsee through the window heavy drops that stirred the green surface ofthe moat at one side of the old building. On the wall hung theadvertisement of an American harvester, a reminder of more peacefuldays. The beating of the rain kept time to the story Captain F----told that night, bending over the map and tracing his country's ruinwith his forefinger. 

Much of it is already history. The surprise and fury of the Germans ondiscovering that what they had considered a contemptible militaryforce was successfully holding them back until the English and FrenchArmies could get into the field; the policy of systematic terrorismthat followed this discovery; the unpreparedness of Belgium's allies, which left this heroic little army practically unsupported for so longagainst the German tidal wave. 

The great battle of the Yser is also history. I shall not repeat thedramatic recital of the Belgian retreat to this point, fighting arear-guard engagement as they fell back before three times theirnumber; of the fury of the German onslaught, which engaged the entireBelgian front, so that there was no rest, not a moment's cessation. Inone night at Dixmude the Germans made fifteen attacks. Is it anywonder that two-thirds of Belgium's Army is gone?

They had fought since the third of August. It was on the twenty-firstof October that they at last retired across the Yser and two dayslater took up their present position at the railway embankment. Onthat day, the twenty-third of October, the first French troops arrivedto assist them, some eighty-five hundred reaching Nieuport. 

It was the hope of the Belgians that, the French taking their placeson the line, they could retire for a time as reserves and get a littlerest. But the German attack continuing fiercely against the combinedarmies of the Allies, the Belgians were forced to go into actionagain, weary as they were, at the historic curve of the Yser, wherewas fought the great battle of the war. At British Headquarters lateron I was given the casualties of that battle, when the invading GermanArmy flung itself again and again, for nineteen days, against theforces of the Allies: The English casualties for that period wereforty-five thousand; the French, seventy thousand; the German, byfigures given out at Berlin, two hundred and fifty thousand. TheBelgian I do not know. 

"It was after that battle, " said Captain F----, "that the German deadwere taken back and burned, to avoid pestilence. "

The Belgians had by this time reached the limit of their resources. Itwas then that the sluices were opened and their fertile lowlandsflooded. 

On the thirty-first of October the water stopped the German advancealong the Belgian lines. As soon as they discovered what had been donethe Germans made terrific and furious efforts to get forward ahead ofit. They got into the towns of Ramscappelle and Pervyse, where furiousstreet fighting occurred. 

Pervyse was taken five times and lost five times. But all theirefforts failed. The remnant of the Belgian Army had retired to therailroad embankment. The English and French lines held firm. 

For the time, at least, the German advance was checked. 

That was Captain F----'s story of the battle of the Yser. 

When he had finished he drew out of his pocket the diary of a Germanofficer killed at the Yser during the first days of the fighting, andread it aloud. It is a great human document. I give here as nearly aspossible a literal translation. 

It was written during the first days of the great battle. For fifteendays after he was killed the German offensive kept up. General Foch, who commanded the French Army of the North during that time, describedtheir method to me. "The Germans came, " he said, "like the waves ofthe sea!"

 * * * * *

The diary of a German officer, killed at the Yser:--

Twenty-fourth of October, 1914:

"The battle goes on--we are trying to effect a crossing of the Yser. Beginning at 5:45 P. M. The engineers go on preparing their bridgingmaterials. Marching quickly over the country, crossing fields andditches, we are exposed to continuous heavy fire. A spent bulletstrikes me in the back, just below the coat collar, but I am notwounded. 

"Taking up a position near Vandewonde farm, we are able to obtain alittle shelter from the devastating fire of the enemy's artillery. Howterrible is our situation! By taking advantage of all available coverwe arrive at the fifth trench, where the artillery is in action andrifle fire is incessant. We know nothing of the general situation. Ido not know where the enemy is, or what numbers are opposed to us, andthere seems no way of getting the desired information. 

"Everywhere along the line we are suffering heavy losses, altogetherout of proportion to the results obtained. The enemy's artillery istoo well sheltered, too strong; and as our own guns, fewer in number, have not been able to silence those of the enemy, our infantry isunable to make any advance. We are suffering heavy and useless losses. 

"The medical service on the field has been found very wanting. AtDixmude, in one place, no less than forty frightfully wounded men wereleft lying uncared, for. The medical corps is kept back on the otherside of the Yser without necessity. It is equally impossible toreceive water and rations in any regular way. 

"For several days now we have not tasted a warm meal; bread and otherthings are lacking; our reserve rations are exhausted. The water isbad, quite green, indeed; but all the same we drink it--we can getnothing else. Man is brought down to the level of the brute beast. Myself, I have nothing left to eat; I left what I had with me in thesaddlebags on my horse. In fact, we were not told what we should haveto do on this side of the Yser, and we did not know that our horseswould have to be left on the other side. That is why we could notarrange things. 

"I am living on what other people, like true comrades, are willing togive me, but even then my share is only very small. There is nothought of changing our linen or our clothes in any way. It is anincredible situation! On every hand farms and villages are burning. How sad a spectacle, indeed, to see this magnificent region all inruins, wounded and dead lying everywhere all round. "

Twenty-fifth of October, 1914:

"A relatively undisturbed night. The safety of the bridge over theYser has been assured for a time. The battle has gone on the whole daylong. We have not been given any definite orders. One would not thinkthis is Sunday. The infantry and artillery combat is incessant, but nodefinite result is achieved. Nothing but losses in wounded and killed. We shall try to get into touch with the sixth division of the ThirdReserve Army Corps on our right. "

Twenty-sixth of October, 1914:

"What a frightful night has gone by! There was a terrible rainstorm. Ifelt frozen. I remained standing knee-deep in water. To-day anuninterrupted fusillade meets us in front. We shall throw a bridgeacross the Yser, for the enemy's artillery has again destroyed one wehad previously constructed. 

"The situation is practically unchanged. No progress has been made inspite of incessant fighting, in spite of the barking of the guns andthe cries of alarm of those human beings so uselessly killed. Theinfantry is worthless until our artillery has silenced the enemy'sguns. Everywhere we must be losing heavily; our own company hassuffered greatly so far. The colonel, the major, and, indeed, manyother officers are already wounded; several are dead. 

"There has not yet been any chance of taking off our boots and washingourselves. The Sixth Division is ready, but its help is insufficient. The situation is no clearer than before; we can learn nothing of whatis going on. Again we are setting off for wet trenches. Our regimentis mixed up with other regiments in an inextricable fashion. Nobattalion, no company, knows anything about where the other units ofthe regiment are to be found. Everything is jumbled under thisterrible fire which enfilades from all sides. 

"There are numbers of _francs-tireurs_. Our second battalion is goingto be placed under the order of the Cyckortz Regiment, made up ofquite diverse units. Our old regiment is totally broken up. Thesituation is terrible. To be under a hail of shot and shell, withoutany respite, and know nothing whatever of one's own troops!

"It is to be hoped that soon the situation will be improved. Theseconditions cannot be borne very much longer. I am hopeless. Thebattalion is under the command of Captain May, and I am reduced toacting as _Fourier_. It is not at all an easy thing to do in ourpresent frightful situation. In the black night soldiers must be sentsome distance in order to get and bring back the food so much neededby their comrades. They have brought back, too, cards and letters fromthose we love. What a consolation in our cheerless situation! Wecannot have a light, however, so we are forced to put into ourpockets, unread, the words of comfort sent by our dear ones--we haveto wait till the following morning. 

"So we spend the night again on straw, huddled up close one to anotherin order to keep warm. It is horribly cold and damp. All at once aviolent rattle of rifle fire raises us for the combat; hastily we getready, shivering, almost frozen. "

Twenty-seventh of October, 1914:

"At dawn I take advantage of a few moments' respite to read over thekind wishes which have come from home. What happiness! Soon, however, the illusion leaves me. The situation here is still all confusion; wecannot think of advancing--"

The last sentence is a broken one. For he died. 

 * * * * *

Morning came and he read his letters from home. They cheered him alittle; we can be glad of that, at least. And then he died. 

That record is a great human document. It is absolutely genuine. Hewas starving and cold. As fast as they built a bridge to get back itwas destroyed. From three sides he and the others with him were beingshelled. He must have known what the inevitable end would be. But hesaid very little. And then he died. 

There were other journels taken from the bodies of other Germanofficers at that terrible battle of the Yser. They speak of it as a"hell"--a place of torment and agony impossible to describe. Some ofthem I have seen. There is nowhere in the world a more pitiful ortragic or thought-compelling literature than these diaries of Germanofficers thrust forward without hope and waiting for the end. 

At six o'clock it was already entirely dark and raining hard. Even inthe little town the machine was deep in mud. I got in and we startedoff again, moving steadily toward the front. Captain F---- had broughtwith him a box of biscuits, large, square, flaky crackers, which wereto be my dinner until some time in the night. He had an electric flashand a map. The roads were horrible; it was impossible to move rapidly. Here and there a sentry's lantern would show him standing on the edgeof a flooded field. The car careened, righted itself and kept on. Asthe roads became narrower it was impossible to pass another vehicle. The car drew out at crossroads here and there to allow transports toget by. 

CHAPTER X

THE IRON DIVISION

It was bitterly cold, and the dead officer's diary weighed on myspirit. The two officers in the machine pored over the map; I sathuddled in my corner. I had come a long distance to do the thing I wasdoing. But my enthusiasm for it had died. I wished I had not heard thediary. 

"At dawn I take advantage of a few moments' respite to read over thekind wishes which have come from home. What happiness!" And then hedied. 

The car jolted on. 

The soldier and the military chauffeur out in front were drenched. Thewind hurled the rain at them like bullets. We were getting close tothe front. There were shellholes now, great ruts into which the cardropped and pulled out again with a jerk. 

Then at last a huddle of dark houses and a sentry's challenge. The carstopped and we got out. Again there were seas of mud, deeper even thanbefore. I had reached the headquarters of the Third Division of theBelgian Army, commonly known as the Iron Division, so nicknamed forits heroic work in this war. 

The headquarters building was ironically called the "château. " It hadbeen built by officers and men, of fresh boards and lined neatlyinside with newspapers. Some of them were illustrated French papers. It had much the appearance of a Western shack during the early days ofthe gold fever. On one of the walls was a war map of the Easternfront, the line a cord fastened into place with flag pins. The lasttime I had seen such a map of the Eastern front was in the CabinetRoom at Washington. 

A large stove in the centre of the room heated the building, which wasboth light and warm. Some fifteen officers received us. I was the onlywoman who had been so near the front, for out here there are nonurses. One by one they were introduced and bowed. There were fifteenhosts and extremely few guests!

Having had telephone notice of our arrival, they showed me howcarefully they had prepared for it. The long desk was in beautifulorder; floors gleamed snow white; the lamp chimneys were polished. There were sandwiches and tea ready to be served. 

In one room was the telephone exchange, which connected theheadquarters with every part of the line. In another, a long line ofAmerican typewriters and mimeographing machines wrote out and copiedthe orders which were regularly distributed to the front. 

"Will you see our museum?" said a tall officer, who spoke beautifulEnglish. His mother was an Englishwoman. So I was taken into anotherroom and shown various relics of the battlefield--pieces of shells, rifles and bullets. 

"Early German shells, " said the officer who spoke English, "were likethis. You see how finely they splintered. The later ones are not sogood; the material is inferior, and here is an aluminum nose whichshows how scarce copper is becoming in Germany to-day. "

I have often thought of that visit to the "château, " of the beautifulcourtesy of those Belgian officers, their hospitality, their eagernessto make an American woman comfortable and at home. And I was to havestill further proof of their kindly feeling, for when toward daylightI came back from the trenches they were still up, the lamps were stillburning brightly, the stove was red hot and cheerful, and they hadprovided food for us against the chill of the winter dawn. Out throughthe mud and into the machine again. And now we were very near thetrenches. The car went without lights and slowly. A foot off thecentre of the road would have made an end to the excursion. 

We began to pass men, long lines of them standing in the drenchingrain to let us by. They crowded close against the car to avoid theseas of mud. Sometimes they grumbled a little, but mostly they wereentirely silent. That is the thing that impressed me always about thelines of soldiers I saw going to and from the trenches--their silence. Even their feet made no noise. They loomed up like black shadows whichthe night swallowed immediately. 

The car stopped again. We had made another leg of the journey. Andthis time our destination was a church. We were close behind thetrenches now and our movements were made with extreme caution. CaptainF---- piloted me through the mud. 

"We will go quietly, " he said. "Many of them are doubtless sleeping;they are but just out of the trenches and very tired. "

Now and then one encounters in this war a picture that cannot bepainted. Such a picture is that little church just behind the Belgianlines at L----. There are no pews, of course, in Continental churches. The chairs had been piled up in a corner near the altar, and on thestone floor thus left vacant had been spread quantities of straw. Lying on the straw and covered by their overcoats were perhaps twohundred Belgian soldiers. They lay huddled close together for warmth;the mud of the trenches still clung to them. The air was heavy withthe odour of damp straw. 

The high vaulted room was a cave of darkness. The only lights weresmall flat candles here and there, stuck in saucers or on haversacksjust above the straw. These low lights, so close to the floor, fell onthe weary faces of sleeping men, accentuating the shadows, bringingpinched nostrils into relief, showing lines of utter fatigue andexhaustion. 

But the picture was not all sombre. Here were four men playing cardsunder an image of Our Lady, which was just overhead. They were muffledagainst the cold and speaking in whispers. In a far corner a soldiersat alone, cross-legged, writing by the light of a candle. His letterrested on a flat loaf of bread, which was his writing table. Anothersoldier had taken a loaf of bread for his pillow and was comfortablyasleep on it. 

Captain F---- led the way through the church. He stepped over the mencarefully. When they roused and looked up they would have risen tosalute, but he told them to lie still. 

It was clear that the relationship between the Belgian officers andtheir troops was most friendly. Not only in that little church atmidnight, but again and again I have seen the same thing. The officerscall their men their "little soldiers, " and eye them with affection. 

One boy insisted on rising and saluting. He was very young, and on hischin was the straggly beard of his years. The Captain stooped, andlifting a candle held it to his face. 

"The handsomest beard in the Belgian Army!" he said, and the men roundchuckled. 

And so it went, a word here, a nod there, an apology when we disturbedone of the sleepers. 

"They are but boys, " said the Captain, and sighed. For each day therewere fewer of them who returned to the little church to sleep. 

On the way back to the car, making our way by means of the Captain'selectric flash through the crowded graveyard, he turned to me. 

"When you write of this, madame, " he said, "you will please notmention the location of this church. So far it has escaped--perhapsbecause it is small. But the churches always suffer. "

I regretted this. So many of the churches are old and have theinterest of extreme age, even when they are architecturallyinsignificant. But I found these officers very fair, just as I hadfound the King of the Belgians disinclined to condemn the entireGerman Army for the brutalities of a part of it. 

"There is no reason why churches should not be destroyed if they areserving military purposes, " one of them said. "When a church towershelters a gun, or is used for observations, it is quite legitimatethat it be subject to artillery fire. That is a necessity of war. "

We moved cautiously. Behind the church was a tiny cluster of smallhouses. The rain had ceased, but the electric flashlight showed greatpools of water, through which we were obliged to walk. The hamlet wasvery silent--not a dog barked. There were no dogs. 

I do not recall seeing any dogs at any time along the front, except atLa Panne. What has become of them? There were cats in the destroyedtowns, cats even in the trenches. But there were no dogs. It is notbecause the people are not fond of dogs. Dunkirk was full of them whenI was there. The public square resounded with their quarrels and noisyplaying. They lay there in the sun and slept, and ambulances turnedaside in their headlong career to avoid running them down. But thevillages along the front were silent. 

I once asked an officer what had become of the dogs. 

"The soldiers eat them!" he said soberly. 

I heard the real explanation later. The strongest dogs had beencommandeered for the army, and these brave dogs of Flanders, who havealways laboured, are now drawing _mitrailleuses_, as I saw them atL----. The little dogs must be fed, and there is no food to spare. Andso the children, over whose heads passes unheeded the realsignificance of this drama that is playing about them, have their ownsmall tragedies these days. 

We got into the car again and it moved off. With every revolution ofthe engine we were advancing toward that sinister line that borders NoMan's Land. We were very close. The road paralleled the trenches, andshelling had begun again. 

It was not close, and no shells dropped in our vicinity. But the low, horizontal red streaks of the German guns were plainly visible. 

With the cessation of the rain had begun again the throwing over theBelgian trenches of the German magnesium flares, which the Britishcall starlights. The French call them _fusées_. Under any name I donot like them. One moment one is advancing in a comfortable obscurity. The next instant it is the Fourth of July, with a white rocketbursting overhead. There is no noise, however. The thing ismiraculously beautiful, silent and horrible. I believe the lightfloats on a sort of tiny parachute. For perhaps sixty seconds it hangslow in the air, throwing all the flat landscape into clear relief. 

I do not know if one may read print under these _fusées_. I never hadeither the courage or the print for the experiment. But these eyes ofthe night open and close silently all through the hours of darkness. They hang over the trenches, reveal the movements of troops on theroads behind, shine on ammunition trains and ambulances, on therighteous and the unrighteous. All along the German lines these_fusées_ go up steadily. I have seen a dozen in the air at once. Theirsilence and the eternal vigilance which they reveal are mostimpressive. On the quietest night, with only an occasional shot beingfired, the horizon is ringed with them. 

And on the horizon they are beautiful. Overhead they are distinctlyunpleasant. 

"They are very uncomfortable, " I said to Captain F----. "The Germanscan see us plainly, can't they?"

"But that is what they are for, " he explained. "All movements oftroops and ammunition trains to and from the trenches are made duringthe night, so they watch us very carefully. "

"How near are we to the trenches?" I asked. 

"Very near, indeed. "

"To the first line?"

For I had heard that there were other lines behind, and with thecessation of the rain my courage was rising. Nothing less than thefirst line was to satisfy me. 

"To the first line, " he said, and smiled. 

The wind which had driven the rain in sheets against the car had blownthe storm away. The moon came out, a full moon. From the car I couldsee here and there the gleam of the inundation. The road wasincreasingly bad, with shell holes everywhere. Buildings loomed out ofthe night, roofless and destroyed. The _fusées_ rose and burstsilently overhead; the entire horizon seemed encircled with them. Wewere so close to the German lines that we could see an electric signalsending its message of long and short flashes, could even see thereply. It seemed to me most unmilitary. 

"Any one who knew telegraphy and German could read that message, " Iprotested. 

"It is not so simple as that. It is a cipher code, and is probablychanged daily. "

Nevertheless, the officers in the car watched the signalling closely, and turning, surveyed the country behind us. In so flat a region, withtrees and shrubbery cut down and houses razed, even a pocket flash cansend a signal to the lines of the enemy. And such signals are sent. The German spy system is thorough and far-reaching. 

I have gone through Flanders near the lines at various times at night. It is a dead country apparently. There are destroyed houses, soddenfields, ditches lipful of water. But in the most amazing fashionlights spring up and disappear. Follow one of these lights and youfind nothing but a deserted farm, or a ruined barn, or perhaps nothingbut a field of sugar beets dying in the ground. 

Who are these spies? Are they Belgians and French, driven by the ruinof everything they possess to selling out to the enemy? I think not. It is much more probable that they are Germans who slip through thelines in some uncanny fashion, wading and swimming across theinundation, crawling flat where necessary, and working, an inch at atime, toward the openings between the trenches. Frightful work, ofcourse. Impossible work, too, if the popular idea of the trenches werecorrect--that is, that they form one long, communicating ditch fromthe North Sea to Switzerland! They do not, of course. There are blankspaces here and there, fully controlled by the trenches on eitherside, and reënforced by further trenches behind. But with a knowledgeof where these openings lie it is possible to work through. 

Possible, not easy. And there is no mercy for a captured spy. 

The troops who had been relieved were moving out of the trenches. Ourprogress became extremely slow. The road was lined with men. Theypressed their faces close to the glass of the car and laughed andtalked a little among themselves. Some of them were bandaged. Theirwhite bandages gleamed in the moonlight. Here and there, as theypassed, one blew on his fingers, for the wind was bitterly cold. 

"In a few moments we must get out and walk, " I was told. "Is madame agood walker?"

I said I was a good walker. I had a strong feeling that two or threepeople might walk along that road under those starlights much moresafely and inconspicuously than an automobile could move. Forautomobiles at the front mean generals as a rule, and are alwayssubject to attack. 

Suddenly the car stopped and a voice called to us sharply. There weresoldiers coming up a side road. I was convinced that we had surprisedan attack, and were in the midst of the German advance. One of theofficers flung the door open and looked out. 

But we were only on the wrong road, and must get into reverse and turnthe machine even closer to the front. I know now that there was nochance of a German attack at that point, that my fears were absurd. Nevertheless, so keen was the tension that for quite ten minutes myheart raced madly. 

On again. The officers in the car consulted the map and, havingdecided on the route, fell into conversation. The officer of the ThirdDivision, whose mother had been English, had joined the party. He hadbeen on the staff of General Leman at the time of the capture ofLiège, and he told me of the sensational attempt made by the Germansto capture the General. 

"I was upstairs with him at headquarters, " he said, "when word came upthat eight Englishmen had just entered the building with a request tosee him. I was suspicious and we started down the staircase together. The 'Englishmen' were in the hallway below. As we appeared on thestairs the man in advance put his hand in his pocket and drew arevolver. They were dressed in civilians' clothes, but I saw at oncethat they were German. 

"I was fortunate in getting my revolver out first, and shot down theman in advance. There was a struggle, in which the General made hisescape and all of the eight were either killed or taken prisoners. They were uhlans, two officers and six privates. "

"It was very brave, " I said. "A remarkable exploit. "

"Very brave indeed, " he agreed with me. "They are all very brave, theGermans. "

Captain F---- had been again consulting his map. Now he put it away. 

"Brave but brutal, " he said briefly. "I am of the Third Division. Ihave watched the German advance protected by women and children. Inthe fighting the civilians fell first. They had no weapons. It wasterrible. It is the German system, " he went on, "which makeseverything of the end, and nothing at all of the means. It is seen inthe way they have sacrificed their own troops. "

"They think you are equally brutal, " I said. "The German soldiersbelieve that they will have their eyes torn out if they are captured. "

I cited a case I knew of, where a wounded German had hidden in theinundation for five days rather than surrender to the horrors hethought were waiting for him. When he was found and taken to ahospital his long days in the water had brought on gangrene and hecould not be saved. 

"They have been told that to make them fight more savagely, " was thecomment. "What about the official German order for a campaign of'frightfulness' in Belgium?"

And here, even while the car is crawling along toward the trenches, perhaps it is allowable to explain the word "frightfulness, " which nowso permeates the literature of the war. Following the scenes of theGerman invasion into Belgium, where here and there some maddenedcivilian fired on the German troops and precipitated the deaths of histownsmen, [C] Berlin issued, on August twenty-seventh, a declaration, of which this paragraph is a part:

[Footnote C: The Belgians contend that, in almost every case, suchfiring by civilians was the result of attack on their women. ]

"The only means of preventing surprise attacks from the civilpopulation has been to interfere with unrelenting severity and tocreate examples which, by their frightfulness, would be a warning tothe whole country. "

A Belgian officer once quoted it to me, with a comment. 

"This is not an order to the army. It is an attempt at justificationfor the very acts which Berlin is now attempting to deny!"

That is how "frightfulness" came into the literature of the war. 

Captain F---- stopped the car. Near the road was a ruin of an oldchurch. 

"In that church, " he said, "our soldiers were sleeping when theGermans, evidently informed by a spy, began to shell it. The firstshot smashed that house there, twenty-five yards away; the second shotcame through the roof and struck one of the supporting pillars, bringing the roof down. Forty-six men were killed and one hundred andnine wounded. "

He showed me the grave from a window of the car, a great grave infront of the church, with a wooden cross on it. It was too dark toread the inscription, but he told me what it said:

"Here lie forty-six _chasseurs_. " Beneath are the names, one below theother in two columns, and underneath all: "_Morts pour la Patrie_. "

We continued to advance. Our lamps were out, but the _fusées_ madeprogress easy. And there was the moon. We had left behind us the linesof the silent men. The scene was empty, desolate. Suddenly we stoppedby a low brick house, a one-story building with overhanging eaves. Sentries with carbines stood under the eaves, flattened against thewall for shelter from the biting wind. 

CHAPTER XI

AT THE HOUSE OF THE BARRIER

A narrow path led up to the house. It was flanked on both sides bybarbed wire, and progress through it was slow. The wind caught my raincape and tore it against the barbs. I had to be disentangled. Thesentries saluted, and the low door, through which the officers wereobliged to stoop to enter, was opened by an orderly from within. 

We entered The House of the Mill of Saint ----. 

The House of the Mill of Saint ---- was less pretentious than itsname. Even at its best it could not have been imposing. Now, partiallydestroyed and with its windows carefully screened inside by grainsacks nailed to the frames for fear of a betraying ray of light, itwas not beautiful. But it was hospitable. A hanging lamp in its onelivable room, a great iron stove, red and comforting, and a largeround table under the lamp made it habitable and inviting. It wasBelgian artillery headquarters, and I was to meet here ColonelJacques, one of the military idols of Belgium, the hero of the Congo, and now in charge of Belgian batteries. In addition, since it wasmidnight, we were to sup here. 

We were expected, and Colonel Jacques himself waited inside theliving-room door. A tall man, as are almost all the Belgianofficers--which is curious, considering that the troops seem to berather under average size--he greeted us cordially. I fancied thatbehind his urbanity there was the glimmer of an amused smile. But hiscourtesy was beautiful. He put me near the fire and took the nextchair himself. 

I had a good chance to observe him. He is no longer a young man, andbeyond a certain military erectness and precision in his movementsthere is nothing to mark him the great soldier he has shown himself tobe. 

"We are to have supper, " he said smilingly in French. "Provided youhave brought something to eat with you!"

"We have brought it, " said Captain F----. 

The officers of the staff came in and were formally presented. Therewas much clicking of heels, much deep and courteous bowing. ThenCaptain F---- produced his box of biscuits, and from a capaciouspocket of his army overcoat a tin of bully beef. The House of the Millof Saint ---- contributed a bottle of thin white native wine and, triumphantly, a glass. There are not many glasses along the front. 

There was cheese too. And at the end of the meal Colonel Jacques, withgreat _empressement_, laid before me a cake of sweet chocolate. 

I had to be shown the way to use the bully beef. One of the hard flatbiscuits was split open, spread with butter and then with the beef ina deep layer. It was quite good, but what with excitement and fatigueI was not hungry. Everybody ate; everybody talked; and, after askingmy permission, everybody smoked. I sat near the stove and dried mysteaming boots. 

Afterward I remembered that with all the conversation there was verylittle noise. Our voices were subdued. Probably we might have cheeredin that closed and barricaded house without danger. But the sense ofthe nearness of the enemy was over us all, and the business of war wasnot forgotten. There were men who came, took orders and went away. There were maps on the walls and weapons in every corner. Even thesacking that covered the windows bespoke caution and danger. 

Here it was too near the front for the usual peasant family huddledround its stove in the kitchen, and looking with resignation on thesestrange occupants of their house. The humble farm buildings outsidewere destroyed. 

I looked round the room; a picture or two still hung on the walls, anda crucifix. There is always a crucifix in these houses. There was acarbine just beneath this one. 

Inside of one of the picture frames one of the Colonel's medals hadbeen placed, as if for safety. 

Colonel Jacques sat at the head of the table and beamed at us all. Hehas behind him many years of military service. He has been decoratedagain and again for bravery. But, perhaps, when this war is over andhe has time to look back he will smile over that night supper with thefirst woman he had seen for months, under the rumble of his own andthe German batteries. 

It was time to go to the advance trenches. But before we left one ofthe officers who had accompanied me rose and took a folded paper froma pocket of his tunic. He was smiling. 

"I shall read, " he said, "a little tribute from one of ColonelJacques' soldiers to him. "

So we listened. Colonel Jacques sat and smiled; but he is a modestman, and his fingers were beating a nervous tattoo on the table. Theyoung officer stood and read, glancing up now and then to smile at hischief's embarrassment. The wind howled outside, setting the sacks atthe windows to vibrating. 

This is a part of the poem:

 _III_

 "_Comme chef nous avons l'homme à la hauteur Un homme aimé et adoré de tous L'Colonel Jacques; de lui les hommes sont fous En lui nous voyons l'emblème de l'honneur. Des compagnes il en a des tas: En Afrique Haecht et Dixmude, Ramsdonck et Sart-Tilmau Et toujours premier et toujours en avant Toujours en têt' de son beau régiment, Toujours railleur Chef au grand coeur_. 

 _REFRAIN_ "_L'Colo du 12me passe Regardez ce vaillant Quand il crie dans l'espace Joyeus'ment 'En avant!' Ses hommes, la mine heureuse Gaîment suivent sa trace Sur la route glorieuse. Saluez-le, l'Colo du 12me passe_. 

 "_AD. DAUVISTER_, "SOUS-LIEUTENANT. "

We applauded. It is curious to remember how cheerful we were, how warmand comfortable, there at the House of the Mill of Saint ----, withwar only a step away now. Curious, until we think that, of all thecreated world, man is the most adaptable. Men and horses! Which is asit should be now, with both men and horses finding themselves instrange places, indeed, and somehow making the best of it. 

The copy of the poem, which had been printed at the front, probably onan American hand press, was given to me with Colonel Jacques'signature on the back, and we prepared to go. There was much donningof heavy wraps, much bowing and handshaking. Colonel Jacques saw usout into the wind-swept night. Then the door of the little houseclosed again, and we were on our way through the barricade. 

Until now our excursion to the trenches, aside from the discomfort ofthe weather and the mud, had been fairly safe, although there wasalways the chance of a shell. To that now was to be added a freshhazard--the sniping that goes on all night long. 

Our car moved quietly for a mile, paralleling the trenches. Then itstopped. The rest of the journey was to be on foot. 

All traces of the storm had passed, except for the pools of mud, which, gleaming like small lakes, filled shell holes in the road. Anammunition lorry had drawn up in the shadow of a hedge and wascautiously unloading. Evidently the night's movement of troops wasover, for the roads were empty. 

A few feet beyond the lorry we came up to the trenches. We were behindthem, only head and shoulders above. 

There was no sign of life or movement, except for the silent _fusées_that burst occasionally a little to our right. Walking was bad. TheBelgian blocks of the road were coated with slippery mud, and fromlong use and erosion the stones themselves were rounded, so that ourfeet slipped over them. At the right was a shallow ditch three or fourfeet wide. Immediately beyond that was the railway embankment where, as Captain F---- had explained, the Belgian Army had taken up itsposition after being driven back across the Yser. 

The embankment loomed shoulder high, and between it and the ditch werethe trenches. There was no sound from them, but sentries halted usfrequently. On such occasions the party stopped abruptly--for heresentries are apt to fire first and investigate afterward--and oneofficer advanced with the password. 

There is always something grim and menacing about the attitude of thesentry as he waits on such occasions. His carbine is not over hisshoulder, but in his hands, ready for use. The bayonet gleams. Hiseyes are fixed watchfully on the advance. A false move, and hisoverstrained nerves may send the carbine to his shoulder. 

We walked just behind the trenches in the moonlight for a mile. No onesaid anything. The wind was icy. Across the railroad embankment itchopped the inundation into small crested waves. Only by putting one'shead down was it possible to battle ahead. From Dixmude came theintermittent red flashes of guns. But the trenches beside us wereentirely silent. 

At the end of a mile we stopped. The road turned abruptly to the rightand crossed the railroad embankment, and at this crossing was the ruinof what had been the House of the Barrier, where in peaceful times thecrossing tender lived. 

It had been almost destroyed. The side toward the German lines wasindeed a ruin, but one room was fairly whole. However, the door hadbeen shot away. To enter, it was necessary to lift away anextemporised one of planks roughly nailed together, which leanedagainst the aperture. 

The moving of the door showed more firelight, and a very small, shadedand smoky lamp on a stand. There were officers here again. The littlehouse is slightly in front of the advanced trenches, and once insideit was possible to realise its exposed position. Standing as it doeson the elevation of the railroad, it is constantly under fire. It issurrounded by barbed wire and flanked by trenches in which are_mitrailleuses_. 

The walls were full of shell holes, stuffed with sacks of straw orboarded over. What had been windows were now jagged openings, similarly closed. The wind came through steadily, smoking the chimneyof the lamp and making the flame flicker. 

There was one chair. 

I wish I could go farther. I wish I could say that shells werebursting overhead, and that I sat calmly in the one chair and madenotes. I sat, true enough, but I sat because I was tired and my feetwere wet. And instead of making notes I examined my new six-guineasilk rubber rain cape for barbed-wire tears. Not a shell came near. The German battery across had ceased firing at dusk that evening, andwas playing pinochle four hundred yards away across the inundation. The snipers were writing letters home. 

It is true that any time an artilleryman might lose a game and go outand fire a gun to vent his spleen or to keep his hand in. And thesnipers might begin to notice that the rain was over, and that therewas suspicious activity at the House of the Barrier. And, to take awaythe impression of perfect peace, big guns were busy just north andsouth of us. Also, just where we were the Germans had made a terrificcharge three nights before to capture an outpost. But the fact remainsthat I brought away not even a bullet hole through the crown of mysoft felt hat. 

CHAPTER XII

NIGHT IN THE TRENCHES

When I had been thawed out they took me into the trenches. Because ofthe inundation directly in front, they are rather shallow, and at thispoint were built against the railroad embankment with earth, boards, and here and there a steel rail from the track. Some of them werecovered, too, but not with bombproof material. The tops were merelyshelters from the rain and biting wind. 

The men lay or sat in them--it was impossible to stand. Some of themwere like tiny houses into which the men crawled from the rear, and byplacing a board, which served as a door, managed to keep out at leasta part of the bitter wind. 

In the first trench I was presented to a bearded major. He was lyingflat and apologised for not being able to rise. There was a machinegun beside him. He told me with some pride that it was an Americangun, and that it never jammed. When a machine gun jams the man incharge of it dies and his comrades die, and things happen with greatrapidity. On the other side of him was a cat, curled up and soundasleep. There was a telephone instrument there. It was necessary tostep over the wire that was stretched along the ground. 

All night long he lies there with his gun, watching for the firstmovement in the trenches across. For here, at the House of theBarrier, has taken place some of the most furious fighting of thispart of the line. 

In the next division of the trench were three men. They were cleaningand oiling their rifles round a candle. 

The surprise of all of these men at seeing a woman was almost absurd. Word went down the trenches that a woman was visiting. Heads poppedout and cautious comments were made. It was concluded that I wasvisiting royalty, but the excitement died when it was discovered thatI was not the Queen. Now and then, when a trench looked clean and dry, I was invited in. It was necessary to get down and crawl in on handsand knees. 

Here was a man warming his hands over a tiny fire kindled in a tinpail. He had bored holes in the bottom of the pail for air, and wasshielding the glow carefully with his overcoat. 

Many people have written about the trenches--the mud, the odours, theinhumanity of compelling men to live under such foul conditions. Nothing that they have said can be too strong. Under the bestconditions the life is ghastly, horrible, impossible. 

That night, when from a semi-shielded position I could look across tothe German line, the contrast between the condition of the men in thetrenches and the beauty of the scenery was appalling. In eachdirection, as far as one could see, lay a gleaming lagoon of water. The moon made a silver path across it, and here and there on itsborders were broken and twisted winter trees. 

"It is beautiful, " said Captain F----, beside me, in a low voice. "Butit is full of the dead. They are taken out whenever it is possible;but it is not often possible. "

"And when there is an attack the attacking side must go through thewater?"

"Not always, but in many places. "

"What will happen if it freezes over?"

He explained that it was salt water, and would not freeze easily. Andthe cold of that part of the country is not the cold of America in thesame latitude. It is not a cold of low temperature; it is a damp, penetrating cold that goes through garments of every weight and seemsto chill the very blood in a man's body. 

"How deep is the water?" I asked. 

"It varies--from two to eight feet. Here it is shallow. "

"I should think they would come over. "

"The water is full of barbed wire, " he said grimly. "And some, a greatmany, have tried--and failed. "

As of the trenches, many have written of the stenches of this war. Butthe odour of that beautiful lagoon was horrible. I do not care toemphasize it. It is one of the things best forgotten. But anylingering belief I may have had in the grandeur and glory of war diedthat night beside that silver lake--died of an odour, and will neverlive again. 

And now came a discussion. 

The road crossing the railroad embankment turned sharply to the leftand proceeded in front of the trenches. There was no shelter on thatside of the embankment. The inundation bordered the road, and justbeyond the inundation were the German trenches. 

There were no trees, no shrubbery, no houses; just a flat road, pavedwith Belgian blocks, that gleamed in the moonlight. 

At last the decision was made. We would go along the road, provided Irealised from the first that it was dangerous. One or two could walkthere with a good chance for safety, but not more. The little grouphad been augmented. It must break up; two might walk together, andthen two a safe distance behind. Four would certainly be fired on. 

I wanted to go. It was not a matter of courage. I had simply, parrot-fashion, mimicked the attitude of mind of the officers. Oneafter another I had seen men go into danger with a shrug of theshoulders. 

"If it comes it comes!" they said, and went on. So I, too, had becomea fatalist. If I was to be shot it would happen, if I had to buy arifle and try to clean it myself to fulfil my destiny. 

So they let me go. I went farther than they expected, as it turnedout. There was a great deal of indignation and relief when it wasover. But that is later on. 

A very tall Belgian officer took me in charge. It was necessary towork through a barbed-wire barricade, twisting and turning through itsmazes. The moonlight helped. It was at once a comfort and an anxiety, for it seemed to me that my khaki-coloured suit gleamed in it. TheBelgian officers in their dark blue were less conspicuous. I thoughtthey had an unfair advantage of me, and that it was idiotic of theBritish to wear and advocate anything so absurd as khaki. My capeballooned like a sail in the wind. I felt at least double my ordinarysize, and that even a sniper with a squint could hardly miss me. And, by way of comfort, I had one last instruction before I started:

"If a _fusée_ goes up, stand perfectly still. If you move they willfire. "

The entire safety of the excursion depended on a sort of tacitagreement that, in part at least, obtains as to sentries. 

This is a new warfare, one of artillery, supported by infantry intrenches. And it has been necessary to make new laws for it. One ofthe most curious is a sort of _modus vivendi_ by which each sideprotects its own sentries by leaving the enemy's sentries unmolestedso long as there is no active fighting. They are always in plain viewbefore the trenches. In case of a charge they are the first to beshot, of course. But long nights and days have gone by along certainparts of the front where the hostile trenches are close together, andthe sentries, keeping their monotonous lookout, have been undisturbed. 

No doubt by this time the situation has changed to a certain extent;there has been more active fighting, larger bodies of men areinvolved. The spring floods south of the inundation will have driedup. No Man's Land will have ceased to be a swamp and the deadlock maybe broken. 

But on that February night I put my faith in this agreement, and itheld. 

The tall Belgian officer asked me if I was frightened. I said I wasnot. This was not exactly the truth; but it was no time for the truth. 

"They are not shooting, " I said. "It looks perfectly safe. "

He shrugged his shoulders and glanced toward the German trenches. 

"They have been sleeping during the rain, " he said briefly. "But whenone of them wakes up, look out!"

After that there was little conversation, and what there was was inwhispers. 

As we proceeded the stench from the beautiful moonlit water grewoverpowering. The officer told me the reason. 

A little farther along a path of fascines had been built out over theinundation to an outpost halfway to the German trenches. The buildingof this narrow roadway had cost many lives. 

Half a mile along the road we were sharply challenged by a sentry. When he had received the password he stood back and let us pass. Alone, in that bleak and exposed position in front of the trenches, always in full view as he paced back and forward, carbine on shoulder, with not even a tree trunk or a hedge for shelter, the first to go atthe whim of some German sniper or at any indication of an attack, hewas a pathetic, almost a tragic, figure. He looked very young too. Istopped and asked him in a whisper how old he was. 

He said he was nineteen!

He may have been. I know something about boys, and I think he wasseventeen at the most. There are plenty of boys of that age doing justwhat that lad was doing. 

Afterward I learned that it was no part of the original plan to take awoman over the fascine path to the outpost; that Captain F---- groundhis teeth in impotent rage when he saw where I was being taken. But itwas not possible to call or even to come up to us. So, blithely andunconsciously the tall Belgian officer and I turned to the right, andI was innocently on my way to the German trenches. 

After a little I realised that this was rather more war than I hadexpected. The fascines were slippery; the path only four or five feetwide. On each side was the water, hideous with many secrets. 

I stopped, a third of the way out, and looked back. It looked about asdangerous in one direction as another. So we went on. Once I slippedand fell. And now, looming out of the moonlight, I could see theoutpost which was the object of our visit. 

I have always been grateful to that Belgian lieutenant for hismistake. Just how grateful I might have been had anything untowardhappened, I cannot say. But the excursion was worth all the risk, andmore. 

On a bit of high ground stands what was once the tiny hamlet ofOudstuyvenskerke--the ruins of two small white houses and the tower ofthe destroyed church--hardly a tower any more, for only three sides ofit are standing and they are riddled with great shell holes. 

Six hundred feet beyond this tower were the German trenches. Thelittle island was hardly a hundred feet in its greatest dimension. 

I wish I could make those people who think that war is good for acountry see that Belgian outpost as I saw it that night under themoonlight. Perhaps we were under suspicion; I do not know. Suddenlythe _fusées_, which had ceased for a time, began again, and with theirwhite light added to that of the moon the desolate picture of thattiny island was a picture of the war. There was nothing lacking. Therewas the beauty of the moonlit waters, there was the tragedy of thedestroyed houses and the church, and there was the horror of unburiedbodies. 

There was heroism, too, of the kind that will make Belgium live inhistory. For in the top of that church tower for months a Capuchinmonk has held his position alone and unrelieved. He has a telephone, and he gains access to his position in the tower by means of a ropeladder which he draws up after him. 

Furious fighting has taken place again and again round the base of thetower. The German shells assail it constantly. But when I left Belgiumthe Capuchin monk, who has become a soldier, was still on duty; stilltelephoning the ranges of the gun; still notifying headquarters ofGerman preparations for a charge. 

Some day the church tower will fall and he will go with it, or it willbe captured; one or the other is inevitable. Perhaps it has alreadyhappened; for not long ago I saw in the newspapers that furiousfighting was taking place at this very spot. 

He came down and I talked to him--a little man, regarding hissituation as quite ordinary, and looking quaintly unpriestlike in hisuniform of a Belgian officer with its tasselled cap. Some day a greatstory will be written of these priests of Belgium who have left theirchurches to fight. 

We spoke in whispers. There was after all very little to say. It wouldhave embarrassed him horribly had any one told him that he was aheroic figure. And the ordinary small talk is not currency in such asituation. 

We shook hands and I think I wished him luck. Then he went back againto the long hours and days of waiting. 

I passed under his telephone wires. Some day he will telephone that acharge is coming. He will give all the particulars calmly, concisely. Then the message will break off abruptly. He will have sent his lastwarning. For that is the way these men at the advance posts die. 

As we started again I was no longer frightened. Something of hiscourage had communicated itself to me, his courage and his philosophy, perhaps his faith. 

The priest had become a soldier; but he was still a priest in hisheart. For he had buried the German dead in one great grave before thechurch, and over them had put the cross of his belief. 

It was rather absurd on the way back over the path of death to beescorted by a cat. It led the way over the fascines, treading daintilyand cautiously. Perhaps one of the destroyed houses at the outpost hadbeen its home, and with a cat's fondness for places it remained there, though everything it knew had gone; though battle and sudden death hadusurped the place of its peaceful fireside, though that very firesidewas become a heap of stone and plaster, open to winds and rain. 

Again and again in destroyed towns I have seen these forlorn catsstalking about, trying vainly to adjust themselves to new conditions, cold and hungry and homeless. 

We were challenged repeatedly on the way back. Coming from thedirection we did we were open to suspicion. It was necessary each timeto halt some forty feet from the sentry, who stood with his riflepointed at us. Then the officer advanced with the word. 

Back again, then, along the road, past the youthful sentry, past othersentries, winding through the barbed-wire barricade, and at last, quite whole, to the House of the Barrier again. We had walked threemiles in front of the Belgian advanced trenches, in full view of theGermans. There had been no protecting hedge or bank or tree between usand that ominous line two hundred yards across. And nothing whateverhad happened. 

Captain F---- was indignant. The officers in the House of the Barrierheld up their hands. For men such a risk was legitimate, necessary. Ina woman it was foolhardy. Nevertheless, now that it was safely over, they were keenly interested and rather amused. But I have learned thatthe gallant captain and the officer with him had arranged, in caseshooting began, to jump into the water, and by splashing about drawthe fire in their direction!

We went back to the automobile, a long walk over the shell-eaten roadsin the teeth of a biting wind. But a glow of exultation kept me warm. I had been to the front. I had been far beyond the front, indeed, andI had seen such a picture of war and its desolation there in thecentre of No Man's Land as perhaps no one not connected with an armyhad seen before; such a picture as would live in my mind forever. 

I visited other advanced trenches that night as we followed theBelgian lines slowly northward toward Nieuport. 

Save the varying conditions of discomfort, they were all similar. Always they were behind the railroad embankment. Always they weredirty and cold. Frequently they were full of mud and water. To reachthem one waded through swamps and pools. Just beyond them there wasalways the moonlit stretch of water, now narrow, now wide. 

I was to see other trenches later on, French and English. But onlyalong the inundation was there that curious combination of beauty andhideousness, of rippling water with the moonlight across it in asilver path, and in that water things that had been men. 

In one place a cow and a pig were standing on ground a little bitraised. They had been there for weeks between the two armies. Neitherside would shoot them, in the hope of some time obtaining them forfood. 

They looked peaceful, rather absurd. 

Now so near that one felt like whispering, and now a quarter of a mileaway, were the German trenches. We moved under their _fusées_, passingdestroyed towns where shell holes have become vast graves. 

One such town was most impressive. It had been a very beautiful town, rather larger than the others. At the foot of the main street ran therailroad embankment and the line of trenches. There was not a houseleft. 

It had been, but a day or two before, the scene of a street fight, when the Germans, swarming across the inundation, had captured thetrenches at the railroad and got into the town itself. 

At the intersection of two streets, in a shell hole, twenty bodies hadbeen thrown for burial. But that was not novel or new. Shell-holegraves and destroyed houses were nothing. The thing I shall neverforget is the cemetery round the great church. 

Continental cemeteries are always crowded. They are old, and gravesalmost touch one another. The crosses which mark them stand like rowsof men in close formation. 

This cemetery had been shelled. There was not a cross in place; theylay flung about in every grotesque position. The quiet God's Acre hadbecome a hell. Graves were uncovered; the dust of centuries exposed. In one the cross had been lifted up by an explosion and had settledback again upside down, so that the Christ was inverted. 

It was curious to stand in that chaos of destruction, that ribaldhavoc, that desecration of all we think of as sacred, and see, stretched from one broken tombstone to another, the telephone wiresthat connect the trenches at the foot of the street with headquartersand with the "château. "

Ninety-six German soldiers had been buried in one shell hole in thatcemetery. Close beside it there was another, a great gaping wound inthe earth, half full of water from the evening's rain. 

An officer beside me looked down into it. 

"See, " he said, "they dig their own graves!"

It was almost morning. The automobile left the pathetic ruin of thetown and turned back toward the "château. " There was no talking; asort of heaviness of spirit lay on us all. The officers were seeingagain the destruction of their country through my shocked eyes. Wewere tired and cold, and I was heartsick. 

A long drive through the dawn, and then the "château. "

The officers were still up, waiting. They had prepared, against ourarrival, sandwiches and hot drinks. 

The American typewriters in the next room clicked and rattled. At thetelephone board messages were coming in from the very places we hadjust left--from the instrument at the major's elbow as he lay in histrench beside the House of the Barrier; from the priest who had lefthis cell and become a soldier; from that desecrated and ruinedgraveyard with its gaping shell holes that waited, open-mouthed, for--what?

When we had eaten, Captain F---- rose and made a little speech. It wassimply done, in the words of a soldier and a patriot speaking out of afull heart. 

"You have seen to-night a part of what is happening to our country, "he said. "You have seen what the invading hosts of Germany have madeus suffer. But you have seen more than that. You have seen that theBelgian Army still exists; that it is still fighting and will continueto fight. The men in those trenches fought at Liège, at Louvain, atAntwerp, at the Yser. They will fight as long as there is a drop ofBelgian blood to shed. 

"Beyond the enemy's trenches lies our country, devastated; ournational life destroyed; our people under the iron heel of Germany. But Belgium lives. Tell America, tell the world, that destroyed, injured as she is, Belgium lives and will rise again, greater thanbefore!"

CHAPTER XIII

"WIPERS"

FROM MY JOURNAL:

An aëroplane man at the next table starts to-night on a dangerousscouting expedition over the German lines. In case he does not returnhe has given a letter for his mother to Captain T----. 

It now appears quite certain that I am to be sent along the French andEnglish lines. I shall be the first correspondent, I am told, to seethe British front, as "Eyewitness, " who writes for the English papers, is supposed to be a British officer. 

I have had word also that I am to see Mr. Winston Churchill, the FirstLord of the British Admiralty. But to-day I am going to Ypres. TheTommies call it "Wipers. "

 * * * * *

Before I went abroad I had two ambitions among others: One was to beable to pronounce Ypres; the other was to bring home and exhibit to myadmiring friends the pronunciation of Przemysl. To a moderate extent Ihave succeeded with the first. I have discovered that the second onemust be born to. 

Two or three towns have stood out as conspicuous points of activity inthe western field. Ypres is one of these towns. Day by day it figuresin the reports from the front. The French are there, and just to theeast the English line commences. [D] The line of trenches lies beyondthe town, forming a semicircle round it. 

[Footnote D: Written in May, 1915. ]

A few days later I saw this semicircle, the flat and muddy battlefieldof Ypres. But on this visit I was to see only the town, which, although completely destroyed, was still being shelled. 

The curve round the town gave the invading army a great advantage inits destruction. It enabled them to shell it from three directions, sothat it was raked by cross fire. For that reason the town of Yprespresents one of the most hideous pictures of desolation of the presentwar. 

General M---- had agreed to take me to Ypres. But as he was a Belgiangeneral, and the town of Ypres is held by the French, it was a part ofthe etiquette of war that we should secure the escort of a Frenchofficer at the town of Poperinghe. 

For war has its etiquette, and of a most exacting kind. And yet in theend it simplifies things. It is to war what rules are tobridge--something to lead by! Frequently I was armed with passes tovisit, for instance, certain batteries. My escort was generally amember of the Headquarters' Staff of that particular army. But it wasalways necessary to visit first the officer in command of thatbattery, who in his turn either accompanied us to the battlefield ordeputised one of his own staff. The result was an imposing number ofuniforms of various sorts, and the conviction, as I learned, among thegunners that some visiting royalty was on an excursion to the front!

It was a cold winter day in February, a grey day with a fine snow thatmelted as soon as it touched the ground. Inside the car we wereswathed in rugs. The chauffeur slapped his hands at every break in thejourney, and sentries along the road hugged such shelter as they couldfind. 

As we left Poperinghe the French officer, Commandant D----, pointed toa file of men plodding wearily through the mud. 

"The heroes of last night's attack, " he said. "They are very tired, asyou see. "

We stopped the car and let the men file past. They did not look likeheroes; they looked tired and dirty and depressed. Although ourautomobile generally attracted much attention, scarcely a man liftedhis head to glance at us. They went on drearily through the mud underthe pelting sleet, drooping from fatigue and evidently suffering fromkeen reaction after the excitement of the night before. 

I have heard the French soldier criticised for this reaction. It maycertainly be forgiven him, in view of his splendid bravery. But partof the criticism is doubtless justified. The English Tommy fights ashe does everything else. There is a certain sporting element in whathe does. He puts into his fighting the same fairness he puts intosport, and it is a point of honour with him to keep cool. The Englishgunner will admire the enemy's marksmanship while he is ducking ashell. 

The French soldier, on the other hand, fights under keen excitement. He is temperamental, imaginative; as he fights he remembers all thebitterness of the past, its wrongs, its cruelties. He sees blood. There is nothing that will hold him back. The result has made history, is making history to-day. 

But he has the reaction of his temperament. Who shall say he is notentitled to it?

Something of this I mentioned to Monsieur le Commandant as the linefiled past. 

"It is because it is fighting that gets nowhere, " he replied. "If ourmen, after such an attack, could advance, could do anything but crawlback into holes full of water and mud, you would see them gay andsmiling to-day. "

After a time I discovered that the same situation holds to a certainextent in all the armies. If his fighting gets him anywhere thesoldier is content. The line has made a gain. What matter wettrenches, discomfort, freezing cold? The line has made a gain. It islack of movement that sends their spirits down, the fearful boredom ofthe trenches, varied only by the dropping shells, so that they termthemselves, ironically, "Cannon food. "

We left the victorious company behind, making their way towardwhatever church bedded down with straw, or coach-house or drafty barnwas to house them for their rest period. 

"They have been fighting waist-deep in water, " said the Commandant, "and last night was cold. The British soldier rubs his body with oiland grease before he dresses for the trenches. I hope that before longour men may do this also. It is a great protection. "

I have in front of me now a German soldier's fatigue cap, taken by oneof those men from a dead soldier who lay in front of the trench. 

It is a pathetic cap, still bearing the crease which showed how hefolded it to thrust it into his pocket. When his helmet irked him inthe trenches he was allowed to take it