THE CELLAR-HOUSE OF PERVYSE
A Tale of Uncommon Things

From the Journals and Letters of the Baroness T'serclaes and
Mairi Chisholm
1917




Note

Of all the things told of the Great War surely this is the most
uncommon, that two women should have been at the front with the
Belgian Army almost from the beginning. That they should have
lived as the soldiers lived, caring for them, tending them, taking
cocoa and soup into the trenches and even to the outposts. And
this is what has been done by the two British ladies whose names
are on the title-page. Both young themselves, one very young, they
yet have mothered Belgian soldiers through their trials and made a
centre of light and comfort for the soldiers bereft of all that makes
life dear and often in agonized uncertainty as to where their wives,
mothers, or children might be. In March, 1915, a very stern decree
was passed by the allied armies at Paris to the effect that no women
should be allowed in the firing-line, but an exception was made in
the case of these two, mentioned by name, because they had
proved themselves. How did they begin? I have often been asked
that. The book answers.

What did they do? The book answers that too. They lived at first for
long months in a cellar twelve feet by ten, they slept on straw, and of
necessity used foul water from a ditch. As the village they were in
was under constant shell-fire, the chauffeurs, and sometimes
wounded soldiers, had to sleep in that cellar too. There was, of
course, no possibility of changing clothes; they lay down as they
were, and were often called up in the middle of the night to attend to
ghastly wounds. They had none of the appliances and
conveniences surgeons think necessary; there was the greatest
difficulty even in getting boiling water for sterilizing any instruments
which had to be used in first-aid. The air was heavy with the smell of
antiseptics and decayed matter and worse! Night after night the
guns roared before and behind-their own and the enemies'. There
was no minute night or day when swift death might not pounce upon
them. Their clothes were stained with soup and cocoa and smears
of blood, their hands got engrained with coarse work-washing,
cutting up, and peeling potatoes for the soup, potatoes which they
had often grubbed up from neighbouring farms under fire.

They sacrificed their hair, for it was impossible to retain long hair in
such conditions. Thrice they were shelled out and left without a roof
over their heads. When the cellar became uninhabitable they
removed to a house further up the village, which the Engineers
made up with sand-bags, but it was not very long before the
Germans got the range of this and smashed half of it down, burying
a row of young dead boys who had been brought in past aid and
laid out on the verandah. Then these indomitable women went over
to England; they lectured, they told the public of their work, and the
public responded. They came back with funds. Up to this time they
had paid entirely for themselves with the aid of private friends. They
built a wooden hut further back from the trenches, and they had not
been in it three days before enormous shells thundered around, and
there was nothing between their beloved wounded and death but a
roof of match-boarding, so they moved further back still. But they
could not rest there; it was at the trenches they were needed to
save the lives of those who were so overcome  by shock that to
carry them any distance over those smashed-up roads meant
death, whereas rest and warmth and care for even a few hours
gave them the strength to make a fight for their lives. So back the
two women went to the shattered village, now more desolate than
ever. With their own hands they piled up sand-bags, working at
night, going in from their further post after a heavy day's work with
the wounded and sick. Then they settled again in the village, and
there they still carry on the work.

But it has not been unrecognized, for King Albert had heard and
seen what they had done, how many lives they had saved, and how
they had inspired the worn soldiers with their own bright courage; so
he sent for them and pinned on their khaki tunics the Knights' Cross
of the Order of Leopold II., which carries with it the right to have the
Belgian soldiers present arms. He personally thanked them for all
they had endured. And reward came in another way, because Mrs.
Knocker, a young widow, met out there the young Baron Harold de
T'Serclaes belonging to one of the oldest Belgian families. It was
almost a case of love at first sight, and after the many difficulties
incidental to the bride and bridegroom's belonging to different
nations had been overcome, they were married, and both continue
to carry on their duties just the same. It is a wonderful tale.

That it has been written is due to the suggestion of Major A. A.
Gordon, M.V.O., who, since taking part in the siege of, and retreat
from, Antwerp, has gone backwards and forwards regularly from
England to within a few miles of Pervyse.

He had seen the Two in their posts from the days of the cellar at
Pervyse through their varied vicissitudes; he had seen Mrs. Knocker
(as she was then) standing with the skirt of her tunic holed with
shrapnel; he knew something of what she and her companion had
had to endure of dirt, discomfort, and actual want; he had known
what it meant to drive up the long straight road to Pervyse when the
shells hurtled around. Fully appreciating the splendour and romance
of this strange life lived so quietly and untheatrically from day to day
and month to month, he persuaded the Two to entrust him with their
journals and to let him have their home letters, so that the tale which
they had written down quite simply as a record for themselves in the
years to come might be made accessible also to others. It is
doubtful if they would have allowed it to be done but for their earnest
devotion to the wounded Belgian soldiers, and the hope that the
book might inspire interest in them in the hearts of a wider circle
than their own personal appeal could reach. So the matter came
into my hands in the shape of little fat, mud-stained books, written in
pencil at odd moments, sometimes even under fire as one or the
other sat in a car waiting to convey wounded men to a hospital. As
one of them says in one of these journals, "that's the hardest part of
all; it requires nerve to drive an ambulance steadily under fire, but to
sit still doing nothing with the shells bursting around takes it out of
you worst of all."

I should like to emphasize the fact that these journals have not been
in any way touched up before they came to me; they were just as
they had been written. Plain, bald facts are put down simply, find
because of their very simplicity they carry conviction as to the
writers' single-mindedness. Not once throughout is there any
personal complaint, any whining; these journals are not used as
safety-valves for feeling. After the record of some terrible
experience, the comments, if any, are always, "How brave these
soldiers are!" "What a terrible time for the poor soldiers!" Never for
themselves, the writers.

The facts are so astounding that they need no dressing. My part has
been merely that of a recorder, running the two parallel journals
together and omitting repetitions or details too small to be of general
interest. But I am sure that among the multitude of books written of
what has happened at the front there is not one that will re longer in
the minds of those who read them than this of the heroic Two of
Pervyse.

G. E. MITTON. September, 1916.





Contents


Chapter

I. The Start
II. In The Thick Of A Battle
III. The Field Of Mercy
IV. The Retreat
V. On The Road
VI. Gipsy And The Major
VII. A Hideous Night Drive
VIII. The Great Idea
IX. The Cellar-House
X. Varied Life In Pervyse
XI. The End Of 1914
XII. Waiting For Attack
XIII. Shelled Out
XIV. The Steenkerke Hut
XV. Enter Romance






The Cellar-House Of Pervyse




Chapter I
The Start



I shall never forget them as I saw them first, a little oddly mixed
group. They might have been a party of Cook's tourists going for a
week-end across the Channel as they stood there in Victoria
Station; but it was more than a week-end trip they had to face. At
first I thought that some of them were merely seeing the others off,
especially the lady with cherries in her hat. In fact, there were only
two who looked real sportswomen, and they were Mrs. Knocker and
Mairi Chisholm. They were dressed in big khaki overcoats, but as
these were flung open one could see the high boots and tunics
underneath, and there was no manner of doubt that they were
wearing knickerbocker khaki suits in London! The others were
slightly scandalized-one could see it in their furtive glances, and the
way they obviously avoided looking just where the khaki knickers
were. We are so funny, we English; there is nothing so deeply
ingrained in us as a horror of any sort of attitudinizing, and we are so
much afraid of it that we will not get ready for the moment lest the
moment should not come. It was little more than a month then since
war had broken out, and still we were rather shamefaced about it,
most of us; even the recruits felt a little foolish doing those queer
exercises in public, as if they might be ridiculous and not really
wanted at the front after all. Thus, of course, it was difficult for these
gentle ladies, who wore correct costumes and picture hats, to think
there could really be any need for stepping right outside the
conventional lines, at all events until they got to the war zone. The
question how it was to be done afterwards had not come within their
horizon.

Then there were the men of the party. One, a most heroic padre,
had gone in for the whole thing. He never considered for a moment
whether he looked ridiculous or not; he was a most single-minded,
upright gentleman, as he proved many a time afterwards; but the
clergy are not as a rule notorious for the cut of their clothes, and he
had not been able to afford the expense of an officer's khaki suit, so
his was a ready-made rough Tommy's costume, serviceable
enough, and it fell into the picture very completely when he "got
there."

Men's clothes have this advantage over women's, they are at all
events more practical, and the two clever London doctors who were
going out for the sake of the experience looked very comfortable in
their loose-fitting tweeds-the suits they wore when golfing at the
week-ends. As for the leader of the party himself, well, he was
different from anyone; he never had cared a button about his
clothes, and would have handled wounded men in a frock-coat and
top-hat without a care in the world. His hat was as often on wrong
side as not, for his excessive carelessness about dress seemed to
culminate in his headgear, and a cheap cyclist's check cap would
do for him as well as a Belgian officer's gold-tasselled cap. What
matter? He was a visionary, full of enthusiasm, and but for him this
group of people, some of whom at least were to distinguish
themselves in self-sacrificing and noble work with the Belgian Army,
would never have been able to go out at all. That the doctor did not
combine in himself opposite virtues was no fault of his-who does?
He had a positively heroic disregard for detail; it was all one to him if
his corps consisted of two members or of fifteen, as it actually did. I
verily believe if I, a Londoner, with no experience whatever of
medicine or surgery, had stepped forward at the minute the engine-
whistle sounded, and said, "May I also come with you as a member
of your corps?" he would have hauled me into the gathering speed
of the train by one arm, and said, "Dear friend, yes, certainly; by all
means!"

It was characteristic of him that he had managed to start the corps
by a fluke. He had seen Mrs. Knocker on a motor-cycle doing
despatch work for the Women's Emergency Corps, and with a
stroke of genius had recognized that she was the one woman who
could help him in the ambulance work he burned to do in Belgium.
He was quite right about that. A more highly efficient woman could
hardly have been found. Most women do difficult technical things
now, but few did them before the war. Mrs. Knocker was a fully
trained nurse, an excellent mechanic and chauffeur; she spoke
French and German, and with all that it hardly needs adding she
was a capable woman; but the genius of Dr. Munro lay in
recognizing it, because she doesn't look like this, or at any rate not
like the stereotyped notion of a woman who can do all these things.
She is a little above medium height, very slightly built, with a
beautiful profile, clear complexion, and singularly bright hazel eyes.
When you look at her eyes you see at once that she is full of
sensibility and very easily hurt-in fact, she is the kind of woman who
would really take it to heart if, in a great emergency, you swore at
her! She minds very much what her relations to her fellow-beings
are, and this constitutes just the difference between the woman who
can communicate vital energy to wounded men so as to set them
on their feet again and the woman who, however efficient as a
nurse she may be, remains outside the personality of her patients.

To Mrs. Knocker Dr. Munro had confided the choosing of the rest of
the corps, and the first member of it she had selected was a capital
Scottish girl called Mairi Chisholm. Though Mairi hailed from
Inverness originally, she had recently lived in Devon near Mrs.
Knocker. They had been friends before the war, and ridden motor-
cycles together, and it was shrewd Mairi who had christened her
friend "Gipsy," a name which suits her down to the ground, and is so
much more suitable than her own hard married name (which,
however, she no longer possesses) that I shall henceforth use it.

When the war began Gipsy and Mairi had immediately come up to
London and offered their services to the War Office as despatch-
riders. You see, Gipsy has vision, and though at that time the idea
that women could do men's work seemed utterly ludicrous to most
people, she had the courage of her convictions. The War Office, of
course, was too dignified to scoff, but its contemptuous indifference
was quite as bad. After many hopeless attempts the two friends
gave it up and got a job as despatch-riders for the Women's
Emergency Corps, which also had the faculty of seeing ahead. Mairi
had had no training as a nurse, and was only eighteen, but she had
the fundamental qualities of balance, common sense, and loyalty,
and so, when the idea of the corps was mooted, Gipsy chose her at
once to belong to it. Mairi had no money, but possessed with a
burning fervour to help, she sold her beloved motor-cycle to provide
the funds for her expenses. The next selection was a golden-haired
American lady, also untrained, but very willing and eager; she
turned out to be a beautiful pianist. Miss May Sinclair, the novelist,
heard of the project and decided to go too, not as an ambulance
helper, but to be useful in any capacity. She offered herself as
secretary, and the difficulties she surmounted during her three
weeks in Belgium have been ably told in her book A Journal of
Impressions in Belgium. When the party was thus nearly made up
Dr. Munro accepted Lady Dorothie Feilding, whose name became
very well known in connection with her work for the corps. The
British Red Cross had scoffed at this amateur band, but the Belgian
Red Cross was willing enough to accept their useful services; and
when the British one found this out it actually rose at length to giving
them two cars, which necessitated the addition of two working
chauffeurs to the party, and furthermore it eventually gave them
their passages to Belgium. Thus when they set out from Victoria for
Ostend on that momentous day at the end of September, 1914, the
corps had a field of useful work open to them.

There was not one heart among them that was not thrilled as they
steamed across the sea amid numerous ships of our own, which
gave a cheer when they recognized the Red Cross. All that lay
ahead was utterly unknown even to the most experienced of the
party, for what likeness does the ordinary healing work in sickness
bear to the violent wounds and unnatural smashes of the human
body in the grip of war?

Antwerp had not then fallen; the Germans had certainly got a grip
on Belgium, but it was not a strangle-hold. The horrible monster was
advancing, reaching out with his claws to deal red death to soldier
and civilian alike if they lay in his path; and this incomparable little
company of gallant people, with a reckless disregard of danger and
a divine carelessness as to how they were to be supported,
advanced across the water to meet the monster and to rescue from
his jaws, it might be, "two legs or a piece of an ear."

In September, 1913, the crude blues and reds and yellows of the
bathing-machines on the yellow plage at Ostend had been almost
lost amid the still more gaily-hued paddlers and merry-makers who
considered that to dip one toe in the water was bathing sufficiently
and delightfully. In September, 1914, the bathing-machines were still
there, but the crowd was gone. The melancholy-looking crudely
painted wooden erections stood up forlornly like huge fungi, and no
one used them.

Until a day or so before the ambulance corps arrived in Ostend the
place had been fairly full, certainly, but with a different crowd from
the gay crowd of holiday-makers. No one believed that the Germans
would ever get so far as this, but the shadow of the Hun was over
the land, rising up ominously on the eastern horizon, and the chill of
it cut off the gaiety from a nation which, in one of its sections, was
the most pleasure-loving on earth. Then, only the night before, a
message had come from the Germans in the shape of a bomb
dropped on the principal hotel adjoining the railway-station. A great
exodus of the people occurred at once. The bomb had fallen in the
garden and there made a great hole, and one of the first things the
party of English people did on arrival was to go out to look at it with
awe and excitement--a wonderful thing, a hole made by a bomb, the
first any of them had seen! Most of them were to gain so much
familiarity with shell-holes that they were heartily sickened of them.
"Shells, shells, shells!" writes Gipsy in one of her home letters later.
"How I wish I could never see them again!"

Except for the hole, it was certainly not much like war-time in
Ostend, for the huge hotel, with its luxurious bath-rooms provided
en suite to every bedroom, was still just as usual; but the message
that all lights were to be out by 8.30 gave a touch of novelty--it was
long before lights had been lowered in England.

The next morning the members of the corps awoke to face a wild
scramble and much running to and fro, arising from lack of
adequately-thought-out detail.

The party were to go to Ghent, to make their headquarters there for
the present. But how were they to get there? There were two cars
certainly, one a 42 h.p. Daimler, with pneumatic tyres, for passenger
service, and the other a 40 h.p. Fiat, with solid tyres, suitable for
carrying baggage. There were the cars and there were the
chauffeurs, but where was the motive power--the petrol? No one had
thought of this, apparently, and at first, it was suggested that as
petrol seemed unprocurable in Ostend, the cars should be put on a
truck and taken by rail to Ghent; but after a weary delay even this
was found to be impracticable, for the cars, being very large,
refused to go on the trucks. At length, after endless skirmishing up
and down and a good deal of irritation, due to pent-up excitement
among the members of the party, the military authorities lent them
enough petrol to carry them on to Bruges, and about 1.30 they got
off, after what seemed an interminable morning, for they had been
up by 6.

The road to Bruges runs almost due east, straight into the jaws of
that devouring monster which, like the dragon of the old fairy-stories,
was scorching up the country-side with his breath. The road, like all
the main roads in Belgium, had stones in the middle, the pav
sloping down a little at each side, and it was bordered by a ditch and
a line of poplar-trees, straight and sentinel-like. There were very few
signs of war. Even the guns could not be heard; the ambulance
corps motored, as many a hundred parties had motored before
them, in perfect serenity; and if it had not been for the sentries
whom they had to pass occasionally when passports were
demanded, it might have seemed an ordinary holiday. They were all
very innocent of what it was they were going to face.

How little did those two bright-eyed girls-for Gipsy herself was little
more than a girl-foresee the weeks of cramped quarters, hardly a
minute without danger, the horrors of sights and sounds beyond
thought, the horrors of want of baths and change of clothes, the
horrors of creeping things they had never yet encountered, the icy
cold, the continual strain, the rough food and lack of all the
refinements of civilization !

As they ran through the villages, little children in wooden clogs and
women with apple-red faces or wrinkled nut-brown skins, came out
to watch and smile and wave. The very sight of the cars brought
hope to them, for were not these British the vanguard of those
powerful forces which were coming to save Belgium? Poor souls!
They were later to know what German rule meant, with grinding
torture when the iron-shod heel of the Hun pressed down upon their
daily lives, and screwed as they writhed; for all the good-will in the
world could not manufacture troops in time to stop the Hun before
he reached them.

In the generosity of her heart Gipsy showered the cigarettes she
had with her on every man she saw; but Mairi, with a characteristic
touch, held back hers, knowing that when her friend's ran out and
she had no more there would be woe and wailing.

Bruges looked totally undisturbed. The glorious belfry reared itself in
all its delicate glory, straight and slender, peeping over the roofs to
greet them as the cars thumped over the vile pav. A woman with a
little cross-over shawl wrapped round her shoulders was delivering
milk from a tiny cart drawn by a patient square-built dog, just as she
had done every day for years. The cows must be milked and people
must have milk-and there, well, the Germans wouldn't come to
Bruges, they would be stopped long before that! It was difficult even
for educated people to picture beforehand the destruction and
misery which swept like an avalanche on these peaceful towns, and
much more so for the uneducated, who had never been any-where
else, and to whom these towns were the world.

Bruges is encircled by a canal, and the cars had to cross it to enter,
and then ran on to the Grand Place, pulling up before the Post
Office. A Belgian trooper was standing outside, and the untried
French of the party was quite sufficient to make him understand that
petrol was the chief need; he came to show where it might be
bought, and then, with no further delay, out and on they went to
Ghent. They were all so incredibly keen to get there, to fling
themselves into the red zone of war, to begin to bind up wounds,
that the intense stillness of this flat country was almost unendurable.

In the flatness of the calmest sea there is movement and ceaseless
stir; the sea is for ever whispering some tale to those who have ears
to hear. The flatness of the prairie is full of anticipation; no one
knows what may not be revealed as each roll of the land is
surmounted. The flatness of the desert conceals an infinite mystery,
for no human eye, unless it be that of a Bedouin, can sort out into
definiteness the shining gradations of lilac and grey and biscuit
colour. But all these are as nothing to the flatness of parts of
Belgium, which merely waits. And the numb tension of it settled on
the hearts of those who were longing for action.

Ghent was reached at about 5.30, and here indeed, everything
woke up vividly; about a thousand people were collected in the
Grand Place shouting and waving; upper windows were opened and
many leaned out; handkerchiefs were flourished, and the cars had
to go cautiously in the crowded streets, making a kind of triumphal
progress. The whole aspect of the city was as if it had been eagerly
awaiting just these two little carloads of English.

There were two military hospitals in Ghent, and it was to the second,
which had received about a hundred wounded men, that the English
ambulance was attached. It was really the Flandria Palace Hotel,
and the ambulance members were to live there and to have their
meals in a great stately room, waited on by two orderlies, Jean and
Max, little Belgian soldiers who had been to the front and were
convalescing from wounds. No hardship here. For one moment in
the evening a thrill of excitement burst out, when the party heard
that some of them might be wanted to go out to fetch some
wounded, and thus would come in contact with the real thing, and
"begin." But it was a false alarm; only one wounded man came in3
and he was brought by a horse ambulance. Mairi, indeed, went to
see him, thinking in her young zeal she could not begin too soon;
she was rewarded by a sight of the bullet which had just been taken
from his leg.

The next morning all sorts of tiresome formalities about passports
were again necessary, and up and down the crowded streets they
passed. Broad clean streets they are-or were--with electric trams
running along them, a very different place from sleepy Bruges!
Canals run here and there throughout the whole town, cutting it up
into slices and chunks, and at almost every street corner there is a
view of a quaint bridge and some motionless barges. Down one of
the narrow back streets an old woman was sitting by her wooden
door; she wore a frilled granny-cap and worked away with heavily
knuckled fingers upon a piece of the pillow lace by which she
earned her bread. At her feet, jumping endlessly up and down the
sunk step of the doorway, was a hideous tiny tortoise-shell kitten,
quite pleased with itself and its prospects in life; it would have been
hard to say which was the most unmoved by the gathering of the
great cataclysm, the kitten of a few weeks, or the old grandmother
who had long left behind the romance of her life. Possibly her
grandsons were now among the hundreds of sturdily built, ruddy-
cheeked young men who faced the terrific blasts of the German
artillery.

In the Bguinage de Mont St. Armand lived nuns, in immense
flapping white headgear. For years they had been within those
sheltering walls, praying and fasting and doing a little lace-making, 
and now they were soon to be suddenly thrust into a world running
red with blood, with every vestige of the curtain concealing the fierce
realities of life torn away. Not far from their wall, which was still intact
and seemed to radiate something of the somnolence from within, as
bricks radiate the heat when the sun has passed on, stood a
German car, captured and brought in by the great armoured car that
stood beside it--a conscious conqueror. The German car shrieked of
the force that had been used in its destruction, which had riddled its
radiator with holes, smashed its screen to powder, and crushed its
vital power. Across the twisted steering-wheel were smears of half-
dried blood, and wavering over the driving-seat hung a torn and
ghastly rag.

The next two days were dreadfully trying to Gipsy Knocker and Mairi
Chisholm, for here they were " on the spot," but, as they phrased it,
"nothing doing." They could not help in nursing the wounded, for
there were plenty of nurses--besides, that was not their job; their
part was to go out to the firing-line to fetch the wounded and render
first-aid, and bring them in, but no one had sent for them and they
had no permission to go.

They visited the refugees who had come in from the country-side,
escaping from under the fringe of the great cloud that rolled ever
westward. There were as many as eight thousand at that time in
Ghent, and they had been housed, by a strange irony, in the Palais
des Ftes! Straw had been heaped up round some of the halls, and
here they lay, whole families together, robbed by shock of all power
of initiative, stunned by the earthquake that had flung them up and
out of the places where they had lived their simple lives. All links
with the past, every treasured household remembrance, had been
wrenched from them, and the future was an utter blank. Something
of that bewilderment, amounting to agony, which overtakes one
occasionally when one awakes after a deep dream and cannot
regain the everyday self was theirs in terrible measure. In the
spacious storey above mothers were even now bringing forth
babies, with no country, no place in the world, no prospects.

The feeding of all these people was an enormous task, and it is to
the credit of Ghent that it was so well tackled. Some of the
ambulance party helped, cutting up huge chunks of bread, setting
out bowls of soup, and working till their backs ached, on the
principle of doing anything that might be useful; but even this was
denied them, for they were recalled by authority, for fear they might
carry germs to the wounded when they handled them.




Chapter II
In The Thick Of A Battle



By September 29, three days after they had arrived in Ghent,
Gipsy's vital energy had got too much for her, and she had to do
something or explode; so she found a job in driving the car of the
Belgian Colonel, whose own chauffeur had disappeared. She fell
into this niche, which fitted her to a nicety, in the simplest and most
feminine way possible, because she walked up to look at the
Belgian trenches outside the town, and found the Colonel minus a
coat button. Of course she sewed it on, and followed up the obvious
opening by offering to fill the place as chauffeur. Though the Belgian
Army was not nearly so much swathed about with red tape as some
of the older countries, yet it was rather an innovation that the
Colonel should accept a woman as chauffeur in war-time, and
therefore certain formalities had to be faced. These were got
through with the speed born of necessity, and the following day
Gipsy took the Colonel on his rounds to various outposts, picking up
a wounded man on the way. She had coffee with her new employer
before he went on to the actual front, and she concluded that he
was "a dear, so kind and considerate;" he had not taken any
advantage of the unusual position.

Already it was beginning to be apparent that there was a fatal lack of
organization in the ambulance corps. The men part of it were
rushing hither and thither bravely enough, but in a most haphazard
manner, wasting much precious petrol, and even joy-rides were not
unknown, whereas much real ability and energy was running to
waste.

Various signs of military activity were to be seen through Ghent from
time to time. Some field-guns caused a diversion, and when
numbers of sturdy plucky Belgian troops marched through, the lady
members of the corps gave them cigarettes to express that
sympathy which for the moment they seemed to have no other way
of expressing.

The post of chauffeur, after all, took up very little time, and even this
outlet was blocked, for Dr. Munro, rather naturally, objected to one
of his corps being taken off for such work, and it had to be stopped.
Gipsy and Mairi therefore amused themselves playing games with
the convalescent soldiers, but all the while brain and heart were
under a terrific strain; there is no strain quite so bad as waiting in the
certainty that any moment you may be called upon to put forth all
your resources and face scenes so horrible that you may fail, for
even the best of us never knows his calibre until tried. "We
mouched around," says Mairi miserably. "I felt bored with life.
Another day of waiting! One must have patience beyond
everything!" Then there swam into their ken the gay and gallant
figure of a young Belgian officer; he was slim and tall, with fair hair,
showing up in contrast with his well-fitting dark green uniform. They
nicknamed him "Gilbert the Filbert." At that time he was with the
Voluntary Cyclists Corps, and used to go out at nights on his
motorcycle to pick off German outposts; he had accounted for forty-
eight Germans in the weeks preceding, so his presence was
inspiriting. He was to be very closely associated with them in their
work, but at the time he was merely a passer-by.

The first serious work came when the trainloads of wounded men
had to be met at the station at any hour of the night, and conveyed
to the hospitals. In the dark and icy-cold station the friends waited
hour after hour for the trains which never came when they were
expected. They snatched hurried moments trying to rest in a railway
carriage, but the cold was so intense that sleep was out of the
question. Sometimes they talked to the men in charge of the solid,
heart-cheering British omnibuses, straight from London, having their
shiny sides painted with Clapham, Cricklewood, and other names
which seemed more lovable and attractive than London suburbs
ever did before. There was a dramatic moment when a trainload of
terribly smashed and maimed Belgians came in at one platform of
the station, just as a trainload of self-confident, clean, fresh British
Tommies was going out from another. The little Belgians had not as
yet seen such assurances of help, and one and all, exhausted and
faint as they were, cheered and waved their poor bandaged hands;
while, as the other train began to move, the Tommies looked at
them in pleased shyness, not in the least knowing how to show they
appreciated the welcome. "Give them a cheer, boys!" shouted
Gipsy, letting loose the spring at the psychological moment, and the
resounding shout in response echoed through the vaults of the
gloomy station roof.

The girls worked with the strength of ten; when none of the men of
the party were available they even did the heavy lifting, raising the
dead weight of unconscious or helpless men on stretchers. They
worked sometimes right through the night, so that when they got
back to their quarters in the morning there was only time to wash
and be ready again for what the day should bring forth, for they
might be wanted at any moment. "I never felt so googly and utterly
played out in my life," says Mairi after one such night. Still, they had
comfortable rooms to go back to, and good food when they wanted
it; this was child's-play to what came afterwards. The waiting, which
had seemed so interminable to their eager hearts strung up to
expectation, really endured for only a few days, and they soon
began to range around the outlying villages to find wounded men.
By the beginning of October they had learnt many things. They had
seen the Belgians working busily at digging trenches, in absolute
silence, so as not to attract the Germans, who were only a hundred
yards away. They had run along in the open, expecting any moment
to be noticed and made a target for shells. They had had the most
discouraging of all experiences, that of seeing their allies obliged to
retreat. In one place they passed through one of those experiences
which remain like a hurt on the heart. Fifty men had been left to
guard the retreat of the rest, left to what was almost certain death.
Theirs to hold up the flood-tide so long as they might before going
under. There was a look on the faces of these men seen only on the
faces of the dead who have died in peace. There was no
uncertainty, no disquietude. They awaited their fate as if they had
already met it, not lightly or discounting what it meant, but with the
calm willingness of those who had seen all they loved in the world
swept away. The clear blue eyes of every rough soldier had in them
something of the light that comes from a vision of the beyond. There
was no faltering, but no braggart conceit; they were invincible alive
or dead.

And the fate that descended on them was not left only to the
imagination of those who perhaps might have found it difficult to
imagine, having had no previous experience of such things. For a
few days later Gipsy, going out with some of the men of the
ambulance, came upon what was left of just such another group, at
Nazareth, not far from Zele. Twenty-six military police holding an
outpost had been surrounded by about three hundred Germans,
who had acted according to their kind and passed on.

The Belgians had resisted to the death, and the whole twenty-six lay
there, pitched about in various attitudes. They had been shot at by a
ring of their foes at a range of from ten to fifteen yards, but that was
not all. Even this finished slaughter had not satiated the Germans'
stomach for blood, and they had deliberately set to work to mutilate
and rob the dead foe. That tiny plot of grass was rusty with blood.
Every face was smashed in except that of the Captain, who had
been shot through the heart and left as he was, to be identified,
possibly with the cool intention of showing that the leader had not
escaped. From the others everything had been stolen-boots,
purses, stockings, and other clothes--so that the dead were nearly
naked, and even their identification discs had been removed.

One of the first times Gipsy and Mairi were actually under fire was
on October 5, and it was at Berleare, a little village about four miles
west of Termonde and a good way east of Ghent. The account is
best told in Gipsy's own simple wording, taken from one of her
letters home, which was afterwards reproduced in a local paper:

"We went through busy lines of cavalry, and all the way along the
firing got louder and louder."

"We ran into Berleare about 9.30 a.m., and about 9.45 a big shell
fell on a neighbouring house and shattered the roof. I was able to
get a large piece. While we were standing listening to the fearful
noise of shell and rifle fire, the order came through that there were
wounded at Appels to be fetched. Off we went, and we found that
we were bound to leave the ambulance close to the main road and
walk with the stretchers, as we had to go toward the river, and the
Germans were the other side. We had to walk about three miles,
and then came to the river (Dendre). The river was, I suppose,
about fifty yards wide, with a high trench built on either side. We had
to creep, bent double, all along the side, until we came to these
wounded men. I will try and explain the position. The river bank had
been highly trenched, and there was a pathway along the side of the
trench, about five yards wide. There was a steep bank descent, and
at the bottom a boggy water-meadow country, with only a small foot
pathway, raised out of the water, across each field. At 2 p.m. it
began to rain heavily, and it was difficult keeping one's feet on the
muddy, wet ground, as it was thought safer to walk on the bottom of
the bank in the water."

"So our little band trudged on with four damp stretchers and our
heavy box of dressings. At last, lying on the soaking grass and wet
through, we discovered a Belgian Tommy almost exhausted and
terribly wounded; his right foot carried away by shrapnel and also
shot badly in the back. We did what we could for him, but we could
only put him on a damp stretcher and leave him in charge of
someone while we went on. No talking was allowed, as sounds
carry over the river. All this time the shells were whizzing over our
heads and rifle-fire was heard all round."

"We crept along the bank, slipping and falling, until we saw on the
river pathway, just behind the trench, the uniform of a Belgian Major.
He was badly shot in the thigh, and had to be carefully attended. It
was terribly difficult work, as the German patrol spotted us on the
other side of the river, and it was not a pleasant moment. If you can
imagine us exactly between the two firing-lines, you have some idea
of our position. You can imagine those big shells whizzing over our
heads, and with lives to save, it was not a moment to laugh. We had
to carry the Major practically along the ground--that is, we had to be
bent nearly double, so that our heads were below the level of the
river trench. I wonder if anyone can realize what it means. I only ask
them to put a heavy grown man on a stretcher and attempt to carry
him by bending double; it is a terribly difficult and exhausting
proceeding, and all the time that awful heavy fire. And it was getting
so dark that it was hard to see. Suddenly everything was lit up by
the firing of some houses in Berleare by the Germans."

"We nearly got lost on the way home. We had to tramp over the
fields those three miles back to rejoin the ambulances, resting every
fifty yards to change arms and bearers. I shall never forget the
evening. We could not light a match on account of being watched
by the Germans. But we managed to find our ambulance and get
the men home at last. How plucky these little Belgians are!"

To this account it may be added that the danger of getting back to
Berleare was much emphasized by the great dykes full of water to
be crossed somehow, and that the cheeriness of the whole
expedition was enhanced by a steady downpour of rain.

One day came the news that Antwerp had been evacuated. Even if
they had not heard it they would have known it by the flood of
fugitives which poured into Ghent. The roads were choked by them,
men and women and children, piled on carts or dragging
handbarrows, some, who had lost all they loved--children, husbands,
wives, or mothers, without much prospect of ever again discovering
them--were still clinging grimly and quite unconsciously to a tawdry
ornament or some such trifle, snatched up automatically and
gripped with the grip that death does not loosen. Out of all this
welter of horror one or two scenes stand out by reason of the
pathetic touch. An old woman of the working classes was conveying
a small cart dragged by a dog; in the cart sat two wee babes,
probably her grandchildren. The dog had been wounded, for his
fore-paw was bleeding, and he limped along painfully, but with great
determination and full consciousness of his immense responsibility.
Every now and then he turned his brown eyes on his mistress, as if
asking permission, and then sank down on the roadside to lick his
paw, while the stream of amazingly mixed traffic swept by on each
side of him. The old granny looked at him mutely, but did not hurry
him; she knew that in him lay the sole chance of her babies
reaching safety, for she was too old and weak to carry them. If the
dog failed they would die, and therefore she waited with feeble
resignation until he himself, without being urged, took up the collar-
work of his little living load and staggered on.

It was the sense of personal isolation which struck one most in
these crowds. In normal life if one falls out by the way there are
always any number of healthy and well-to-do folk to give a hand; but
here, where each tiny group was tried to the utmost in struggling up
out of their own avalanches of misfortune, there was no one who,
however willing, could help. It was sink or swim for each family or
individual, alone.

Most of the people in this crowd were Flemings, and they are a
curious race. Nothing seems to disturb them. As they tramped along
in hundreds it was rare to see a woman in tears. They seemed to
accept the inevitable with a stoical patience; no questions were
asked, no complaints made, and there was certainly not the least
sign of panic. They trudged along, scarcely paying any attention to
the troops they met, or those that passed them marching, also in
retreat. Their absolute lack of emotion was almost uncanny; their
faces were unnaturally calm. To an outsider it appeared as if it might
be the calm of un-intelligence, but the look of pain in the eyes of
some of them contradicted that theory. The Two could not help
asking, "What lies behind that mask of indifference? Are there any
feelings there at all?" It is difficult for one of another race to
understand the Flamand. Is he only stupid, or is there a lack of
frankness in his nature which forbids one to trust him entirely? Most
of these people were agriculturists--the Flamand does not take kindly
to mechanical work. These strong, thick-set men and women looked
what they were, farm-labourers born and bred, without any streak of
the vivacity of their fellow-countrymen the Walloons.

One day a message was brought to the ambulance corps that there
was a wounded officer awaiting rescue in a shattered house at 
Lokeren, then on the very furthest fringe of the Belgian territory, up
against the German lines. On the way out indeed, the ambulance in
which Gipsy was, passed part of the Belgian Army in retreat. But
this did not deter the party; on they went past those stained and
worn men who were still unconquered and as resolute in retreat as
in advance. Some of the last of them stopped a minute and pointed
out the house where the wounded man was to be found, before
they hurried after their comrades, and were lost in that dull-coloured
mass of muddy clothes and torn uniforms. The place was a little
cottage, which had received some battering, but was still
comparatively whole; it looked utterly deserted. With tense
expectation the rescuers pushed open the door, and stopped for a
moment to get used to the gloom; there was a horribly eerie sound
ringing through the emptiness, a drip, drip, steady and unexplained,
like the drip of a kitchen tap. Then the cause was revealed, for on
the table lay an officer, a young man in the prime of life, in a
beautiful new uniform with brightly polished buttons and stars
gleaming, and as he lay there his blood dropped slowly and steadily
on to the floor, draining away his life. He was beyond help.

As the party left the house the German forces poured in at the other
end of the village.

However, the ambulances had already picked up three other
wounded soldiers, and they felt their perilous dash into danger had
been worth while. When they were almost clear of the houses on
the way back a blind man came slowly groping towards them, and
they stopped for him, though they knew that the Germans were right
behind them. He advanced, but his movements were slow, and he
had only placed one foot on the step when a burst of rifle-fire told
them that they were fully in range, and were being deliberately made
a target of. It was a choice between the life of one civilian and three
wounded soldiers, and they decided for the latter, and went off at full
speed. It is, however, satisfactory to hear that the blind man was
afterwards brought in safely by an armoured car.

The party had hardly returned to Ghent when a call came for them
to go to Melle, a little village about six miles off on the main road
running southeast from Ghent. Here the Two were to have one of
the greatest experiences of their lives--one of those experiences
which scores a deep mark across consciousness, so that the "after"
can never again be quite as the "before."

When they arrived at Melle at about 8 o'clock at night they were told
by soldiers who were dodging round the houses that the main street
was "cleared for action," and that they must on no account go there;
so the ambulance was drawn up in a side-street right in the heart of
the battle, for close behind it was the Belgian artillery. Wounded
men soon began to require aid, and the car was quickly filled and
ran back to Ghent, to return again just as the Germans made a rush
and swept down the main street. Unimaginable uproar and
confusion resulted. Shells were not actually bursting in the town,
because neither side could be sure of not hitting their own men, but
the artillery were hard at work sky-rocketing their missiles at one
another overhead to prevent reinforcements coming up, and in
among the houses a perfect storm of bullets hissed like deadly hail,
rebounding off the houses or lodging in the crevices of the
woodwork. It cannot have been given to many women, especially
those of another race than the combatants, to have been in the
thick of such a battle.

The French marines were helping the Belgians, and both together
were resisting in a desperate fight, the most deadly fighting of all,
hand-to-hand combats hemmed in by houses. It was quite dark, for
there was no moon, and all around the ambulance party were little
groups of French marines awaiting the word of command to spring
into action. Some of them brought up a stretcher, whispering about
the bless who was on it, hit in the leg. Groping to feel the horrible
wound, Gipsy leant over him and began bandaging, and then some
inertness made her aware she could do nothing. At her request a
match was struck, and she saw her surmise was true, the man was
already dead. Then there were sudden shouts and the jangle of field
equipment and a hideous scuffle, and all in the dark, right around
the car, Belgians and French and Germans inextricably mixed in
bayonet-fighting swept past. The car held already one badly
wounded man, and it was about time to move, so when the tense
moment was past they worked their way out of the town to go back.
But in doing so they naturally came under shell-fire, and hardly had
they started than shells burst within fifty yards of them, crashing into
the ground and exploding with volumes of sickening smoke, leaving
great pits.

II was mere touch-and-go whether one would not land on the top of
the ambulance and exterminate the whole party, but they escaped
injury as by a miracle, and arriving at the hospital, left their precious
burden and actually returned once more through the deadly fire-
zone. The scene had changed; the combined Belgians and French
had thrust back the invaders, and the town was saved, the line
being where it had been before. Perhaps the most remarkable
feature of the whole episode was the coolness of Mairi. This girl of
eighteen, who had so little experience to prepare her, had been
under fire the whole afternoon and through this awful turmoil; and in
her diary, written with no intention of anyone ever seeing it, but
merely as a personal record, she writes: "It was most interesting; the
shrapnel was screaming overhead the whole time--a most
fascinating sound."

Gipsy's comment is: "We got more than we wanted: we nearly lost
the ambulance. Mairi and I were on the step under heavy fire, and I
saw a German soldier with a good eye taking deliberate aim at us."

One would feel instinctively that he had a good eye!

She too, ends up on a note of exultation: "It was a wonderful and
grand day, and I would not have missed it for anything."




Chapter III
The Field Of Mercy



In the midst of this whirlpool of madness and misery Melle was
inhabited. There were old men and women and children whose
homes were in those shot-torn houses, and they had cowered there
while the shells hurtled overhead and the piercing bullets flew like
arrows. After this fearful day there were a larger number of wounded
civilians than usual. The nuns at the convent had their hands quite
full. The dull dreamy current of their lives had dashed into a vortex,
and in it they had had to stretch out hands of help and pity to those
who were drowning beside them. As Gipsy came into the convent
next morning, she was overwhelmed with pity at the spectacle of the
wounded people there. Somehow it is so much worse to see
civilians wounded than soldiers; soldiers, at all events, know what
they are out for, but these poor sheep. She stepped over to one little
girl of about eight, who was horribly torn in the stomach and lay
gazing wide-eyed at Fear. At least that was what the expression in
her eyes conveyed; she seemed to have seen "Fear" large and
personified in front of her, and was unable to wrench her gaze from
the grisly spectre. As Gipsy drew near she started and tried to pull
away her hand with a little terrified moan, but after a moment
nestled nearer to her, as if she wanted to shut out that awful sight
that was burnt in all the while in her own poor brain. The village was
a village of horrors; the dead were piled up in hundreds, friend and
foe together, and there was no time to bury them while the danger
was so imminent.

It was known that there must be lying around the town at no great
distance hundreds of wounded and maimed, longing for aid, and
desperate measures must be taken to get at them and shepherd
them in. Gipsy and Mairi Chisholm, whose friendship had been
cemented by the ghastly night, so that it was firmer than ever,
walked out alone across three fields in the direction of the hottest
fighting, and they climbed off the road to what looked like a peaceful
turnip-field; and not until they reached it did they notice that among
the turnips were many curious grey humps, and with a sudden thrill
realized that here were the dead and the dying they had come to
seek. Some doctors, in fact, were already at work crouching down,
and seeing them, called out to them to come and help. Most of the
bodies were in that cold grey-green uniform the colour of which
seemed somehow to have got into the air and sky, and tinted them
a cold grey-green too--a colour which will for ever after be associated
in the mind of every Belgian with horrors unspeakable.

The very first man they saw lying by the hedge was stone-dead,
shot through the jaw. Another not far off lay on his back, his face a
bloody mask upturned to the frowning sky; he was still as marble,
except for his right knee, which twitched regularly, ceaselessly, like a
returning pulse. Gipsy hastened over to the help of the doctor who
had called her, as Mairi fell on her knees beside this man, and at
that moment, without warning or expectation, a salvo of German
shells burst around them. They had been observed in their work of
mercy and were being shot at! "Catch them, wipe them out! Good
job too! Why bother with the wounded--our own or the others? What
use is a wounded man any more? Let them die!" Thus spoke the
batteries, and the shells fell faster.

If the wounded had been Belgians or French, it is probable that the
devoted workers would not have left them even then; but to be fired
at by Germans while succouring Germans was rather too much,
and they fled for the time.

But the thought of those wretched wounded men, with broken and
smashed bone and muscle, agonizing in thirst, their life-blood
draining into the broad-leaved turnips, pulled at the warm hearts of
the men and women from England, and once again later they tried
to get at them. They took the ambulance, and left it at the nearest
point on the road, and went off again across that stretch of field
where dead cows with grotesquely inflated bodies lay in the corners.
When they reached the turnip-field, they found some pigs rooting
among those dead heaps of clothing, a sight that turned them sick
for all their courage; but they went on, and had hardly gained their
field of mercy, hardly had time to note that the awful pulsing
movement of that right knee was still ceaselessly continuing without
cessation or rest, when the guns were burst upon them again, and
they had to withdraw once more.

They still stayed in the town, in the hope that somehow after dark
they might reach that field of death and carry out a rescue. During
the afternoon a car came in to Melle with three dead German
officers and a chauffeur who had escaped with his life by the merest
fraction. They had driven too near the Belgian lines, and three of the
four had been wiped out by the Belgian armoured car.

When dusk fell at last Gipsy and Mairi made an urgent request to
Dr. Munro that they might be allowed to go back to the turnip-field,
for they would have risked their lives indifferently for friend or foe, so
long as they were wounded and helpless. Dr. Munro, however, quite
rightly refused. They had been twice driven off by the fire of the
Germans--why jeopardize valuable lives and the precious
ambulance? As they discussed the question a Belgian Red Cross
car ran into the village, and the Two eagerly applied to the doctor in
charge to help them. He could not resist their earnest pleading, and
carried them along with him to the field.

It was almost dark when they worked softly into position as near to
the scene of action as possible, and then stepped gently down, and
thrusting aside the osier bushes that line the road, crept, holding
their breath, out to those awfully still humped grey forms. They
reached the man that the doctor and Gipsy had begun to bandage
that day, but he was already dead, killed by the brutality of his own
comrades when he might have had a chance of life. Then they
instinctively drew nearer to each other as they glanced toward that
other silent form, and there, regularly as the secondhand of a clock,
that awful galvanic movement went on, as it had done for hour after
hour: the twitching of the right knee up and down, up and down!
They picked up the poor wretch, who seemed quite unconscious, on
a stretcher and carried him back to the ambulance, but he died the
same night.

When the wounded had been safely transferred to cars to go back
to Ghent, yet once again the two women went out with the Belgian
military doctor, past the French outposts, and waited there for him
under a railway bridge while he and another man went off to
reconnoitre. It was all so still it might have been the day after death
and before resurrection, as indeed it was for many. A tense dead
stillness surrounded them, hanging heavily on ears vibrating still
with the hellish scream of the shells. There was no moon, but a kind
of diffused greyness which conveyed a curious idea that it might any
moment burst into brilliant and unearthly light.

The car went back to Melle and then to Ghent, and there Gipsy,
hearing that someone was needed at Melle all night, went yet again
back in it, leaving Mairi to go to bed. But hardly had Mairi been in
bed an hour, and fallen asleep with the heavy overpowering sleep of
a child, than a light flashed in her eyes and she was told to get up,
as all the ambulances had been called out. No wonder each day
seemed as if it had been a month! She went out in the big Daimler
car with two of the men of the party, and half-way to Melle the big
car bumped wildly and danced off the pave into the mud; a tyre was
punctured! When everyone is dog-tired such incidents are bound to
happen, but despair is a word unknown to members of ambulance
corps of the right sort.

By great good luck another car came cautiously along in the dark,
almost tumbling on the top of the first. It belonged to a Belgian
doctor, who picked up the little Scottish girl and carried her on to
Melle. Here she was greeted by her friend, white and worn, but quite
cheery, and heard it was a false alarm, for after all they were not
needed! So back they went to the Flandria in the same car, landing
there about four in the morning.

No wonder Melle is written ineffaceably on their minds! It was here
that they first saw the dead and wounded in masses. Here they
found themselves in the thick of an actual battle. It was the chief
centre of their activities in those days at Ghent, the village they saw
first and last, and the name will always stand out in letters of flame.




Chapter IV
The Retreat



But Ghent did not long remain a refuge; well before the middle of
the month earnest warnings to evacuate it were given. The way in
which the final summons came was dramatic. Mairi was in bed,
sleeping with her usual heart-whole earnestness, when she was
awakened suddenly, and saw standing by her one of the doctors
attached to the ambulance, telling her the Germans were upon
them and they must fly. Then followed a scramble. The first thing
was to save the wounded soldiers, who must not be left to fall into
the hands of the foe. Alas! the order had come through the day
before that all the kits belonging to these men were to be sent to
Ostend as a measure of precaution. One of those "decisions in
blinkers" which cause such infinite suffering. The patients were
mostly in thin cotton pyjamas; the night was foggy and bitterly cold;
the only conveyance was an open transport waggon with a scanty
layer of straw on the boards. Gipsy and Mairi rummaged for all the
blankets they could find, and wrapped the poor fellows up in them;
but it must have been a terrible journey for many of them. They
were drawn by horses, and could only go at a walking pace on
account of the direful roads, the quantity of traffic already occupying
them, and the darkness of the night. And they had to cover fifty
miles to gain safety! When they were finally sent off the members of
the corps had to think of themselves.

There was none too much room in the cars, and they had to pack in
like sardines. As Gipsy had been sitting up with a wounded officer
when the summons came, and since then, having been occupied
with the soldiers, had not been able to change the cotton hospital 
dress she happened to be wearing, she suffered frightfully from the
cold. The cars crawled along to Eccloo, where they stopped at the
house of an Englishwoman, a friend of Dr. Munro's. Although this
lady and her husband were themselves preparing to fly, they
received the rather forlorn party with the utmost kindness, and
spread abundance of blankets on the floor of the drawing-room,
where they made up a-roaring fire. There they all waited till
daybreak. A strangely assorted party they were, lying about in all
directions, some on the window-seats, some on the floor, and the
two chauffeurs betrayed their qualifications by falling sound asleep
with their mouths open, sitting bolt upright on two stiff-backed chairs,
a feat that filled some of the others with admiration.

After breakfast next morning they all followed the wounded, and
reached Bruges in time to get them into the convent hospital by
midday. The stiff cold men had been unpacked, and fed, and laid in
comfortable beds, and were beginning to recover a little from their
awful night, when like a thunderbolt came the news that the
Germans had entered Ghent at seven that morning, and that twelve
thousand of them, ruthless men, without pity or consideration for the
fallen, were hastening forward to Bruges; so all the poor tired
soldiers had to be carried down again, and sent onward once more.
It was heart-rending work.

This time the objective was Ostend, and along that poplar-lined
road, which had seemed so peaceful when they ran the other way in
high hopes about three weeks ago, back the Munro ambulance
people went with heavy hearts. The nearer they drew to Ostend, the
greater grew the crush. It seemed as if the whole population of
Belgium must be converging on the port, the last link of the chain
which England held. Hospital ambulances, troops, refugees, guns,
transport, carts, were surging together and every now and then
jammed. There was much cursing and swearing in a variety of
tongues. In the town, streets, shops, houses, were packed with
people; it seemed as if they must all be welded into a jelly, and
unable to extricate themselves until the Germans arrived. The
mental harassment of seeing to the wounded added tenfold to the
strain on those responsible, and the relief was great when, at last,
they were got on to a boat going across to England, which carried
no less than seven thousand wounded men!

With the lifting of this terrible load the personal troubles of the
ambulance were by no means ended, only now they had time to
think of themselves. So desperate was the situation considered that
no baggage was allowed to be taken off the cars. Still in her cotton
dress, now soiled and crushed in a way to depress the heart of the
most careless of women, Gipsy had to pass another night; and all
night long consciousness was beating at the back of her half-awake
brain that any moment the summons to continue the weary flight
might sound. Rumours flew fast. The advance of the Germans was
at a terrible pace. They would be here before morning! Already they
were here! Their numbers swelled to hundreds of thousands--all
was over! Though the worst of these forebodings proved untrue, yet
the situation was bad enough. The work seemed smashed across
the middle, past possibility of recovery, and there was a horrid knell
of defeat to deaden and depress energies already heavily
overtaxed.

That evening in Ostend, Mairi came across an elderly man in civilian
clothes, much too small for him, standing at a street-corner, with
tears running down his cheeks. She remembered having noticed
him a few hours earlier in a garde civique uniform, and greeting him
in the informal way that necessity teaches, she learnt his tale of
woe. It was poured out on her in a flood of mingled French and
Flemish, in that half-whimsical, half-serious way that told her he was
sorely hurt; and as her French had already improved, she gathered
the gist of it even before she was helped out by a Cockney Tommy
who stood beside him.

' 'E sys, lydy, that orders is froo for 'em to put off of them clothes; he
ain't a soldier, and them Boches, if they cetch 'im, why, they'll 'eng
him I seen 'im done it. 'E's pitched 'em in the sea, all them noo
clothes. Gord! I wish I had had 'em on a Sunday morning in the East
End! I'd 'ev got more'n a quid for 'em! 'E's right-down sore, 'e is,
pore old blighter! And thet's what 'tis all about. Na, I not speak his
lingo--for why? 'Tain't necessary; I can understand these chaps
wifout, and that's for why."

Mairi left them with a mingled feeling of laughing and crying; it
seemed so preposterous that the great stout citizen who had given
up his spare time and trained in peace should now have this awful
humiliation forced upon him, the knowledge that he was only a play-
soldier and no use at all. To be held in disdain; to be forced, by his
own action in throwing away his beloved uniform, to confess it was
all make-believe and no use when real war came--this was worse
than being wounded. And there were hundreds of his kind doing the
same thing. In Ghent the canals were choked with the heavy coats
and belts flung away at the fierce threat of a shameful and
ignominious end. It seemed, after all, as if the plight of the Gardes
Civiques was more pitiable than that of the ambulance corps.

By nine the next morning a greatly swelled procession was
marshalled out of the town on the road to Dunkirk; everyone had to
keep in position and go at one pace, which was necessarily a crawl.
There were about three hundred and fifty cars in the line, including
those of two Belgian Generals and others belonging to Ministers.
Most depressing of all was the news--which turned out after all to be
untrue--that the Diplomats accredited to Belgium had gone to
England. That horrible morning left its mark on the Two. Each hour,
spun to extremity by the tension within, had upon them the effect of
three in power of exhaustion, and yet they really got to Dunkirk not
much after midday. Here again was the inextricable confusion, the
crush and push. In contemplating war one looks at it usually in the
light of history, when events are clear-cut and told with precision. Of
the horrible uncertainties, the dubious outlook, the impossibility of
reliable information, the difficulty of correct judgment on the spot,
only those who are in the midst of it are aware.

Even at Dunkirk there was no room; men were sleeping on the
billiard-tables in the hotels. So the two friends went out to a little
bathing-place on the coast called Malo-les-Bains. But they were now
in Belgium no longer, and the feeling that they had been forced to
leave the country they had come to help weighed heavily on them.
"I think I never felt so truly miserable," says Gipsy, "as the moment
when we passed the frontier line between Belgium and France. I
have left my heart behind me in that brave, honest little country. I
shall always think of Belgium as the first country in the world for
bravery, honesty, chivalry, and patriotism, and it will be my fervent
prayer that they may some day get their country back again. There
is something about Belgium that no other country has. I think my
heart will always feel more Belgian than British in future"--which
embodied an unconscious prophecy.

It was probably the first time Malo-les-Bains had ever had any
visitors so late in October, and it must have been puzzled and
overwhelmed by this strange honour. Inexpressibly dreary was
Malo, with its long level plage and straight sea-line, seen through a
curtain of steadily pouring rain. The rows of empty bathing-sheds
faced the sea like sentry-boxes, and the little, cold, inadequate
fringes of foam crept hesitatingly to their doors as if they hardly
knew what to make of it all. There were still a few fishing-boats
about, and a few men shrimping, mostly very old men, who " must
eat."

The whole of this place was transformed by war, and the overflow
from Dunkirk more than sufficed to overcrowd it as it had never
been overcrowded in its gayest season. It was here that the party
were joined by the authoress, the late Miss Macnaughtan, who
afterwards established a soup-kitchen in Furnes, and did excellent
work there at the railway-station among the hungry and bewildered
soldiers.

Malo was crammed with troops. There were the British with the
strong unmistakable Manchester accent of self-confidence; the
French in their heavy and clumsy-looking overcoats; Senegalese
shivering and wilted by a climate which spoilt the delightful game of
war; and, of course, plenty of Belgians. Now and again a Taube
hovered overhead, fiercely hawk-like, and got well shot at; and once
a British aeroplane descended hurriedly, emitting sulphurous
language, because it had been unrecognized and included in the
too cordial welcome. At night all lights were out save the great
searchlights which, like the Flaming Swords of the Angel of Eden,
pierced the flatness of the forsaken sands.

On October 20 began what resulted in the tremendous fight for
Ypres, when the Germans were thrust back, and those who had
thought Belgium all lost took heart again. The mixed population on
the coast thinned down again. Those who had given up heart went
on further into France, the soldiers were moved, the refugees
absorbed elsewhere. The place in these circumstances looked
more dreary than ever, and, to add to their woes, the friends had a
personal grief.

Gilbert was missing--Gilbert, who had so endeared himself to the
corps that they felt for him as for a lifelong friend. They had seen
nothing of him after the hasty summons to leave Ghent, and they
greatly feared he had fallen, and was lost in the great swathes of the
nameless and unburied. Dr. Munro had gone over to England to get
help to start the work anew, and Mairi and Gipsy spent the few
uncertain days at Malo wandering about, walking into Dunkirk on the
pretence of shopping, and trying to make the best of the
contradictory news that filtered in. One day they suddenly saw a
familiar green uniform on a straight, slim young figure, with the head
held proudly and lightly as ever. There was no mistaking that gait
and that gay insouciance; even before they had caught a glimpse of
his face they had flown toward him with outstretched hands. Gilbert
laughed and seemed pleased at their solicitude. Oh, he was all right.
He had stayed with his regiment to hold up the German vanguard
and allow time for the evacuation of Ghent; but he had got off all
right, scot-free not even a wound. "You won't have the pleasure of
nursing me; I believe you're really disappointed," he chaffed in his
quick French, and Mairi's shrewd eyes saw the tender, quizzical look
he gave her friend. Instantly it darted into her mind that there was
something behind all this. Gipsy's white face and worried,
preoccupied manner had not been only for a surface friend. Mairi
was clever beyond her years, and a loyal little soul; she led the way
to the sea-shore, indicating the road back to Malo, and then quietly
absented herself, and they did not miss her!

As she turned rather sadly by herself to go back into the town she
was hailed by one of the British naval officers she knew. He caught
sight of her at once, for the streets were comparatively empty; every
kind of vehicle had been requisitioned for the flight. There was a
hideous, dead-alive look settling down on Dunkirk.

"Come along and have a joy-ride in the last taxi-cab left in Dunkirk,"
he cried out cheerily. "An experience to record!" She assented
readily, feeling rather lost without her almost inseparable
companion. Her mind, indeed, was busily at work as she sat there
beside this clean frank boy, who looked like a Spaniard, SO dark
was his colouring. Of course, it was inevitable that Gipsy would
marry again some time. She was so good-looking, so high-spirited,
so charming, that many, many men would want to marry her; and
oh, she did so love to be loved! Therein lay the danger! Was Gilbert
good enough? After all, they knew very little about him. He was
attractive enough personally, but he was not of their race. Mairi
would, of course, never spoil sport; if Gipsy was glad to walk alone
with him, walk alone with him she should ! If she wanted to marry
him, marry him she must; only she could decide. But then she was
impulsive, her enthusiasm could be caught at the high tide, and
what if such a match were not for her happiness? In some ways
Mairi often felt older than her friend. "The dear kid!" she said half
aloud.

"The blue eyes are very clouded to-day," remarked Lieutenant N-----,
turning his own black ones on his companion.

He said it very nicely and not offensively, but Mairi sat up, on her
dignity at once.

That sort of thing was all right for Gipsy, who had been married
already and could put up with it; but as for her, she had other things
to do than marry- at present, at all events. In the far future, of
course, it would be all right, but when it came in her case it would be
a very serious, for-ever-and-a-day business.

"Do you believe in mixed marriages?" she asked, refusing to
respond to the personality.

"Depends what sort of 'mixed,' " the naval man replied briskly,
making an opening for himself out of the most unpromising material,
as is the way of the navy. "Old and young? Rich and poor? Fair and
dark? Land and sea?" The last two very significantly, bending his
own close-cropped, dark head down toward the girl's fair hair. "I
believe in the last two all the time!"

Mairi looked at him quite candidly and fearlessly, without a trace of
coquetry. "I haven't any use for that sort of thing," she announced
simply; "I'm a Scot," and she wondered why he laughed so merrily.

Dr. Munro returned next day with the news that all was well, and that
they were to have headquarters at Furnes, in Belgium, and continue
the work. The party was to be reorganized, and M. de Broqueville,
one of the sons of the Belgian War Minister, was to command one
division of it. This was a great help, as naturally, with all the good-will
in the world, an ambulance party, which has to go into the most
secret places and which can't help poking into matters that must be
kept secret, is on delicate ground when run entirely by another race,
even though they be the closest of allies. This addition would put
them on an unassailable footing. The British Field Hospital was also
to be re-established at Furnes and work in connection with the
corps.

Gilbert also was to be attached to the party, and was to drive one of
the cars and take some sort of command.

Even in the three weeks that she had been with the corps Gipsy had
already been dissatisfied with her own position; she felt that so
much energy and usefulness was being run to waste for want of
proper grip and organization. Nevertheless, she and Mairi knew one
thing, for lack of which knowledge so many well-intentioned women
fall by the way when they attempt to do hard public work. They knew
how to wait. In all work of world importance there are dreary
intervals of waiting, and, as Mairi said, "patience is necessary
beyond everything." A great many women live on a kind of spurious
excitement; they must be rushing from one thing to another, and if
this stimulant fails them they collapse altogether. It is the woman
who knows how to wait who can take the opportunity when it comes.
Therefore, though the first start had not been auspicious, yet Gipsy
was willing to wait, for with the additions to the party, and the
knowledge born of experience, she was hopeful of better things for
the future. It was a new start.

She and Mairi went through their clothes, and discovered that many
things that had been considered absolute necessities on leaving
were merely encumbrances; so they sent back to England all but
the strictest minimum, or what they now considered so. They had
passed one milestone on the way, but there were others ahead!
Three of the ladies of the party were to work with the forward
ambulances in future, collecting the wounded, and the other two, at
first, were to remain at the hospital. Naturally there was great
competition for the danger-line. Mrs. Knocker, it was unanimously
acknowledged, must be a "forward" as, owing to her expert
knowledge of cars, she was invaluable. "My driving was much more
use than my nursing," she remarked, in speaking of these days; but
there were difficulties in placing the rest of the party. It eventually fell
to Mairi and the American lady to toss for the last place at the front,
and Mairi, to her great joy, won.

Furnes is south of Nieuport, about a third of the way between it and
Dunkirk, but further inland than either. It is not a coast town, and is a
meeting-place for many canals. Like all these quiet old Belgian
towns, it has a Grand Place, and to this day Furnes still embodies
something of the restful Sunday-afternoon feeling which was a
characteristic of so many of these little towns before they were
rudely awakened out of their sleep to be mutilated and smashed.
There are two great churches in the Place, and a beautiful Htel de
Ville with a verandah or balcony in front.

In one corner of the Square are some quaint old Spanish houses
with crow-stepped gables and red roofs, in contrast with the grey
stone of the other buildings. As the cars rolled in on October 21 the
red light of the autumn sun caught these roofs and showed up
between the flying buttresses of St. Walburga. The little groups of
soldiery standing about gave the impression of terriers with their
ears pricked. They wore an air of expectancy; yet Dixmude was
held, and while Dixmude remained Furnes was safe.

Year by year on the last Sunday in July the inhabitants of Furnes
have turned out in holiday garb to watch, with mingled awe and
excitement, the strange procession organized by the "Confrrie de
la Sodalit". Weird men covered by dark brown robes which came
over their heads like palls, leaving only two slits for their bright
narrowed eyes to peep out, walked solemnly through the streets;
they bent beneath burdens of heavy crosses, and their bare feet
struck the uneven stones. Yes, and there were women too, thus
disguised, doing penance for sins of which their own consciences
accused them. They were followed by other oddly dressed
characters, which seemed to the startled children, who kept one
hand on their mother's gown, to have marched straight out of the
Bible. There was Abraham flourishing the very sword with which he
prepared to kill Isaac, and Aaron with his snaky rod. Then the hot
grip relaxed a little, for there came next a real babe, one that they
knew was like themselves. But the awe and the mystery gathered
again as they saw Jesus crowned with thorns, stately though in
agony, with the sharp points actually pressing into his flesh, and the
same Christ bending beneath the cross. Then, as the evening
darkened, and the serious mummers, doing their part with intense
earnestness and solemnity, paraded round the Square, there
appeared the Host, most mysterious of all, with flaming torches and
shadowy figures beside it. All these sights were of the nature of a
mystery-play, and were reverently carried out by the people
themselves: they were not done for purposes of gain or to attract
tourists, for very few tourists ever discovered Furnes. With this
annual ceremony and the remembrance of the Inquisition in their
midst, of which dread stories were whispered, while the very house
where those awful torturers sat in conclave is still standing in their
sight, the people of Furnes grew up with more of seriousness in
their nature than their fellow-subjects.

And now reality had come upon them. What need any more to
represent these things in mummery when the via crucis was on
every high-road in Belgium; when strings of weary men and women,
parched with thirst and nearly dead with fear, bowed beneath their
loads, trudged solemnly along they knew not whither; when these
very churches, so sacred and so grand, St. Walburga with its high
steeple and St. Nicholas with its tall, blunt tower, were packed with
dying and agonized men suffering from tortures as real as any dealt
by the Inquisition? The remembrance of those garbed figures
peeping through the slits in their hoods became almost friendly in
comparison with the ruddy-faced, brutal German soldier in the hated
grey-green uniform. When Furnes revives her Passion-play, it will
seem a play indeed against the background of reality.

The convent close up against St. Nicholas is now a hospital, and it
was into this courtyard that the cars of the ambulance party turned
when they reached their destination. The battle of Dixmude had
filled the little rooms with wounded, and even the reading-rooms and
the chapel were requisitioned. The courtyard was crowded with the
ambulances, and every ten minutes a fresh load of wounded was
brought in.

No words can describe the horror of the scene that unrolled before
them in the wards. There was so much to be done and so few to do
it. The great influx of the wounded had swamped all attempts at
order. Those who had just been attended to were lying side by side
with the dead, and all the loathsome sights and smells of an
operating-theatre were mingled with those of a charnel-house.
Some men lay dying silently, the perspiration standing in beads on
their foreheads as they gasped for each difficult breath that might be
the last; others were hideous spectacles, with smashed faces or
lack of limbs. They twisted and groaned in irrepressible agony,
uttering low, heartrending moans that would not be suppressed.
Valiantly the whole party of the new-comers set to work to separate
the living from the dead, and carry out the bodies to the room set
apart for them opposite.

"Twice we were called into the operating-room with our stretcher,
and twice I received the full weight of a man off the operating-table. I
supported the head-end of the stretcher, as I was the stronger," said
Mairi. The doctors had not a second to lose, or life might be wasted;
if a man died, he must be tumbled off hastily to make way for one
for whom there might be a chance. The dead were laid out in rows
together, some wrapped in winding-sheets; but here and there the
uniformity of the still lines was broken by a homely, mud-stained
uniform, just as if a soldier had lain down to sleep among them.

For five hours these noble women worked at this terrible task. As
fast as the beds in the wards were emptied of their inert burdens
they were re-occupied by others, for the ambulances brought in
fresh cases continually, and it might be that the next man also died,
and was in his turn carried out within the next few moments.
Meantime, two small boys with a hand-cart were all the transport
available for transferring the bodies from the ever-filling mortuary to
the place of burial. The lads took hold of the stretcher, tilted it up a
little, slid the dead man into the cart, and when they had as many
bodies as they could manage they went off with their load. Thus the
men who had stood up for honour and right against an
overwhelming foe, who had preferred that their country might for a
while be overrun in order that her soul might live for ever, were
huddled into nameless graves.

There was no room in the already overflowing convent for any of the
party to lodge, and so they were told to hunt up quarters for
themselves anywhere in the town. Many of the houses were empty,
as the inhabitants had fled. A Belgian gentleman who had lost
everything he possessed by the war had attached himself to the
ambulance corps as chauffeur, and when at last Gipsy and Mairi,
feeling as if they had been bruised all over, body and soul, with the
body-breaking and heartrending work, were free to think of
themselves, they found him waiting.

"You will want somewhere to live; I can show you a house that
belonged to my cousin," he said in French. "It has, at all events, a
good pianola and is clean."

They followed him gratefully, for to start house-hunting in an
unknown town at that hour of the night was a pastime that had no
attractions to offer. When they reached the house, he gave them
the key and told them to go in and take possession, and himself
vanished.

It might have been one of those houses in Pompeii where everyone
was eating and drinking and going on with their ordinary avocations
when swift death descended on them from the sky. On the table in
the dining-room was the horrible dbris of what had been the last
meal, scraps of food lying on the dirty plates where the dust had
hardly had time to settle. Flowers still unwilted were in the vases,
and the promised pianola was open. As the two tired women
penetrated from one room to another they became very silent, and
ceased to remark on the familiar evidences of life. It was as if the
house were tenanted with ghosts; it was almost impossible to
believe that these people who had lived and loved in that place
were not there silently resenting the intrusion. The evacuation must
have been in the night, for the beds had obviously been used, and
the coverings were hastily flung aside as by those who rise in haste.
In the largest bedroom, that of the lady of the house, clothes were
lying about on chair-backs and on the floor--dainty delicate
garments, in accordance with the dressing-table appointments, and
the violet-scented sachet carelessly dropped among them. It was
horrible to think of the occupant of that room as a homeless
wanderer, possibly dependent on charity!

They could picture the scene. The scepticism as the tale of the
oncoming Germans became more insistent; the refusal to go. "They
will never come to Furnes," and then the cry ringing through the
silence of the night: "Dixmude is fallen; the Germans are almost
here." No matter whether the cry were true or false, it pierced like
truth into those startled ears, and almost stopped the beating of the
heart for an agonized second. Then the thoughts of husband and
wife simultaneously leapt to the nursery. "The children!"

This was on the next storey, and the toys of the children proved
their presence. They lay on the floor in a pathetic little row. Near the
door were a furry bear, a doll without a head, and a cart. It was as if
the little ones had snatched up their treasures, and had had them
pulled away from them one by one by the frightened nurse. Would
they ever return? And what would be their future, torn up by the
roots like this? Lucky for them, indeed, if their parents clung tightly to
them in that modern Exodus, for if not, it might be that those very
children, whose soft little fingers had clung so determinedly to the
beloved bear, might be hopelessly lost, as thousands of Belgian
children have been, to be brought up in one great group, not
knowing their own names or the names of their forbears, forlorn
waifs, in spite of all that human kindness could do.




Chapter V
On The Road



There was no question about the amount of work waiting to be
done at Furnes. Calls from Dixmude, where hot fighting was going
on, were incessant, and the ambulances were kept hard at it.
Dixmude is about eight miles south-east of Furnes as the crow flies,
but much more by road; and the way along the scattered and
smashed pav was rolled out many times in a day by the coming
and going of the motors. Chauffeurs were difficult to get, and there
were many cars requiring drivers now; so early next morning Gipsy
had hardly had time to get on her clothes before there was a shout,
and she ran down to find Gilbert waiting outside with the heavy 40
h.p. Napier. There was no one else to take it, and he ordered her to
do so. Put upon her mettle, she obeyed at once, but as she climbed
into the seat she realized that she did not even know which were the
levers for the various gears, for she had never driven that sort of car
before. A trifle like that was soon rectified by a few little experiments,
and she managed all right. Before she had been in Belgium long
she had driven an extraordinary number of different makes of car,
including a Daimler, Wolseley, Mercedes, Napier, Pipe, Sunbeam,
and Fiat, and she had had to take a great many of them at a
moment's notice too.

It was not like driving on an English road, for here the pav in the
centre is made of cobbles, and just wide enough for two vehicles to
pass each other with care; it slopes down a little at each side, and is
usually, in the winter at all events, greasy with a thin layer of mud,
whereas, if you fail to hold on, you land in unfathomable depths of
mud like thick porridge which borders the sides. Beyond this again
there is usually a ditch filled to the brim with water, and with no sort
of guard to protect the sides, so that a plunge into icy water is not
outside the bounds of possibility. With a top-heavy ambulance the
joys of getting off into the mud are enhanced by knowing that it is
quite as likely as not that if your wheel goes deep into that quagmire
the whole thing may turn right over, a particularly cheerful prospect if
it happens to be full of wounded men! At the very best, the feat of
regaining the pav entails a tearing strain on a woman's hand and
arm. There is a choice of two roads between Furnes and Dixmude.
The northern one is more direct, but it was not considered feasible
at this time, so the party went by the southern one, turning up by
Oudecappelle within sight of Dixmude.

It was the last part of the straight, open road, when they were well
within range of the German guns, that strained the nerves most.
Mairi was beside her friend on the front of the ambulance, and they
were the last of the whole cavalcade, so that if anything had
happened to them none of the others would have seen it. Gilbert,
who was leading, always went "hell for leather," with a disregard of
adverse conditions little less than miraculous, and he never went
faster than when he was heading straight for danger. The vile road
was broken and pitted with the huge, irregular craters where the
shells had fallen. Far ahead was the little bunch of houses, of which
some were already burning. Shoved to one side of the route by
someone who had had to get off his car to do it was a dead horse
on his back, with all his legs in the air in a grotesque parody of a
comfortable back-scratching roll. Not far off him was an "awful
warning " in the shape of a big car smashed to pieces by a. shell
which must have landed plump into the middle of it and wiped out of
time and space any occupants it contained. Ahead the firing was
like a tropical thunderstorm, with ominous flashes and a deep,
menacing growl, and instead of fleeing from it, as would be man's
natural instinct, they were steering straight into the heart of it. They
could not get actually into Dixmude itself, but reached Caeskerke,
where Gilbert, who was in charge of the party, told them to reverse
the cars, facing them homewards, ready to plunge off any second.
They were up against some small cottages, and about them some
of the French soldiers were entrenched, while others lay along the
sloping sides of the road along which they had just come. They
were there for half an hour watching with a kind of fascination the
sharp, stabbing flame, followed by a cloud of white smoke, or a red
roar as a shell caught one of the remaining cottages out in the open
and sent it up in a furnace of fire. Nearer and nearer came the
warning hiss and scream, until at last they could actually see the
pieces flying as the shells burst, exactly as sometimes represented
in an illustration, a thing pooh-poohed by those who have never
been under shell-fire. Then with a roar and a deafening noise a
farm-house not more than fifty yards from them received a shell full
upon it, and Gilbert waved a commanding arm ordering them to
begone.

It required more than common nerve to get the engine started in
such conditions, but it was achieved at last, and they went back the
way they had come, out into the open, passing by a huge new pit
that had been made in the last half-hour, a pit which yawned across
the way and would easily have swallowed up the whole car.

They drew up near a church about a mile out, and waited here for
further orders; they had not been there ten minutes when an
armoured car came bumping painfully along with a burst back tyre.
Some Belgian officers jumped down, and after standing round for a
few minutes in discussion together, one of them advanced, with the
fascinating little tassel swinging from his cap as he saluted, and
asked if the ladies would take back to Furnes some German
prisoners he had in the armoured car, otherwise he did not know
what to do with them. It certainly was a strange request to make to a
woman not of his own nationality, and the trust implied in her skill
and courage was unbounded. Gipsy rose to the occasion at once.

"I think it was the proudest moment of my life," she says in her diary.

The five Germans, well set up, fair, hard-eyed striplings, were
transferred to the ambulance without delay, and as they were
installed and the order given to start the two friends saw with a sort
of terrified glee that the Belgian officers did not think it necessary to
provide an escort; they had too much to do elsewhere. They
seemed to take the whole abnormal proceeding very much as a
matter of course, and stood in a row and saluted while the two
women drove off with the very strangest carload it had ever been
woman's fate to convoy.

Eight miles lay between them and safety, and at any moment, if
those unemotional, ruthless young brutes inside had taken it into
their heads, they could have got out and knocked the amateur
chauffeurs on the head, and escaped with the car. As they went
cautiously along this aspect of it was naturally very much to the fore
in the minds of the Two on the front seat, and they spoke of it in
whispers; but possibly the Germans themselves were glad enough
to get safely out of that hell of shot and shell, for they made no
attempt at an escape.

The job was accomplished safely, the men handed over to
authority, and the car went on to take a load of wounded soldiers to
the station. Then, conscious of having accomplished an excellent
day's work, the Two returned to their quarters and supped off bully
beef and soldier's biscuit. "It was a great day," they said.

In the days that followed they were constantly backwards and
forwards on that long and dangerous road, and recognized without
difficulty each new shell-hole along the way. The road was so
broken in parts that men were sent out with great faggots of wood
on their shoulders to throw into the holes and fill them up, and
constant repairing was necessary to keep the route open for the
heavy military transport. All this work in the open air, with hard
physical lifting and driving, took it out of the Two so much that they
were always thankful, when the day's work was done, to get back
and drop into bed-a real bed, too, a great luxury in those times. A
few other members of the party were installed in the same house,
but Mairi and Gipsy retained their bedroom to themselves. They
were usually able to obtain food at the hospital, where they fared
very simply. Porridge for breakfast was acceptable, and
occasionally fried potatoes were added, if they had time to cook
them and they did not get spoiled just as they were ready, which is
the way of potatoes in the hands of amateur cooks all the world
over. "These" porridge must have felt gratified at its appreciation;
even in Scotland, where it is ennobled by the use of the plural
number, it can rarely have been referred to as "a joyful basin of
porridge!"

The night work was perhaps the greatest strain, for there could of
course be no lights, and the way was lit up grimly by the sudden
flare of the exploding shells, or the dim light of distant buildings
which they had set on fire. It was a curious sight to see the roof of
one of these huge torches collapse suddenly, apparently in absolute
silence, for the ceaseless cannonade drowned all lesser sounds;
then the flames would shoot up like a great cascade of fireworks,
brightening everything for hundreds of yards around, and
illuminating the great holes cut in the road till they appeared like an
irregular procession of monstrous tortoises who had eaten the
"Food of the Gods."

Sometimes so many of these devil's fires were alight at once that
they brought back a reminiscence of bonfires on Coronation night.
"Farmhouses burning, trees burning, everything burning. It was a
grand sight, and one I shall never forget," says Mairi
enthusiastically. And in the midst of that great amphitheatre set for a
life and death drama Luck and Fate stalking alongside, determined
that these particular actors should live to play a great part.

The effect of the shells, even on the presumably tough chauffeurs,
was eloquent of the nerve-racking strain. One man was perfectly ill
with it, and yet he had the right sort of pluck, for he owned up to the
cause of his malady, but set his teeth and went on in grim
determination. He stuck to his wheel one day, when he was driving
Mrs. Knocker, until he became fairly paralyzed, and was manifestly
unable to go on, so she changed places with him and took the
driving-wheel herself. They were carrying four wounded men, and
she brought them into safety, and then said she must go back, as
she had left Mairi at Oudecappelle, but that as he was feeling ill he
had better stay at Furnes. He looked at her with a face that was like
the face of one of the dead in the convent wards, and said doggedly
through stiff lips: "Can't drive, but I ain't going to give in to it. I'm
coming back right alongside of you this very minute." She could not
but admire this heroic triumph of mind over matter.

"Poor fellow! When we turned the corner of the road and got within
range of those big guns, and each flash could be clearly seen, he
turned suddenly sick, and I had to stop and give him brandy and
cover him with a rug. I begged him not to look. It is a sight which
requires a peculiar kind of nerves." She does not add that it requires
a kind of courage so peculiar that it is rare indeed!

It was getting dusk, and those great bulbs of flame were horribly
vivid, and everywhere the masses of farm-buildings or haystacks
showed their effect. The continuous deafening noise was killing, and
always above the deep bass of the guns the high alto of the
screaming shells never ceased for one instant. It seemed as if it
were too frightful to continue for another second, yet if it stopped
suddenly one's skull would fall to pieces!

It was no wonder that some of the chauffeurs, who were mostly very
young and raw, could hardly face it. They did not do badly
considering. It was the custom for the heavy ambulances to be left
outside the worst firing, in what might be called the penumbra of the
danger-zone, and then the light scout cars were run up into the
hotter places to retrieve the wounded. No one was forced to go on
this service; volunteers were called for, and among these volunteers
were always the women of the party. Just at first of course, they, like
the men, were quite ignorant of the fearful danger, and went forward
with the excited interest of children into the battle-field; but soon,
very soon, their eyes were opened, and they knew what it meant. It
was then, when the danger was fully recognized, that the pull came!
One young Cockney chauffeur, called Tom, was among the bravest
of the brave, and did more than his share, because, besides going
fearlessly and light-heartedly into the very mouth of the inferno, he
exercised a dry turn of humour, which helped the others through
better, possibly, than anything else could have done. It often just
tipped the balance the right way when it was swinging dangerously.
After all, risky as the fire-zone was, it was quite a question among
them whether it was not more risky in another way to stay in the ill-
ventilated, over-crowded hospital, with its primitive lack of sanitary
arrangements.

The Furnes folk were still in that happy state of simplicity when
anything out of sight is considered harmless. It was Tom who
expressed the British view when, on coming suddenly one day into
the poisonous atmosphere after the freshness of a rush through the
air, he exclaimed: "My, but them drines is just crude! Give me
busting shells all the time-o."

On the evening in question Mairi had been sitting on a wall in
Oudecappelle, waiting for the return of the car, with a few soldiers
and one or two peasants to keep her company. She, as well as
Gipsy, always had a feeling that it was less dangerous to be out of
doors under shell-fire, or, at any rate, that it was preferable to meet
death, if it must be met, under the full sail of the sky, rather than the
flat straitness of roof and walls. So Mairi sat there in charge of some
wounded men who lay just inside the door of a cottage, and she
watched the shells getting heavier and heavier. The French and
Belgian batteries were quite near, and were answering the
challenge of the foe madly, and altogether there was no lack of
liveliness. Then some of the soldiers, hurrying up, told her that the
Germans were coming--the same old cry--and that they themselves
had been ordered further down the road; but the girl only smiled
sweetly, and went to look at her charges to be sure that everything
was ready for immediate transportation when the ambulance should
arrive. And as she went out again to look for its coming another
ambulance drove up from the opposite direction, and from it
stepped out a man of medium height, with a keen, laughing face
and those glinting eyes that carry a signal of personal fearlessness
even to the least observant. No wonder he looked a little surprised
to find this fair-haired girl, so very young and not over big, in charge
by herself in the gathering dusk, at this place, which in a danger
competition would have gained high marks. He had just come from
Dixmude himself, which would certainly in such a competition have
been more successful still. So he began to talk to Mairi with a warm
degree of comradeship, and just then Gipsy drove up, with the
exhausted chauffeur beside her, as miserable and ashamed as a
man could be. Dr. Van der Ghinst thereupon introduced himself,
bowing gracefully, and held out to the Two a rose apiece, telling
them laughingly that they were the last roses in Dixmude, where he
was working at the hospital of St. Jean, looking after the wounded.
As Dixmude was then about the centre of the vortex, and most of
the houses were either fallen or tottering, he did not lack exhilaration
in his daily routine. Brave spirits all the world over have something in
common, and these three fraternized at once. There was no need of
introductions; they knew each other, for their hearts were set on the
same thing.

The doctor was evacuating his wounded, who had to be taken over
all the long road to Furnes, with the result that many died by the
way, and, looking at them pitifully, an idea which had been
germinating for some time in Gipsy's brain suddenly took form. Why
should there not be a dressing-station close up to the lines at the
front? Could not many lives be saved if the wounded could have
immediate rest and care, so as to neutralize the effects of shock
and fortify them for what they had to go through in the way of weary
journeying and knocking about? At present, many a man died from
a comparatively slight wound, because his system was utterly
exhausted by shock and he had no strength left. While they were
still discussing the project, from which extraordinary results were to
spring, a French marine came in screaming with pain; two of his
fingers had been severed, and he sobbed and groaned so heart-
rendingly that, though they were getting a little hardened, it almost
unstrung Mrs. Knocker.

It was still raining hard when, tired out, the two friends returned to
their house. It was quite lonely, no other member of the party being
there at the time. They found the back-door open and the glass
panels smashed. As they stood for a second looking at one another
in surprise, they could hear the distant rumble of the guns and the
immediate drip and splutter of the rain running down in spouts from
the roof. They slowly penetrated into the empty house, not knowing
what they might not meet. The front-door also stood wide open, and
it looked as if whoever had been there had hastily escaped that way
on hearing their approach. However, they searched everywhere,
and, having found no sign of anyone, at last literally dropped asleep
as they undressed, tumbling into bed dead-beat.

The next morning they were still in bed when they heard a knock at
the door, and when Mairi, huddling on a coat, opened it she was
confronted by a burly French soldier, who looked uncommonly
sheepish. He explained hurriedly and with his eyes anywhere but on
her face that he wanted his revolver. "But I have not got your
revolver," said Mairi, too surprised for words. "Gipsy, here's a man
who wants his revolver--at least, I think that's what he wants, unless
there is some other French word which sounds exactly like it."

But it was his revolver he inquired for steadily, and when they
pressed him to say where it was, and why he thought they had got
it, his eyes roved more wildly than before as he blurted out, "C'est
dans votre lit, mesdemoiselles.'1''

Hastily they turned back to the bed, but the man slipped past them,
and, putting his grimy hand beneath the pillow, drew forth his heavy
revolver. Gipsy snatched it from him. "You shan't have it until you
tell us how it came there," she cried, in mingled amusement and
indignation; so he confessed that he and the other soldiers who
were about the place, and had no regular quarters, used to come
and sleep here in the daytime, because they knew the ladies were
always out till late. "a ne fait rien, et c'est bien confortable," he
ended, gripping the revolver and grinning as he rushed out.

French soldiers sleeping in the bed by daytime! Only those who
have been among soldiers will understand what that means. It
explained so many things!




Chapter VI
Gipsy And The Major



By this time the resources of food at the hospital had run out--even
porridge was not available--but fortunately one small butcher's shop
in the town was discovered open, and at the back was a kind of little
caf where the workers could get something to eat. Through the
streets of Furnes they went night by night in the pitch darkness,
occasionally brightened by an odd gleam that seemed to come from
nowhere until you were right on the top of it and looked down into a
cellar opening off the pavement, where some of the few inhabitants
who had not fled were crouching together talking in awestruck tones
by the gleam of a candle or a few sticks. All lights were strictly
suppressed of course, and at first, when there was still a certain
amount of meat in the butcher's shop, they had to grope their way
out, knocking their faces against the cold, still carcasses that hung
suspended stiffly from their hooks.

As for the provender they got, Mairi remarks caustically of the soup:
"One tomato in fifteen pints of water, but it was hot."

In desperation she and Gipsy at last descended to the cellars of the
house they were in, and found some potatoes, jam, beer, and
bottled waters, and carried them back for all to share alike. They
had certainly earned their keep by the work they were doing for the
Belgians.

Dixmude was being steadily shelled, and day by day they went on
that long, dangerous road to bring in all the survivors they could. But
the day's work was not unrelieved tragedy; a note of high comedy
was struck the day Gipsy happened to be out in Oostkerke, about
four miles west of Dixmude, just off the more direct and northerly
road between that place and Furnes. She had made friends with a
very odd-looking Belgian Major who, if he had been a little larger,
would have done, without any making-up, for the figure of the giant
in the old nursery tales, for he had a rubicund face, brilliant red hair,
and a flaming moustache and bristly eyebrows of the same hue--
therefore the word that fitly describes him is "scarlet." He was on
observation duty. The only possible places in this flat country from
which any extent of ground can be surveyed are the tall steeples of
the churches, or, rather, perhaps they were the only places, for as
both sides made the same discovery, and used them for the
identical purpose whenever they came across them, they were
naturally shelled persistently, and few indeed survive. The stout
Major knew no English, but he was greatly impressed by this good-
looking, fearless Englishwoman in her war-stained khaki suit, and
so, with expressive gestures, he invited her to climb up the church
steeple and see for herself where it was that he spent his days
surveying. Gipsy never refused an offer like that, especially when
the church tower might any moment be crumpled up by a shell. As
Miss May Sinclair has said, "she had an irresistible inclination toward
the greatest possible danger."

Up they climbed, and as they mounted each ladder became steeper
and narrower than the last. When they gained the summit and
peered out of the tiny observation hole, shells were bursting around
in a way to satisfy the most ardent lover of danger! As they
descended, in a very steep and narrow place, the Major stopped,
completely barring the way, and drawing from his pocket a little
crumpled French-English dictionary, laboriously turned the pages
with his thick moistened thumb until he had found what he wanted.
Then, looking up, he spluttered out: "Si je n'tais pas mari. Je
voudrais dire, 'I luv you.' "

A sense of her own appalling loss must have made Gipsy nearly fall
from her perch; it certainly required every bit of her self-control to
enable her to keep her countenance and insist on his proceeding.
But she had plenty of dignity, and the descent, perilous in more
ways than one, was safely accomplished. They descended again, to
find at the church door a sight which straightway sent the matter
flying from her head. A French officer lay there with his foot in "a
lovely mess." He had been scouting along the railway line which
runs through Oostkerke, between Furnes and Dixmude, and a bullet
had gone clean through his leg low down. He dropped on the
ground to apply his first-aid bandage, and suddenly a "Black Maria"
burst within ten yards of him, throwing earth all over his bleeding
wound. He knew the great danger of the microbes in the soil getting
into an open wound, and, having nothing else handy, he used the
contents of his flask, which happened to be coffee, to wash it out.
But as he told the story he was concerned, not with the pain of the
wound, or with the terribly narrow escape he had had of his life, but
with indignation that the shell should have dared to spatter him and
make him waste his precious coffee! Such is human nature! He had
dragged himself back to shelter with his mind full of this detestable
outrage, and he poured it forth to a most sympathetic listener. Gipsy
attended to him skilfully, and helped him into the little dug-out
occupied by the Major. But directly she had entered it she was filled
with anxiety to get out in a hurry; such a smell of stale tobacco,
burnt fat, and other worse odours, permeated the place that it might
be imagined even a shell would rebound harmlessly off the solidity
of the atmosphere! However, nothing would satisfy the Major but
that she must sit down and have a plate of soup. In whatever
circumstances, soup did sound inviting on this bitter day to
someone chronically under-fed and over-tired, so she assented.

A plate was promptly produced containing soup of a pale yellow
colour, with a layer of grease about half an inch thick on the top. It
was accompanied by a spoon which had most obviously been used
to "sup soup" by someone else a very short time before. However,
Gipsy philosophically remarks, "It looked a little cleaner when it had
been in my soup!"

While she was struggling with the mess heroically, unwilling to hurt
the feelings of her well-meaning host, his face lit as a happy thought
struck him, and, fumbling in his pocket, he produced a little silver-
paper pill, which he crushed between his fingers, burying it gaily and
firmly in the midst of the plate of soup. The awful thought that it
might be some sort of love-potion--nothing seemed too weird for
belief in the strange life she now led-seized on Gipsy, and her quick
mind visioned a sort of "Midsummer Night's Dream," with the Major
in the part of Bottom! Seeing that he was delighted with his own
performance, and totally unaware of the feelings he was arousing in
her, even while she watched the soup grow darker under the
influence of the pill, she nobly swallowed more of the nauseous
compound. The taste assured her that the addition must have been
some sort of Liebig, and the worst consequences would not result!

In came just then a doctor belonging to the corps, and he was
straightway supplied with a similar plate; and as he looked at it
wonderingly, and Gipsy thrust hers from her, having had all that
human nature could endure, the little Major thereupon crowned his
achievements by snatching at the spoon and picking up by its aid
what was left of the silver pill--mainly paper by this time--and
conveying it and the spoon together into the soup of the new-comer!

The second course of this appetizing meal was a stale and decrepit-
looking piece of steak that had evidently won through with its life
after a fierce assault by someone. This was too much; good
intention carries far, but beyond a point flesh revolts. Gipsy shook
her head as pleasantly as she could, but with a decision that was
unmistakable, whereupon, the little man, dancing round her in the
confined space, hauled out his precious dictionary, and after a mad
hunt found the elusive words he was searching for, and with flaming
face and eyes thrust them under her nose:

"I am stung to the quick!"




Chapter VII
A Hideous Night Drive



Dixmude was in a terrible state, suffering from a blasting and
withering shell-fire, yet there the ambulances went on, hearing that
wounded men needed them. They did not stop short of the town
itself this time, but went right in. "We worked there all day and all
night."

The streets were heaps of dbris. Whole walls had fallen flat; others
were cracked by great diagonal fissures, and were ready to fall at
any moment and bury the party, who crashed along anyhow over
huge upturned paving-stones and masses of brick rubble. Every
now and again a shell landed somewhere, hitting a house fair and
square, and reducing it to the same condition as hundreds of
others, which had already lost all semblance of houses; when this
occurred a Gargantuan puff of black smoke rose, and on its
evaporation, behold, the house was no more!

At one place the whole of such a house had slid across the street,
and when the first car arrived at the obstacle the chauffeur looked at
the leader for instructions. "Go over it," he said, and the man, with
wonderful pluck, did so, landing with a tremendous jolt and crash on
the other side. At first the place seemed deserted, but as they
advanced hasty figures diving round corners and disappearing in
by-streets showed more and more frequently, and at last the first
impression was completely wiped out-the place seemed alive with
Belgian and French soldiers. The wounded had been collected at
the splendid Town Hall, the building which means so much more to
Continental nations than it does to us. The mighty pillars at the
entrance had fallen this way and that, and one standing grandly
upright recalled the majesty of a ruined Egyptian temple.

It was not the wounded only that were to be saved; there were still
some few miserable inhabitants living in the haunted desolation, and
by peeping down into gaping cellars, and calling softly to see if any
living thing would respond, at last four or five old women of ages
between eighty and ninety were discovered huddled together,
waiting for death. One of these poor old things had had her hand
badly hurt; it had been roughly bandaged some four days before,
and had remained uncleansed and unchanged since, so that the
wound was in a horrible state. But she did not seem to mind the
pain; only as Gipsy attended to her gently she started jabbering
hard and very fiercely, as if she was angry about something. As it
was a stream of Flemish, nothing was intelligible. Gipsy called to a
Flemish soldier outside to come in and interpret, and when he had
asked a few questions of the excited old crone he laughed
carelessly, and explained in French: "It's all right, Sister; she is only
upset because a wisp of her hair is hanging down and she can't get
her hands up to tidy it, and she doesn't think she's fit for you to see."
So the long wisp of lanky grey hair had to be tenderly fastened back
before the dressing proceeded.

The dash into Dixmude was followed by a terrible discovery--M. de
Broqueville, who had been in charge, was missing. He had given
the order to start back, and then, when the cars had got clear of the
town, it was found that he was not with them. After the wounded had
been safely landed attempts were unsuccessfully made to find him,
but it was not until the next day he turned up smiling, walking quietly
in among his comrades, mercifully unhurt. It appeared he had made
a dash down a cellar to help someone at the last minute, and when
he came up found the cars had gone. He had actually walked back
along the shell-torn road and escaped without a scratch.

It was nearly the end of October when the first warnings came that
Furnes in its turn might have to be evacuated. The great grey host,
like a swarm of locusts, was advancing on the unhappy country;
thousands had been killed, but there seemed always to be
thousands more to take their places. The gallant defenders had
nobly played their part, and it must be remembered that they were
really more like a trained civil force than an army, for Belgium had
had no reason to expect war. They had performed prodigies of
valour, nobly backed up by the plucky little French marines and
Senegalese. Further to the south, at Ypres, the British had come to
the rescue, but the Belgians themselves must have the credit for
holding the most western extremity of the line, helped by the British
naval guns as the enemy came within range. Some of their feats
are worthy of the best traditions of a military nation. They had
dashed with armoured cars right into the heart of the enemy's host,
spurting leaden death, and retiring unharmed themselves; some of
these tales read like the stories of knights in armour attacking
dragons in the old days.

But the huge soulless machine in opposition was only scratched by
such episodes, not injured. The immensity of it was past all
calculation. Its efficiency was the result of years of concentration,
and the discipline of the units was such that they were merged in
one welded mass; no man had a soul of his own. Stories of the
irresistible momentum of this compact mass, of its appliances for
continuing and enduring and filling up gaps, its horrible persistency
when beaten back again and again, had swelled and gathered, and
terror grew. Small wonder was it then, when a few shells fell in
Furnes, that imagination quickened its approach. The few people
who had not already gone began to go post-haste. It had come
within the range of possibility that the hideous cruelties and
loathsome brutalities enacted at Louvain and Dinant, Aerschot and
other towns, might even be the fate of Furnes. All night long the
streets rumbled with departing vehicles, mingled with the clatter of
advancing cavalry hoofs, and as a background the roll of the guns
gathered force and sounded ominously nearer. Even the
ambulance people were warned to leave, but they determined to
"stick it out" so long as they could be useful.

On the morning of October 29, Gipsy and Mairi got up as usual at
six. They washed in that "half-teaspoonful" of water to which they
had grown accustomed. Water was very scarce in Furnes and
Gipsy remarks casually, "I am so dirty, I feel I shall soon walk
without legs!"

The British field hospital had taken a different view of the situation
from the members of the ambulance corps, and had gone south at
the sound of the alarm. The leaders had already once experienced
what it meant to wait to the last minute, and knew what it had cost
them, and so were determined not to be caught again. There was
an atmosphere of horrible uncertainty everywhere, the confusion of
a war seen from the middle instead of from the end.

Yet the cars ran out to Oudecappelle as usual among the dead
bodies of horses and cows that lined that road. Some of these had
been cut up, and the joints taken for food; others had reached the
stage of being pestilential. Gipsy was driving, and rifle-bullets,
always a sign of an advance, had begun to hum. She sheltered
beside the wall of a house, which does form some protection from
this form of attack, though none from shell-fire, and she amused
herself by remarking the different notes of the bullets. When one
struck anything it made a little smack like the crack of a well-
manipulated whip, because the displaced air cracks at the sharp
end of the flight.

Most of the day was given over to a vague running about hither and
thither without much result, and the atmosphere was full of a
maddening suspense. At last a message came for someone to go
out to an outlying post to fetch in wounded men. This could only be
done under cover of darkness. So as soon as the dusk came down
in a kindly veil several of the party started. Tom was driving the first
car, and had Mairi with him, among others; whilst Gipsy drove the
second, the big Napier ambulance. This still retained its glass
screen, and as it was raining the screen became blurred and added
to the difficulty of seeing ahead. It was a matter of crawling along
foot by foot in the grease of the pav. Thus they went to Claeskerke,
close to Dixmude, where the Germans might break through at any
moment according to reports.

When they came to the cross-roads Gipsy received orders to turn to
the left, while the first car went to the right. The first party picked up
a number of Senegalese very quickly and took them back to
Furnes. Gipsy crawled over the ground at a walking pace toward a
lonely farm, where she had been told she would find cases to bring
back. The surface was so greasy that the wheels would hardly hold
the road at all, but there was a fair light from a village in flames
some way off. The farm-house had been used as a depot for the
wounded, and they were being brought in thick and fast. When she
arrived here the whole available space in the ambulance was
quickly filled with stretcher cases. Mr. G------, an American who had
done good work with the ambulance, climbed inside the car to help
the men whose hold on life was slipping from them, and all alone on
that front seat sat one frail woman to guide to safety that huge,
heavy car which resembled a motor-bus.

The roads were abominable; never had she known them so bad.
Sometimes the steering-wheel was jerked right out of her hands,
which, for all their skill, had not the strength to hold up the weight so
suddenly thrown upon the wrists. The skids were almost continuous,
and jerked the living freight from side to side. At any moment the
whole ambulance might topple right over. She had been driving off
and on since seven that morning, and was already tired. Her back
ached to agony, her eyeballs were strained with trying to pierce the
grisly darkness.

The blaze of the burning village died down until only a red glow
remained. All at once a shell burst as it seemed right overhead, and
in the blinding light she saw something straight across the track,
something big and black, which made her shut down the brakes and
pull up. Then she could see nothing with that flashing light still
repeating itself in her eyes and making the red dusk seem velvet-
black; so, after waiting a minute, she clambered down from the seat
and felt about with her hands, and ascertained that the body of a
great cart-horse was lying across the way. It was far beyond her
strength to move, so, groping in the mud, she measured the space
left in which to pass, and found she could do it with six inches to
spare, but the miscalculation of the six inches would land them all in
an awful catastrophe! However, there was nothing else for it: these
precious lives inside depended on her; so, bitterly cold and soaked
to the skin, she crept back to the steering-wheel and essayed the
difficult task. Inch by inch she crept past judging the distance, and
as her pupils widened she was enabled to see a little, and then she
breathed once more as she gained the pav, which, compared with
the mud at the side, seemed safety. But she was not by any means
out of the wood, for not a quarter of a mile further her groping sight
revealed another black mass, this time so big that it was visible
without the aid of a shell-burst. Once more she had to get down and
investigate; it proved to be a shell-hole quite large enough to
swallow the whole ambulance and its contents. Once more she had
to carry out unaided that manuvring process with so little margin
of safety.

When back again on the road she almost ran into a compact group
of cavalry that was coming with uncanny silence toward Dixmude.
The background of constant noise obliterated all lesser sounds. She
warned the men of the shell-hole and passed on. But the end was
not yet. According to agreement, she was to return to Furnes by
way of Oudecappelle, where Gilbert was waiting. Numbed and
trembling with the shocking strain, she felt a momentary relief when
she alighted beside his dark figure. Her muscles were wrenched
and her hands were shaking, but here was Gilbert without a car, and
possibly he would take over the driver's job. She waited silently.

"How many have you got?" he asked in French.

"It is full inside; there is no room--except"--as an afterthought--"two
sitting cases could come alongside me on the front."

"Then you must go back at once and fetch two sitting cases. There
are two waiting, slightly wounded, along that road you came. I will
show you where."

"I felt as if my heart would burst," Gipsy says, when recounting this
incident in her diary.

But what could she do? She was under orders, and her high spirit
would have forced her on like a mettled horse until she dropped
dead.

With a little choke, but without a word of protest, she turned the car
and proceeded to re-traverse that awful road, with Gilbert sitting on
the step beside her as a guide. They found the wounded men and
placed them in front, and then returned. The road was being shelled
heavily now, doubtless because the Germans anticipated
reinforcements coming along it. The whistling scream of the great
shells, like the scream of a railway engine as it dashes through a
station, got nearer and nearer, and even Gilbert himself ducked
involuntarily as one burst within ten yards of them whereat the
patient driver smiled a little in the dark. She was far past minding
shells herself, voluntarily or involuntarily.

"To get the car along at all, I had to brace every muscle to breaking-
point, and every nerve in my body was strung taut. My head ached
from straining my eyes in that drizzle, my arms ached from clutching
that heavy wheel. There were moments when I felt I could not go
on, and yet I knew I must, and so I did."

On reaching Oudecappelle again, Gilbert alighted and rejoined his
own car, which had come back, and for the fifteen miles or so
homeward the whole burden of responsibility again fell on this
indomitable woman.

How the miles were passed over she did not know. She almost
reached the point of insensibility, working like an automaton without
feeling before the end; but she came to life on reaching Furnes, and
the coming alive was agony. At the entrance into the courtyard of
the convent there is almost a right-angled turn up through the gates,
a tricky task at the best of times. When she reached it her weak,
strained wrist refused to do it. The car had to be stopped, backed,
and the chauffeur tried again, failed; tried once more, yet more
feebly, and failed again; and then, utterly done, she fell forward on
the steering-wheel and for the first time in her life broke down.
Faithful little Mairi, who had come home with Gilbert's car and not
gone out again, was waiting and watching, and sprang to help her
and take her indoors while others brought in the car. No wonder
Gipsy says in her diary, "It was one of the most appalling
experiences of my life!"

In going through these days of horror during the crisis at Dixmude
one is struck with the miraculous way in which the party were
preserved. Never shirking, hardly ever out of danger, yet not one of
them was hit; they were certainly watched over by a Higher Power.

One time, when they were at Oudecappelle awaiting cases to take
home, it seemed quite an ordinary thing to M. de Broqueville to
suggest to Gipsy that they should walk up the shell-strewn road after
having left the ambulances--just as natural as if he had asked her to
go for a stroll in a country lane to wile away the time until the horse
had had a feed at a country inn. And it seemed quite as natural to
her to accept. She made no comment on the astounding
proposition. She simply went.

They could see the shapeless observation balloons of the Germans
floating ahead, and Gipsy airily chaffed her companion about the
gold tassel on his cap, saying that as it bobbed up and down in the
rare gleam of sunlight they were enjoying it made a beacon for the
hostile fire. She had hardly said it, and they were about a hundred
yards along the road, when a German shell burst in a field on the
left; so their pleasant little stroll had to be abruptly curtailed, and they
turned to go back. Then a shell sailed straight toward them. They
heard it coming, and knew well from experience that the sound
portended a very near thing. They stopped dead, waiting tensely
through that second that might be the last scrap of time left to them,
and the shell pitched not fifteen yards away, covering them both
with a pall of dust.

"Ne bougez pas," M. de Broqueville counselled, in his wise, kind,
unalarmed tones. So Gipsy stood waiting quietly. Just ahead of
them was an old, old peasant man whom they had passed pushing
along a barrow full of turnips, and as the "Ne bougez pas" rang out
he, too, stopped where he was and raised his withered hand to wipe
his forehead. The third shell flew screeching overhead, and burst in
the ditch by the side of the road, sending up a great spout of water
like a geyser. The splinters flew far and wide. One pierced Gipsy's
coat, but left her uninjured; and , when the smoke died away they
saw that the old peasant had fallen forward across his barrow. They
sprang forward to help him, and found a splinter had caught him in
the back, and it was all over with him.

Having once started, the two ran back toward the cottages where
the ambulances were, and as they ran two more shells broke close
to them, one smashing an empty cottage into a heap. It had
occurred to them both that with the deadly missiles bursting around
like this the precious ambulances must be in danger, and must be
secured at any cost; so they backed them off three hundred yards
along the road, and returned with stretchers to pick up the wounded,
for one of the doctors was injured, and a sergeant had had an arm
blown off.

After this episode Gipsy remarks severely: "Shells are not things
one likes at all. Anyone who says he likes them is certainly not
speaking the truth."




Chapter VIII
The Great Idea



The brilliant idea which Gipsy had conceived the day she met Dr.
Van der Ghinst grew like Jack's beanstalk, one night at
Oudecappelle, when for the first time the two friends together slept
among the soldiers in the fire-zone. They had been up and down,
up and down, under the direction of Gilbert, almost all day, and
when they heard their services would possibly be required at night
too, it seemed the obvious thing to do to sleep at this tiny village
instead of going back that long, weary way to Furnes. The French
marines were occupying a wee caf, and as one of them advanced
to ask the ladies to share it with them, they thought for the moment
he was suffering from some new and horrible kind of wound,
because he never looked the same for two seconds together; as a
matter of fact, he had a face of the gutta-percha variety, and in his
civilian days had earned many a penny by displaying this
eccentricity, of which he was obviously proud. He did not want to let
his talent rust for want of use, and so as he came forward he
displayed one moment a large, flat, vacant-looking visage, with two
tiny eyes like currants, and the next it was shrunk and wizened up
as if he had lived to the end of all time. They watched, fascinated,
until he turned and led the way to shelter. This was a very low, dirty
little Flemish house with a filthy stained wooden table, greasy soiled
chairs, and a floor which might have belonged to a cow-byre. Two
chairs were pulled out and put in a corner, and here the two friends
sat together, while, as dusk gathered, the gloom was lightened by a
guttering candle stuck in a wine-bottle. Just behind them was a
Belgian battery, and the heavy guns sent out a roar every few
seconds which shook the tumble-down place, so that it was
marvellous it did not fall in a heap. Every scrap of glass in the small
window-panes had long since vanished. The French soldiers were
sitting in the filthy damp straw on the ground, smoking and chatting,
spitting, and playing cards with a pack on which the stains looked
like a weird new variety of suits. The place was fairly stuffy, but
every now and then the door opened to let in an icy draught.
"Rubber Face," as they had christened him, noticed that his guests
had nothing with them in the way of food, and in his large-hearted
generosity immediately did his best to provide for them. He
produced an egg from his pocket with the air of doing a conjuring
trick--as indeed it was, for Heaven alone knew how he had managed
to keep that egg unbroken since he had obtained it. One would
have thought the concussion of the guns would have been enough
to shatter it. He promised an omelette, and finding an old tin plate,
which he assured them had "dj de la graisse," he broke the egg
on to it, holding it over an improvised fire. He would have probably
died of a broken heart if they had refused it, and being out to heal
and not to break, they had to go through with it.

They wondered what would happen when sleeping-time came. It
would be a weary performance to sit upright all night, and yet to fall
upon that wet and fetid straw, among the French soldiers, many of
whom were heartily asleep already, seemed equally impossible. But
Gilbert, by exploring, discovered a small inner room and managed
to procure a certain amount of fairly clean straw, and there they
retired. It was indeed to Mairi not the first experience of such a kind,
because a night or two before, when Gipsy had gone over to
Dunkirk, she had slept here alone among the men with the fearless
freedom of a child. She had had her own pile of straw in the corner,
and was hedged in by Gilbert and Tom, the trustworthy chauffeur.
They had had some cushions from the car as pillows, and a couple
of rugs, and she says, "I was well protected, for Gilbert had his
revolver under his pillow, and lay between me and the soldiers."

It speaks highly indeed for the men that her confidence was
justified. And in all the most difficult circumstances arising out of the
crude conditions these two women encountered, there is never
once a hint that they were annoyed in any way. Mairi had lain down
now with her knitted khaki wool cap pulled well down to prevent the
straw from tickling her ears, and she was asleep within five minutes.
Like the soldiers, she had become so much accustomed to the
thunder of the guns that she hardly heard it. But Gipsy was more
highly strung, and she found sleep impossible. There was a faint
gleam from the candle, which burnt all night, and though she tried
hard to sleep, at first she found it out of the question; her
imagination was too active.

"The place was so eerie and small, and the rats worried me. I
thought of all sorts of stories of rats eating one's nose and nibbling
one's finger-nails. The men through the doorway snored, too,
horribly. I wondered what would happen if the Germans came
suddenly, as they might quite easily do. The springing to life of those
slumbering men, and the awful carnage there would be in that tiny
space!" It was only when there was a lull in the firing for a moment
that the snores could be heard; they were ordinarily drowned in the
hullabaloo. When there was a louder crash than usual, so that
Gipsy started up thinking the whole house was coming down to bury
them, not one of the sleepers stirred. So she sat up and wrote her
diary, the little green book that accompanied her everywhere, and
was stained and soiled with the weather, matching the red one that
Mairi faithfully carried and looked upon as an inestimable confidant.
To have the privilege of seeing those two diaries is to get a peep
into two uncommonly fine souls, of very different and in many ways
complementary characteristics.

At 2.30 Gipsy got up to creep outside to see if anything was
happening, and as she moved her girl companion stirred, turned,
and flung back the cap from her fair hair and opened her sleepy
eyes; so they crept out together. There they stood, feeling very, very
small under the arch of that immense plain, with the flashes on the
horizon, the red glare over devastated Dixmude, and a bitter wind
sweeping around. It was impossible not to recall the solemn words
of the prophet Isaiah: "Your country is desolate, your cities are
burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence."

The solemnity of the night, with Death stalking close at hand ready
to spring upon them at any second, impressed them. What was
going to happen in the future? Were they prepared to go on with this
work in spite of all the dirt and rats and smells? Were they able to
say to each other fearlessly and confidently, "I will go through with it;
I will devote myself to helping the little soldier in the trenches,
whatever comes. No more will I think of myself. I will sleep whenever
and wherever I can. I will live, if need be, under fire as he lives. I will
carry my life lightly if I can succour, help, and comfort him." The
glamour had all evaporated; they knew what such a vow involved,
but quite steadily they both agreed to take it. There were no heroics;
there was no romance; there, in that bitter wind, standing in front of
the poor little house full of snoring soldiers, with that horrible glare in
their eyes, and the thunder of the guns shaking the ground they
stood on, they held each other's hands, and determined to thrust
away all idea of fears, nerves, or feminine weaknesses. In the early
grey light of the morning they consummated that heroic resolve with
a real sacrifice. They saw it must be; there was no escaping it. So,
with a pair of surgical scissors, Mairi cut and hacked and chopped
until she had shorn her friend's dark silky hair to a length of about
two inches all round, and then Gipsy did the same for the strong fair
crop so unlike her own. They looked at it, laughing queerly, the fair
and the dark, before they knotted the tresses together and sent
them floating down the canal. When one is grown up, hair
completely cut off can never grow quite the same again. Later on,
recounting how little one member of the party had really done for the
cause, Mairi remarks significantly, "She never cut off her hair."

They pulled down their woolly caps well over their shorn heads, so
that the men should not notice anything, and returned to the hut.
Gipsy says, "With that little bundle of hair went all our nervousness,
all our fear of rats, our dislike of dirty food, and our ideas of home
comforts. We became soldiers from that hour."

It was very shortly after this that they met Dr. Van der Ghinst again.
He had stuck to his wounded in Dixmude until the Germans actually
came into the town and took him prisoner; but he was allowed to
continue his work, which he did for three days, and then, when he
went out to the German trenches under escort to collect the
wounded, he managed to give his captors the slip, and, after it was
dark, got clear away.

During the many hours of waiting since they had first met him, Mrs.
Knocker had thought out many things. It seemed to her that a great
deal of the ambulance work was running to waste; there was too
much careering backwards and forwards, with too little result. Huge
ambulances, consuming a great deal of petrol, were sent on trivial
errands. One night she and Mairi had been ordered miles away with
a great car merely to carry a bundle of bandages. At another time
she had actually been asked to take out "sight-seers" from England
in one of the cars!

It was after the wounded were collected that the shaking up over the
vile roads, and the long interval before they could be properly
attended to, often resulted in death. There must surely be some way
of preventing this. It seemed to Gipsy that a poste de secours right
up as near to the firing-line as possible, where the men could be
treated for shock, and restored somewhat before they had to
undergo the awful journey, would be the means of saving many.
The question was whether such a poste was feasible. Dr. Van der
Ghinst warmly approved the idea, but he stood alone, for when it
was mooted to the rest of the Corps it met with disapproval all
round. Dr. Munro, indeed, told Mrs. Knocker plainly that if she did
this she would do it in disobedience to his orders, and all funds
would cease--she must finance herself. Ambulance work had the
cachet of respectability; everyone knew what it was, and approved
of it; but this other--whoever in their senses had heard of women
living right up among the actual fighting soldiers, miles from any
hospital? It had never been done, and therefore, of course, it was
useless to try it--so argued the official mind. The other members of
the Corps had had the same experiences as Gipsy, but though they
saw they did not perceive as she did.

Yet Gipsy never wavered for one moment in her determination. She
had the sense and foresight to see that in this original idea lay a field
of mighty usefulness; she had the courage to look out over the edge
of the rut of custom and convention. She knew instinctively where
her own strength lay; she could put through a big thing where others
might fail. Opposition only hardened her determination. She began
to piece out this great idea, to fit it together. Practical points must be
considered. In the first place, she could not run the poste herself,
and who so suitable to help her as Mairi, the brave little assistant
who had been her right hand all along? It was not because Mairi
had been her friend in that far-away, almost forgotten life in England
that she chose her, but because she had proved herself the
possessor of the right kind of qualities, and in spite of her age had a
steadiness far removed from that excitable feminine love of rushing
about which many women think displays their enthusiasm. It was
tolerably certain that she and Mairi together could do more for the
lives of the Belgian soldiers than had heretofore been done by all
the ambulances together.

A night or two later (November 7) Furnes was shelled in earnest,
forty or fifty shells falling into the town. Gipsy and Mairi were still in 
their disused house, and slept peacefully through it all. One doctor,
who occupied the room above them, had a cheerful habit of walking
about on the parquet flooring in his thick boots at unearthly hours,
so when Gipsy heard of the shelling she expressed surprise at not
having been wakened by it; but added: "Though, to be sure, I
should never have known the difference between the shells and the
doctor's boots, even if I had!" So are the small, near things and the
great, far-away things merged into one size by our human
limitations.

As the German advance seemed imminent, the time was ripe for
the new experiment, and the place chosen must, of course, be
approved by the military authorities. Dr. Van der Ghinst was himself
now established at Pervyse, which he considered suitable. A road
from Dixmude runs westward, and bifurcates at Pervyse. From here
the roads form a sort of isosceles triangle, with the base on the sea-
coast, one branch running through Furnes and the other to
Nieuport. Pervyse therefore lies roughly about half-way between
Dixmude and either Furnes or Nieuport. Gipsy, who never let go of
anything which she had determined to carry through, one day took
out Dr. Van der Ghinst in a car to Pervyse to survey the place and
to consider its suitability.

It was obvious that this part of the country was being bludgeoned to
death. A week earlier there had been some houses still standing at
the sides of the road, but now there was little, not even an upright
ruin, only heaps of stones; while the road, which had once boasted
a shell-pit here and there, was now pock-marked with them,
converted into black cauldrons filled with water by the incessant
rain. Driving a car resolved itself into a perpetual gamble, with the
odds against one.

All along the road were abandoned motor-cars dashed to pieces
even as they ran along, or smashed by a collision with a heavier
waggon, which had sent them hurtling into the deep ditch. The
prodigal waste of it all was appalling! There was plenty of evidence
that the passengers had not always escaped the fate of the cars. In
one of them the charred body of the chauffeur was mixed up in
grisly fashion with the wrenched and distorted wheel. The air was
tainted by the revolting charnel smell, not to be imagined by those
who have not experienced it, nor to be forgotten by those who have.
The first challenge of it is unmistakable, carrying certainty as to its
origin, and it seems to curdle the very blood with its loathsomeness.

Bloated cows like inflated balloons, humped sheep, and horses
looking terribly clumsy in grotesque attitudes, lay in the fields; and
when they drove into Pervyse, Gipsy exclaimed with conviction:
"There is not a house one could even pig it in!"

She little foresaw how long it would be her home!

Dr. Van der Ghinst promised to look out and find, if possible, a
shelter for her head among the ruined houses. He advised her,
however, to take a rest and go over to England before starting on
this new work, as she and Mairi had now been under almost
continuous strain, in very trying conditions, for over six weeks. She
agreed, and resolved to arrange it. When she returned to the house
in Furnes, which she had now grown to look upon as quite her own,
to tell her comrade and pack a few clothes, she found Mairi standing
speechless before a furiously enraged bonne, who was pouring out
upon her, in the dialect of her particular native part of France, what
she thought of thieves and robbers in general, and of these Two in
particular. Even Gipsy's French, which was better than the average
Englishwoman's, was unequal to the situation. The woman flew at
them like a hornet, and refused to admit them. She had cautiously
returned to collect some clothes for her mistress, and the first glad
surprise at finding Furnes still standing, had turned to wrath in her
frugal soul when she found evidences of occupation; and they were
bound to admit that she was not unjustified from her point of view.
They had to fetch the Belgian on whose authority they had
established themselves, to explain and set matters right before they
could collect their things.

Then away to that glad, strange England, which seemed almost like
a foreign country after such amazing experiences. It is hardly to be
wondered at that fair-haired Mairi, in her well-worn khaki and knitted
soldier's cap, carrying part of a Uhlan's lance given to her as a
trophy, created quite a sensation in Waterloo Station.




Chapter IX
The Cellar-House



By the third week in November, 1914, the Two were established in
Pervyse.

A vast area of flood-water, lying flat and white in the cold light,
covered acres upon acres of submerged land north of a line
between Nieuport and Dixmude. The Belgians had opened the sea-
sluices, and those salt waters which had ever lapped hungrily at
their small country now proved a strength and protection in enabling
them to keep at bay a far more dangerous foe. Reaching up to the
margin of the water was a hideous huddle of gaunt stone houses
which had once been the peaceful little village of Pervyse.

Gipsy had said with decision that there was not a house to lodge in,
and she was right; but there was a cellar--two, in fact--and in one of
these the two friends were domiciled for living and sleeping both. It
was reached by a rough stairway leading from the battered shell
above, which had once been the house it belonged to. The dim
project had taken shape.

When the two friends had returned to their work after being a few
days in England, unfortunate Mairi had been taken ill, and was
unable to go at once to the cellar-house; but now she was all right
again, and they were installed in surely the very oddest
circumstances two women had ever managed to get themselves
into before. In the other remaining cellar across the road were the
officers of the Mitrailleuse Third Division, to which Dr. Van der
Ghinst was attached.

To get a clear idea of Pervyse, it is necessary to enter it from the
direction of Furnes, where the road makes several curves, and at
the last goes quite straight and gives evidence that it comes well
within the range of the German shells. The village which once lay
along the sides of this road was rather like a Scotch village, for the
houses were built of stone, and stood right on to the edge of the
road, so they had that bare, unfinished appearance which is so
disappointing to the stranger first visiting Scotland, who is
accustomed to the bright little flower-gardens of the south-country
villages of England. Every one of these houses had been smashed
up by the continual rain of missiles. Houses without man are the
most melancholy sight, it is the soul without the body, though, oddly
enough, it is when they are broken up that they bear most
resemblance to the body, showing a series of distorted faces.

At the top of the village stood the church, which had originally had a
dumpy spire; but the top of this had been shot away, so that it was
left square. Of this church the late Miss Macnaughtan wrote: "A
haggard-looking church, like a sentinel with both eyes shot out.
Nothing was left but a blind face. The tower had great holes in it,
and the aisles had fallen. The churchyard looked as though some
devil had stalked through it tearing up crosses and digging up
graves."

This churchyard is as thickly crowded with bodies as the old London
city churchyards before they were cleared out. Not only Belgians,
but hundreds of Germans have been buried there. The remnants of
tombstones had been hurled this way and that, graves gaped,
giving up their dead, and the scrubby trees were withered and
stripped by the fiery blasts. The two cellars were at the church end
of the village, the dangerous end, nearest to the German guns.
Water was scarce, and when they first went there the Two had to
use the flood-water in the ditch, so it is probably true, as one paper
remarked, that they drank water which had filtered down from the
graveyard, where lay scores of dead Germans!

At right angles to the main road run both the railway line and the
Nieuport-Dixmude road, which crosses the other just on the
Pervyse side of the line, and all along by the railway line are the
Belgian trenches commanding the flooded area beyond. It must be
remembered that in Belgian flood-areas trenches are not exactly
what one usually understands by that term. Instead of being "dug-
outs," they are "throw-ups." It would be obviously impossible in that
saturated soil to make any trench which did not immediately
become a ditch, and therefore earth-works are thrown up, which
serve the same purpose, and even then the men are most of their
time in water, in spite of much pumping. Many of them constantly
trudged through the village carrying great bundles of straw, which
they threw down to give them for a short time a dry standing space.
Their little shelters are built along by the earth-work, then roofed
over and filled with straw, and at night comes a faint glow through
the insufficient roofs, telling of dim lights and smoky fires within,
where the men lie huddled upon their primitive cribs.

The Furnes road does not end at the line, but goes on across it, and
runs out into the great waste of water like a pointing finger. It is
raised, as nearly all main Belgian roads are, and forms a sort of pier
or bund, so has to be strongly guarded. The Belgian outposts are
established far out upon it. Behind the wide belt of water is still
preserved the "very small remnant" of their fertile land left to King
and people; small as it is, it forms a well-spring of hope and good
omen for the future.

The blessed belt encircling such a priceless territory is
comparatively shallow, but very unequal in depth, and therein lies its
value. Even if the German infantry could start knee-deep to march
across it, they might any minute find themselves up to their necks in
ditch or hole, and at the best the heavy guns of the artillery would
stick in the plastic paste beneath. In the shroud of the shallow grey
water are buried German guns which had to be left in the headlong
flight when the sluices were opened, and the invaders fled pell-mell,
to escape the fate which overtook so many. An uncertain grey hump
floating here and there suggesting a water-turtle, betrays the
drowned bodies. Simple as it seems, this stretch of shallow water is
at once the slightest and most permanent barrier that could be
found. On that grey November day, when Gipsy and Mairi wandered
out to get some idea of their surroundings, great bars of yellow
drifted through the pervading fog, and made spots of colour on the
water, where the dead fish, killed by the effects of the salt water,
were floating dismally, with their white undersides turned to the sky.

The sides of that raised road were sprinkled with dead animals.
Twenty-seven cows, five sheep, eight pigs, and three horses could
be counted before the outpost was reached. Standing on the
Belgian side, and looking out from an observation-post across the
water, it seemed like a shallow sea, broken here and there by
islands. On one of them was a picturesque ruin which had once
been a pleasant chteau; on another, nearer, was a farmhouse in a
clump of trees. It was not often that the moisture-laden atmosphere
permitted a glimpse of the far side, but when it could be seen it
showed itself as a low line of trees, behind which were the German
guns, from which ever and again at stated times tongues of fire
belched forth and missiles leaped across the water, sometimes
falling short of their objective and generating huge geysers,
sometimes pitching well into the village, and with a thunderous roar
shattering into a heap one more of the tottering walls.

It was here the Two settled down in a crumbling house, with every
pane of glass shattered to splinters and the walls gaping. A musty
smell of the dust of ancient bricks and mortar, compounded with dirt
and damp, hung over it all. There was no comfort, no convenience
of any kind. To have to sleep there one night would have been
considered a hardship by most people. The light was always dim, for
the cellar was lit only by gratings in the pavement above. It was,
perhaps, ten feet by about twelve feet, and so low that Gipsy, who is
not much above medium height, could just stand upright in it. Mairi,
of course, found plenty of space for her lesser inches, also it suited
most of the little Belgian soldiers well enough, but there came a day
when a King----- But that must be told in its own place!

Yet they set to work at once to make it cheery. They marked it
outside by a Union Jack and the Belgian and French flags, and it
was not long before they were joined by the Lion of Scotland, for a
Scot is never so Scottish as when away from his, or her, own land.

The first need was some sort of a fire to cook by. They found a
stove, which they humoured like the family cat, for it had all the
attributes of that animal, taking everything for granted and
immovably refusing to do what was required of it in return, and
behaving generally as if the cellar had been built for its
convenience. Two soldiers had been sleeping in the cellar on some
straw when the new tenants arrived. They were good, willing lads,
called Alphonse and Desir, and they at once set themselves to be
useful, and helped to loot a few necessary bits of furniture from the
deserted houses round. When all was done there was not very
much; a table, a few chairs, and some straw held in its place by a
board, were the principal items, and even then there was hardly
room to move. Here the Two settled down. At night they lay down as
they were in their clothes; as Mairi explains, "To dress, that means
to brush one's hair and put on one's boots." They were seldom
alone; the Cockney chauffeur, Woffington, slept in one corner, and
the little cook, Alexandre, in another. This was of necessity also, for
the cellar was the only place in Pervyse which provided even a
measure of safety from the shells. If other members of the
ambulance party turned up, as they sometimes did, they generally
went back to Furnes the same day, but if any of them stayed they
had to sleep there too. The first night the American lady and Dr. van
der Ghinst were both there. How they all fitted in is a puzzle.
Certainly one could not have set a boot on the ground between
them.

The details of settling in and finding household requisites were work
after Mairi's own heart. She was never so satisfied as when she was
giving everything a "good turn-out" and making all comfortable!
Aided by some of the Belgian Engineer officers, quartered in a
ruined house at the other end of the village, she climbed by means
of a plank over to a farm-house on an island which had been left
desolate. Here they found spoons, forks, plates, knives, and other
necessaries. A few cabbages and potatoes might still be scraped up
in the gardens and patches of ground, and these were most
welcome for the soldiers' soup. A little lean-to outhouse, in which
there was, most fortunately, a copper in working order, had been
made into a kitchen, and here the soup for the weary, frozen men in
the trenches was made.

Alexandre, the cook, was a cheery little Belgian lad of seventeen; he
had a bullet head and a seriocomic expression that made one laugh
to look at him. He had been through all the fighting, and considered
this relegation to the kitchen as a "soft thing." He had an immense
sense of his own importance, and very quickly let people know that,
in spite of his lack of inches and years, he was master of his own
quarter-deck; even the officers who hung around, drawn by the
savoury whiffs that came forth, were quickly sent about their
business. Alexandre was no longer a private, but a chef! It was the
difference between an ordinary seaman in the Navy and the captain
of a merchant ship. He soon became known far and wide as "le
magnifique petit cuisinier." He and the other two worked of their own
accord, for at this time the military authorities gave no countenance
to this astounding project.

Alphonse and Desir were Walloons, and manifested all the striking
divergencies which lie between Walloon and Fleming, countrymen
though they be. The Walloon is excitable, talkative, and inclined to
be frivolous. It is true that when he works he generally puts his
whole heart into it, but he is only too ready to knock off and have a
chat with anyone who will oblige him. He is very intelligent and fond
of mechanical inventions; he readily grasps the idea of new
machinery, and makes a good chauffeur. He has a great deal in
common with the Frenchman, which is hardly wonderful. Youth
seems his most characteristic feature; the simplest things amuse
him, and he runs eagerly, like the Athenians, after "any new thing."
He is up and down, extravagant, careless, attractive--all by turns. He
wins your heart and hurts you, and brings you round again, so that
you forgive him and would do anything for him; but you are left with
a conviction, after all, that he does not much care. It is hardly to be
supposed that with all this the Walloon is going to submit easily to
discipline, and as most of the chauffeurs which the Two had from
time to time were Walloons, there was frequent trouble. As Mairi
explains, "If you say to him, 'Do that,' he will immediately not do it! If
you say, 'Will you please do that' he will think about it. You must
lead them, not drive them, or you'll never get a thing done." About
their courage, however, there cannot be two opinions. And it was
something to have a couple of men who could do heavy lifting when
it got beyond women's strength.

The atmosphere in the cellar naturally got a little dense after a night,
and it was very early in the morning when Gipsy climbed the ladder,
and, putting her head out, indulged in a long in-drawn breath of the
sharp morning air. It was keenly cold, everything was frozen hard,
and the white cat-ice snapped on the puddles in the road. She had
hardly been there a second when she was joined by Mairi.

At first it was very difficult to get accustomed to the perpetual feeling
of dirt and being tumbled. After a day or two camping out anyone
knows how "lived in" one's clothes feel; but the clean, natural
surroundings of woods are Paradise compared with a dank cellar.
The sense of discomfort was very great, but there was nothing for it
but to grin and bear it; and there was so much to do, it was forgotten
after a while. The very first morning job was to see that Alexandre
did his duty in getting the fire under the copper alight and the
appetizing soup heated. It was soon bubbling away, with cabbage,
turnips, and potatoes and other ingredients in, and was poured out
still scalding hot into pans, which the orderlies carried to the
trenches, following the Two. The trenches were only fifty yards
away, and the men who had been on watch or trying to sleep in their
icy little shelters, insufficiently clad, were thankful to see this vision of
Paradise, and greeted these wonderful English ladies with
enthusiasm, holding out their little mugs in stiff, frozen fingers. Oh,
the joy of being able to do it! It was worth while to have gone
through all the weary days of waiting and the disagreeables for this!
But, alas! though there seemed quantities of soup when they
started, it was never enough--they could have done with much more.

The difficulty of dealing it out into the small mugs was considerable,
and the Two usually came back to their own breakfast splashed with
soup but glowing with pleasure.

In the days that followed, the grand success of the soup was almost
eclipsed by the charms of the chocolate which succeeded it later in
the day. Cauldron after cauldron of this was emptied as quickly as it
could be made. When the men were relieved in the trenches they
came over to the little cellar-house, and swarmed around it like
bees, waiting patiently for their turn, and holding out those endless
mugs which became like a nightmare to the fillers. Hour after hour
chocolate was scooped up and poured in, and the stains of dirty
brown formed a pattern with the stains of greasy soup on the khaki
suits of the two patient workers, whose backs ached after this really
hard manual toil. Yet there was nowhere to rest; it was impossible,
even had there been time, to go and lie down on the dank straw in
the cellar, with people coming in and out, and there was nowhere
else to go.

What the perpetual dirt and cold and discomfort meant to these Two
can hardly be put into words. There was no privacy and no
possibility of a good wash: their hands quickly became engrained
with scrubbing, potato-peeling, and other rough work. To keep the
place habitable at all, with the continual incursion of wet and
wounded men, was difficult. To get rid of soiled, stained bandages
was difficult. There was a constant smell of disinfectants and
stagnant or rotting things. Continual wet penetrated everywhere,
and in those early days they had not learned, as they did later, the
best way to equip themselves against this.

The news of this extraordinary little centre of light and comfort right
up in the actual firing-line spread like wild-fire, and every Belgian
officer discovered that urgent business took him to Pervyse at one
time or another in the next few weeks. They appreciated the
chocolate just as much as the soldiers did, and also the English way
of making tea, "the four o'clock," and the tiny cellar was generally
packed about that hour, while Mairi, with a flushed face, hastened to
and fro, wondering if the supply would last out for all these guests.
The very fact that the ladies were there in the midst of them, English
ladies, backing them up and believing in them, sent the spirits of the
whole Division up degrees higher. It was the 9th Regiment that was
then stationed at Pervyse, and they began to look upon the ladies
as their particular property, and crowed over the other unfortunates
who had no such luck.

In the ruin of the house above the cellar was a half-buried piano,
and one day one of the officers, being unable at that moment to
squeeze into the cellar, try he never so hard, cleared away the
stones and rubbish that had fallen on it, and discovered that though
it missed a part of the keyboard in the treble, the rest went all right,
so he sat down and played a waltz to fill up the time. Immediately
those of the rank and file who were hanging about outside started
dancing, their heavy boots clashing on the frosty road, until the party
in the cellar emerged to see what was going on. As the ladder
disgorged man after man it seemed a miracle where so many had
managed to pack themselves.

Mairi, flourishing the immense kitchen spoon with which the soup
was stirred, beat time for the dancers. The rattling piano, with its
occasional lapses, wheezed gaily away in the wind-swept ruin, the
ruddy-faced men and the two handsome women laughed
helplessly, while the hidden death waited ready to pounce. It was
like laughing in a lions' den; it was all right for the moment, but
anything might happen.

A strange life, indeed!

There was even a worse job to be faced than that of carrying the
soup to the trenches in the morning. This was to visit the sentries
and outposts at night, over the railway line, towards l'Yser, and carry
the warm comfort to feed their bodies, and the cheery thought, they
were remembered, to brace up their minds.

After tea this hung ominously over the girls; it was the worst bit of
the day, but it had to be faced. It could not be done until it got dark,
and then, as often as not, the shelling began. So they took their
lives in their hands, and never knew when they started out if they
would come back.

They were always accompanied by an officer, who had the
password, and the mission had to be carried out in perfect silence,
so as not to attract the enemy's unwelcome attentions. Sometimes
there was a gleam from the stars if it were frosty, but generally,
frosty or not, the damp from the ground rose in a white winding-
sheet and shut out all such light. Their feet rang on the iron-bound
road in spite of all their care; they carried the heavy jugs of scalding
liquid, and the sudden challenge, "Halte l!" ringing out in the night,
always made them jump, though they knew, or perhaps because
they knew, it would come. "Officier Belge," was the reply. "Un
homme en avance," commanded the voice of the unseen sentry,
and the officer moved slowly forward within five paces of him, while
the others waited till the password and countersign had been softly
given and received.

Three times this ceremony had to be repeated as they went out and
three times on their return, but on the outward journey each grateful
sentry received a cup of hot chocolate as a delightful reward.

Out across the bleak raised road, with the water lapping at its sides,
or with the thin crackle of ice settling down, they went. There was a
pale line of radiance from their own side where the trenches lay, and
sometimes the flashes of the German artillery shone out across the
water, or occasionally a star-shell, making a radiance more glorious
than the heart of the lightning. Then they had to catch their steps at
once and stand still as stocks, jug in hand, until the star burst and
faded. The air was full of portent and menace. Once as a doctor
advanced on this very road to meet Gipsy a shell caught him, so
that he died. "Why was it he, and not I?" Any sensitive mind must
ask that question.

The men of the mitrailleuse who guarded the outpost lived in a hole
in the ground. In pitch darkness a hand groped for the jug and drew
it in, and then, their work accomplished, the little party started back
again on their eerie journey.

Back across the railway line night after night, with the woolly fog
touching damp faces like unearthly fingers, then good-night to the
officer, and the stumble down into the little "cave," where the stove
was perhaps giving off a warm glow, reflected on the red blankets
and the slumbering form of Woffington. They crawled into their
sleeping-sacks, and slept the dead sleep of those whose whole
being has endured to the utmost during the run of daylight.




Chapter X
Varied Life In Pervyse



In any society in the world two such attractive women would excite a 
good deal of admiration, but out here, where the raw edge of life
was so apparent and recreation of any sort was so scarce, they
shone brilliantly. Gipsy is by nature very outspoken, and in her
dealings with headquarters she had made everyone she met
understand very clearly just what she wanted and how it was to be
done, and done it generally was. Her excessive frankness did not
always make for friendship, and some people were even offended
by her outspokenness. She was so quick and efficient herself that
she had not much of that patience which "suffers fools gladly,"
though she could be patience itself with suffering. Like all natures
which have a touch, or more than a touch, of genius in them, she
was very original, up and down, and full of facets, showing first one
side and then another, until some people thought they would never
be able to understand her. Her stern determination to get through
against opposition, her rapier strokes at those who stood in the way,
showed an entirely different side of her character from that she
displayed in off-times, when she was as much a child as the best
Belgian among them. She threw off cares and concentrated herself
entirely on the moment, and being an excellent mimic and very
versatile, she could entertain anyone until they too forgot the
sadness of the world around and were completely absorbed in her.

The wonderful position in which she found herself had been entirely
due to her own brilliant idea and quick grasp of what was necessary
in the first instance, and her wonderful perseverance in the second;
she never spared herself, and never rested till she had put through
what she had set her mind on. But she hated detail; in developing
the large outline of a scheme lay her strength--the detail must be
carried out by others. Like many another of the same temperament,
she "could not be bothered with small businesses," as the Indian
fortune-teller said. She needed someone behind who would pick up
what she dropped and see that she did not kill herself with excess of
energy, and Mairi was exactly the person required. Mairi is eminently
sane and steady. She cannot bear to sit down in an untidy room;
she must know where to lay hands on anything that might be
needed at a moment's notice; she is free from any trace of egotism,
and has a large capacity for hero-worship, yet, withal, the
shrewdness not to offer it at unworthy shrines. She is keen,
competent, and trustworthy, and the two together at Pervyse made
a perfect combination.

The officers who surrounded them adored them, as was only
natural, and were equally divided in their admiration of "Madame"
and "Miss."

Dr. Van der Ghinst, through whose frank cheeriness there ran a
deeper undercurrent of observation and perception, was a constant
friend and adviser. He very nearly fulfilled the highest ideal of
manhood, one who could have bestowed the most patient attention
on the wounded finger of someone else, even though he himself
was bleeding to death from something much more serious. Since
the Two had arrived in Pervyse, he had always been ready to listen
and to enter into any plan for the welfare and comfort of the soldiers.
He was an unfailing inspiration in the work. He was more fortunate
than many, for his wife was safe, and even paid a visit to Pervyse.

Another of the Belgian officers of whom the Two had seen a good
deal in Furnes was Captain Robert de Wilde, and when he turned
up and became observation officer in Pervyse they were delighted.
He was a perfect companion; "he never needed entertaining, but it
always seemed it was just right for him to be there." What higher
tribute could mortal man desire?

He got into the way of dropping in most evenings, and then there
was patience, or jig-saw puzzles, or, best of all, discussions on
those deep questions which must lie below the surface in the hearts
of all thoughtful men and women, and which are revealed at times
when the bare facts of human existence lie starkly uncovered and
all spurious sentiment falls away. These discussions meant much to
Gipsy, who needed mental stimulation; they left both her and Mairi
refreshed and brightened. "The nearer to the trenches, the gayer we
are!" she exclaimed one day, and indeed, it is not only at Pervyse
this truth is apparent. It is in the intervals of great crises that men let
themselves go with light-heartedness; the heights are proportionate
to the depths. Into no humdrum life has ever entered the utter
abandonment of gaiety felt at times by those who have faced
incredible danger and hardship. All happiness lies in contrast.

One morning Gipsy was alone in the cellar for a marvel; she was
reading a very dirty old magazine in a rare interval of leisure, for
there was no call for her services. Someone knocked and came
slowly down the steps. She saw in a moment, in spite of the dim
light, that this was a new-comer, and not any of the officers she had
yet met. He was very tall, so tall that he could not stand upright in
the cellar, though he tried more than once; and he wore the smart
uniform of the Guides, with crimson breeches, shining boots, green
tunic, and peaked cap. Somehow she felt unaccountably
embarrassed, and suddenly aware that she was in soiled clothes,
sitting on a heap of straw in a most unbecoming way. What was it in
the presence of this young man--he was only a Lieutenant--that
should shed such a brilliant illumination on things? It was very
remarkable, and she felt inclined to laugh, not knowing that with him
had entered her Fate!

Courteously saluting, he handed her a message from his Colonel,
and turned to retrace his steps; and as he went he smiled, a smile
that lit up his face and indeed the whole cellar. That smile seemed
positively to linger and irradiate everything in a remarkable way!

She felt unusually shy about mentioning the incident to Mairi, and it
was not until they passed him one day on his way to the trenches,
when he smiled again as he saluted, and Mairi asked casually,
"Who's that?" that Gipsy owned having met him at all.

"I don't know his name; he came with a message from the Colonel,"
she said, and felt, to her dismay, that she was growing very red as
she spoke.

It was less than a week after that the young Lieutenant once again
appeared, this time bearing a box of marrons glacs as a present
from the Colonel. A very welcome sight it was, for they both loved
sweets; indeed, Gipsy once plaintively remarks in one of her home
letters, "There is no more chocolate in the whole of Belgium, and
none in Dunkirk, so I feel horribly lonely."

Whether it was the marrons glacs or the smile she could not tell,
but from that date she had a feeling of security and comfort so long
as the young Lieutenant was in the trenches, though they saw very
little of him. Pervyse seemed in a miraculous way to have become a
safe and singularly happy place. And when, a couple of months
later, he was suddenly transferred elsewhere, and went without a
good-bye, though she saw him march off, it seemed as if the whole
side of Pervyse had been laid bare, and the Germans might sweep
in at any moment!

One day a little later she found it impossible to get a necessary
matter attended to. "I will go myself, and speak to Headquarters
about it," she said; "it's the only way to get anything done." So she
mounted her motor-cycle and went off, intending to let Headquarters
see how very unpleasant she could make herself when they would
not attend to her wishes. She had been feeling like that lately, as if
she rather wanted to blow someone up. "Nerves," she called it to
herself.

Now as she ran out on the long, raised road she had to stop for a
moment to attend to her cycle, and a car which was careering along
from the opposite direction stopped just beside her while the
occupants showed the sentries their papers. With a start which
thrilled right through her, Gipsy saw that young Lieutenant de
T'Serclaes, whose name she had now learned, was in the car, and
that he was in a new uniform with the wings of an aviator on his
sleeve. Again that happy smile seemed to strike through her, but no
word passed between them.

She mounted her cycle, and involuntarily looked back as the car
spun on its way. It was a most curious coincidence, but the
Lieutenant looked back too, at precisely the same moment!
Somehow the feeling of annoyance and "nerves" fell from Gipsy;
she suddenly felt herself again, and noticed how the larks were
singing in the battered fields around. She changed her mind, after
all, she wasn't going to bully Headquarters, she didn't feel she
wanted to bully anyone to-day, and she rode back again to Pervyse
in a state of serene bliss.

Supplying soup and chocolate was not the whole reason for the
settlement at Pervyse, or indeed the chief one--there were casualties
to be attended to and much suffering saved. The word "casualties"
by no means implies only actual wounds caused by weapons, but all
those terrible hurts due to the exposure of men's bodies in
circumstances of hardship and want. The intense cold and the lack
of proper clothing had their share in bringing about misery and
suffering, which in a minor degree, but still quite appreciably,
affected the fighting power of Belgium. Bare toes met the frost
through burst boots, and pneumonia and bronchitis supervened
upon nights of shivering, soaked bodies.

Gipsy wrote home urgently for clothes, clothes of any description;
they were not particular. At that time the Belgian Army was not clad
in khaki, and the soldiers were ready enough to snatch up any warm
garment they could find; a motley crowd they looked sometimes, but
they were units whose individualism would have stood a stronger
test than a lack of uniformity in garments, which might have
imperilled the cohesion of a German regiment. "I wish I could get
hold of some society that has heaps and heaps of soldiers'
clothing," Gipsy says. "Helmets, scarves, boots, and socks."

From the first the poste was on an organized and systematic
footing. There were to be no casual loiterers playing at stomach-
ache to secure the comforts it offered; every man who came to ask
for the ladies' assistance had to bring a letter from his commanding
officer warranting that he was in need of it.

Such varying needs, too! One had caught his hand on a nail, and
the wound was festering; another was in agony with swollen,
inflamed feet; a third was quite done up, nothing to show except that
he was incapable of the smallest exertion. Him they fed and put into
what they called the "bless bed " in the corner, because it was
devoted to the soldiers. They piled up hot-water bottles round him,
and let him sleep the clock round, after which he arose a new man.

Every morning one or other of the Two was up at six to see
Alexandre did not neglect his duties in getting the fire alight. Mairi
sometimes went foraging, and though she generally started alone,
she was seldom allowed to return so. To the Belgian officers her
roguish smile and the dimple in her sweet face were like sunlight,
and she never lacked admirers, but through them all she passed
unscathed. Her heart was not easy to reach. She was charming to
all, with a frank independence that was like that of a delightful boy,
and was new to most of them in a woman. She made use of them
and listened to their chaff or their compliments with just the same
manner, and the humour she shared in common with most of her
countrymen, despite the gross libel kept alive by those who wouldn't
know a Scot if they met one, was constantly in play. Her nerve was
unassailable; she went to dig up potatoes and came back laden
through a shower of shrapnel, which she apparently regarded much
as she would a shower of rain.

Here is an account of one such incident in her own words: "We
found some potatoes up the road past the trenches. Then we went
right to the other side of the village to get some cabbages. When we
had cut them we wanted to wash them, and were shown a well. This
done, we started back. Just behind the church we were warned it
was impossible to get back, as the Germans were plumping
shrapnel across the road. We decided to take our chance, so went
on. Immediately the shrapnel came whistling along and burst just
over us, so we ducked in under a house. Then we went on again
and got in safely. The shrapnel continued all the morning."

And with this life, so full and rich in the most life-giving element of all,
the knowledge that one's presence is almost indispensable to the
well-being and happiness of many, a great peace descended on the
Two. Shell-fire, the desolation of that curved street with gaping
wounds, and the lack of all amenities, had not power to affect them.
They quickly grew to love their little cellar-house, and to feel that it
was a true home.

One morning they awoke to a perfect fusillade of rifle-fire, and for
the first grave moment thought the Germans had really broken
through and were charging up the village street. They climbed up
out of their shelter and gazed down the street, for, as Gipsy said,
"Curiosity beat fear." They saw no Germans, so they scampered
along in the direction of the trenches, determined at all costs to
satisfy their curiosity, and there they met a dismal procession. One
or two men were being helped along as they stumbled and stayed,
leaving heavy red drops on the road; others were being carried on
stretchers; and the cause was that one of the trenches had caught
fire, and a quantity of ammunition had given a demonstration on its
own account, with the result that no less than six soldiers suffered.
They were tenderly cared for, for by this time Mairi was a most
efficient assistant, far better after her practical experience than
many who have spent months in bandaging imaginary patients. But
all this was done under great difficulties. There was no clean running
water; no sinks and other appliances--only a dim, dark cellar, so
small that one could hardly turn round; no room to store anything;
constant curtailment of everything that a medical man would have
looked upon as indispensable. The shortage of water was a great
bother. There had been numerous pumps and wells, but most of
them were choked or smashed. It was a great triumph when the
genius Alexandre, poking about by himself in the dusty heaps of
bricks and great fallen beams that now represented Pervyse,
actually discovered a pump in working order. With that phlegm
which was his most valuable quality, he annexed the top part of the
pump, so that no one else could use it, and so exhaust the supply.
As water even for drinking or cooking purposes was scarce, it may
be deduced that water for baths was unobtainable. It was so at first,
and as the Two slept night after night in their clothes--a proceeding
which exhausts a woman far more than a man--a bath became a
thing to sigh for. Of all the luxuries in England, the wide rooms, the
dainty food and accessories, the soft sheets, the thought of a hot
bath was the most alluring. The best they could do was to get a
bucket of hot water occasionally, but the difficulty was to know when
to make use of it, for the cellar-house was never free from intrusion
any moment, night or day. It might be that Mairi had stationed
herself on the topmost rung of the ladder to scare away all comers
while Gipsy had a delicious wash below; but who was to foretell
whether at that very moment when the bather was most helpless
before convention, a desperate wounded man needing immediate
succour might not materialize?

At last a bath was discovered, a real porcelain bath of the latest
kind--a most unusual thing to be in a Belgian village at all. It was
unearthed in one of the tumble-down houses, and carted bodily into
one of the ruined rooms above the cellar, where, by disregarding
the risk of being shelled at any minute, one could have a bath with
the strictly minimum amount of privacy necessary for decency. But
before this great find was made Gipsy, getting desperate, borrowed
a beautiful horse belonging to one of the officers and rode into
L'Esprance, the little place where Dr. Van der Ghinst and other
officers were now quartered, where was a tiny inn and the possibility
of a wholesale wash. Just as she arrived there she met an
Englishman. She looked at him keenly and he at her, and for a
moment they paused, not knowing whether the flash of familiarity
that passed between them was merely due to the magnetic
attraction of a countryman and woman in a strange land, or the
result of real acquaintance somewhere in that old, almost-forgotten
life lived once, centuries ago, before the war. Gipsy recovered first,
as the woman invariably does. She leaned down over her horse's
silky neck, and said softly: "It was hard luck that you couldn't
manage that last rise at Leith Hill! You would have beaten me!"

Quick as a flash the new-comer retorted, laughing, "My own fault for
having let the beastly thing leak; all the petrol had run out." Then
they plunged into delightful reminiscences of the day of the motor-
cycle contest and hill-climbing test, but all at once Gipsy sat up
straight, and her delicate eyebrows drew together with an
expression of anxiety as she looked back the way she had come.

"Firing," he said, following her glance. "They say the Boches are
shelling Pervyse."

"Pervyse!" She sat straighter. "Oh yes, a few shells, Pervyse often
gets those, but this is a storm!"

"So they say," he answered, waving indifferently toward two officers
who had come out and were standing at the entrance of the inn.

"I must go back instantly." All thoughts of her bath were merged in
the remembrance that Mairi was there alone in that tornado, far
worse than anything they had yet been subjected to at the poste.

The Englishman caught her rein. "Go back? Good lord! Why?
You're well out of it!"

She only laughed, flicked her rein from his hand, and with a cool nod
trotted off hard toward the ominous sound. Dismounting on the
outskirts of Pervyse, she hitched the horse up in one of the broken-
down barns and went on on foot. But the firing was terrific. Shells
began to burst around, and involuntarily she sprang to the meagre
shelter of some broken walls. Then Woffington came round the
corner driving a car as hard as he could go, with that curious silence
they had already noticed, which made it seem like an object in a
cinematograph. She stepped out and shouted to him to stop, and
Woffington, who always had his wits about him, obeyed coolly. He
said Miss Chisholm had sent him post-haste for the doctor, as a lot
of wounded had been brought in. However, he turned without cavil
and carried Mrs. Knocker back into the deadly fire-zone, setting her
down at the cellar, before once more he reversed his car and ran
out on his errand; and to his credit it may be noted his hand did not
shake, nor had his colour in any way abated.

The wounded were, as he had said, crowded in the cellar, with Mairi
and the old priest kneeling by them; there was hardly room to get in
beside them. One of the men over whom Gipsy bent had had his
arm nearly severed, and with a quick contraction of the heart she
recollected having met him on his way to the trenches as she rode
out to L'Esprance only an hour before. Then he had given her a
royal salute, and now never again would he be able to salute with
that poor arm.

After hard work, the wounded were patched up sufficiently to be
sent down to Furnes.

A day or so before this they had had a great excitement, for word
had come that King Albert, the hero-King whom they were serving,
was in the village. He did not come to the cellar, for which they were
thankful, as he is so very tall. Mairi was certain he would have
bumped his head "every minute," which would have been awful; but
he spoke kindly to them both, with that absence of conventionality
which characterizes him.

With all the stern, and many times ghastly, scenes that they went
through, there were bright intervals of enjoyment that stood out like
beacons by the way. One of these was when an invitation came
from the Engineer officers stationed at the bottom of the village for
the two British ladies to go to dinner with them. They had lived so
sparsely and simply on biscuits, chocolate, bully-beef, and cheese,
and spent so little time or thought on preparing their own meals, that
this came as a glad surprise. They had not realized until then how
tired they were of the coarse, monotonous fare. They spent a whole
hour beforehand trying to work themselves up to a due standard of
attractiveness for the great occasion; but some stains on their worn
clothes were impossible to remove. Exactly at six o'clock, as
arranged, a couple of officers came to escort them on foot, and they
passed down that wide, curved street, with the rows of shattered
houses and the heaps of barbed wire, among which were one or
two scanty, leafless trees sticking up perkily, not yet splintered or
blasted by the firing.

The officers were waiting to greet them with clat. The house in
which they were quartered was in better condition than most of the
others in the village, and they had made it still more habitable. A
round table was set out in the middle, though their utmost efforts
had been unable to produce a cloth! Mairi says, "When the menu
was presented to us, we nearly had a fit!" so surprising was the fare. 
She knew well their hosts must have worked for days beforehand to
get such a menu together in this wilderness.


MENU.

Anchois d'Ecosse.
Potage tomates.
Asperges Irlandaises.
Pr sal.
Haricots verts.
Poulets.
Petits pois.
Saucisson.
Salade.
Desserts varis.

WINE.
Chteau Grand Puech.
Haut Mdoc and Champagne.


"If that isn't fine, I don't know what is!"

But this was not all. Music was also provided, and one of the
soldiers, a born musician, played to them Liszt's Rhapsodies and
other pieces out of his head during dinner, for the officers of the
gnie had also managed to procure a piano.

The Two passed a gay and charming evening, and about 10.30
were safely escorted home again, a very necessary precaution, as
the sentries in the village were apt to let off their rifles on very small
provocation after dark.

They had hardly got to sleep, feeling well fed and comforted in mind
and body, when Gipsy was awakened by stealthy footsteps coming
cautiously down the stairs. She turned on the electric torch she
carried for emergencies, and, as the door was thrust back, saw two
Belgian soldiers carrying another. The poor man was in agony, with
a leg smashed by shrapnel and hanging by a thread. It was too bad
a case for even a skilful nurse to manage, and, after examining it,
she decided to have a doctor. But the chauffeur was away in
Furnes, so she had to turn out herself and walk down the village to
find the doctor, who slept with the soldiers. He came at once and did
what he could willingly and cheerfully, but the poor fellow was too far
gone to be saved. There was no more sleep, however, for the
soldier's friend, who lay awake and constantly got up to ease him or
minister to him as he moved and groaned. He was sent down to the
hospital at Furnes the next day, but he died shortly after.

It was quite obvious that, in spite of its advantage in being
comparatively safe, the cellar was very unsuitable in many ways for
the work, and the picture of that poor wretch with his trailing leg
coming down the steep ladder, developed an idea that had been
germinating in Gipsy's head. She discussed with Dr. Van der Ghinst
and her friends, the Engineer officers, if it were possible to make a
room in the house itself--say, on the ground floor--habitable, so that at
least it could be used throughout the day and save the brave fellows
much pain. The idea was accepted enthusiastically; everything that
was feasible should be done at once. The house outside was just
like any little straight up-and-down English cottage. The roof had
been broken to pieces, but the passage on the ground floor was
weather-tight, and out of this there opened a room on the right that,
by a little shoring-up and roofing-in, could be made habitable. This
was accomplished without delay, and, when it was finished, Gipsy
says with delight, "It was lovely." To her impressionable nature
surroundings meant much, and the mere fact of being able to have
an open fire and to be above-ground made her very happy.

When the Two moved into this palatial apartment there was a great
merry-making. While they were all enjoying themselves, they heard
the steady tramp of the "dear little soldiers" outside collecting to
replace those who had had their turn in the trenches. There was not
a man of them who did not look at the little house, marked by
drooping flags, with a softened feeling in his heart, for that battered
house to nearly all of them for the moment represented "home." It
must be remembered that these men had, in the great majority of
cases, lost sight of parents, wives, or children They did not know if
they would ever see them again. They were up against a foe with
enormous resources and crushing strength. All their country, except
one tiny strip, was in the hands of that enemy; their conditions were
most miserable. They lacked everything. The trenches were sodden
and often actually under water, the weather was bitter; yet they were
still cheerful, and though not by nature a fighting race, the brutal
outrage of their giant neighbour had aroused in them a spirit equal
to that of the most dour Scot. Also they had to uphold them the
example of their noble King and Queen, whose fortitude is beyond
anything that has ever been recorded of' Sovereigns. They had
never left Belgian soil, and behind them was Britain, which had
never yet been beaten. As a sign of it, here were these two British
ladies, who had come to share the hardships and dangers of the
rough soldiers, and live actually among them, to make for them a
little bit of home in the wilderness. Some of these men were really
clever in a variety of odd ways. Two of them played well and
musically on two lengths of lead piping they had picked up and
twisted into shape.

An account of an ordinary day is given by Mairi about this time. "Our
job is to get up at six, make chocolate or something hot, and keep it
served all the day." No light job, either! From twelve to three some
days without ceasing, except to snatch a biscuit, they served out
chocolate, and as they had to go out late to the outposts, and were
often disturbed in the night, it did not leave much time for rest.

One day, Mairi, coming back with a pail full of potatoes, found a very
young Lieutenant--a mere infant--standing outside the shattered
house, but not daring to set his foot therein. He looked younger than
he was, because his hair was of the soft downy kind seen on all
very young things. She knew quite well he cherished an adoration
for Gipsy so deep that it almost tore him in two, and that his appetite
for bully-beef had been so seriously impaired that it had provoked
comment. He flushed a pretty pink all over his chubby little face
when he saw her, and saluted, but did not move.

"Are you going on duty?" she asked, for Mairi, whose French had
been of the schoolroom variety when she arrived, now rushed
headlong into it on all occasions.

"Non, Mamselle."

"Are you going off duty?"

"Non, Mamselle."

"Are you going to do anything?"

"Non, Mamselle."

"What are you standing there for, then?"

"Rien du tout, Mamselle."

She burst out laughing and ran into the room. "Oh, you infant-
catcher," she addressed the astonished Gipsy, "go and see your
handiwork, and think scorn of yourself!"

Gipsy put her head out of the door, but this was too much for the
youth. His feelings were altogether beyond him; the sight of the
adored one overcame him, and he turned on his heel and walked
briskly away. We are told that in the fourth highest heaven of the
Buddhists a touch of the hand satisfies love, in the fifth lovers simply
gaze upon each other, and in the sixth existence in the same place
is enough. Here was an example of it.

At nights there was sometimes a terrific noise from the guns, and
though she might well have been inured to it by this time, Gipsy
often lay awake listening, trying to distinguish between the Belgian
or French guns which were behind and the German shells which
came from the front. The Belgian batteries were so well concealed
that even she and Mairi did not know where they were, though they
could occasionally hear the "ping" of the telephone by which the
results were communicated, possibly by their friend Captain de
Wilde, who was observation officer. The departing shells had a sort
of finished swish about them that sounded as if they said, "Now I'm
off," and with a rush and report that shook the building they went;
but those that arrived made a kind of despairing burst that shouted,
"I've done my worst, and I've not killed you."

So long as no military orders to evacuate the poste were given, the
Two stuck to it, however bad the bombardment, but they knew the
summons might come at any moment. One night, when hopeless
wakefulness possessed her, Gipsy lit the lamp, and saw that even
the imperturbable Woffington was awake, chewing a piece of straw
between his teeth, though Mairi slept soundly through the vibrating,
ear-splitting crashes. In the intervals between these Mrs. Knocker
said, "We may have to go, Woffy."

He nodded.

"Supposing the order came, and I said I wouldn't go, what would
you do? Leave me?"

He considered the situation.

"I'd get a hold of you by the shoulder and give you a good un, and
say, ' 'Ere, Knocker, up and 'op it!' " he decided at last.

At that second came the most appalling bang; the very house
danced, for the lamp was shaken out! And Mairi, sitting up in the
darkness amid her straw, cried out, "What is it? What has
happened?"'

Though often there was comparatively little shelling in the daytime, it
was impossible to make up a lost night's rest then, for people were
in and out all day; if it wasn't the wounded needing attention, it was
members of the ambulance corps flying out in their cars, perhaps
bringing sightseers as to a show. Among the people who visited
Pervyse from time to time were Ramsay Macdonald, Madame
Curie, and Maxine Elliott, a grotesquely incongruous trio, within
which every variety of nature and occupation incidental to civilized
human nature might be fitted!

The poste was unique; such a thing had not only never been heard
of, but never been thought of, before. There was even a certain
amount of jealousy about it; others doing various kinds of work in
Belgium pictured themselves in similar surroundings, but they never
saw the gruesome side of the work there, the aching back and
splitting head, and the constant anxiety. They only saw a singularly
dramatic situation like the scene on a stage, with a singularly
beautiful and inspiring couple of women in it, and it was not in
human nature that they should not contemplate the possibility of
making a similar setting for themselves. What Gipsy thought of all
this, especially of the reporters who hunted her out, may be
gathered from the following private letter to a near relative:

"You tell me in your letters that you often see our names mentioned
in the papers. I hope mine is not often there. I'm afraid I have fallen
out with many reporters, but I hate all this penny-a-line business. I
realize now that many decorations are not worth anything, and one
sees, on the other hand, so many really fine things done without a
word of recognition, because they are done so quietly that they
never get into the papers. I have a Belgian friend, a Dr. Van der
Ghinst, who has probably never been heard of in England, and
certainly does not wish to be--a quiet, splendid character. He was in
Dixmude seven days and seven nights, absolutely alone, just
keeping together the wounded men and civilians, and getting them
out gradually from that veritable hell."

But if the visitors ignored the dangers in connection with that
attractive setting, they were well known to the military. For some
time Dr. Van der Ghinst had been uneasy as the German guns
grew fiercer, and one day the good priest, who rode about on a fat
white mare as round in the barrel as the variety on which the statues
of our Stuart Kings are usually set, added his voice to the doctor's,
telling the ladies that a terrible bombardment was expected, and
they had better leave for safer quarters while there was time.

That same night, when everyone had gone, after--as the poste said--
inconsiderately stirring up their feelings, Gipsy began to wonder if,
after all, they ought not to go also; at any rate, the responsibility lay
with her. Mairi would do whatever she was told, for among her great
charms was one not usually associated with so young a girl--a loyal
obedience to anyone whom she trusted. They began to discuss the
question together, and finally, both being rather worked up, they
decided to go down the village to the gnie house, as they called it,
and ask the advice of the Engineers.

It was a wild night, and the wind caught the rain and slung it this way
and that, until it became as sharp as hail. Also it was very dark, so,
clutching each other's hands and groping with their feet, the Two
crept step by step along the ruined street, followed by the faithful
Woffington.

They found the Engineer officers at supper, and were cordially
welcomed. It was, indeed, an unexpected picture when Mrs.
Knocker, with her brilliant eyes shining, peered in at the door, and
Mairi peeped past her, with her fair hair uncovered, as she dashed
the wet from her helmet cap.

The officers promptly suggested that they should pass the night
there, as, being at the far end of the village from the front, the gnie
house was less likely to be shelled than the cellar. One of the
younger men, whom they had nicknamed "Lieutenant Shrapnel,"
gallantly vacated his room, and so the Two slept there, with
Woffington on a stretcher at their feet.

At five o'clock next morning a hideous alarum-clock went off with a
scurry and shriek, and there was almost immediately cheery
laughter and much scraping of feet, and some snatches of song
that for the moment bewildered the two guests, who had forgotten
where they were. At 6.30 came breakfast, consisting of toast,
cream-cheese, fresh butter, and strawberry jam! In the middle of it
an orderly arrived with orders for the officers to evacuate and go to
Ypres. The Major waved the letter above his head. "Dieu vous a
bnit!" he exclaimed, pointing out that Providence had evidently
designed this order for the express purpose of allowing the poste to
take up its quarters in this house instead of their own. This seemed
to be the general opinion, and against fate there is no fighting. So
when the last officer clattered off, Mairi with a deep sigh of
satisfaction, set to work and scrubbed and cleaned and wiped and
dusted, and made the place a little more presentable.

After all, the officers came back, but not the meanest man among
them would have disturbed the ladies; so they fixed themselves up
in another half-ruined house elsewhere.




Chapter XI
The End Of 1914



The piano in the new house proved better than the old one. There
was also room for a double bed, a food cupboard, and other
luxuries; after the cellar it seemed Paradise. At nights, wooden
shutters had to be put up to hide the light, as the Two were now
above ground. The glass in the windows had long been smashed.
They had no idea yet of abandoning the cellar-house; they intended
to keep that as a poste, for it was nearer to the trenches, but they
themselves lived in the genie house. This, of course, entailed
continual passing to and fro over the quarter of a mile or so that
separated the two, and in the weeks that followed they grew used to
ruined Pervyse in all its aspects. By the bright moonlight, with the
black shadows lying in the corners, it suggested in a ghastly way a
horribly decayed mouth with missing and broken teeth. By day it
was very like one of the pit villages of the North, left to fall to pieces
when the coal has run out, and abandoned by the whole population
in a body; only in Pervyse there were more signs of violence than in
such a melancholy village. Some of the houses were
unrecognizable--just a heap of stones--and others had had a slice
taken cleanly off the front, so that the whole interior lay revealed in
naked intimacy. In some of these the furniture was still intact, and in
others smashed and riddled with holes. In many cases, where it had
been spared by the shells, it had been wantonly split up for firewood
by the troops and good polished mahogany and walnut lay in
splinters. It was the furniture that made the place so pitiful. In the
colliery villages the inhabitants take their household goods with
them when they remove, and there is no evidence of occupation cut
suddenly short and left like an unhealed wound. To peep into one of
the Pervyse houses, to see the pictures hanging all askew, the
carpets or rugs mouldy and stained, the china ornaments in atoms,
the easy-chairs rotted and fallen, conveyed an awful sense of
desolation. In one room, where the upper floor had been cut in two,
a baby's cot balanced precariously by one of the rockers, and the
coverlets were hanging down. Where was the baby occupant?

One day, as Gipsy passed along, she stopped, and started at
hearing a sound of digging at the back of one of these houses.
There was no shelling at the moment, and in the unusual stillness
such a sound needed explanation. She passed round among the
ruins, and came upon a very old woman, tall but bowed, with eyes
like red pits, so inflamed were they with weeping. She was groping
in the fallen dbris, and had evidently found what she sought, for
she stood up trying to hide beneath her shawl a cheap painted
timepiece with a penthouse wooden roof and gaudy flowers
smeared on the wood.

By one of those strange chinks in the general danger the clock-face
had slipped through the bombardments and was unbroken. As the
old woman gazed at it her weather-hardened face looked quite
beautiful; she smiled at Gipsy, and without a word started to walk
back again to Furnes, her sabots clanking on the cobbles. She had
come out with one object, and had attained it. That clock had
probably been a wedding gift, and was associated with the only
days of pride and joy she had ever known. It was at least likely that
she had lived out her span of life entirely in Pervyse, and never
been elsewhere until torn up by the roots and flung out. For her
there was nothing more to do but fade away; she could never take
root again. Gipsy had nodded and smiled and tried to speak to her,
but she found it impossible to make her understand, and as she
stood there watching the bent figure hobble away, a sense of pity
welled up in her so strongly that the tears came to her eyes. She
shook them impatiently away. What use to drivel? There was work
to be done. No wonder she writes: "I don't think I shall ever forget
my life at Pervyse; it was all so strange at times, so pathetic, and yet
there were moments when we giggled like children."

Continually terrible cases called for attention. Some of these were of
men who had been sent out as scouts toward the German lines,
and who had been seen and shot at. One night Alexandre, who
slept in the kitchen of the gnie house, came in saying that there
was a wounded man somewhere down the road. Taking a lantern,
Gipsy started out to find him; as usual, it was wet and very cold. She
groped along, calling softly now and again, bracing herself for the
sentry's challenge any moment. It came sharp and clear, "Halte l!"
but when she explained the man knew her and let her go on.
Presently a faint groan drew her in the right direction. Wheeling
toward it, she nearly went headlong into a huge shell-pit; then she
discovered that the groans came from there. The man was at the
bottom, lying in a foot of black water. She slipped and slithered
down beside him, and found the poor fellow had an awful cut right
across the head which had penetrated the skull. It was amazing that
he lived, and still more so that he had managed to struggle so far as
this in the direction of the poste before he fell into the pit. She
bandaged him up first, and then, calling some passing soldiers for
assistance, carried him into safety, and eventually he recovered
sufficiently to go into Furnes.

Both women were much touched by the gratitude of the soldiers;
however badly hurt, so long as they retained consciousness at all,
they were never too far gone to try to express their thanks for what
was done for them. And some of them were grievously hurt. One
was shot in both shoulders by mitrailleuse bullets, and another had
a bullet through the lung. A sergeant came in with a badly fractured
leg and arm, and bullet wounds in his feet--"a terrible case, and just
one of the pluckiest men I have ever seen. He smiled all the time,
and was so brave and cheery--a fine soldier with a fine character."
He died the next day.

The bravery of the men was indeed almost beyond belief. One day
one of the soldiers appeared with a fearful wound. His right hand
had been shot to bits while he was wearing a woollen glove. "I have
never had such a disagreeable job as taking off that glove," Gipsy
writes. "I could see every finger was blown to pieces, and the bits of
glove mixed up everywhere, and the hand smashed; I expected
every moment to pull off a finger with the glove. I cut as much as I
could away, but it was all such a mess and muddle that I was afraid
the scissors might do more harm than good." It must indeed have
been a loathsome task, enough to try the nerves of the strongest.

One day, when some of the members of the corps came out in a
car, seeing how white and worn Gipsy looked, one of them offered
to stay for a night and let her have a rest, which she gladly
accepted; but she had hardly made her preparations to go into the
town, and had not got clear of the village, before a quite
extraordinary number of wounded came in, and the lady sent after
her begging her to come back, as it needed great experience to
cope with such an influx.

A cheery crowd of naval officers turned up unexpectedly in a car
from Dunkirk to see for themselves what the Two were doing.
Among them was Mairi's friend the "Spaniard," as she, with her
readiness at nicknames, had christened him. They were amazed at
the sight of the village, and freely expressed their opinion that no
ladies should be allowed to live there. They had seen many bad
places since this war began, but this--you know--why, it was absurd,
and they might be killed any time too! What were the authorities
doing to allow it? Etc., etc., lot of old muddlers.

"The whole British Army objects to our being here," said Mairi; "but it
can't do anything."

"Well, if I were one of the red-hats, I'd soon have you out of it ! Why,
you'd be safer on board. You might get killed, you know, any
time."

"Yes, we know all about that."

"But then it's ridiculous," the "Spaniard" protested feebly. "Really,
Mairi, you'd much better marry me."

"So that you'd have power to keep me away, you think? Well, of
course, if you are only proposing it on humanitarian grounds, I can
tell you it wouldn't answer, because if ever I did such a mad thing,
I'd come here just the same."

"You're doing a much madder one now," he said promptly.

"It's quite safe."

"Oh, rot! I say, how did the place get like this if there hasn't been
shelling, and big shelling too?"

"Perhaps the Germans did it when they were here."

"Do you mean to tell me that shells don't drop in here now and
again?"

"Perhaps they do. What are they like? Describe one."

He looked at her, but she met him with the perfectly candid
expression of a simple desire for information.

"Well, I'm-----" he began, and then there was a long hiss and a
scream and a crash, so near that they both instinctively leaped for
the shelter of the genie house.

"That's punctured a hole in your terminological inexactitude," he said
reproachfully. But before he finished speaking another came, and
another. They were in for a bad bout. They continued to scream and
crash, and presently the Belgian batteries near took up the antiphon
and there was a real hullabaloo. This upset the naval men
altogether. They absolutely buzzed in their anxiety.

"Do you mean to say you get this often? It's shameful! Someone
ought to make you come away."

"Write to The Times about it," suggested Gipsy pleasantly. "And,
meantime, don't you think we might have luncheon?"

"Luncheon? Oh, we brought a few things for you. We knew you
couldn't buy much up here."

They hastened out, and unpacked from the car a royal supply,
which, with the invariable consideration of men of the sea, they had
carried up with them. They lunched royally off excellent ham, and
tinned fruit, and other luxuries, but all the while the officers
grumbled: they seemed to feel a personal enmity against the military
who permitted such things. And finally they insisted on leaving
behind one of the two cars in which they had come. "Then you can
make tracks, if ever the time comes when you must," one of them
said. This certainly was considerate, because frequently the car they
used was away, taking wounded to Furnes, and in case of a sudden
evacuation the Two would have been stranded.

"Dear fellows," said Gipsy, watching them bump off down the road in
the other car.

"Very young," said Mairi, with an old-world air--"such boys!" As for
her familiarity with shells, which Mairi had so innocently repudiated, 
this was the kind of thing that constantly happened: she was walking
between the gnie and the cellar-house, when she heard the shrill
warning whistle, and sprang to one side, though really the broken
ruins afforded no protection; then, as she went on, a small shell
burst about fifty yards on the right. She concluded it was silly as well
as useless to mind, so very deliberately strolled on down the middle
of the street with her hands in the pockets of her tunic. Just as she
reached the poste, another burst in front, sending the mud spurting
up in all directions.

Gipsy had been watching her.

"Why on earth didn't you run?" she inquired rather breathlessly, for it
is much worse to watch another person in danger than to be in it
yourself.

"It's not dignified when you are in khaki," answered Mairi gravely.

In her journal she constantly records some such remark as this:
"Very little doing, except a few shrapnel coming in."

Yet the time came when they had to take notice. They were all at
the cellar-house, and had just decided it was too much trouble to go
back down the village for lunch. So Mairi cut up some potatoes and
put them on to fry, saying that would stave off the pangs of hunger
till tea-time, and then, in an instant, with no sort of warning, a shell
really did land almost on the top of the house. It struck it
somewhere, though, mercifully for them, not square, and for the
moment it seemed as if the whole building was coming bodily to the
ground. Each, catching her breath, thought instantaneously, "Is this
really the end?"

Bricks and mortar flew, but when the noise subsided they found they
were still alive and quite unhurt, though the explosion had carried
away a corner of the house; one of the men in the cellar opposite
had been wounded by a splinter which flew in, and the Daimler car,
which stood in a ruined outhouse, had been peppered. They
counted twenty-eight holes in the bonnet, besides other damage.

When they had attended to the wounded man, they went on to the
gnie house, naturally feeling a little shaken, in spite of their nerve,
and there they found the two doctors from the British Field Hospital
to which the ambulance had been attached. These men had heard
the explosion and seen part of the cellar-house collapse, and were
dreadfully upset at the idea of women being in such peril. They
couldn't get used to it. One of the soldier servants standing by
looked at them open-mouthed, and exclaimed:

"Vous n'avez pas peur?"

What could they reply but, "Pas du tout," though limbs were still
trembling and hearts palpitating? He was a cheery soul, and
encouraged them by remarking complacently, "Les Boches
bombardera encore cette maison-ci."

Reinforcements were being hurried up. The fighting at Nieuport was
furious, and the whole line was being attacked with unusual vigour;
all around there was stir and menace. What had preceded seemed
almost peaceful in comparison; anything might happen these days.
Coming out of the gnie house in the afternoon Gipsy passed a
couple of the great patient mitrailleuse dogs who had been struck by
a splinter of shell; their shaggy paws were being bound up by the
gunners. She went over to help, regardless of the risk and
exposure, and had them brought into the kitchen, and one of them
licked her hand with his rough tongue, for all the world as if he were
trying to express gratitude like his masters.

Seeing that the bombardment continued to be pretty furious for
days, it was natural that the naval men should turn up again to see
how the Two were getting on; they seemed to think it a sort of
personal slur that they should be under fire while they themselves
were not. The "Spaniard" got no chance that night, for Mairi was
surrounded. Her type appealed peculiarly to the men of the sea;
they saw in her all that they adored in the vision of a " fresh British
girl," and her cheery aloofness and lack of susceptibility heightened
the flame. "You'll have to marry some time," one of them told her,
with a touch of maliciousness in his tone.

"No use meeting evils half-way," she retorted gaily.

In spite of their anxiety, the officers were full of hope and
expectancy; everywhere it was said that the offensive would soon
be begun, and that the Germans would be driven back. The Taubes
certainly had an idea also that something was afoot, for their visits
were persistent, and hardly a day passed that one or more did not
soar above, to be tackled by the French airmen. One day the Two
watched with intense eagerness a fight between aviators in which
neither eventually got the better of the other, though the
manuvres and dodges were splendid to watch. The Frenchman at
last daringly dropped headlong on to his antagonist, endeavouring
to smash one of his wings, missed by inches, as it appeared to the
rapt onlookers, and fell too far to recover himself before his
adversary flew away.

Another time, seeing a Taube overhead, they ran out to look at it,
and heard the firing of a mitrailleuse somewhere near. They could
not make out where the firing came from. It couldn't be from the
Germans, who were too far off; it couldn't be from their own men,
because the bullets were beginning to splash around. Nearer came
the deadly splashes until they realized they must beat a quick
retreat into shelter of some kind, and it was only then they grasped
the fact that the Taube man was leaning over his machine
deliberately potting them with a quick-firing gun!

At the very top of the village, near the railway line and the trenches,
stood the church, with its high rectangular tower, which had for
some time been used as an observation station by Captain de
Wilde, and was now unsafe. It had parted company with the nave
and leaned forward at an angle, and the military men decided it
must come down. They sent a message to the poste inviting them
to attend the ceremony, so they walked out along the stretch of
melancholy street that they traversed so often in a day and were
growing to hate. The first violent explosion under the church tower
produced apparently no result at all. It was followed by another, but
though the tower looked as if the push of a hand must send it over,
it never stirred, and then there was a long interval, possibly five
minutes, which seemed like fifteen to the spectators. "It's not going
at all," said Mairi, as the third explosion rang out, but it was! Very
slowly and with dignity the tower seemed to turn on its axis,
revealing a gaping wound all down its side, and then it subsided
almost gently. It was a melancholy sight, as if some living thing had
received the coup de grce. The huge clock-face, rescued from the
dbris, was sent down as a present to the poste; they found they
couldn't take this rather unwieldy souvenir inside, so propped it up
against the wall.

It was a sad day when the 9th Regiment, which had been at
Pervyse from the first, had orders to move elsewhere, saddest of all
because their good friend Dr. Van der Ghinst had to go too. Pervyse
was the most coveted position in the whole Belgian line by this time;
every man in the army had heard the story of the wonderful ladies
who were there to tend and sympathize. The incoming regiment
proved itself quite as appreciative and grateful as the last, but one
day the Two were amused to receive a note from the 9th, saying
that if the poste wasn't happy at Pervyse with their successors, they
had better come along and join them in their new quarters!

It had been decided that Gipsy must be spared at Christmas to pay
a brief visit home to see her little boy Kenneth, and in the meantime
others must carry on the work as best they could. As she was the
moving spirit and originator of the whole scheme, and she alone
had made it feasible by her personality and capability, it was like
losing the soul when she went. But Mairi by this time was a skilled
assistant, and far beyond the average girl of her age in steadiness
and sense. She was the first to see that her friend's highly strung
nature was worn by the incessant noise and calls upon her
sympathy, and by the burden of wearing responsibility, and must
have relaxation. For though indomitable in spirit, Gipsy was built in a
delicate mould. The way was made easier because Lady Dorothie
Feilding agreed to come to live with Mairi in Pervyse while Gipsy
was away.

The farewells were touching, including letters of God-speed from the
officers, loving good wishes and evidences of a wealth of devotion
from the men which she warmly appreciated.

She ran into Furnes in a car, and while there went to see Miss
Macnaughtan, who was then working at her soup kitchen. The
station was lit only by a dim swinging lamp, and through it there
defiled a procession of weird figures that might be the vision of a
nightmare or a page from Dante's "Inferno." Many of them came
straight from the trenches wearing their torn and motley clothes, and
they were bandaged so that their outlines were distorted or their
faces were invisible, while many lacked limbs. The humped-up look
of the stretcher cases added a depressing touch of its own. And
there was a curious silence pervading the waiting train. Gipsy
walked down beside it, saying a quiet word of encouragement here
and there, and suddenly from among the disguised crowd one
stepped out, and grasping her hand in his left, the only one
available, poured out on her a stammering tale of recognition,
reminding her she had tended him at Dixmude. Since then he had
been back again to the front, and a second time been wounded. By
the light of this it seemed more miraculous than ever that she, who
had been under continual firing, should have escaped. Among the
men was one German, white and terrified, expecting nothing less
than torture or death; wild-eyed, he refused even a cigarette, lest it
should be poisoned!

The weather was bitterly cold; mud and rain all the way--a horrid
crossing.

What a contrast to be awakened on Christmas morning by the glad
cries of her little son, who had discovered the joys of his full
stocking! She could hardly realize where she was. The softness of
the yielding bed, the white sheets, the perfect stillness and comfort
and cleanliness of everything, seemed to sink into her very bones.
How little people who took these things as a matter of course every
day of their lives knew of the hell out there!

Meantime, Mairi was helped by Lady Dorothie Feilding, who was
fully seasoned to danger by many a ghastly experience. These two
girls, for there were not very many years between them, carried on
the work successfully. In one of her private letters home Gipsy says
of Mairi: "She has never shirked a day or night; always cheerful and
bright, and absolutely to be depended on."

In spite of all her wisdom, she was youthful enough to feel the
glamour of Christmas. "Only one Christmas card and a bunch of
mistletoe," she remarks.

She began her day by the good "tidy-up" which her soul loved, and
after having washed up the dishes, she and her companion began
to give out some socks which had been sent for the soldiers, when
"Crash came a shell! Crash! Crash! Crash! Nothing but falling bricks
and the whistle of arriving shells for half an hour. One hit the house
opposite us, brought all the tiles down; two hit our house and came
through the wall; shrapnel burst just at our door, hitting the soldiers
sheltering in our passage. The clock-dial standing against the door
was riddled with holes, and all the smoke and smell of powder blew
in at the door! A nice Christmas present to send us!"

She attended to the slightly wounded men, talked to the old priest
who had turned up to beg a shirt for himself, and then, helped by the
Lady Dorothie, hung up little flags to make the room gay for the
Christmas dinner. Even the candle had a paper lantern round it.

The dinner itself was a triumph. Ox-tail soup, cold fowl, fried
potatoes, plum pudding, mince pies, sweets, chocolate biscuits,
nuts, and even crackers! The guests at this feast were Dr. Munro,
Captain Robert de Wilde, and another man, and one of them
supplied champagne.

A raging gale the next day blew down everything that hung tottering
in Pervyse; the floods rose, streams of water came through the roof
of the gnie house where the shrapnel had burst it, and in the midst
of all this Mairi received distinguished callers--the Colonel of the
Chasseurs and General Melis, Chief of the Belgian Army Medical
Service. The fame of the poste was growing!

On the last day of 1914 Gipsy returned.




Chapter XII
Waiting For Attack



After having seen death around in so many guises, it seems
natural for Mairi Chisholm to open her New Year's diary with the
terse and unaffected words: "What will 1915 bring to us? Death, I
suppose, to many--I wonder which ones!" Fortunately they were both
spared; not a scratch did they get, though they worked the whole
year through in the thick of the danger.

For women, especially women unaccustomed to continuous
physical exertion, the difficulty is to keep on doing the same thing,
as many heads of canteens have found. A woman in her own home
may do a little housework, but there is nothing to prevent her
knocking off and resting when she feels it too much; to "keep on
keeping on," as Mr. J. C. Snaith has it, is the test. There are
hundreds of women willing to do a day a week in canteens, handing
out food to munition workers or soldiers, but even the one
continuous day, always the same day, seems more than many are
able to manage, and it is the units among the tens who hold on
regularly. But to go on as the Two did, day in, day out, while months
ran into years, with every nerve on the alert, under a strain both
physical and mental, is a wonderful feat.

The New Year made them both very busy, as the fighting continued
active, and the urgency of the work compelled Gipsy to break off her
journal, which does not begin again until September; but sturdy
Mairi continued hers, and Gipsy's letters home fill the gap.

In the very beginning of the year, she took over a party of six
soldiers to England; they were going to convalesce in a little house
which had been given by friends. That journey was a nightmare.
The men were very ill--they were not merely slight cases; three of
them were on stretchers. The crossing was rough as it could be; all
the half-dozen were sea-sick, and, as some of the poor fellows were
stomach cases, and ought never to have had this added strain, their
condition became pitiable. Each separate one needed a nurse to
himself, and in the close quarters, with the violent motion of the ship,
Gipsy had to do everything for them all, with only the help of anyone
who might happen to be there. The responsibility for those poor
racked bodies was hers. When they drew near Dover, it was so
rough no pilot would come out, and they tossed about three weary
hours outside, until by desperate signalling as to the condition of the
wounded on board a pilot was obtained. They got into Dover at nine
at night instead of five o'clock, as expected, and the additional hours
of tossing about seemed spun out into eternity for each suffering
man. The last train up to town had gone, and as arrangements had
been made on the supposition that they would be in London that
night, there was no accommodation ready at the town. Mr. G-----,
one of the ambulance corps, had fortunately come to meet the boat, 
and had got some ambulances. From the pier Gipsy telephoned to
the military hospital to ask that her patients might be taken in, but
there was no room. Then she tried the King's Head Hotel, and was
able to get them in there. Naturally they were all frightfully ill with
pain and exhaustion, and all night long she had to run from one to
the other, helped by an R.A.M.C. officer who fortunately happened
to be staying there. She must have been feeling very bad herself,
but she never mentions this in her account of the incident; all she
says is, "They were splendid."

This was on a Saturday. The men were taken up by train to London
next day and across to Euston, and here, owing to the scarcity of
Sunday trains, it was impossible to avoid a delay of five hours. Out
of the six sufferers, four were really in a very precarious state and
one in particular very nearly died. It was an immense relief when at
last they reached their goal and were handed over to the willing
helpers waiting for them. But the experience was enough to turn
anyone's hair grey, and it is easily understood that Gipsy found it
actually "restful" to get back to Pervyse. She was knocked up by the
experience, and looked forward to a decent night's rest, but instead
of that the guns split the air all night long.

The floods at this time were terrible; it looked almost as if Pervyse
itself might be inundated. The ground was saturated, and the water
rose a foot high in the cellar, so that it could not be used at all. In the
gnie house they were dry underfoot, but in spite of all they could do
to stop it the rain dripped through the cracked and battered roof into
the living-room. The Two lived in oil-skins and rubber boots as they
paddled to and fro on necessary errands. The men in the trenches
were knee-deep in water, and agonizing cases of cramp,
rheumatism, and neuritis, came in daily. To add to all these joys, the
Two discovered a new form of danger which had so far escaped
their notice; this was the risk from their own shrapnel when the
empty cases fell in the village. "We were watching some aeroplanes
when we heard a most quaint sound--an indistinct low whistle, like a
shell, and yet different from any kind of shell we had met. We heard
it for some time, and were puzzled by it, but came to the conclusion
it certainly was getting nearer, and quite suddenly, with one impulse,
we both fled like rabbits into our hole, and an empty shrapnel case
pitched on the side of the road exactly where we had been. It was
from our own shrapnel. We had never thought of that."

A brief record of some of the cases dealt with from day to day is
given by Mairi. A sergeant was brought in on a stretcher, but he was
already dead, half his head having been blown off. Another man
had gone out of his mind with the noise and horror; another had his
hand badly scalded; several had severe internal pains brought on
by inflammation in the cold, and one morning at 3.30 they were
woke up to tend a man in supreme agony who had had the bad luck
to blow off his own hand with his rifle. He had somehow managed to
shoot off his right thumb, and the same bullet had gone on and
penetrated his left arm. How he had done it remained for ever a
conundrum--there seemed to be no sort of attitude that even a
contortionist could take to manufacture that particular damage.

All this time the Two had paid for their own food, and had never
asked a penny from the Belgians. They lived precariously on
whatever they happened to get. " We had a ham to boil, and I made
the breadcrumbs," said Mairi, showing that they did not neglect any
amenities within their reach. Another day "An officer shot eight
sparrows, which he gave us, and I started in and plucked the little
jossers. Quite a job!"

The occasional runs into Furnes to fetch stores were a pleasant
break in lives which, though full of incident, tended to become
monotonous. In Pervyse they had to spend most of their days in
"two dingy, smelly, little postes," the only alternative being that
depressing street with its brooding death. The rattling drive into the
town was over roads pock-marked with shell-holes, varied by an
occasional bump when the car ran off the pave and landed in the
mud. On these occasions they had to get out and heave her back;
once they had even to use a jack, and, as shells were flying about
and they were well within the radius, it required some nerve. When
they arrived in Furnes, "we had a mad rush round the shops and
grabbed all the stores we could find; it all seemed so new and
interesting after a desolate village. Then a mad rush back again
over the same old bumpy, holey road, and home to our tumbled-
down cottage. Yet you have no idea what a great treat it all seems
to us."

The first time they did this in January, though they were only away
two hours, they found that it was just that scrap of time in which the
Queen of the Belgians had chosen to pay them a visit. They could
have wept with disappointment at having missed her. "We were as
sick as death," says Mairi in her expressive slang, "and it will take us
some time to get over it."

There were other visitors of much less consequence who had found
them at home, and that she, the heroine Queen who had been the
inspiration of Belgium in these its darkest days, should have missed
them caused them acute chagrin. The Mayor of Paris was among
their visitors one day, and Gipsy remarks ironically: "There never is
a wounded man here when these great folks arrive. I think I shall
have to get a tame bless and keep him permanently bandaged on
a stretcher on the floor, and when I see them coming get busy and
look interesting with hot chocolate and bandages."

They had grown to be quite expert in the matter of judging the
different kinds of shells, and even their size, from the noise they
made, and by now they were accustomed to the crash of the naval
guns from the coast, which pitched huge shells right over Pervyse.
One day, when the bombardment was very bad, a priest and some
soldiers ran into the gnie house to recover their breath and shelter
before going on. The shells from the German lines seemed to be
dropping all round that particular spot. "They must be passing over
the cellar-house, anyhow," Gipsy remarked; "they can't be in two
places at once."

But they could, and were, for some of them at any rate fell close by
one poste, and some near the other, exactly as if those two houses
had been the only objectives. The cellar-house itself was not hit, but
it escaped by a miracle, for, judging from the destruction around, at
least a hundred shells must have pitched close by it, and the first
line of trenches just behind was churned up into mud. Luckily there
did not happen to be any soldiers there on that particular day, and
the damage done was trifling. The total bag was the priest slightly,
and one soldier badly, wounded, for all that expenditure of shell-
power. But it was obvious that the cellar-house was untenable, and
sadly they decided to give it up altogether. The shelling now came
very close to it constantly, and what with the wet and the danger, it
seemed foolish to try to hold on to it, especially now that they had
got the other poste where the necessary work could be carried on.

One morning they agreed to go together to the cellar-house to bring
up the few things that remained there. At the moment there was, as
Mairi phrases it, "nothing doing," and they walked along light-
heartedly. Close by the cellar-house half a dozen of the soldiers'
horses were stabled in a dilapidated outhouse, and Gipsy, who was
a good horsewoman and passionately fond of horses, went in to pet
them. She and Mairi stood there a minute or two stroking the soft
noses of their friends and feeding them with bits, and then went on.
It did not take ten minutes to pick up what they wanted in the cellar,
and they had just started homewards when "out of the blue" there
came a most appalling explosion and then the smashing and falling
of bricks. The noise was quite different from that of a shell bursting
on the roadway, and they knew that something had happened.
Wheeling round, they saw clouds of mortar and smoke and dust
rolling about, and found that the room above the cellar was
smashed to pieces, the last remnants had gone. Worse still, the
stable had suffered too, and regardless of the fact that usually three
shells pitch in quick succession about the same place, they ran
back to see what had occurred. The cellar-house had only caught a
little of the explosion, but it was obvious a large shell must have
plumped right into the stable, for three of the horses lay dead, and
the other three, badly hurt, struggled feebly. It was an agonizing
sight, like a slaughter-house, with the crazy walls and damp straw
splashed red with blood. It was, perhaps, more like "War," as seen
in the imagination, than anything they had yet come across. One of
the soldiers came to take the three surviving horses to L'Esprance,
and led them up the village. When Gipsy saw the miserable
procession, she realized at once that the poor animals were too
severely injured to walk all that way, so she stopped them at the
poste and had them put in the garage shed.

All that day she spent in alternately trying to do what she could and
"annoying every officer I saw, from a General to a Lieutenant," to
send a vet. At length, at nine that evening, a vet came. He shot two
of the remaining horses, saying their case was hopeless, while the
Two stood beside him holding the lantern, with the wind and rain
moaning round, and the only survivor looking on with patient eyes,
as if he understood all about it. But alas, he had to go too! The vet
took immense pains, and dug bits of shell out of him all over, but his
case was hopeless, and the next day he shared the fate of his
fellows. Both girls felt this deeply. Animals had a tremendous hold
on their hearts, and it seemed a pitiable filiale to the little cellar-
house, now finally abandoned.

From henceforth a new chapter of the story was opened, and they
lived in the gnie house altogether and tended the men there. A
notice was put up outside the cellar-house directing all who needed
aid to come on farther. The gnie was in reality not so safe as the
cellar-house had been, because it was entirely above ground, but it
was a little further from the guns, and one terror that had haunted
both of the friends, though they had never confessed it in words,
was laid to rest. At least, whatever happened, they would be always
together. It had been secret agony to think that, with the coming and
going from one poste to the other, one might be caught and
smashed while the other was not there. More than ever they
determined to cling to each other, always and everywhere, so that in
death they should not be divided.

In the midst of all this a painter came to paint their portraits. And in
the words of the irrepressible Mairi, "We had to stand at fearful
angles for unknown times." Tension was still growing, in spite of
these frivolous incidents. Before the end of the month Furnes,
having been heavily bombarded, was evacuated by the British
hospital, which had so far "stuck it out," and though their connection
with the hospital, or indeed any practical association with the
ambulance corps, had long ceased, this cutting of the thread made
them feel more than ever that they stood alone in their little shell-
swept village.

Custom breeds contempt, and so many times had they heard that
the Germans might make a big attack and break through that they
had grown to smile inquiringly at such rumours and pass on,
forgetting all about it in five minutes. But now the rumour grew and
gathered force, and was backed up by authorities there was no
gainsaying; yet, as no orders had come through from head-quarters
about evacuating their post, they stayed where they were. On the
evening of January 25 some of the officers whom they had not seen
for a little while came in, and seemed surprised to find them still
there. They obviously did not want to be alarming, and yet their
grave looks and general air of tension indicated that something
unusual was expected. The girls questioned them, and made them
admit that they had every reason to expect a terrific onslaught
before the morning. However, it was too late now to take any steps
toward evacuation, even had they wished to; there was nothing for it
but to see it out. It was the waiting in inaction that was most trying.
Again and again both of them say in their journals, " I don't mind the
shells while I am busy with the wounded; I forget all about them."
But to sit and wait for this unknown terror, that was indeed a strain
on nerve power. For the time all was quiet--an uncanny stillness that
was saturated with suspense!

The officers continued to come in and out, going away to see to this
or that item of supply, and returning again graver than before.

Man after man got up and went out to hold mysterious whispered
colloquies in the passage with despatch-riders; the atmosphere
grew more tense with portent. Visions of the grey-clad Germans,
lust-mad, bestial, pouring in like a herd of wild beasts, haunted the
women.

The room in which they sat has been described by Mary Rinehart,
an American writer, who visited them here. "What a strange room it
was, furnished with odds and ends from the shattered houses
about! A bed in the corner, a mattress-bed on the floor, a piano in
front of the shell-holed windows--a piano so badly cracked by
shrapnel that panels of the woodwork were missing and keys gone--
two or three odd chairs, and what had once been a book-case, and
in the centre a pine table laid for a meal. Every opening of the door
into the corridor brought a gale of wind through the ruined house--
hardly a foot of the plaster interior of that room was whole. The
ceiling was riddled, so were the walls; in the centre of the former
was a great bulge."

One of the other ladies happened by an unlucky incident to be at
the poste that night; it was the American, whose forte was piano-
playing. Presently she sat down and began to play on the hacked
and battered piano, that had once been used only for hymn-tunes
strummed out on Sunday evenings by a respectable bourgeois
family. The melody that was its soul now found utterance and
streamed out from her finger-tips, and floating away through the
chinks in the rough improvised shutters, carried the souls of her
hearers up into the world of great spaces lit by stars. Even the men
who brought those fateful messages paused for a moment at the
shot-battered entrance outside as the music drifted round them.

On and on she played, until one o'clock came, and still no guns
were heard. One by one the officers slipped away, all except one
who was on picket duty. As Mrs. G----- paused, letting the notes die
away, a far-distant sound of mitrailleuses came over from the
trenches. All the party were now very white, and it was long since
anyone had uttered a word.

Soon after a quick step was heard on the road, and there was a little
stir of expectancy while Corporal Delmotte of the Mitrailleurs came
in. They had not seen him for a day or two, as he had been on
leave. He saluted the Captain, explaining that all the reserve
mitrailleuse men on leave had been called back and centred in
Pervyse, as a big attack was expected at earliest dawn. Even now,
he suggested, there was time for the ladies to go back to Furnes.
His proposal was no sooner understood than dismissed: they had
had no orders--unanswerable reply. But to back it up, woman-like,
they added: what better would they be if they did go? Supposing
that accursed host burst through, would they be any better in
deserted Furnes than here?

"So we passed this strange, strange night." But the strangest
incident of all was to come.

Mrs. G----- had flung herself face downward on one of the beds and
fallen asleep. Gipsy and Mairi linked arms and stole quietly to the
door, with the Captain and corporal behind. They felt the street as
vibrant as an electric wire, though all the sounds were muffled and
any orders were in whispers. They had stood there only two
minutes, when behind them on the side remote from the German
lines they saw an electric torch flash out--once, twice, dot, dash, dot,
stop! It was away out in the fields, and even though they could not
read the message, there could be no doubt of its purport: it was
telling the Germans what reinforcements were being brought up. A
bright blue light from the German side sprang out in reply.

The man beside them gave a deep hiss in his throat, "S-s-sacr!"
There was a hurried whisper, then a quick scuffle and rush as the
corporal with a detachment of three swept past to nail the traitor in
his lair. They did not get him, needless to say--traitors are far too
wily to remain where bayonets may pin them to the door-post.

By five o'clock the two friends had fallen peacefully asleep, utterly
unable to keep their eyes open any longer, and when they reopened
them in broad daylight everything was as usual, and the Germans
had not materialized, but all day long came in an avalanche of
wounded, which showed what the cost of holding them up had
been!




Chapter XIII
Shelled Out



General Jacquez, commanding the Belgian Army, had been once
or twice to call upon the ladies of the poste. But when he came in a
day or two after this, accompanied by three staff officers, there was
something official in his air which set them on the alert. Mrs.
Knocker and Mairi stood before him, a little confused at the
magnificence of his salute, which had a sort of special
impressiveness about it. They watched him, wondering what on
earth was coming as he drew out a paper; was this at last a "notice
to quit." The General's air of satisfaction hardly portended that.

He said with great dignity, "I have been sent by His Majesty the King
of the Belgians to inform you that he has created you Knights
(Chevaliers) of the Order of Leopold II, and I ask you, ladies, to
accept my most sincere congratulations," and he handed them the
King's Order.

For a moment they stood stock-still, dumb-founded, not realizing all
it meant, only perceiving with a rush of gladness that what they had
tried to do had been known and appreciated by the hero-King, for
whom they cherished the deepest admiration.

It was so unexpected that it was a little difficult to assimilate. From
time to time some of the officers had let fall hints of a possible
decoration, but that it would be other than a medal, bestowed at the
end of the war, had never entered their heads. It was not until
General Jacquez had left that they were able to think coherently,
and then they drank each other's health in a glass of Horlick's
malted milk.

It came out later that the King's attention had been drawn to them
since that first awful day at Melle, when they had insisted on going
back under fire and bringing out the German wounded. The episode
of their driving to Furnes, alone and unprotected, five German
prisoners, had also been brought to the King's notice; Mrs.
Knocker's marvellously heroic work in driving the ambulances under
terrible conditions, when even hardened chauffeurs gave way, had
made her name famous; and their steady and purposeful work
under constant fire at Pervyse, where the King had himself seen
them, had been the culminating point. One thing had led to another,
and had it not been for the previous work, which had shown such
unusual qualities of pluck and devotion, the development of this
poste at Pervyse could never have been permitted. It was only very
exceptional women who could be trusted to keep their heads amid
such strange and trying conditions, which demanded the utmost
discretion and resource. And now that the King had set his seal
upon the work and given it his countenance they were in quite a
different position. Gipsy recognized with joy, not only the personal
honour, which she valued as highly as anyone could, but the greatly
increased opportunities of usefulness it opened the way for in the
future.

The sequel came in a message from the King, asking whether they
would like him to send the insignia, or whether they would go to him
to receive the decoration at his hands. They chose the latter,
naturally. The day fixed was February 1, on which many of the
officers were to be decorated; curiously enough, it coincided with the
birthday of little Kenneth, Mrs. Knocker's only child. The two who
were to be decorated had agonisedly inquired of everyone exactly
what was the etiquette of the occasion, and what they ought to say
and do; but they were both extremely nervous, and a cold, blustery
day did not improve matters. Here is Mairi's description of that
nerve-trying morning: "A lot of dashing round trying to find things,
and vainly hoping to improve our appearances; falling over
everything, and getting in each other's way."

The wind blew straight from the sea, bringing with it a tang that bit
pink cheeks and made noses unbecomingly red. They were clad in
weather-stained khaki knickers, long leather coats, and high boots,
with khaki wool caps bearing in brass letters the number of the army
division to which they were attached. They stood ranged in rank at
the end of a long line of officers for about three hours. Mairi is much
the fairer of the two, and her clear blue eyes have something in
them of the glint seen in the eyes of a man who knows not fear.
They are so limpid and candid, no one could dream of the horrid
experiences and revolting sights which have bitten deep into the life
of this brave little Scot, and have, so she says, made her feel ten
years older since she went to Belgium. Mrs. Knocker's eyes are
hazel, or, as someone has called them, "khaki-colour"!

All the hastily acquired ideas concerning etiquette fled from their
minds when the immensely tall King towered above them, his sad,
deep-blue eyes looking down upon them as he pinned the Cross on
their tunics. He talked with them a long time in English, and asked
many questions about Pervyse, expressing his personal gratitude
for their work among his beloved soldiers; and when he had passed
on to decorate others, they realized with something like dismay that
he had so completely enthralled them they had quite forgotten to
curtsey, and had talked with him as if he had been a kind friend or
one of the officers who came familiarly in and out of the gnie
house.

The tufty grass was iced, and when they came to themselves again
they found their feet were too!

Miss May Sinclair, in an article in the Daily Chronicle about this time,
says:

"The special correspondent has missed Mrs. Knocker altogether,
and yet perhaps it is by her services and those of Miss Mairi
Chisholm that the Munro Ambulance has best proved the fitness of
women in the actual field." She goes on to speak of what they had
endured. "The net of death around a field ambulance is at times
woven so fine that only by a miracle can they escape it." There was
no limelight on the field at Melle, on that road between Dixmude and
Furnes, or among the blood and straw in the cellar at Pervyse.

In a private letter to one of Mrs. Knocker's near relations Miss
Sinclair says:

"You will have heard of the great honour that has just been
bestowed on her (Mrs. Knocker) and Miss Chisholm: they have both
been made Chevaliers de l'Ordre de Leopold II., which is a great
honour, and given by the King himself. I dare say she has not been
able to tell you how thoroughly she has deserved it; but you will
realize that. I am rejoiced that it has come so soon, and come to
them alone of the corps, for there is not one of them that has done
such fine work so unobtrusively and untiringly or shown quite such
splendid courage as they. And it has been so sad to know all this,
and to see other people getting the credit for what they have done--
the establishing and carrying through of the dressing-station at
Pervyse was done by Mrs. Knocker and Miss Chisholm only. I hear
that there are several conjectures as to what particular deed has
won them this honour."

"I wish I could have done more to make their splendid work known
as it should be. It was enough honour for any woman to have been
with them and to have seen some of it."

However, when the new decorations were freshly pinned on their
tunics they were very shy about them, and, buttoning their leather
coats over them, they went into the town to try to buy something
"special" to take back to celebrate the occasion, and to their great
joy managed to procure a leg of mutton! In the inn they encountered
some of the naval officers who had not been present at the
ceremony, and were surprised to see them both together so far
from their "cheery little village." Their curiosity was uncompromisingly
snubbed, but men of the sea are not easily put off' when they
want to know anything, and at last they wormed out the secret.
Then they called, "Three cheers for King Albert," until the roof rang.

"It was Justice with a big 'J' when you were singled out," said one of
them cordially. "So far as I know, you are actually the only women
right up in the firing-line at all--and you jolly well shouldn't be," he
added, after a pause.

It was true. Nurses work at base hospitals which are established
beyond the fire-zone; some canteens are fairly near, but none can
be said to be right up at the front. But these two girls had not only
been there, but been there all the time, which is more than could be
said of the soldiers themselves, who were withdrawn and changed
at intervals. Members of the ambulance corps had dashed in and
out and given a hand now and again, but Gipsy and Mairi were the
only two who had, in the slangy but expressive phrase, "stuck it out"
all the time. The poste was due to them, and them alone. It was
Gipsy's idea, and her personality only had made it possible. Yet this
view was not taken in all quarters; there were some who loved the
limelight, and having been in it pretty frequently, thought the King
must have suffered from myopia to pass them over, though as a
matter of fact he had really proved his uncommon keenness of
vision.

On their arrival back at Pervyse the Two found themselves plunged
into a white heat of excitement; the avant-poste, right out on the
long road across the water, had been taken by the Germans! So
often had they visited that poste at nights with jugs of hot chocolate
that they felt a keen personal interest in it, and when the Belgian
guns began to talk and express their views of the matter they
listened with eager attention, wondering anxiously if the shells fell
straight and true. The noise, of course, was terrific; this was no time
for economising munitions, and the many batteries went to work
whole-heartedly to help out the infantry, and by ten o'clock that
evening the poste was recovered.

Now that the King had recognized their work it was on a different
footing altogether. The Headquarter Staff approached Gipsy with a
request that she would open another poste, similar to that at
Pervyse, elsewhere on the front. A higher compliment could hardly
have been paid to the utility of the work, but there were great
difficulties in the way of compliance. It would be impossible to have
the two postes sufficiently near together to be run at once; even the
coming and going between the two houses in little Pervyse had
been a greater strain than they had anticipated, and yet, if the
postes were to be run separately, who was to look after them?
Excellently trustworthy as Mairi had proved herself, she was too
young to be left in charge of one alone. So they asked for time to
consider the matter, and meantime went to Wimereux for a few
days' holiday with friends, and while there celebrated Mairi's
nineteenth birthday. She had a birthday-cake with a Cupid and
candles in the centre, though the Cupid surely must have been a
jest, as he was not in Mairi's line at all!

When they returned on March 3 they were greeted by a salvo of
shells, and the pluck and nerve possessed by nineteen-years-old
can best be gauged by the following incident:

Two men were brought into the poste too far gone for anything to be
done; they were bad head cases, the most shocking of all forms of
wounds, and the brains were protruding. Mairi says: "Immediately
they were dead we took them out and put them in the back yard;
shells were coming in all the time. We helped to search through the
clothes of the poor fellows. One, a boy of nineteen, had only been in
the trenches two days. As I was searching through the pockets of a
big overcoat, I came across the brains of one of the men, evidently
blown there by the force of the explosion"--and she adds sedately, "a
very curious incident."

The shelling continued with unabated force, and the Belgian doctor,
Martin, grew uneasy, saying the poste was no place for wounded
men to be in, and they ought to get away at once. But what could be
done? It was also much too dangerous to take them down that
shell-swept street, so for the time they had to remain where they
were. The next day terrible cases continued to accumulate, nearly
all these ghastly head-wounds, which proved so fatal that one after
another of the poor fellows had to be carried out and laid on the
verandah. Poor lads, only about Mairi's own age, who had gone up
singing to the trenches the evening before! All the morning of the
4th the cruel, heart-tearing work went on. Dr. Martin, who was one of
the best and staunchest of men, slipped out to get his lunch with the
officers, but returned directly afterwards.

He was wanted elsewhere, and had only come back to get his
mackintosh; while he stood there a military ambulance came up to
carry away the dead bodies. It had required some fortitude for the
chauffeur to bring it through, for the shelling was still going on,
though it was not quite so bad as it had been. The chauffeur leapt
from the car, and with that desperate feeling which leads everyone
to rush to shelter, even though they know it affords no real
protection, he ran into the kitchen, where were another chauffeur
and the orderlies. As he did so, there came an appalling crash, one
of those which spoke of something more than a mere burst, and
they all knew the house itself had been struck. Stones and mortar
came clattering down, and stray bricks flew about amid a great
cloud of evil-smelling smoke and choking dust. The chauffeurs and
orderlies staggered through into the living-room, where the shock
had been slighter, holding their arms up over their faces to protect
their eyes, which nevertheless were smarting with bits and splinters.

As the confusion slowly calmed down, like a death-knell in the
hearts of the two devoted women rang the word "Evacuation!" They
knew there was no chance of staying after this. Once already they
had hung on to a poste until it had actually been struck and they
had been driven out, and now they must retreat a second time!

"Get on your hats and coats, and make a rush for it," someone
shouted. The chauffeur, recovering himself, gallantly went first,
expecting every second the impact of another large shell, and got
his car turned ready for the rest; then they all rushed out, tumbling
into it pell-mell, knowing that each second's delay might cost them
all their lives. So they fled, leaving a piece of their hearts behind at
the dear little poste which had sheltered them. They were followed
down the road by the Belgian doctor in his own car, but before they
reached the brasserie, where was the headquarters of Colonel
Flbus, the doctor was struck and fell. There was a boy from the
Congo, personal attendant of one of the officers, a faithful lad who
stuck to his master through thick and thin, and many times proved
his brave heart. He dashed out and carried the doctor in
triumphantly, and when he was examined they thought his wounds
were not serious, and he would live for many a day to continue the
work he had done so unweariedly. Alas, gangrene set in and he
died!

The Two were welcomed at the brasserie, and the Colonel said that
of course they must give up all idea of being at the poste for the
future. Once the German guns had been trained actually upon it, it
was only a matter of time when it would be demolished altogether.
So miserably they waited, their hearts heavy with sorrow, until about
five o'clock, when, the shelling having subsided, they went back to
collect all they could from the ruined house. It was a dismal sight.
The kitchen was a shapeless mass, and in falling had made a
natural tomb for the poor dead bodies on the verandah. The walls
were riddled, and one soldier who had taken refuge in the shed
adjoining, that they called the garage, had been killed as he stood.

It was very difficult for the two friends to know where to go now they
were refugees. However, that evening found them at La Panne, a
little place on the sea-coast, the most miserable-looking objects you
could find, covered with mud and blood, and terribly depressed at
this wholesale retreat forced upon them, which came across their
high spirits like a shameful bruise.

They remained ten days or so at La Panne, walking along the
sandhills and thinking things out. Everything was in a state of flux
and uncertainty hard to bear. Some of the officers who knew Gipsy's
passion for riding lent her their horses, and many a good gallop she
had, passing through the dunes covered with coarse, bent grass,
beaten down by the wind, out on to the firm, flat sands, where the
grey sea frothed and moaned.

One day she was riding with one of the artillery officers, and as she
went off full stretch he was left a little behind. All at once he yelled
"Halte!" with such swift unexpectedness and ferocity that she pulled
up sharply, looking behind. "I really thought I must have dropped my
horse's tail!"

Amid the immensity of desolate sand walked one simple little lady
who was taking an afternoon stroll, and the officer was sitting very
erect in his saddle with his hand at the salute. All too late Gipsy
gathered that she had ridden at full speed past the noble Queen of
the Belgians, of whom it has been said, "She is the greatest heroine
in history." It seemed as if Fate was to compel them to miss the
Queen, and the chagrin was most mortifying.

The Belgian military authorities soon communicated with Mrs.
Knocker, and things began to be put on a better footing. The last
threads that bound her and Mairi to the ambulance corps, now
temporarily at Coxyde, were severed. The Two were officially
attached to the Third Division of the Belgian Army. They were asked
to continue their work, but at the same time it was announced that
no women except these two were to be allowed near the front at all. 
It was inevitable. The establishment of the poste at Pervyse had
been the signal for the crowd of sight-seers and those who loved
the limelight to dash in and out, often bringing visitors who had
nothing whatever to do with ambulance work, but came out of mere
curiosity. Frequently even those who might have helped, instead of
setting to work and lending a hand in times of emergency, merely
made the tour of the trenches, thereby disturbing everyone and
making themselves a nuisance. This could not be permitted any
more. The decree went forth, and henceforward Gipsy and her
companion were singled out and set apart from all other women in
the sight of the army, of which they became a part, and to them
alone was accorded this great privilege of remaining in the place of
honour and danger. They were asked to establish their poste again
wherever they thought advisable, and meantime were granted ten
days' leave to go over to England to arrange their affairs, and
incidentally to collect funds, which were sorely needed.

They might well have used this cong for complete rest, but in some
ways it was harder than anything they had done yet. Gipsy soon
discovered that if she herself could tell the people in England about
the work being done, and of the actual state of the case, there was
none so mean of soul as to grudge his pence. But the telling was a
great strain; to rush about and lecture and allow interviews, which
she loathed, tried her sorely.

It was at this time that she focussed into words the idea which had
seemed to her more worth while doing than anything else in life.

"The great object of my work, the theory on which I have been
acting and which my experience has proved to be sound," she says,
"is the treatment of the wounded for shock before anything else. We
have saved many a man who has been brought into my station
saying, 'I don't care what you do to my wound; get me warm.' The
effects of shock are worse in many cases than the wounds. It is not 
difficult to imagine it perhaps. When one is under fire, when a shell
is coming, one feels like shrivelling up. Even if one is not hit, the
effect upon the nervous system is very trying. If a man is hit in such
circumstances the effects are much worse. For a time, some are
like mad people. I have known a man wounded, and under ordinary
conditions unable to trot, run round and round my dressing-table
unable to stop. Another poor fellow, brought in wounded in the lung,
was stone grey with cold, unconscious, and apparently lifeless. He
was given up as hopeless, and it was said that if an attempt were
made to get him back to the hospital he would certainly die on the
road. I got him in front of the fire, wrapped him in hot blankets,
applied hot-water bottles, rubbed his extremities, and got him warm.
After two hours' work he roused up and asked for a drink. That man
is now convalescent in a hospital in England, and is expecting to go
back to the front. That is one case out of many."

"The object of my dressing-station, situated as near as I can
possibly get it to the trenches, is to provide a place of rest for the
wounded. They are made comfortable and warm, and given some
hours' rest, before being joggled over the rough Belgian roads to the
hospitals where their hurts can be attended to. If the wounded
soldiers can rest out of the trenches before being treated they
recover quicker. In the ordinary way, the wounded remain in the
trenches until night, when the military ambulances can be brought
up for them. Our work is to get them out of the trenches as soon
after they are hit as possible."

No wonder all those who heard her story were melted by it, and
money came in rapidly--at any rate, rapidly enough for the little they
needed. Lord Norreys gave an ambulance car, a 16-20 h.p.
Wolseley, which had been presented to the St. John Ambulance
Association by Sutton Coldfield and district. This did the most
wonderful work described later. With two hundred pounds in hand,
the Two returned to Pervyse full of cheer. They were proud and
pleased to find themselves for the first time beyond the hand-to-
mouth state they had always hitherto existed in, and knowing how
far they could make the money go, they felt quite rich and above the
possibility of want for some time to come.

They were once more in Belgium before the end of March, and
began to look about for a lodging. Naturally they returned to
Pervyse, which had so strong a hold on their affections. Just outside
the village, farther out than the poor ruined gnie house, was a little
place called the Villa Espagnole, which it seemed to them might be
made to do. It was in a filthy state, but that was easily remedied.
Mairi started at once to scrub it with that thoroughness characteristic
of her, while Gipsy went into La Panne to fetch out the possessions
they had left there. But all the time Mairi scrubbed she felt
uncomfortable; there was something lonesome and decayed about
that villa, an awful smell of the dead, and more than once she got
up and went outside to draw in a long breath of the clean air before
getting on with her natural vigour. Directly Gipsy returned with the
pots and pans she had to go out again to retrieve a wounded man,
and she was away a long time. Dusk began to gather, and with it
there crept up like a thickening fog this eerie feeling that could no
longer be ignored. Least imaginative of persons, there is yet in Mairi
that vein of "second sight" so often found in her countrymen, and an
audible voice whispered softly to her in warning:

"Take care; leave this place; you mustn't stay here."

So strong did the obsession become that she left off trying to do
anything and went outside, preferring to wait in the road, though it
was now pitch dark, until Gipsy came back.

The villa was very small. It consisted only of two downstairs rooms
and one upstairs. There were two or three steps down to the road,
and these opened directly from the principal room. This room itself
communicated with the kitchen at the back by another two steps,
and from it also a stairway led up to the room above. Beneath this
stairway was a third door, bolted and barred, which gave access to
some cellar or underground place.

Mairi stood at the foot of the front steps in the road until she heard
the welcome sound of the returning car. The wounded man was
bound up and sent back to La Panne in charge of the chauffeur,
who presently returned.

The fire burnt cheerfully enough that evening as they ate their
simple supper of bread and butter, but though Mairi naturally said
nothing about her odd feelings, Gipsy got up once or twice and
moved uneasily round like a dog or a cat in a new house, and even
while she was sitting her eyes roved about disquietingly.

They had thrown down plenty of straw in one corner and laid their
two sleeping-bags upon it, and in another corner there was straw for
the new chauffeur, Augustus, who had superseded Tom, required
for duty elsewhere. They called him Augustus for the all-sufficient
reason that he "looked like it."

The fire was still well alight when they tucked up in their sleeping-
bags for the night, but it did not seem to produce any warmth. There
was a chill as of death in the air, and the "something" kept on its
almost audible whisper, "Go away, go away." At last even matter-of-
fact Mairi could bear it no longer, and creeping nearer to her friend
she felt for her hand.

"What is it?" asked Gipsy, startled.

"Gipsy, there is something dead in here; but-yet it's not dead------"

Gipsy sat upright suddenly. "I haven't dared to tell you," she said.
"But ever since I have been in this house something has been
saying quite distinctly in my ear, 'Go,' and it makes me feel cold all
over. But, Mairi, it isn't real cold; it's a queer kind of cold that never
gets warm any-more-----"

They had spoken in whispers, but suddenly the chauffeur sat up
and said in French, "II y a quelque chose de je ne sais quoi-----"

They were not apt to suffer from nerves, those three; they had seen
death too often and in too many horrid forms to be scared by it, but
now they knew it was something beyond death that had awed them,
something which was vague and terrible, and to all three it seemed
as if this "thing" was behind that rusty barred door. It was
imprisoned, yet menacing, and was trying intangibly to thrust them
away.

They did not sleep at all for the remainder of the night, and were
glad when the morning dawned. Without consulting each other, they
had simultaneously made up their minds that this house was
impossible, and as soon as they could they went to Headquarters
and stated that it was unsatisfactory, without giving reasons, and
asked for suggestions as to settling elsewhere.

Afterwards there came rumours of the strange influence of that
house on others besides themselves. A priest had been living there,
and was unable to move because his military duties tied him to the
place, and there was no habitable corner elsewhere in it. From the
first he had felt uncomfortable, but had struggled against the
nameless horror that crept into his veins, and in the end he had
gone mad with it!




Chapter XIV
The Steenkerke Hut



As there were no other houses that could be inhabited in Pervyse,
and, furthermore, as, even if there had been, there was no manner
of use exposing wounded men to the dangers of that much shelled
place, it was decided that a hut must be put up some way back from
Pervyse for the sole purpose of the poste. As the Two had now a
banking account, and were in consequence feeling free to do what
they thought best, they talked it over with Mr. Costa, Harrod's
representative, who was then doing some hospital-building at La
Panne. He entered into their plans warmly, and brushing aside
obstacles set to work at once. For the week during which the little
hut was being constructed the Two lodged in La Panne. The hut
was put together in the manner of the prairie huts of Canada, and,
when ready, was carted up on huge army lorries and put in position
in a field just off the road away back from Pervyse toward Furnes.

It will be seen from the map that Avecappelle and Steenkerke lie
just off this road about halfway between Furnes and Pervyse. The
hut was not far from Avecappelle. In the nature of the case there
could be no cellar, but as it was supposed to be out of the fire-zone
that did not matter.

The Two finally took possession on Wednesday, April 11, when two
sick men were sent to them. They revelled in the cleanliness and
the newness of the hut after the constant smell of mortar and dust
which they had breathed in the thickened air so long. Gipsy writes: "I
wish I could show you our funny little wooden house. It is like a
Canadian log-hut, and contains two fair-sized rooms, one for
ourselves and one for the sick and wounded; and two wee cubicles,
one for the orderly and one for our stores, dressings, etc. We have
the motor-kitchen drawn up tight against our door, and we step out
sideways into it. There we make soup for the soldiers and do our
sick-room cookery. The work here is more tiring than it was at
Pervyse, because we take both sick and wounded, and that makes
more cooking; but I love it all, and only long to be able to keep it
going." But, alas! they were not destined to be free from trouble.

About six o'clock on Sunday, 14th, only three days after they had
finally got straight, Mairi was writing out accounts in one room and
Gipsy was massaging a patient in the other, the whole of the five
available beds being occupied by wounded men. Suddenly a sound
they never thought of hearing there shrieked into their ears, and "out
of the nowhere" arrived a huge shell, which came down somewhere
quite near with a thunderous crash. The noise and force of it,
shaking the ground like an earthquake, told their experienced ears
that it must be a twenty-one centimetre shell, commonly called a
vingt-et-un; and this was dropping near a little wooden shed with a
match-boarding roof which would not have stopped for the fraction
of a second a 7.5 centimetre shell! Gipsy's face expressed all she
felt; she was white with horror at the thought of the blesss lying
there in her charge. She flew to help them on with their clothes, and
bundled them out of the house into a little stone house; then,
dashing out on to the road, she hailed a passing motor-bike, seated
herself on the carrier, and went thus to Steenkerke to fetch the
Wolseley ambulance, which was on duty there.

Mairi, who had not for one instant lost her steadiness, waited until
the last man cleared the door, and then locked up. Franois, a new
orderly who had been lent to them by the army, stayed with her, and
when they came round the corner of the house the others had
vanished. The first shell had been quickly followed by many similar
ones, and they were now simply raining round. It was not safe to go
upon the road, which is usually more shelled than anywhere else;
besides, if a shell does drop on the hard pav, the resulting
explosion from the impact is so terrific that there would be nothing
left of anyone within a wide radius. Knowing this, Mairi cut across
the fields, with Franois at her heels, but they had the most awful
time of their lives, and it took them half an hour to traverse one
small field! When they heard the murderous shriek they went flat on
their faces in the mud, and waited for the final explosion, and then
got up and ran a few feet and dropped again. Sometimes, even as
they ran, the force of an explosion threw them down. The air was
literally humming with shells. But even in her bewilderment Mairi
noticed the curious clean scoop they make in the soft mud of a field,
like an inverted funnel or a wine-glass, with the sides as smooth as
paste--so different from the jagged, broken craters of the smashed
roads. Once, as she lay there, expecting every instant she would be
wiped out of material existence, she put out her hand mechanically
to touch the fragment of a shell which had fallen beside her, and
started to feel it burning hot. Another most odd fact was that the
larks were singing all the time. They almost seemed to like the
noise, and in every tiny scrap of silence their notes rose high and
clear. The whole effect was awesome, like some weird dream.

When they finally got on to the Steenkerke Road they were out of
range, but where was Gipsy? Hardly had the question arisen when
she appeared with the Wolseley ambulance. She had come back to
look for them, and was thankful beyond words that they were safe.
Her fine sense of responsibility had made her put in safety first of all
the wounded who were in her charge, but the instant they were
disposed of she had sought for her friend.

All thoughts of remaining in a hut in that position was at an end.
When the shelling quieted down a little later on they returned and
collected some of their belongings, and, after talking the matter over
together, asked Mr. Costa to put up the hut for them again nearer
Steenkerke.

Three times they had been shelled out of their refuges and escaped
unhurt. What would the end be?

The building of the hut had made a big hole in the funds collected
for the upkeep of the poste, and its removal was a disaster,
because it necessitated further inroads on their small capital.
However, they were not to be daunted, and with the hut once more
set up the work began again.

They were certainly much better off in many ways than they had
ever been before. Here, besides the five beds for soldiers, there
was one in a separate room for an officer. They were well provided
with cars. Mairi, who has a head for detail, gives an exact list of
them: "A 16-20 h.p. Wolseley ambulance (St. John Ambulance car),
a 75 h.p. Mercedes, and a 40-60 Fiat with a kitchen body." Besides
these, the British Red Cross had given them a lorry for fetching
goods from Dunkirk, but it was "such a beast" that they exchanged it
for a "dear little 10-12 h.p. Mors," which did excellent work.

The first officer to occupy the small room was the son of General
Jacquez, and his being entrusted to their care was felt to be a mark
of great confidence. Rumour at once rolled around. "It was the son
of a General they had in charge. What General? Oh, General
French, of course. No, it was a royalty. Then it must be Prince
Alexander of Teck." And so on. All these surmises and conjectures
reached their ears from time to time, and caused them much
amusement.

From this time the poste took on a more established character. Mrs.
Knocker appealed for cards, puzzles, French books, chocolate, and
cigarettes for her beloved wounded. "It is such a splendid little
country!" she said. "I have lived amongst the soldiers so long, and
know how plucky and cheerful they are. I see them patched up,
returning to their regiments unmurmuring. I wonder if even our
British Tommy would fight so cheerfully as he does if he were
established on twenty miles of Kent, knowing that all the rest of his
country was in the hands of the Germans, not knowing where his
mother, wife, or sisters were, or if he would ever see them again.
What awful odds against them! I am asking for funds to enable me
to keep up my little hospital, and not give up the work I am so keen
about."

Rations were supplied by the army for each wounded soldier, but
they needed more than that to feed them up. Also there was no
allowance of food for the ladies themselves, or the orderly and
chauffeurs, and coal and other necessaries had to be provided.
Even with the utmost economy the cost of running the poste was
not less than three pounds a week.

One of the most untiring of their friends was Major A. A. Gordon,
M.V.O., Courrier de sa Majest le Roi des Belges, who had known
them through all their vicissitudes in the Pervyse days, and now
continued his visits, never without bringing priceless treasures of
condensed milk, preserved caf au lait and other necessaries.

They had arranged to have stores sent out from Harrods' to Dunkirk
once a week, and one of them had to motor in and fetch them. By
this time Mairi was quite a good hand at a car, not only at driving it,
but in knowing "how to poke her nose inside the bonnet" to make it
go when it was sulky.

Now that they were not living right up at the trenches, and had their
own ambulance, they used to go to collect the wounded. On those
open roads they were clearly visible from far away, and the
Germans used to make a target of them whenever they saw them.
Gipsy draws an amusing little diagram showing the shells marking
their course, but always breaking just behind them, so that they look
as if the car had dropped them out as it ran.

The Wolseley car, already mentioned as having been presented by
Sutton Coldfield and district, did wonderful work. Mairi says of it, "It is
a car in a million." Since March, 1915, up to the time of writing, it has
carried 1,500 sick and wounded men, and that without any break-
down--a record any car might be proud of. The car has always been
driven by one of the Two themselves, and that has helped to keep it
in order, for careful driving goes a long way towards the preserving
the life of cars, and the way some chauffeurs knock them about is
appalling. The experiences of the Two with their various chauffeurs
have been painful and amusing together, and the amount of energy
expended in the futile hope of keeping some of the men in order is
enough to move one to tears.

Gipsy says, "Our cars and our chauffeurs have made us feel older
and thinner than any hard work we have ever done." Of course, the
first requisite for a driver at the front is pluck, and not only the sort of
pluck coming of sound nerves, which almost every chauffeur, even
in ordinary home traffic on good roads, must possess, but a kind of
dare-devil recklessness in addition. The trouble out there was that if
they got a man with this kind of courage, he was as a rule utterly
undisciplined, and refused to obey orders, and generally made
himself a nuisance. It seemed sometimes as if it were a choice
between a polite man who agreed to everything he was told, but
simply dropped off the car and sat in a ditch if he approached a tight
place, and a reckless, careless, rude fellow who went when he liked
and where he liked without the least consideration for what was
expected of him. As an instance of the first type, one day when Mairi
was driving up to Pervyse, and reached the long, straight stretch
before the village, she found that shells were bursting ahead, but felt
she must go on. She continued therefore steadily, but when she
reached the village and turned to give an order to the chauffeur
Joseph, who should have been seated behind, she found that he
had vanished. He had thought it simpler and easier to roll out of the
car and lie in the ditch until the danger was over!

In contrast to Joseph there was Paul, who met an order with a dark
scowl, and if told to get ready to drive, sometimes replied promptly,
"I'm not going to drive this morning," not happening to be in the
mood for it. Supposing he were severely reprimanded, he would
disappear until he thought his employers had been sufficiently
punished. Yet of his pluck there could be no question. He not only
went headlong into danger if the mood took him, he really seemed
to enjoy it; and if the car broke down he knew every screw and nut
in her, and not only could put her right again, but would do it even
under fire. Yet at last he got so unbearable that Gipsy asked the
General to give him a word of reprimand, thinking innocently that,
coming from the General, it must make some impression. When
she told her recreant that the General had sent for him at three
o'clock, all the reply she got was, "What for?"

She did not give anything away, merely repeating that the General
wished to see him, and that he must present himself at
Headquarters at three. He answered quite calmly, "Then you can go
down and tell the General I'm busy," and departed, hands in
pockets, with an expression on his face showing there was no work
of any kind to be got out of him for twelve hours; someone had to
suffer for their rash interference with his liberty! This was
unbearable, and he had to go, and was replaced by Joseph, whose
exploits have been detailed.

Good driving of an ambulance car is not only necessary for
preserving the life of the car itself, but the lives of those who are in it.
The man who goes fifty miles an hour at and over and into anything,
as the Belgian chauffeurs love to do, will probably kill many of those
he is carrying, and even if they are not actually murdered, he will
cause them unnecessary agony. In driving ambulances holes
should be avoided wherever possible, and, even if there is shelling
going on, a really good driver will consider his charges and his ear
rather than his own instinct to get out of it as quickly as possible.
Both Gipsy and Mairi thoroughly understand cars, and it is pain and
grief to them to hear the gears grate and the nuts wrench and jar by
foolish or reckless carelessness. Sometimes Gipsy has been
advised, "Madame, if you would leave your chauffeurs alone and
trust them, they would never give you any trouble." At last, in
desperation, thinking the trouble could not be greater than it was,
she did leave them to themselves for one day, with the result that
the big 75 h.p. Mercedes was rushed out to Calais for a joy-ride,
and had to be towed back on a lorry because the back axle was
smashed! Leaving the chauffeurs alone for a day usually meant a
big bill for repairs.

One day the Two were at Oestkerke when the shelling was very hot.
Every movement must have been visible to the enemy. They were
in the Wolseley ambulance, and turned to the right at some cross-
roads and drew up beside a farm-house. A Captain came out from
the house and told them there was a wounded man in the village
needing them, so they turned and raced back to fetch him under a
killing fire. They managed to find him and dashed back, though one
shell burst right behind the car. Gipsy, who was in the front seat
beside the chauffeur, looked sharply back, expecting to see that the
rear part of the car had been sliced off. But for the splendid qualities
of the Wolseley car they would never have got out alive, and the
Sutton Coldfield donors may feel satisfied that their contributions
have achieved notable work. It was for this feat they were
mentioned in despatches. The orders of the day ran :

"J'exprime tous mes remerciements  Madame Knocker et 
Mademoiselle Chisholm pour le nouvel acte de dvouement qu'elles
ont pos le 25 courant en allant relever un de nos blesss dans une
endroit battu par l'artillerie ennmie."

The General himself came to congratulate them and stayed to have
tea.

Money soon began to fail them again, and Gipsy contemplated
another run over to England to fill the coffers. It seemed hard that
when she was there and able to tell people in person about the
work, she should get what she wanted, but the moment she went
back to take up the work again subscriptions ceased. "It seems
easy enough to get money," she says pathetically, "when people
see you, and hear you talk, and realize what you are doing, but the
moment you get back and begin to do it again, and cease talking,
they forget all about you."

Even though they were now outside the worst danger-zone, they
soon realized that it would be the prudent course to bank up the little
poste with sandbags to deaden any splinters or shrapnel that might
come that way, and Gipsy wrote home praying for bags of any kind,
only not too big, because they couldn't lift them themselves. She
especially asks that her little son might make one, and have his
name painted in large letters across it, so that it might be recognized
and could be stuck up in a prominent position. Besides this they had
a dugout made beneath the hut into which they could hurry their
wounded charges at the first alarm.

The weather had now become very hot. At first this was a welcome
change after the long dreary winter, but presently the heat became
almost more trying than the cold had been. The glare and dust were
awful. But the Two had occasional changes; once one of the naval
men took them for a run along the coast in a motor-boat, and the
breath of the sea air came like a vivifying blast to both. On another
never-to-be-forgotten occasion they went down by invitation to the
aviation ground, and there quite suddenly Gipsy found herself being
introduced to Baron Harold de T'Serclaes de Rattendael, a
representative of one of the oldest Belgian families, and recognized
with a quick movement of surprise that this was the officer who had
brought messages from his Colonel, and whom she had often
thought of since. They had hardly had two words together until then,
but the acquaintance formally made seemed as if it were going to
blossom. From the very first Mairi, with instinctive tact, always found
someone else to talk to at the right moment.

Both the girls were dreadfully tried by that summer. Not for anything
would they have given up the work, but yet, "I feel I should love to
be quietly at home in a wee cottage with the sound of guns miles
away. One gets tired of the same old grind, the same old food, and
never a change. I dare not say how sick one gets of it for fear of
being disheartened," tells its own tale.

About the end of July, Gipsy visited Pervyse again one day, and
discovered how terribly the little poste was missed there, so she
began to wonder if it would be possible to reopen it. The hut was all
very well, but it was not right at the front where the men could get at
it any time in coming from the trenches, and the atmosphere of
hope and brightness which the mere presence of women had been
able to create in the village, was sadly lacking while they were some
miles out. There was an empty house opposite the brasserie where
the officers lived, which, though badly shattered, might perhaps do.
She considered the matter, talked it over with the officers, and after
a good deal of trouble with Headquarters, gained permission to
return there if she wished.

The four outside walls of this "possible" house were still standing,
but the roof and inside walls had quite gone, except for two rooms,
one of which was the cellar. Mr. Costa put up a wooden partition
inside to replace the broken wall, and the Engineers were willing to
do all they could, and helped to fix iron rafters across the roof by
working at night. They had only just accomplished this when they
got orders to move elsewhere. But the two girls, with indomitable
pluck and perseverance, themselves dragged up sandbags and
piled them on the rafters; and this they did after a heavy day's work
at the poste, coming up from Steenkerke at nights in order to put it
through. A friend, named Mr. Colby, found them at it one night, and
was horrified that they should be using their strength in this rough
work. He was most kind, and sent men and materials to the rescue,
and it was time someone did, for the heavy work and long strain had
had their effect, and Gipsy, who had been showing signs of nerve
strain for some time, broke down completely. So both she and Mairi
obtained leave, and went over to England. It can hardly be said that
this was a holiday any more than the former trip, but at any rate it
was change of work; and after lecturing and interviewing, and
running about a good deal, they both came back quite well on
September 9, 1915.

It was at this time they met again Miss Eva Moore, whom they had
worked for when attached to the Women's Emergency Corps. Miss
Moore was immensely interested in all they had done since then,
and set herself to work untiringly to help them, sending them out
funds and contributions in kind which were the greatest help; in fact,
had it not been for her, the poste might have had to cease
altogether.




Chapter XV
Enter Romance



The spirits of the Two rose unaccountably at getting back to
Pervyse; Steenkerke had been clean and comfortable, but never
could take hold of them as Pervyse had done. Here they had
inaugurated the great scheme, here they had worked for months
against difficulties. Hungry and cold, and perforce dirty, lacking
everything yet doing all things, they had struggled on and been able
to perform marvels; their hearts had glowed at the gratitude of the
Belgians, their spirits had been cheered by the lively companionship
of brave men. They had their ups and downs, and, as was
inevitable, all had not been quite smooth sailing between them, but
each slight "breeze" had left their deep friendship for each other
deeper than before, as they felt how necessary they were to each
other. It was more than a year since they had come out, two
members of a comparatively large band, ignorant of what would be
expected of them, and unable to give effect to what they felt might
be done and ought to be done. They had evolved this scheme and
carried it through against opposition and difficulty which in these
pages have been only faintly indicated; sometimes it had seemed
as if they must be overwhelmed and let go, but always doggedly
they had held on, and now they had emerged on to what seemed by
contrast tolerably firm ground.

From the cramped and stuffy cellar-house they had mounted to the
shot-torn gnie. Thence they had passed to the clean little newly
built, and in some ways convenient, hut, but it had not held for them
the homeliness they found in the desolate village of Pervyse.

Mr. Colby had been as good or better than his word; when they
came back after their holiday, full of eagerness, they found that the
ceiling of the bedroom had been laid a foot thick in concrete and
piled up with sand-bags. The other rooms were still unfinished, but 
they set gaily to work to splash about whitewash with energy, and to
make the great red crosses outside to signify their merciful work.
The bedroom and living-room in this house looked out over the
street, and at the back were the bless room and the cellar. Mairi
ought to have been an engineer or architect, for she adorns her
journal all the way through with little groundplans, showing the
arrangement of the rooms in all their abodes, and never seems
satisfied until this is done. She was full of enthusiasm about the new
house; it was at the same time an "abode of bliss," and "not such a
bad little hole considering all things."

The brasserie was exactly opposite, and the men of the regiment
gave the Two a rousing welcome; they did not seem in the least
surprised that Les Dames Anglaises had been unable to live far
from them, and had felt impelled to come back again. There was so
much to do to the house that they had not got it exactly as they
wished until three months had passed. During this time they had
more than one bombardment. One day it was very hot with 15-
centimetre shells, which fell all around them and the brasserie,
which was pierced in several places, one shell actually going down
into the cellar there and wounding three men. A call was made for
help, and the Two dashed across the road in the thick of the falling
shells to do the bandaging. They had not lost any of their lan
through familiarity with danger. They used the little hut near
Steenkerke as an evacuation station, and took the wounded out
there at once. The kind of incident that came very frequently into
their lives at this time is best told in Gipsy's own words :

"I had just come back from taking three badly sick men to
Steenkerke Infirmary, and was tidying up, when the sudden distant
boom of a German gun was heard, so quickly followed by the hasty
shriek and the crash of explosion. I wondered why I had managed
to get in just in time, and why Mairi and I had not been outside, as
we so often are--our luck is so kind to us. This one shell was followed
by the usual succession; I was glad we had a fortified dug-out, and
that we were fairly safe.

"Suddenly a little soldier came to our open door and told me, with
tears in his eyes, that a comrade had been terribly badly injured,
and they were bringing him to me. I hurriedly dragged out the
wheels of the running stretcher, and he ran up the road, while I
prepared the room and got all possible quick dressings ready.
When this was done I went out to meet the stretcher, and I saw at
once that the poor brave little soldier was past my aid. I said to
them, 'II est mort.' They turned to me with an incredible look, as if I
had spoken from inexperience, but I have seen so many--the
number runs into thousands--that I could make no mistake. Poor
comrades! they looked so sad and heartbroken; he was obviously a
favourite. I ordered the stretcher to be taken to the garage--or,
rather, what we call the garage--a tumbled-down outhouse, where
stands our emergency car. Had this man had the remotest chance
of life I should have, within five minutes, placed him in the car en
route for La Panne. Poor man! it seemed so sad, and one cannot
help asking, 'Why?--why should it be he, and not Mairi or I? Here
was a laughing, cheerful, healthy man one short quarter of an hour
ago, and now still and silent, and past all pain. His friends kept
asking if I was sure he was dead. Was it possible to live with his
terrible wound? A bit of shell had taken off half his head. I turned
and asked a soldier to see if there was a doctor in the place, just to
write out his paper; but, as is so often the case, there was no doctor:
it was 'Madame' who had to do all the last little rites, so Mairi and I
set to work to search his pockets--such a pathetic work, it brings one
so much in touch with Life and its meaning. Just a few scraps of
paper, containing a few words of happiness from friends or relatives,
a tobacco-box, a pipe, his plaque d'identit, and a gold ring on his
finger. His friends tell me his brother is at Avecappelle, and would
like to have everything, even the ring, so it must be taken off--it is so
tight and so difficult to get off. I put everything together in a little pile--
such a little pile--and cross his arms upon his chest, and cover him
with a rug. How I hate the look of those silent, humpy stretchers--and
the thoughts keep racing through my mind, and I know by Mairi's
face she is thinking the same! 'Why?' and 'I wonder' and it gives
one a longing to be miles away from this war.

"As the batteries are silent and the road is clear and there is a long
way to go, I have that stretcher placed in the car, and Mairi and I
drive it to the cemetery at Adinkerke. There it is put on the long
clean table, and measured for the coffin. We drive away once more
for Pervyse, feeling weary of heart and sad. All along we meet the
little soldiers who greet us with a cheer, and we have to force a
smile in response."

But it was not all depressing, for they had many true and staunch
friends who came in to see them, and the brightness of both officers
and men was extraordinary. A new joy also had entered into Gipsy's
life, for every now and again, when the weather was too bad for any
flying to be possible, the young Baron H. de T'Serclaes appeared at
Pervyse, and his wonderful smile irradiated the most dismal day. In
November, one day when Mairi as usual had discreetly absented
herself to fulfil some household jobs, he proposed and was
accepted! On talking it over the happy pair agreed (according to the
usual custom on such occasions) that they would not be married for
a long time. In their case there certainly seemed to be some reason,
and they decided to wait until the end of the War. But the self-
denying ordinance was about as lasting as it generally is in such
cases, and as the days went on and love grew apace, they found
the extreme difficulty of being engaged in anything like a satisfactory
manner amid such extreme publicity, and began to waver. Of
course it was quite possible to argue the matter both ways; the fact
that they were in danger of their lives every day seemed to urge
upon them the common sense of getting married at once, and
making the best of what time might be left to them. This view was
especially predominant when, after a long ride over execrable roads
in abominable weather, the young Baron found himself discussing
such subjects as the gramophone, the cars, and other superficial
things during his short time off, and even this had to be carried on in
gulps because of the incessant inroads of soldiers, chauffeurs, and
every imaginable kind of "other," none of whom possessed the tact
of Mairi. Gipsy suggests that it is a test of true love, whether it will
stand this most aggravating experience, with the addition of
continual bursts of huge shells banging overhead, draughts
wreathing round one's feet, and perpetual small worries to improve
one's temper.

It was before Christmas that the idea, fostered by such influences,
finally won the day, and it was decided they were to be married in
January, 1916.

To Mairi, of course, this would make an enormous change; never
again would she have her friend entirely to herself, and the good
days in which they had grown to know each other in all sorts of
circumstances were over.

But though Mairi felt the separation bitterly she was far too loyal to
do other than rejoice in her friend's happiness, and even her private
diary contains nothing but pleasure at this unexpected change.

Except for the visits of "Harry," that winter was a very quiet one in
Pervyse. The place was more desolate than ever. The year before,
the houses, though ruined, were mostly standing, now many more
were heaps of stones, without a suggestion of life. Previously
horses had been quartered in some of the sheds, the Engineer
officers had been coming and going, "one saw movement"; even in
the village there were usually soldiers marching to or from the
trenches, and when the first shells fell after an interval, there had
often been a rush for shelter like that of rabbits flying to their holes in
a warren on the approach of a "human." But this year there was
hardly a living being to be seen; the only inhabited place besides the
poste was the brasserie. "If one walks through the village one sees
nothing but absolute ruin and desolation. Poor little Pervyse! The
Germans certainly have knocked it about. In the Rue de Dixmude
the houses which are left are crumbling to pieces, soon there won't
be even an upstanding wall left. The Htel de Ville is most
depressing, it lifts one great chimney to the sky, the other long since
having fallen, and on one wall in the interior, which is now laid bare,
is the figure of an angel. The weather has been awful, all through
these months, rain falling unceasingly. Our shelter is filled with
water, and we are obliged to pump it out frequently." As far as the
rest went it was all much the same; the great artillery duels raged
overhead, shells fell around, and many wounded were brought in.
"Our work comprises every kind of thing. Now that the winter
months are in full swing the men need much attention if they are to
be kept alive. Woollen garments of every sort are in great demand.
Often men come to us soaked through from head to foot, having
fallen into the inundations while doing patrol work, and then we are
able to give them a place to themselves where they can undress
and wrap themselves up in blankets, while their clothes are being
dried in the oven. We attend to all their wants: cuts, burns, sore feet,
boils, all kinds of little ailments which a doctor cannot, or will not, be
bothered with."

The Two still carried out hot drinks at night to the sentinels at the
avant-poste, and still made soup and cocoa for the hungry, cold
men in the trenches. Their faithful friend, Robert de Wilde, who had
become like an elder brother, dropped in frequently in the evenings,
but there were not many others.

So the time passed on until January. The day for the great event
was fixed for the nineteenth, and there was much to arrange first.

"It seemed as if everyone had to give their permission," says Gipsy.
"The man sends in his demand to get married, and with it his
fiancee's birth certificate, and an account of her parents, stating
whether they are of good family or not. Then the round begins. This
goes to the Commandant; he considers it and signs it. He sends it
on to the Commanding Officer of the Aviation, who does the same.
From there it goes to General Headquarters. From there to the
Ministry. From there to the War Minister. From there to the King.
Then it reverses the route and crawls back again."

The ceremony was to take place in La Panne from the little villa
which the Two had occupied in their last week there together, and
two days before it, Gipsy was there arranging matters when up
came Baron Harold de T'Serclaes laughing, and said the papers
had indeed at last returned from their long journey, but there was no
birth certificate with them; it had been dropped apparently
somewhere on the way, and the Tribunal refused to go through with
the marriage unless it turned up!

And this at the eleventh hour, when all the guests were invited!

"What could I do?" says the poor bride-to-be. "I sat down and
racked my brains. There seemed no two ways open to me. I could
wire to my wonderful shipping agent in Dover, who has so many
times pulled me through difficulties, and ask him to send someone
to London by passenger train to Somerset House, there to get a
duplicate of the certificate, and with it catch the Calais boat the
following day, so that he could hand the certificate to the Captain,
and I would meet the boat at this end and get it from him. But all this
would take a lot of explaining in a wire, and involved a fearful risk, as
things might go wrong.

"Secondly, I might go to Havre and myself fetch the missing
certificate, which must be there. But Havre is a seven-hour journey
by road, and is outside the zone of my pass--that left me only one
day to get a laissez-passer--and supposing I allowed for a fifteen-
hour journey, I could only just do it without counting any break-
downs. What a position! I saw my wedding-day vanishing into dim
mists, but as my fianc was being cheery I was going to be so too,
and I did not let him see how dreadfully worrying all this was to me. I
crawled back to Pervyse that night, still beating my brains to find a
way out. There I found the poste full of sick and wounded, and so
much work to do that I had not time to think even about my own
wedding.

"But in the middle of the night a thought flashed upon me that I had
with me an old tin box full of papers, and in among them all my
hospital examination papers, and I had had to have a birth
certificate to get into the hospital, so it might be there still."

It was!

So the ceremony had not to be postponed, after all!

It had been suggested that the marriage might take place in the
ruined church of Pervyse, open to the sky, where there was still a bit
of the altar standing, but, used as she was to continuing her work
calmly amid falling shells, Gipsy considered that in such conditions
her responses might not be so clear and firm as she would wish,
and also that the coming and going of such a party of people might
draw the German fire, and so the idea was set aside.

January 18 was a Tuesday, and on the evening of that day Mairi
writes: "The day before THE DAY! How strange it seems that the
dear kid is going to get married! We have so often talked about it
and discussed it laughingly, and now it is going to become fact. How
things change! The last day I shall ever have Winkles to myself 1
(Winkles was another pet name evolved spontaneously.) Pray God
she may be happy! She deserves happiness, if anyone does. Dear
little Winkles, what a good friend you have been to me! You will
never realize what it has meant to me to be with you for these
months. I shall miss you horribly. Goodbye, Winkles; good luck to
you, and all my very best wishes for your future life."

Captain Robert de Wilde, who was to be best man, turned up early
and had breakfast with them. Gipsy says of him: "One of the most
charming and bravest of the Belgian officers I have met. We have
shared the ups and downs of shelling ever since the first days of
Pervyse, when he was observation officer. He is now in command
of a battery. He talks English as we do, and is one of those rare
men who are always cheerful."

They started in the Wolseley car at eight o'clock, and no sooner had
they got clear of the village than Gipsy remembered she had left her
shoes behind, and had to go back. Lucky that she wasn't caught by
a shell. She was dressed for the wedding in a blue frock and a big
black hat, with a white wing across the front--very suitable in view of
the bridegroom's position. They arrived at the villa which had been
lent to them about 9.30, and there the bridegroom met them for the
civil ceremony. Then they went on to the church, a Roman Catholic
chapel, which faith the bride had embraced before her marriage.

The organ was beautifully played during the ceremony, and the
congregation rivalled that to be found at any West End London
church at a society wedding.

There were present Brigadier-General Prince Alexander of Teck, the
Russian representative, General Jacquez, Lady Denbigh and her
two daughters, one of whom--Lady Dorothie--had played her part in
the ambulance work, Baron de Bleaumaerts, Baron de Wahliss,
many of the officers of the Belgian Army, and personal friends. Even
the photographers were not omitted, and the war-wedding was quite
like those usually known in peace.

With this the book might end, as 80 per cent, of the reading public
consider a wedding the only satisfactory conclusion, but there is still
something to say. Mairi went over with the happy pair on leave to
England. She obtained permission, after exceeding difficulty, for her
father to come and share her rough and dangerous life at Pervyse.
She was back at her post before the honeymooners, and went
down to Boulogne to welcome them on their return on February 8.
Then she performed the really amazing feat for a girl of her age (she
was by this time close on twenty) of driving them back from
Boulogne to La Panne and taking the car on to Pervyse, altogether
160 miles!

The poste was further fortified by endless sandbags and made
more secure. But the question of means continued to be an anxious
one. When Gipsy resumed her work she and Mairi discussed it
often. They realized that they could not continue to draw from the
few personal friends, who had already given as much as they could
possibly afford, yet how were they to reach a larger public? One
day, when the question was to the fore, someone said to them that
if only means could be found of letting the general public in England
know what they had done and were still doing, he was sure many,
many people would gladly subscribe, a view that seemed borne out
by the ready way which money flowed in if one of the hard workers
themselves told the people of England of their life. It was suggested,
therefore, that their cherished diaries, which they had kept entirely
for their own interest, should be handed over to someone they
knew, who had the requisite knowledge of the conditions, to be
written out in book form, and then they should be published. Thus
the wider public--that which reads--might be reached, in which case it
would be easy to ask everyone who sympathized with the work to
send some trifle, even if only a shilling, after reading the book. Many
shillings would fill the exchequer. After some persuasion this was
agreed to. The Two had always hated publicity, but owing to the
unique character of their work and the approval of the King of the
Belgians, they had not been altogether able to hide their light under
a bushel, as they would have preferred to; so for the sake of that
work, which was their very life, they agreed to go further, and with
pain and grief handed over the journals to see what could be made
of them.

Mairi is still hard at work, and Gipsy is still as devoted as ever,
despite her new responsibilities.

On March 2, 1916, in the early morning a message came to them
that King Albert was going to visit the trenches at Pervyse, and
would probably look in at the poste on the way. Luckily Gipsy had
been staying there for the night, so she was on the spot, and able to
help Mairi to tidy up with all speed. The dug-out looked very dusty
and sombre when they viewed it to see if it was fit for the King, but
they had done all that was possible.

As early as 8.15 the King came down the village street
accompanied by two Generals; he was dressed in khaki, with a
khaki metal helmet on his head, and looked taller than ever among
those gaunt ruins. The Two stood by the door of the poste to see
him go by, and when his eye fell on them he came across to them
and held out his hand in a friendly way.

"I want to congratulate you on all you are doing for my soldiers," he
said. "I think you are very courageous to stay up here."

Glowingly they replied that they loved their work more than ever; it
had become a part of them.

"I hope you are sufficiently sheltered?" he asked, glancing at the
piled-up sandbags.

Yes, indeed, they assured him. Would he care to look inside? So he
lifted his helmet and, stooping, came in.

Now among the most valuable possessions of the poste was a
Siamese kitten, which had been given to the Two, and which was
never allowed to stray into the street, lest its small life should be
abruptly ended. With the usual propensity of its species, its one
endeavour was always to get out, and whenever the door of the
dug-out was opened from outside, those coming in put down a wary
hand and stopped its tumultuous exit. In this case, however, neither
of the Two could go in before the King, and they looked at each
other as the door opened. The orderly, Henri, who had been with
them for a long time, and loved them and all things that were theirs,
including the kitten, with deep devotion, seeing the door open and
the kitten make a bolt, flew from the innermost recesses, crying out :

"Hlas! Attention l, que le petit chat ne se sauve pas!" Thus he
came right up against the King! Poor man, he looked as if he would
never get over it!

The King only laughed as the petit chat was frustrated, and looking
round the low room with interest, he noted the portraits of himself
and the Queen and their family hanging on the walls, doubtless
remembering that Gipsy was now legally his own subject.

When he turned to go he thanked them again in a simple, friendly
way, and asked how long they had been in Pervyse.

When they told him, he echoed, "Eighteen months! It is a long time,"
and with a kindly hand-clasp he passed on.

Baroness de T'Serclaes said at her recent public meetings in
England: "I found that far too many of the stretchers contained dead
bodies when they arrived at the base hospital, and it seemed to me
that the reason must be that they had died from shock or from the
way they were driven over the badly-shelled roads. I appealed to the
Belgian Government, and asked if they would permit Miss Chisholm
and myself to go into the trenches and try and see if, by treating the
soldiers for shock at once, we could save life."

"After several refusals we were allowed to go into the trenches for
twenty-four hours, and have stayed nearly two years."

"In March, 1915, when the big war conference was held in Paris,
and it was decided that no women were to be permitted in the
trenches at all, it was further decided, after examining the work I and
Miss Chisholm were doing, that we should be the only two women
who were permitted in the firing-line, because our treatment was
necessary, I found it was as I thought, and if one could get to a
soldier directly he was hit, and treat him for shock, he was able to
stand an operation better than one who was bundled into an
ambulance and driven quickly over bad roads to the operating-table,
where he, perhaps, died under the operation or from the after
effects. We are in telephonic communication with every trench in the
division, and have many thousand men to look after. The telephone
means that when a man wants our care we can get to him right
away. We do all we can to save the men's lives, and on many
occasions we are able to deal with them so quickly that they are on
the operating-table within twenty minutes!"

And even after the war, when Belgium comes into her own again,
the work will not cease; there will be crippled men, and helpless
men, and men wholly incapable of doing anything for themselves:
these will all need care and attention, and in her new country the
Baroness will find ample work to fill her life in devoting herself to the
"splendid little Belgian soldiers" whom she has learned to love.



