"We've been under fire!"
But I was very angry. Coldly and quietly angry. I felt like that when I was ten years old and piloting my mother through the thick of the traffic between Guildhall and the Bank, and she broke from me and was all but run over. I don't quite know what I said to him, but I think I said he ought to be ashamed of himself. For it seems that Ursula Dearmer was with him.
I remembered how Ursula Dearmer's mother had come to me in the committee-room and asked me how near we proposed to go to the firing-line, and whether her daughter would be in any danger, and how I said, first of all, that there wasn't any use pretending that there wouldn't be danger, and that the chances were-and how the Commandant had intervened at that moment to assure her that danger there would be none. With a finger on the map of France and Belgium he traced the probable, the inevitable, course of the campaign; and in light, casual tones which allayed all anxiety, he explained how, as the Germans advanced upon any point, we should retire upon our base. As for the actual field-work, with one gesture he swept the whole battle-line into the distance, and you saw it as an infinitely receding tide that left its wrack strewn on a place of peace where the ambulance wandered at its will, secure from danger. The whole thing was done with such compelling and convincing enthusiasm that Ursula Dearmer's mother adopted more and more the humble attitude of a mere woman who has failed to grasp the conditions of modern warfare. Ursula Dearmer herself looked more docile than ever, though a little bored, and very sleepy.
And I remembered how when it was all over Ursula Dearmer's mother implored me, if there was any danger, to see that Ursula Dearmer was sent home, and how I promised that whatever happened Ursula Dearmer would be safe, clinching it with a frightfully sacred inner vow, and saying to myself at the same time what a terrible nuisance this young girl is going to be. I saw myself at the moment of parting, standing on the hearthrug, stiff as a poker with resolution, and saying solemnly, "I'll keep my word!"
And here was the Commandant informing me with glee that a shell had fallen and burst at Ursula Dearmer's feet.
He was so pleased, and with such innocent and childlike pleasure, that I hadn't the heart to tell him that there wasn't much resemblance between those spaces of naked peace behind the receding battle-line and the narrow streets of a bombarded village. I only said that I should write to Ursula Dearmer's mother and ask her to release me from my promise. He said I would do nothing of the kind. I said I would. And I did. And the poor Commandant left me, somewhat dashed, and not at all pleased with me.
It seems that the shell burst, not exactly at Ursula Dearmer's feet, but ten yards away from her. It came romping down the street with immense impetus and determination; and it is not said of Ursula Dearmer that she was much less coy in the encounter. She took to shell-fire "like a duck to water."
Dr. Bird told us this. Ursula Dearmer herself was modest, and claimed no sort of intimacy with the shell that waked her up. She was as nice as possible about it. But all the same, into the whole Corps (that part of it that had been left behind) there has crept a sneaking envy of her luck. I feel it myself. And if I feel it, what must Mrs. Torrence and Janet feel?
Mrs. Lambert, anyhow, has had nothing to complain of so far. Her husband took her to Alost in his motor-car; I mean the motor-car which is the property of his paper.
In the afternoon Mademoiselle F. called to take me to the Palais des Fêtes. We stopped at a shop on the way to buy the Belgian Red Cross uniform-the white linen overall and veil-which you must wear if you work among the refugees there.
Madame F. is very kind and very tired. She has been working here since early morning for weeks on end. They are short of volunteers for the service of the evening meals, and I am to work at the tables for three hours, from six to nine P.M. This is settled, and a young Red Cross volunteer takes me over the Palais. It is an immense building, rather like Olympia. It stands away from the town in open grounds like the Botanical Gardens, Regent's Park. It is where the great Annual Shows were held and the vast civic entertainments given. Miles of country round Ghent are given up to market-gardening. There are whole fields of begonias out here, brilliant and vivid in the sun. They will never be sold, never gathered, never shown in the Palais des Fêtes. It is the peasants, the men and women who tilled these fields, and their children that are being shown here, in the splendid and wonderful place where they never set foot before.
There are four thousand of them lying on straw in the outer hall, in a space larger than Olympia. They are laid out in rows all round the four walls, and on every foot of ground between; men, women and children together, packed so tight that there is barely standing-room between any two of them. Here and there a family huddles up close, trying to put a few inches between it and the rest; some have hollowed out a place in the straw or piled a barrier of straw between themselves and their neighbours, in a piteous attempt at privacy; some have dragged their own bedding with them and are lodged in comparative comfort. But these are the very few. The most part are utterly destitute, and utterly abandoned to their destitution. They are broken with fatigue. They have stumbled and dropped no matter where, no matter beside whom. None turns from his neighbour; none scorns or hates or loathes his fellow. The rigidly righteous bourgeoise lies in the straw breast to breast with the harlot of the village slum, and her innocent daughter back to back with the parish drunkard. Nothing matters. Nothing will ever matter any more.
They tell you that when darkness comes down on all this there is hell. But you do not believe it. You can see nothing sordid and nothing ugly here. The scale is too vast. Your mind refuses this coupling of infamy with transcendent sorrow. It rejects all images but the one image of desolation which is final and supreme. It is as if these forms had no stability and no significance of their own; as if they were locked together in one immense body and stirred or slept as one.
Two or three figures mount guard over this litter of prostrate forms. They are old men and old women seated on chairs. They sit upright and immobile, with their hands folded on their knees. Some of them have fallen asleep where they sit. They are all rigid in an attitude of resignation. They have the dignity of figures that will endure, like that, for ever. They are Flamands.
This place is terribly still. There is hardly any rustling of the straw. Only here and there the cry of a child fretting for sleep or for its mother's breast. These people do not speak to each other. Half of them are sound asleep, fixed in the posture they took when they dropped into the straw. The others are drowsed with weariness, stupefied with sorrow. On all these thousands of faces there is a mortal apathy. Their ruin is complete. They have been stripped bare of the means of life and of all likeness to living things. They do not speak. They do not think. They do not, for the moment, feel. In all the four thousand-except for the child crying yonder-there is not one tear.
And you who look at them cannot speak or think or feel either, and you have not one tear. A path has been cleared through the straw from door to door down the middle of the immense hall, a narrower track goes all round it in front of the litters that are ranged under the walls, and you are taken through and round the Show. You are to see it all. The dear little Belgian lady, your guide, will not let you miss anything. "Regardez, Mademoiselle, ces deux petites filles. Qu'elles sont jolies, les pauvres petites." "Voici deux jeunes mariés, qui dorment. Regardez l'homme; il tient encore la main de sa femme."
You look. Yes. They are asleep. He is really holding her hand. "Et ces quatre petits enfants qui ont perdu leur père et leur mère. C'est triste, n'est-ce pas, Mademoiselle?"
And you say, "Oui, Mademoiselle. C'est bien triste."
But you don't mean it. You don't feel it. You don't know whether it is "triste" or not. You are not sure that "triste" is the word for it. There are no words for it, because there are no ideas for it. It is a sorrow that transcends all sorrow that you have ever known. You have a sort of idea that perhaps, if you can ever feel again, this sight will be worse to remember than it is to see. You can't believe what you see; you are stunned, stupefied, as if you yourself had been crushed and numbed in the same catastrophe. Only now and then a face upturned (a face that your guide hasn't pointed out to you) surging out of this incredible welter of faces and forms, smites you with pity, and you feel as if you had received a lacerating wound in sleep.
Little things strike you, though. Already you are forgetting the faces of the two little girls and of the young husband and wife holding each other's hands, and of the four little children who have lost their father and mother, but you notice the little dog, the yellow-brown mongrel terrier, that absurd little dog which belongs to all nations and all countries. He has obtained possession of the warm centre of a pile of straw and is curled up on it fast asleep. And the Flemish family who brought him, who carried him in turn for miles rather than leave him to the Germans, they cannot stretch themselves on the straw because of him. They have propped themselves up as best they may all round him, and they cannot sleep, they are too...
