Joan Martin-Nicholson, a Red Cross sister, arrived in Brussels on 9 August 1914. After the Germans occupied Brussels on 20 August she was ordered to work at the Hôpital Militaire, where Professor Haeger was in charge.
The large grounds hold one big main building giving on to a stone-paved courtyard, and lines of one-storied wards connected one with another by matting-covered corridors. Kitchens, laundry, and laboratories are separate, each surrounded by trees or lovely flowers, and within its own walls, secluded and peaceful, lies the convent itself, where the Lady Superior had ruled so gently for over sixty years.
I was seated opposite the courteous white-haired old Professor; my luggage had been taken to a sunny, pleasant bedroom on the ground floor in a building on the other side of the grounds, and there remained only a few details to discuss before I took up my duties amongst the most severely wounded. Everything seemed very quiet and peaceful, when suddenly we heard the tramp of many feet. Neither of us spoke as the sound came nearer, but when the door was flung wide open the old man rose and courteously bade the six German officers enter.
Rapid and decisive are the methods of the enemy, as was proved by the orders rapped out by the Colonel upon entering:
‘Herr Professor doubtless knows that Brussels is ours. We need a Lazarette for our men coming in from long marches. We have decided upon this place. The entire Belgian staff will leave by four this afternoon. The Herr Professor will hand over all papers and documents, and kindly remove his belongings by the same time. The less injured of the sick will be transported as prisoners to Germany.’ Then, turning a small, steely eye upon me as I was waiting to go, he continued:
‘The Gnadige Fraulein is, I understand, an English nurse. Our nurses have not yet arrived; you will therefore remain and look after the seriously wounded Belgians until their arrival.’
‘I should prefer to go!’ I replied in German.
‘Ach! You speak our language; that is good. We shall get on well, I think. But Madame must understand that she is a prisoner. She cannot get out, so let her resign herself, and be not afraid if she finds sentries posted outside her door and window, for is she not the enemy? Though’ – here the huge man, with breast covered with ribbons, drew himself up and saluted – ‘a very charming one.’
As I passed out of the room the other officers also saluted, passing pleasant remarks. I, the one woman in the whole place, for many days was to live and sleep alone amongst more than a thousand of the enemy.
Outside my door I saw a soldier with fixed bayonet, who put out his hand as I approached. ‘Your key, Schwester!’
‘No man has the key of my room,’ I replied icily.
‘But I have orders!’
‘Well, bring to me the officer who gave them, and I will explain.’
The soldier looked at me in utter astonishment. He hesitated for a moment, and gave a grunt of satisfaction as the Colonel turned the corner.
But his short-lived satisfaction gave way to astonishment as I, in spotless white and blue uniform, gave orders in my turn, as I heard him explaining outside my window later to an almost unbelieving circle of friends, which the Colonel took uncomplainingly, leaving the key in the possession of this strange Englishwoman.
Days of storm and stress followed, filled in with hard work, tears and smiles, brutality and kindness, risk, danger, and sympathy.
The little nun had been banished. Two prisoners had escaped on the first day, so the convent was suspected of subterranean passages; and the next morning, whilst I was talking to the venerable old lady superior, I watched the entry of German officers and soldiers into this cloistered place. Right through the house they went, into the cells where the nuns, kneeling before the crucifix, took no notice of this untoward intrusion; then into the chapel with their caps fixed firmly on their shaven heads; and here a soldier with his bayonet ripped through the drawn curtains of the confessional.
‘You will be out of here by this time tomorrow, the lot of you. Until then you are prisoners under lock and key.’
‘Where do we go, monsieur?’
‘Go? Where you like!’
And so these gentle women were ruthlessly turned out into the burning countryside of devastated Belgium, and I was left alone to strive as best I could for the welfare of my wounded.
That evening as I sat eating my supper with my men, an orderly came to me and saluted.
‘The officers’ greetings, and will the Gnadige Schwester honour them with her presence at mess from today on.’
A tense silence reigned in the ward. As I shared their pittance of a bowl of coffee without milk and sugar at 8am, a bowl of soup and a bit of bread at 12, a bowl of coffee at 4pm, and a bowl of indescribably disgusting gruel at 8 in the evening, my patients knew how hungry I must be. They knew, too, how good the fare at mess was; for, watching from the windows, they had seen the mess servants running to and fro with meat, and wine, and every delicacy likely to appease the Teuton appetite, and they had noticed how thin and white I had got to look in these past few days in which I had continually fought for them, defying the doctor, who strictly forbade me to touch the dressings, only to find on his visit on the next day that I had done them regularly every four hours night and day, cleaning, cutting, and bandaging wounds that made even him shudder.
I looked across my bowl.
‘My sincere thanks to the officers, but I prefer to eat with my patients.’
The snatches of song and coarse laughter, born of much champagne, that floated across to us told me that I had decided wisely, and how grateful my sick were, showing their appreciation by small offerings of their rapidly diminishing store of chocolate and jam, which, added to the gruel, only made it more indescribably disgusting, although I ate it without a sign.
When I went down at midnight to my room, a thunderous knocking made me open my door.
The Colonel stood without.
‘Hasten, Gnadige Schwester, to pack your things and come to another room in another building.’
I protested that I was too utterly tired and would like to know the reason why.
For a minute the officer hesitated, then he replied shamefacedly –
‘There have arrived six slightly wounded officers in the room opposite yours; you will, I am sure, understand that they have been at the war for many weeks, away from towns, people, and – and women. I could not trust them even though you were behind steel doors.’
I did not speak. I just looked the man in the eyes, bringing a dark flush to the stern face, and turned silently to pack.
My days were a veritable burden on account of the soldier who followed me with fixed bayonet every time I crossed the grounds, my nights were broken every two hours as the sentry was relieved, and the new one challenged me through the window, demanding the watchword.
And yet, as the following incident shows, one sentry at least felt pity for me, the only woman amongst these men, mad with the lust of battle, after hacking a passage of blood through a stricken country.
As I put my key into my door one night, it was rudely snatched from me by a second lieutenant.
‘I have orders to see that you are comfortable!’
I vigorously protested, but without avail, and he passed into my bedroom before me. I had just time to beckon to the sentry, praying that his years and the gold ring on his marriage finger might incline him to help me, when the officer, seizing me by the wrist, pulled me into the room and slammed the door. With my back to the wall I waited.
The officer took one step towards me when the door opened, and the sentry stood there, leaning silently on his rifle and seemingly oblivious of the situation.
‘Get out of here!’ roared the lieutenant.
‘I cannot,’ the man replied stolidly, ‘the Herr Colonel has given me strict orders to look after the Schwester.’
The officer hesitated for one brief second, then, taking me roughly by the arm, threw me across the room, picked up my crucifix and dashed it on to the ground, and, cursing vehemently, stormed out of the room.
I made up my mind. No matter what the result might be, I would protest against this behaviour.
Outside the door the sentry beamed on me, and when I thanked him he replied with pride –
‘Ach, Schwester! I have a wife and three daughters, and ach, how they can cook!’
Across the gardens I went, to be caught in a vortex of German nurses; they had just arrived, weary and dusty, and had already heard of the English Sister, and, full of patriotism, they turned and scowled at me.
Straight into the mess I walked.
‘Ach, the Madchen has changed her mind,’ jocularly remarked one stout young lieutenant.
‘Silence!’ I rapped, and turned to the Colonel, who rose to his feet as I spoke.
Assured that no such incident would occur again, I went out, running into a major who was joyfully hastening to the food.
‘Here, you there! You look fairly intelligent for one of your country!’
There, a lonely woman in the centre of a crowd of about 300 soldiers, I had to stand and listen to the jibes and jeers which this officer so far forgot himself as to throw at me.
He insulted my country, scoffed at my King, jeered at my countrywomen, reviled my Navy. I got whiter and whiter with rage as I stood under the torrent of abuse. I felt rather than saw that the officers at mess had crowded to the window.
‘And your Army, ach liebe Gott!’
He stuttered in his rage, almost screamed in his hate; and one soldier put his fingers to his nose and cried, ‘Schwinehunden!’
There was one moment of breathless silence as they waited to see what this Englishwoman would say, and then – I left their Kaiser and their country, their Army and their Navy alone, but like a tigress I fastened on their Kultur, their honour, and their faith. My comments were severe, and they emptied the windows of the mess, and so cowed the major and the soldiers that they silently made way for me and allowed me to pass.
As I entered my building a fat little corporal patted me on the back.
‘See Schwester, I have a bottle of wine, and you look so tired! Will you not have some? And see, a bit of cake.’
I smiled my thanks and went to my room. As I did so a veritable babel of women’s voices broke the air. Too tired to think, I sat on my bed, wondering how much longer I could stand it, when again a thundering knock brought me to the door.
The Colonel begged me to pack at once as the German nurses had gone on strike, refusing to work if the Englishwoman remained.
Joyfully I flung my things into my small trunk. Then I went out into the courtyard, crowded with soldiers bearing torches – hundreds of them. Some officers stood round a car which held an armed escort. When I protested vigorously that I was not a prisoner and was not going to be taken through the town under an armed escort, it was explained that the escort was not for me but for two Belgian civilians who were to be shot at dawn, and that as the hour was so late, I would have to go on the same car to wherever I wanted.
It was one o’clock at night and everything was shut up, and then I remembered an old couple who had begged me to knock them up at any hour I might want help.
The Colonel came to say goodbye; he would not shake hands as doubtless he thought I might object; the officers stood at the salute with complimentary remarks, and soldiers surged round friendly and willing to help to the last moment … I was free …
A few days after war was declared Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland went to Brussels but immediately discovered she was not needed as there were many other Red Cross workers in the city. Dr Antoine Depage, an eminent Belgian surgeon, suggested on behalf of the Belgian Red Cross that she should equip an ambulance unit and go to Namur, a strategically important border town surrounded by nine forts, some thirty-five miles from Brussels. A week later the unit, consisting of the Duchess, as Commandant, a surgeon, eight trained nurses, and a stretcher-bearer, arrived in Namur. They were given rooms in a convent that had been turned into a hospital to nurse the wounded. One of the nurses was Mildred Rees [qv]. Their necessary equipment – medicines, dressings and disinfectant – followed a little later. As they arrived the Germans were advancing – the townspeople were evacuating – and all communications had already been cut.
The Convent of Namur after last week’s hurry seemed extraordinarily quiet. Les Soeurs de Notre Dame are scholastic sisters, and they had arranged the school part of the building, which was new and sanitary, as a hospital. My nurses were given a long dormitory where the scholars usually sleep and I had a small dormitory to myself. The nuns treated us most kindly, and said they would do all the cooking for the wounded. In the Belgian Red Cross ambulances and in the military hospital all the nursing is done by partly trained, but willing nuns and ladies. The dressings are done by the doctors.
It was a strange experience next morning to be sitting in the old Convent garden full of fruit trees and surrounded by high walls, whilst the nuns, the novices, and the postulants flitted about the paths with their rosaries and their little books. It was almost impossible to realise that there were nearly 200 nuns in the Convent so quietly did they move. From an upper window the nurses and I watched a regiment of Belgian artillery roll by. It was coming in from the country. ‘A big battle rages near Ramillies,’ said one nun. ‘All the poor families are coming in in carts.’ The Belgian military doctor, Dr Cordier, came to inspect our hospital equipment, which only arrived by the last train that reached Namur … He criticised our carbolic, smiled at the glycerine for the hands, and was immensely impressed by our instruments.
It was almost impossible to find out what was really going on. The noise of the motors, the scout motor cyclists, and the occasional whirr of an aeroplane mingled their sounds with a perpetual clanging of church bells. Our nurses were all busy making splints, cushions, sandbags, etc., and generally getting this scholastic side of the nunnery into one of the finest hospitals in Belgium. The English nuns helped us very much. I shall always remember Sister Marie des Cinq Anges and Sister Bernard.
On 21 August there was almost a panic in Namur. All night long the guns had been firing from the forts, and all the morning there was hurrying and scurrying into groups of weeping hatless women and of little children. The great secrecy as to all events that were passing filled them with untold fear.
It was evidently the beginning of a terrible experience. The Germans had been massing on the left bank of the Meuse and had come as close to Namur as circumstances would permit. They had passed through the country carrying off the cattle, burning the villages, cutting the telegraph and telephone wires, and attacking the railway stations. The closeness of the atmosphere had made Namur almost impossible to breathe in, that day. Tired Belgian soldiers came in. They seemed to have so much to wear and to carry. A regiment of Congolais, a Foreign Legion which had been in service in the Congo, marched through with their guns drawn by dogs.
The place was full of refugees who had been brought in from the country in carts. The Germans had burnt the villages of Ramillies and Petit Rosière. The inhabitants had been driven for shelter to Namur with a few poor bundles. They could not be kept at Namur for fear of shortage of food, so they were sent to Charleroi.
In the morning at 7.30 a bomb had been dropped from an aeroplane a few streets from our Convent. It was intended to fall in the Jesuit College, which was temporarily used as Artillery barracks, but it missed the college and dropped near the Academy of Music, breaking all the windows, ploughing a hole in the ground, and badly wounding four artillerymen.
We went over to the Café des Quatre Fils d’Aymond for our two franc dinner. We heard the explosion of another bomb in the next street. People were rushing hither and thither in a distracted manner, but no one could say who had been killed. At the door of the café we looked up, and I saw the Hornet of Hell, as I call the German ‘Taube’ which had dropped the bomb, floating slowly away. I thought it better to get my nurses to the shelter of the Convent, as German shells directed upon the station were beginning to fly over the town. We heard the long screaming whistle as they rushed through the air like some stupendous firework, and the distant explosion.
On 22 August I wrote my diary in the cellars of the convent. We had taken refuge there with all the schoolchildren, who were very frightened. We sat among sacks of flour, which the military authorities had put in charge of the nuns. Our nurses cut out red flannel bed-jackets and tried to take photographs! The German shells had been whistling ominously over the Convent for 24 hours. They said they were directed against the fort of Maizeret. Rumour had it that Fort Marchevolette had fallen.
One of the strangest parts of all was the fact that we were nursing in the Convent of Les Soeurs de Notre Dame de Namur. Exactly 100 years ago the Venerable Foundress, Mother Julie Billiart, who called herself Sister Ignatius, wrote her experiences of the Napoleonic War in the same Convent.
During those days of penury and distress no one knew how the Venerable Mother contrived to feed her sisters and children. In the same mysterious way today the Reverend Mother contrived to feed the soldiers and children, her 200 nuns, and novices and postulants, and has promised to feed our wounded.
Never shall I forget the afternoon of 22 August. The shelling of the past hours having suddenly ceased, I went to my dormitory. I had had practically no rest for two nights, and after the emotions of the morning I was falling asleep when Sister Kirby rushed into my room, calling out, ‘Sister Millicent! The wounded!’
I rushed down the stone stairs. Six motor cars and as many waggons were at the door, and they were carrying in those unhappy fellows. Some were on stretchers, others were supported by willing Red Cross men. One or two of the stragglers fell up the steps from fatigue and lay there. Many of these men had been for three days without food or sleep in the trenches.
In less than 20 minutes we had 45 wounded on our hands. A number had been wounded by shrapnel, a few by bullet wounds, but luckily some were only wounded by pieces of shell. These inflict awful gashes, but if they are taken in time the wounds rarely prove mortal.
The wounded were all Belgian – Flemish and Walloon – or French. Many were Reservists. Our young surgeon, Mr Morgan, was perfectly cool and so were our nurses. What I thought would be for me an impossible task became absolutely natural: to wash wounds, to drag off rags and clothing soaked in blood, to hold basins equally full of blood, to soothe a soldier’s groans, to raise a wounded man while he was receiving extreme unction, hemmed in by nuns and a priest, so near he seemed to death; these actions seemed suddenly to become an insistent duty, perfectly easy to carry out.
All the evening the wounded and the worn out were being rushed in. If they had come in tens one would not have minded, but the pressure of cases to attend to was exhausting. One could not refuse to take them, for they said there were 700 in the military hospital already, while all the smaller Red Cross ambulances were full.
So many of the men were in a state of prostration bordering almost on dementia, that I seemed instantly enveloped in the blight of war. I felt stunned – as if I were passing through an endless nightmare. Cut off as we were from all communication with the outer world, I realised what a blessing our ambulance was to Namur. I do not know what the nuns would have done without our nurses at such a moment. No one, until these awful things happen, can conceive the untold value of fully-trained and disciplined British nurses. The nuns were of great use to us, for they helped in every possible tender way, and provided food for the patients. The men had been lying in the trenches outside the forts. Hundreds of wounded were still waiting to be brought in, and owing to the German cannonading it was impossible to get near them. I kept on thinking and hoping that the allied armies must be coming to rescue Namur.
The guns never cease. The heavy French artillery arrived last night, and have taken up the work of the Marchevolette fort, which is reported to be out of action, but one of our wounded tells us that this artillery came 24 hours too late, and that the French force on the Meuse is not sufficient.
The Belgian Gendarmerie have just been in and collected all arms and ammunition.
I have been seeking for the rosaries the patients carry in their purses. They want to hold them in their hands or have them slung round their necks. On the floor there is a confusion of uniforms, kepis, and underclothing, which the nuns are trying to sort. Our surgeon is busy in the operating theatre, cutting off a man’s fingers; he was the first to be brought in and had his right hand shattered.
Sunday 23 August. There is a dreadful bombardment going on. Some of our wounded who can walk wrap themselves in blankets and go to the cellars. Luckily we are in a new fire-proof building, and I must stay with my sick men who cannot move. The shells sing over the convent from the deep booming German guns – a long singing scream and then an explosion which seems only a stone’s throw away. The man who received extreme unction the night before is mad with terror. I do not believe that he is after all so badly wounded. He has a bullet in his shoulder, and it is not serious. He has lost all power of speech, but I believe that he is an example of what I have read of and what I had never seen – a man dying of sheer fright.
The nurses and one or two of the nuns are most courageous and refuse to take shelter in the cellars, which are full of novices and schoolchildren. The electric and gas supplies have been cut off. The only lights we have to use are a few hand lanterns and night-lights. Quite late in the afternoon we heard a tremendous explosion. The Belgians had blown up the new railway bridge, but unfortunately there are others by which the Germans can cross, and we hear that they are in the town. There is some rapid fusillading through the streets and two frightened old Belgian officers ran into the Convent to ask for Red Cross bands, throwing down their arms and maps. In a few minutes, however, they regained self control and went out in the streets without the Red Cross bands.
Now the German troops are fairly marching in. I hear them singing as they march. It seems almost cowardly to write this, but for a few minutes there was relief to see them coming and to feel that this awful firing would soon cease. On they march! Fine well-set-up men with grey uniforms. They have stopped shooting now. I see them streaming into the market-place. A lot of stampeding artillery horses gallop by with Belgian guns. On one of the limbers still lay all that was left of a man. It is too terrible. What can these brave little people do against this mighty force? Some of the Germans have fallen out and are talking to the people in the streets. These are so utterly relieved at the cessation of the bombardment that in their fear they are actually welcoming the Germans. I saw some women press forward and wave their handkerchiefs.
Suddenly upon this scene the most fearful shelling begins again. It seemed almost as if the guns were in the garden. Mr Morgan, Mr Winser [the stretcher-bearer], and I were standing there. I had just buried my revolver under an apple tree when the bombardment began once more. The church bells were clanging for vespers. Then Whizz! Bang! come the shells over our heads again. Picric acid and splinters fall at our very feet. We rush back into the convent, and there are fifteen minutes of intense and fearful excitement while the shells are crashing into the market-place. We see German soldiers running for dear life … Women half fainting, and wounded, old men and boys are struggling in. Their screams are dreadful. They had all gone into the Grande Place to watch the German soldiers marching, and were caught in this sudden firing. A civilian wounded by a shell in the stomach was brought into the Ambulance. He died in 20 minutes. We can only gather incoherent accounts from these people as to what had happened. The Germans sounded the retreat and the shelling seemed to stop. At last it leaks out that the German troops on the other side of the town did not know that their own troops had crossed the Meuse on the opposite side. They were firing on the Citadel, an antiquated fort of no value. The shells fell short, and before the Germans discovered their mistake they had killed many of their own soldiers and Belgian civilians who had rushed up to see the German troops. It seems a horrible story, but absolutely true.
Now it is quiet again, save for the sighs of the suffering. All night long we hear the tramp, tramp, tramp of German infantry in the streets, their words of command, their perpetual deep-throated songs. They are full of swagger, and they are very anxious to make an impression upon the Belgians.
Our wounded are doing well, and one must remember that, if their nerves have gone to pieces, to lie in trenches with this awful artillery fire bursting over them, knowing that even if they lifted their heads a few inches it might be blown off, must be an appalling sensation.
The Doctor and I went up into the tower in the dark. The bombardment had ceased, but everywhere on the horizon, there were blazing fires, villages and country mansions flaring in the darkness. Motor cars dashed past. Instead of Belgian, one sees now only German motors filled with German officers. Where are the English and the big French troops? That is what I am wondering.
24 August. The day was peaceful enough after the previous soul-stirring hours. Early in the afternoon a German Count with a Red Cross on his arm came and inspected our ambulance at the Convent. He was perfectly civil, and one had to be civil in return. He drank the beer which the nuns tremblingly pressed upon him, and took a note of the sacks of flour which the nuns were keeping in the cellars.
‘Pour l’autorité militair Belge’, they said.
‘Allemande,’ the young Count replied significantly.
I made a mental note to get possession of that flour, for the German troops were rapidly depleting Namur of all its food, and refugees were streaming into the town. We had not seen butter, milk, or eggs for days. Now the nuns came to me and said there was no yeast for the bread, and they were trying various recipes to make bread without yeast.
The German Count adopted a sort of ‘charming woman’ manner to me; he seemed thoroughly pleased with himself. He said, ‘Now the Germans are in possession of Namur all will be quiet and well arranged. There will be no trouble unless the civilians are treacherous and fire on the soldiers. If they do that we shall set fire to the town.’ Having said this he clattered out. The Namuriens had suffered so much and had seemed so utterly broken down, it did not strike me that the civilians would venture to fire on these thousands of troops that were filling their streets, their barracks, and their shops. All I kept on thinking was, ‘Where are the English and the French?’
It was a hot, still summer night. We had begun to laugh again. We were so interested in our wounded – and we were so relieved at the cessation of firing save of one distant cannon which would not stop and was evidently attacking the last fort.
It was ten o’clock and I decided to go to bed and was nearly undressed when a few rifle shots rang out in the street near the Convent. A pause, and then came a perfect fusillade of rifle shots. It was dreadful while it lasted. Had the Belgians disregarded the warning of the Town Council, of L’Ami de l’Ordre [the Namur newspaper], and of the German ‘swankers’, and refused to take their defeat lying down? If the civilians were firing, it was mad rashness. My door burst open and Mr Winser rushed in calling out, ‘My God, Duchess, they have fired the town.’
The Hôtel de Ville was on fire, the market place was on fire. Then came the message that the town was fired at the four corners. One of the buildings of the Convent was absolutely fire-proof and in this portion the worn-out wounded were very quiet. We had about a hundred in a dormitory in an older building. The flames simply shot up beside this and the sparks were falling about the roof. Fortunately the Convent was all surrounded by a garden and the wind was blowing the flames away from us. The whole sky was illuminated; we came to the conclusion that there was nothing to do but to wait and watch the fire, and leave the patients alone until we saw the flames must reach us. It was a terrible hour. The nurses courageously re-assured the wounded and persuaded most of them to remain in bed.
The Padre came in at last and said that the flames would not reach us. In the afternoon we ventured into the smoky street. It was like walking through a dense fog. All the buildings were smouldering. The whole of the market-place and the Hotel de Ville had been burnt and the dear little café where we went for our meals before the bombardment. All the shutters were up on the shops that had not been burnt and one could hardly walk for the number of German troops massed in the streets, bivouacking with their rifles stacked before them. A German officer told me that the town was burnt because some of the civilian inhabitants had been shooting at the soldiers from dark windows.
The Doctor and I thought we had better visit the Commander, General von Bülow. The Headquarters Staff was established at the Hôtel de Hollande. The General apologised for receiving me in his bedroom, so terribly overflowing were all the other rooms with officers. Field Marshall von der Goltz, who arrived en route to take up his duties in Brussels [as Governor], was kept waiting while the General spoke to me.
General von Bülow said he was sure he had met me at Hamburg, and that he would arrange with one of the diplomats to get a telegram through to Berlin, which he trusted would be copied in the London papers, announcing the safety of our Ambulance.
‘Accept my admiration for your work, Duchess,’ he said. He spoke perfect English. To accept the favours of my country’s foe was a bad moment for me, but the Germans were in possession of Namur and I had to consider my hospital from every point of view. Also those who are of the Red Cross and who care for suffering humanity and for the relief of pain and sickness should strive to remember nothing but the heartache of the world and the pity of it.
General von Bülow ‘did me the honour’ to call the next morning at our Ambulance. He was accompanied by Baron Kessler, his aide-de-camp, who composed the scenario of La Legende de Josephe. He had been much connected with Russian opera in London during the past season. It was exceedingly odd to meet him under such circumstances, after having so often discussed ‘art’ with him in London.
I was able, with the assistance of Mr Winser, whose sister had married a German, to obtain an order that the flour in the cellars might be kept for the use of our Ambulance.
On 27 August the Germans were in full possession of peaceful Namur. We had now over 100 patients. The Germans were occupying the temporary barracks across the road from the Convent which had lately been full of Belgian soldiers. Some German Infantrymen brought us three wounded comrades – an artillery waggon had upset and passed over them.
The walls were pasted with German proclamations. Owing to the shooting of the civilians an order came out that all soldiers, Belgian or French that might be hidden in the houses, were to be given up as prisoners-of-war before four o’clock in the afternoon in front of the prison. If this order were not obeyed the prisoners would be condemned to perpetual hard labour in Germany. If any arms were hidden in houses and were not given up by four o’clock the inhabitants would be shot. All streets would be occupied by German guards, who would take from each street ten male hostages. These hostages would be shot if any other person whosoever fired upon the German troops. No houses could be locked at night. After eight o’clock at night three windows must be lit in every house. Anyone found out in the streets after eight o’clock would be shot. Proclamations of this sort succeeded one another every day. The German authorities fairly tripped over their own regulations. They allowed the Namuriens to have their own Bourgmestre, but when General von Bülow left the town, as he did in a few days, he was succeeded by another Commander, who proceeded to unsew in regulations all that had been sewn up before.
By 3 September Namur had settled down to a certain amount of calm. German sentries stood outside the military hospital, Germans filled every cafe and German troops were perpetually going backwards and forwards through the town. Fresh regiments came up – others disappeared.
A German officer came into our ambulance and said the German wounded that we had there must be taken to the military hospital. They were not really fit to go and I could see that they were very sorry to leave us. I used to go every day and visit the Commander and Dr Schilling [the head doctor of the garrison] and quote the Convention of Geneva and do all I could to lighten the lot of our wounded. In spite of this the Germans soon came and took away as prisoners 30 of those who had nearly recovered. Dr Schilling had a very rough manner, but I do think he had a good heart and positively hated the job in which he was engaged. He was always working to get even the badly wounded sent on as prisoners, ‘to evacuate’, he said, ‘to make room for other wounded’. I asked him if the Belgian and French prisoners were properly looked after in Germany when they were wounded. ‘God in Heaven! Madame,’ he answered, ‘do you take us for barbarians?’
Yesterday a guard of eight German soldiers was sent into our Convent. This was really more than I could bear so I forwarded a message to the Commander and in half an hour the guard was taken away. I asked for two sentries to be left at the door. These men were changed every two hours and I had long conversations with them. They all seemed anxious to go home again and knew nothing of why they were fighting or where they were going to fight.
We were getting very hungry in Namur. An order had gone out from the Commander to re-victual the town, but it was easier said than done. With the destroying of the surrounding villages and with so many troops in the town, there was hardly anything left to eat, although the nuns always managed to provide coffee and bread for the wounded. There was no milk. I had fortunately brought down some biscuits and jam from Brussels, and the nuns fed us with all they could let us have and gave us lots of fruit.
Mr Winser was at last able to go to Brussels in a Red Cross motor. He brought back a ham, a cheese, and some marmalade … He fetched from the American Legation a Weekly Dispatch of 30 August and in this I learnt of the French reverses near Charleroi and of the English difficulties at Mons and St Quentin.
My whole mind was now bent upon getting to Mons. Comtesse Jacqueline de Pourtales had come back with Mr Winser from Brussels. She said the city was full of German wounded, but no English. She told me that Miss Angela Manners and Miss Nellie Hozier [the sister-in-law of Winston Churchill] had gone down with a small ambulance of London Hospital nurses to Mons, having got the permit from the German authorities through freely using Mr Winston Churchill’s name.
We heard bad news of the burning of Louvain. Some of our patients were Louvain University students and they were miserable at the burning of the University and their wonderful and world-renowned library. Some say the Germans saved the books and took them to Germany.
I wished to see the English wounded and on 5 September I obtained a permit from the Commander to visit Mons in a motor car with a German soldier as guard. I asked for the guard, as I knew by this means our car would be able to pass everywhere in safety.
All the way to Charleroi from Namur along the banks of the unhappy Sambre the country was desolate. I shall never forget the burnt houses, the charred rubbish, the helpless-looking people. There had been fearful fighting in the suburbs of Charleroi. The fields were full of German graves. The persistence of the glorious weather made the contrast more tragic.
Mons is an attractive town with large avenues of trees. At the very first Red Cross Ambulance I found five British privates – two Royal Scots, two of the Irish Rifles, and one of the Middlesex Regiment.
The Belgian Red Cross ladies were more than kind to them but the trouble was that they could not speak English and the soldiers could not speak French. I understood from Miss Manners and Miss Hozier that there were about 200 British wounded in the town, and that a whole ward of the civil hospital was full of British wounded. They were well looked after by Belgian doctors and were clean and comfortable. I gathered from every man I asked that they had been surprised by the Germans on 22 or 23 August. They had killed a great number but they had got separated from the remainder of the British force, and knew nothing of the sequel of the fight.
I had to leave Mons without seeing all the English wounded. I wanted to get as near to the frontier as possible on my way back to Namur, in case of coming across any out-lying wounded. The big siege cannon were still firing at Maubeuge, evidently the forts had not yet fallen.
Presently we came to a country house embedded in trees with a Red Cross flag flying. I drove up and found the place belonging to Count Maxine de Bousies at Harvengt. He was nursing here 20 English wounded of the Irish Rifles, Irish Guards, Coldstream Guards, and others. Nuns were in charge, and the men assured me they were splendidly taken care of.
When I got back to Namur I found the Germans had been busy; taking advantage of my absence they had announced their decision to close all private ambulances in Namur. They said they would group the wounded in two big ‘Lazarets’ or German military hospitals. Our wounded would have to be taken to the College of the Jesuits under German control before they entrained for Germany as prisoners.
I felt furious at this news, but it was too late to do anything that night as the fatal hour of 9 was passed, when all who ventured into the streets were shot.
In the morning I went to Dr Schilling. He said that we could have a room at the Jesuit College in which to put all our wounded, and he gave me a note to the head German doctor at the College to this effect, but he would make no exception for our ambulance to keep it open …
On 20 September 1914 Sarah Macnaughtan, a well-known author, musician and painter, and member of the British Red Cross Corps, arrived in Antwerp to serve as a senior orderly with Mrs St Clair Stobart’s Unit – which was made up of women doctors, nurses and orderlies. They brought a large store of medical equipment and immediately started to scrub floors and set up operating theatres, receiving rooms, kitchens, bathrooms and wards in a large, empty philharmonic hall that the Belgian authorities had commandeered for a hospital for Belgian and French casualties. Beds were ranged in rows, each with clean sheets and a bright counterpane and on 24 September the first fifty wounded men were received. Some of the staff lived in rooms over the philharmonic hall and others in a nearby convent.
28 September
Last night I and two orderlies slept over at the hospital as more wounded were expected. At 11pm word came that ‘les blessés’ were at the gate. Men were on duty with stretchers, and we went out to the tram-way cars in which the wounded are brought from the station, twelve patients in each. The transit is as little painful as possible, and the stretchers are placed in iron brackets, and are simply unhooked when the men arrive. Each stretcher was brought in and laid on a bed in the ward, and the nurses and doctors undressed the men. We orderlies took their names, their ‘matricule’ or regimental number, and the number on their bed. Then we gathered up their clothes and put corresponding numbers on labels attached to them – first turning out the pockets, which are filled with all manner of things, from tins of sardines to loaded revolvers.
We arranged everything and then got Oxo for the men, many of whom had had nothing to eat for two days. Their absolute exhaustion is the most pathetic thing about them. They fall asleep even when their wounds are being dressed. When all was made straight and comfortable for them, the nurses turned the lights low again, and stepped softly about the ward with their little torches.
A hundred beds all filled with men in pain give one plenty to think about. I was struck by the contrast between the pillared concert-hall where they lie, with its platform of white paint and decorations, and the tragedy of suffering which now fills it.
At 2am more soldiers were brought in from the battlefield, all caked with dirt, and we began to work again.
At five o’clock I went to bed and slept till eight. Mrs Stobart never rests. I think she must be made of some substance that the rest of us have not discovered. At 5am I discovered her curled up on a bench in her office, the doors wide open and the dawn breaking.
2 October
At 7am the men’s bread had not arrived for their six o’clock breakfast, so I went into the town to get it. The difficulty was to convey home twenty-eight large loaves, so I went to the barracks and begged a motor car from the Belgian office and came back triumphant. The military cars simply rip through the streets, blowing their horns all the time. Antwerp was thronged with these cars and each one contained soldiers. Sometimes one saw wounded in them lying on sacks stuffed with straw.
After breakfast I cleaned the two houses, as I do every morning. When my rooms were done I went over to the hospital to help prepare the men’s dinner, my task today being to open bottles and pour out beer for 120 men. Afterwards I went across to the hospital again and arranged a few things with Mrs Stobart. I began to correct the men’s diagnosis sheets, but was called off to help with wounded arriving, and to label and sort their clothes.
The men’s supper is at six o’clock, and we began cutting up their bread-and-butter and cheese and filling their bowls of beer. When that was over and visitors were going, an order came for thirty patients to proceed to Ostend and make room for worse cases.
The Germans have destroyed the reservoir and the water-supply has been cut off, so we have to go and fetch all the water in buckets from a well. After supper we go with our pails and carry it home.
The shortage for washing, cleaning, etc., is rather inconvenient, and adds to the danger in a large hospital, and to the risk of typhoid.
4 October
Winston Churchill is here with Marines. They say Colonel Kitchener is at the forts.
The firing sounds very near. Dr Hector Munro and Miss St Clair [May Sinclair qv] and Lady Dorothie Feilding came over today from Ghent, where all is quiet. They wanted me to return with them to take a rest, which was absurd, of course.
Some fearful cases were brought in to us today. My God, the horror of it! One has heard of men whom their mothers would not recognise. Some of the wounded today were amongst these. All the morning we did what we could for them. One man was riddled with bullets, and died very soon.
It is awful work. The great bell rings, and we say, ‘More wounded’, and the men get stretchers. We go down the long, cold covered way to the gate and number the men for their different beds. The stretchers are stiff with blood, and the clothes have to be cut off the men. They cry out terribly, and their horror is so painful to witness. They are so young, and they have seen right into hell. The first dressings are removed by the doctors – sometimes there is only a lump of cotton-wool to fill up a hole – and the men lie there with their tragic eyes fixed upon one.
The lights are all off at eight o’clock now, and we do our work in the dark, while the orderlies hold little torches to enable the doctors to dress the wounds. There are not half enough nurses or doctors out here. In one hospital there are 400 beds and only two trained nurses.
5–6 October
I think the last two days have been the most ghastly I ever remember. Every day seems to bring news of defeat. It is awful, and the Germans are quite close now. As I write the house shakes with the firing. Our troops are falling back, and the forts have fallen. Last night we took provisions and water to the cellars, and made plans to get the wounded taken there.
All these last two days bleeding men have been brought in. Today three of them died, and I suppose none of them was more than 23.
The guns boom by day as well as by night, and as each one is heard one thinks of more bleeding, shattered men. It is calm, nice autumn weather; the trees are yellow in the garden and the sky is blue, yet all the time one listens to the cries of men in pain. Tonight I meant to go out for a little, but a nurse stopped me and asked me to sit by a dying man. Poor fellow, he was twenty-one, and looked like some brigand chief, and he smiled as he was dying.
7 October
It is a glorious morning: they will see well to kill each other today.
At lunch-time today firing ceased, and I heard it was because the German guns were coming up. We got orders to send away all the wounded who could possibly go, and we prepared beds in the cellars for those who cannot be moved. The military authorities beg us to remain as so many hospitals have been evacuated.
The wounded continue to come in. All the orderlies are on duty in the hospital now. We can spare no one for rougher work. We can all bandage and wash patients. There are wounded everywhere, even on straw beds on the platform of the hall.
At 7 last night the guns were much louder than before, with a sort of strange double sound, and we were told that these were our ‘Long Toms’, so we hope that our Naval Brigade has come up.
We know very little of what is going on except when we run out and ask some returning English soldiers for news. Yesterday it was always the same reply: ‘Very bad’. One of the Marines told me that Winston Churchill was ‘up and down the road amongst the shells’, and that he had given orders that Antwerp was not to be taken until the last man in it was dead.
The Marines are getting horribly knocked about. Yesterday Mrs O’Gormon went out in her own motor car and picked wounded out of the trenches. She said that no one knew why they were in the trenches or where they were to fire – they just lay there and were shot and then left.
On Wednesday night, 7 October, we heard that one more ship was going to England, and a last chance was given to us all to leave. Only two did so; the rest stayed on. Mrs Stobart went out to see what was to be done.
At midnight the first shell came over us with a shriek, and I went down and woke the orderlies and nurses and doctors. We dressed and went over to help move the wounded at the hospital. The shells began to scream overhead; it was a bright moonlight night, and we walked without haste – a small body of women – across the road to the hospital.
Nearly all the moving to the cellars had already been done – only three stretchers remained to be moved. One wounded English sergeant helped us. Otherwise everything was done by women. We laid the men on mattresses which we fetched from the hospital overhead, and then Mrs Stobart’s mild, quiet voice said, ‘Everything is to go on as usual. The night nurses and orderlies will take their places. Breakfast will be at the usual hour.’ She and the other ladies whose night it was to sleep at the convent then returned to sleep in the basement with a Sister.
We came in for some most severe shelling at first, either because we flew the Red Cross flag or because we were in the line of fire with a powder magazine which the Germans wished to destroy.
We sat in the cellars with one night-light burning in each, and with seventy wounded men to take care of. Two of them were dying. There was only one line of bricks between us and the shells. One shell fell into the garden, making a hole six feet deep; the next crashed through a house on the opposite side of the road and set it on fire. As long as we stayed with the wounded they minded nothing. We sat there all night. We just waited for daybreak. When it came the firing grew worse. Two hundred guns were turned on Antwerp, and the shells came over at the rate of four a minute. They have a horrid screaming sound as they come. We heard each one coming and wondered if it would hit us, and then we heard the crashing somewhere else and knew another shell was coming.
The worst cases among the wounded lay on the floor, and these wanted constant attention. The others were in their great-coats, and stood about the cellar leaning on crutches and sticks. We wrapped blankets round the rheumatism cases and sat through the long night. All spoke cheerfully, and there was some laughter in the further cellar.
At six o’clock the convent party came over and began to prepare breakfast. The least wounded of the men began to steal away. Mrs Stobart was walking about for three hours trying to find anything on wheels to remove us and the wounded. At last we got a motor ambulance, and packed in twenty men – that was all it would hold. We told them to go as far as the bridge and send it back for us. It never came.
We got dinner for the men, and then the strain began to be much worse. I told Mrs Stobart we must leave the wounded at the convent in charge of the Sisters, and this we did, telling them where to take them in the morning.
About five o’clock the shelling became more violent, and three shells came with only an instant between each. Presently we heard Mrs Stobart say, ‘Come at once’, and we went out and found three English buses with English drivers at the door. They were carrying ammunition, and were the last vehicles to leave Antwerp. We got into them and lay on the top of the ammunition, and the girls began to light cigarettes! The noise of the buses prevented our hearing for a time the infernal sound of shells and our cannons’ answering roar.
As we drove to the bridge many houses and sometimes a whole street was burning. No one seemed to care. No one was there to try and save anything. We drove through the empty streets and saw the burning houses, and great holes where shells had fallen, and then we got to the bridge and out of the line of fire.
We set out to walk towards Holland, but a Belgian officer got us some Red Cross ambulances, and into these we got, and were taken to a convent at St Gilles, where we slept on the floor till 3am. At 3 a message was brought, ‘Get up at once – things are worse.’ Everyone seemed to be leaving, and we got into the Red Cross ambulances and went to the station.
9 October
We have been all day in the train in very hard third-class carriages with the RMLI. The journey of 50 miles took from five o’clock in the morning, when we got away, till twelve o’clock at night, when we reached Ostend. The train hardly crawled. It was the longest I have ever seen. All Ostend was in darkness when we arrived – a German airship having been seen overhead. We always seem to be tumbling about in the dark. We went from one hotel to another trying to get accommodation, and at last (at the St James’s) they allowed us to lie on the floor of the restauarant. The only food they had for us was ten eggs for twenty-five hungry people and some brown bread, but they had champagne and I ordered it for everybody, and we made little speeches and tried to end on a good note.
10 October
Mrs Stobart took the unit back to England today.
12 October
Everyone has gone back to England except Sister Bailey and me. She is waiting to hand over the wounded to the proper department, and I am waiting to see if I can get on anywhere. It does seem so hard that when men are most in need of us we should all run home and leave them.
The noises and racket in Ostend are deafening, and there is panic everywhere. The boats go to England packed every time. Some ships lie close to us on the grey misty water, and the troops are passing along all day.
Later. We heard tonight that the Germans are coming into Ostend tomorrow, so once more we fly like dust before a broom. It is horrible having to clear out for them.
This evening Dr Hector Munro came in from Ghent with his oddly-dressed ladies, and at first one was inclined to call them masqueraders in their knickerbockers and puttees and caps, but I believe they have done excellent work. It is a queer side of war to see young, pretty English girls in khaki and thick boots, coming in from the trenches, where they have been picking up wounded men within 100 yards of the enemy’s lines, and carrying them away on stretchers.
Dr Munro asked me to come on to his convoy, and I gladly did so: he sent home a lady whose nerves were gone [Miss May Sinclair] and I was put in her place.
13 October
We had an early muddly breakfast. Afterwards we all got into our motor ambulances en route for Dunkirk. The road was filled with flying inhabitants, and down at the dock wounded and well struggled to get on to the steamer. People were begging us for a seat in our ambulance, and well-dressed women were setting out to walk 20 miles to Dunkirk.
I began to make out of whom our party consists. There is Lady Dorothie Feilding – probably 22, but capable of taking command of a ship, and speaking French like a native; Mrs Decker, an Australian, plucky and efficient; Miss Chisholm [qv], a blueeyed Scottish girl, with a thick coat strapped around her waist and a haversack slung from her shoulder; a tall American, whose name I do not yet know, whose husband is a journalist; three young surgeons, and Dr Munro. It is all so quaint. The girls rule the company, carry maps and find roads, see about provisions and carry wounded.
We could not get rooms at Dunkirk and so came on to St Malo les Bains, a small bathing-place which had been shut up for the winter. The owner of an hotel there opened up some rooms for us and got us some ham and eggs, and the evening ended very cheerily. Our party seems, to me, amazingly young and unprotected.
St Malo les Bains. 14 October
Lady Dorothie Feilding is our real commander, and everyone knows it. She goes to all the heads of departments, is the only good speaker of French, and has the only reliable information about anything. All the men acknowledge her position.
16 October
Today I have been reading of the ‘splendid retreat’ of the Marines from Antwerp and their ‘unprecedented reception’ at Deal. Everyone appears to have been in a state of wild enthusiasm about them, and it seems almost like Mafeking over again.
What struck me most about these men was the way in which they blew their own trumpets in full retreat and while flying from the enemy. We travelled all day in the train with them and had long conversations with them all. I find the conceit of it most trying. Belgium is in the hands of the enemy, and we flee before him singing our own praises loudly as we do so. The Marines lost their kit, spent one night in Antwerp, and went back to England, where they had an amazing reception amid scenes of unprecedented enthusiasm!
I could not help thinking, when I read the papers today, of our tired little body of nurses and doctors and orderlies going back quietly and unproclaimed to England to rest at Folkestone for three days and then to come out here again. They had been for eighteen hours under heavy shell fire without so much as a rifle to protect them, and with the immediate chance of a burning building falling about them. The nurses sat in the cellars tending wounded men, whom they refused to leave, and then hopped on to the outside of an ammunition bus.
21 October
Firing has begun again. This afternoon we came out in motors and ambulances to establish ourselves at Furnes in an empty Ecclesiastical College. Nothing was ready, and everything was in confusion. Night was falling as we came back to Dunkirk to sleep (for no beds were ready at Furnes).
Today I see tired dusty men, very hungry looking and unshaved, slogging along, silent and tired, and ready to lie down whenever chance offers.
23 October
The guns are nearer today or more distant, the battle sways backwards and forwards, and there is no such thing as a real ‘base’ for a hospital. We must just stay as long as we can and fly when we must.
About 10am the ambulances that have been out all night begin to come in, the wounded on their pitiful shelves.
All day the stretchers are brought in and the work goes on. It is about five o’clock that the weird tired hour begins when the dim lamps are lighted, and people fall over things, and nearly everything is mislaid, and the wounded cry out, and one steps over forms on the floor. From then till one goes to bed it is difficult to be just what one ought to be, the tragedy of it is too pitiful.
Blood-stained mattresses and pillows are carried out into the courtyard. Two ladies help to move the corpses. There is always a pile of bandages and rags being burnt, and a youth stirs the horrible pile with a stick. A queer smell permeates everything, and the guns never cease. The wounded are coming in at the rate of 100 a day.
The Queen of the Belgians called to see the hospital today. Poor little Queen, coming to see the remnants of an army and the remnants of a kingdom! She was kind to each wounded man, and we were glad of her visit, if for no other reason than that some sort of cleaning and tidying was done in her honour. Tonight Mr Nevinson [the war artist] arrived, and we went round the wards together after supper. The beds were all full – so was the floor. The doctors said, ‘These men are not wounded, they are mashed.’
The surgeons are working in shifts and can’t get the work done. One can only be thankful for a hospital like this in the thick of things, for we are saving the lives of men who perhaps have lain three days in a trench or a turnip-field undiscovered and forgotten.
As soon as a wounded man has been attended to and is able to be put on a stretcher again he is sent to Calais. We have to keep emptying the wards for other patients to come in, and besides, if the fighting comes this way, we shall have to fall back a little further.
26 October. My birthday
We started early in the ambulance today, and went to pick up the wounded.
The churches are nearly all filled with straw, the chairs piled anywhere, and the sacrament removed from the altar. In cottages and little inns it is the same thing – a litter of straw, and men lying on it in the chilly weather. Here and there through some little window one sees surgeons in their white coats dressing wounds. Half the world seems to be wounded. We filled our ambulance, and stood about in curious groups of English men and women who looked as if they were on some shooting-party. When our load was complete we drove home.
21 November. Furnes Railway Station
I am up to my eyes in soup! I have started a soup-kitchen at the station, and it gives me a lot to do.
Our kitchen at the railway-station is a little bit of a passage, which measures eight feet by eight feet. In it are two small stoves. One is a little round iron thing which burns, and the other is a sort of little ‘kitchener’ which doesn’t. With this equipment, and various huge ‘marmites’, we make coffee and soup for hundreds of men every day. The first convoy gets into the station about 9.30am, all the men frozen, the black troops nearly dead with cold. As soon as the train arrives I carry out one of my boiling ‘marmites’ to the middle of the stone entrance and ladle out the soup, while a Belgian Sister takes round coffee and bread.
These Belgians (three of them) deserve much of the credit for the soup-kitchen, as they started with coffee before I came, and did wonders on nothing. Now that I have bought my pots and pans and stoves we are able to do soup, and much more. The Sisters do the coffee on one side of eight feet by eight, while I and my vegetables and the stove which goes out are on the other.
After the first convoy of wounded has been served, other wounded men come in from time to time, then about four o’clock there is another train-load. At 10pm the largest convoy arrives. The men seem too stiff to move, and many are carried in on soldiers’ backs. The stretchers are laid on the floor, those who can sit on benches, and every man produces a ‘quart’ or tin cup. One and all they come out of the darkness and never look about them, but rouse themselves to get fed, and stretch out poor grimy hands for bread and steaming drinks. There is very little light – only one oil-lamp, which hangs from the roof, and burns dimly. Under this we place the ‘marmites’, and all that I can see is one brown or black or wounded hand stretched out into the dim ring of light under the lamp, with a little tin mug held out for soup. Wet and ragged, and covered with sticky mud, the wounded lie in the salle of the station, and, except under the lamp, it is all quite dark … and then the train loads up, the wounded depart, and a heavy smell and an empty pot are all that remain. We clean up the kitchen, and go home about 1am. I do the night work alone. I have a little electric lamp, which is a great comfort to me, as I have to walk home alone. The villa is a mile from the station.
1 December
Mrs Knocker [qv] and Miss Chisholm [qv] and Lady Dorothie went out to Pervyse a few days ago to make soup etc. for Belgians in the trenches. They live in the cellar of a house which has been blown inside out by guns, and take out buckets of soup to men on outpost duty. Not a glimpse of fire is allowed on outpost duty. Fortunately the weather has been milder lately, but soaking wet. Our three ladies walk about the trenches at night.
The piteous list of casualties is not so long as it has been. A wounded German was brought in today. Both his legs were broken and his feet frost-bitten. He had been for four days in water with nothing to eat, and his legs unset. He is doing well.
8 December
Unexpected people continue to arrive at Furnes. Mme Curie and her daughter are in charge of the X-ray apparatus at the hospital.
Today I was giving out my soup on the train and three shells came in in quick succession. One came just over my head and lodged in a haystall on the other side of the platform. The wall of the store has an enormous hole in it, but the thickly packed hay prevented the shrapnel scattering. The station-master was hit, and his watch saved him, but it was crumpled up like a rag. Two men were wounded, and one of them died. A whole crowd of refugees came in from Coxide, which is being heavily shelled. There was not a scrap of food for them, so I made soup in great quantities, and distributed it to them in a crowded room whose atmosphere was thick. Ladling out soup is great fun.
25 December
My Christmas Day began at midnight, when I walked home through the moonlit empty streets of Furnes. At 2am the guns began to roar, and roared all night. They say the Allies are making an attack.
I got up early and went to church in the untidy school-room at the hospital, which is called the nurses’ sitting-room. Mr Streatfield had arranged a little altar, and had set some chairs in an orderly row, and white artificial flowers in the vases, and there were candles and a cross. We were quite a small congregation. Inside we prayed for peace, and outside the guns went on firing. Prince Alexander of Teck came to our service – a big soldierly figure in the bare room.
After breakfast I went to the soup-kitchen at the station, as usual, then home – i.e. to the hospital to lunch. At 3.15 came a sort of evensong with hymns, and then we went to the civil hospital, where there was a Christmas tree for all the Belgian refugee children.
Every man, woman and child got a treat or a present or a good dinner. The wounded had turkey, and all they could eat, and the children got toys and sweets off the tree. I suppose these children are not much accustomed to presents, for their delight was almost too much for them … Without homes or money, and with their relations often lost. The bigger children had rather good voices, and all sang our National Anthem in English. ‘God save our nobbler King’ – the accent was quaint, but the children sang lustily.
We had finished, and were waiting for our own Christmas dinner when shells began to fly. One came whizzing past Mr Streatfield’s store room as I stood there with him. The next minute a little child in floods of tears came in, grasping her mother’s bag, to say ‘Maman’ had had her arm blown off. The child herself was covered with dust and dirt, and in the streets people were sheltering in doorways, and taking little runs for safety as soon as a shell had finished bursting. The bombardment lasted about an hour, and we all waited in the kitchen and listened to it.
About 8.15 the bombardment ceased, and we went in to a cheery dinner – soup, turkey, and plum-pudding, with crackers and speeches.
At 9.30 I went to the station. It was very melancholy. No one was there but myself. The fires were out, or smoking badly. I got things in order as soon as I could and the wounded in the train got their hot soup and coffee as usual, which was a satisfaction. Then I came home alone at midnight – keeping as near the houses as I could because of possible shells – and so to bed, very cold, and rather too inclined to think about home …
May Sinclair, aged 51 and an established novelist, became the ‘Secretary and Reporter’ to the thirteen strong ambulance unit raised by Dr Hector Munro when war was declared. Her role was to keep the accounts, write Dr Munro’s reports, and articles for the daily newspapers. After initial doubts the British Red Cross agreed to buy the ambulances and the unit arrived in Ostend towards the end of September 1914. The members included Mairi Chisholm [qv], Elsie Knocker [qv] and Lady Dorothie Feilding. The Unit’s first Headquarters were in Ghent at the magnificent Flandria Palace Hôtel where some were given bedrooms and private sitting-rooms, although all the fine furniture and draperies had been removed to make an auxiliary hospital. The billiard-room was an operating theatre, the dining-room, reception rooms and some bedrooms became wards. There were only about 100 wounded when they arrived but they were told to be ready to drive out to collect casualties. May Sinclair had a room at the Hôtel Cecil.
Sunday, 11 October 1914
8am
Antwerp has fallen. Taube over Ghent in the night.
We expect that we may have to clear out of Ghent before tomorrow.
4.45pm
Went over to the Convent de Saint Pierre, where Miss Ashley-Smith [qv] is with her British wounded. I had to warn her that the Germans may come in tonight. I had told the Commandant [Dr Munro] about her yesterday, and arranged with him that we should take her and her British away in our Ambulance if we have to go.
The Convent is a little way beyond the Place on the boulevard. I knew it by the Red Cross hanging from the upper windows. Everything is as happy and peaceful here as if Ghent were not on the eve of an invasion. The nuns took me to Miss Ashley-Smith in her ward. Absolutely unperturbed by the news, she went on superintending the disposal of a table of surgical instruments. She would not consent to come with us at first. But the nuns persuaded her that she would do no good by remaining.
I am to come again and tell her what time to be ready with her wounded, when we know whether we are going and when.
The night goes on. I sit with Mr –––– for a little while. It is appalling to me that the time should seem long. For it is really such a little while, and when it is over there will be nothing more that I shall ever do for him … He holds out his hands to be sponged, ‘if I don’t mind’. I sponge them over and over again with iced water and eau de Cologne, gently and very slowly. I am afraid lest he should be aware that there is any hurry. The time goes on.
It is time that I should go round to the Convent to tell Miss Ashley-Smith to be ready with her British before two o’clock …
It is nearly two o’clock. Downstairs, in the great silent hall two British wounded are waiting for some ambulance to take them to the Station. They are sitting bolt upright on chairs near the doorway, their heads nodding with drowsiness. One or two Belgian Red Cross men wait beside them. Opposite them, on three other chairs, the three doctors sit waiting for our own ambulance to take them. They have been up all night and are utterly exhausted. They sit, fast asleep, with their heads bowed on their breasts.
Outside, the darkness has mist and a raw cold sting in it.
A wretched ambulance wagon drawn by two horses is driven up to the door. It had a hood once, but the hood has disappeared and only the naked hoops remain. The British wounded from two other hospitals are packed in it in two rows. They sit bolt upright under the hoops, exposed to mist and to the raw cold sting of the night; some of them wear their blankets like shawls over their shoulders as they were taken from their beds. The shawls and the head bandages give these British a strange, foreign look, infinitely helpless, infinitely pitiful.
Nobody seems to be out there but Mrs Torrence [Mrs Knocker] and one or two Belgian Red Cross men. She and I help to get our two men taken gently out of the hall and stowed away in the ambulance wagon. There are not enough blankets. We try to find some.
At the last minute two bearers come forward, carrying a third. He is tall and thin; he is wrapped in a coat flung loosely over his sleeping-jacket; he wears a turban of bandages; his long bare feet stick out as he is carried along. It is Cameron, my poor Highlander, who was shot through the brain.
They lift him, very gently, into the wagon.
Then, very gently, they lift him out again.
This attempt to save him is desperate. He is dying.
Presently they carry him back into the Hospital.
They can’t find any blankets. I run over to the Hôtel Cecil for my thick, warm travelling-rug to wrap round the knees of the wounded, shivering in the wagon.
It is all I can do for them.
And presently the wagon is turned round, slowly, almost solemnly, and driven off into the darkness and the cold mist, with its load of weird and piteous figures, wrapped in blankets like shawls. Their bandages show blurred white spots in the mist, and they are gone.
It is horrible.
I go over and pack and dress for the journey. I leave behind what I don’t need and it takes seven minutes.
Now it is time to go and fetch Miss Ashley-Smith and her three wounded men from the Convent.
They are all there, ready and waiting. And the Mother Superior and two of her nuns are in the corridor. They bring out glasses of hot milk for everybody. They are so gentle and so kind that I recall with agony my impatience when I rang at their gate. Even familiar French words desert me in this crisis, and I implore Miss Ashley-Smith to convey my regrets for my rudeness. Their only answer is to smile and press hot milk on me. I am glad of it, for I have been so absorbed in the drama of preparation that I have entirely forgotten to eat anything since lunch.
The wounded are brought along the passage. We help them into the ambulance. Two are only slightly wounded; they can sit up all the way. But the third is wounded in the head. Sometimes he is delirious and must be looked after. A fourth man is dying and must be left behind.
Then we say goodbye to the nuns
The other ambulance cars are drawn up in the Place before the ‘Flandria’ waiting.
We arrange for the final disposal of the wounded in one of the Daimlers, where they can all lie down.
It is quarter to three.
They are all ready now. The Commandant is there giving the final orders and stowing away the nine wounded he had brought from Melle. The hall of the Hospital is utterly deserted. So is the Place outside it. And in the stillness and desolation our going has an air of intolerable secrecy, of furtive avoidance of fate. This Field Ambulance of ours abhors retreat.
It is dark with the black darkness before dawn.
And the Belgian Red Cross guides have all gone. There is nobody to show us the roads.
At the last minute we find a Belgian soldier who will take us as far as Ecloo.
The Commandant has arranged to stay at Ecloo for a few hours. Some friends there have offered him their house. The wounded are to be put up at the Convent there. Ecloo is about half-way between Ghent and Bruges.
We are not going so very fast, not faster than the three cars behind us, and the slowest of the three (the Fiat with the hard tyres, carrying the baggage) sets the pace. We must keep within their sight or they may lose their way. But though we are not really going fast, the speed seems intolerable.
Somewhere on this road the Belgian Army has gone before us. We have got to go with it. We have had our orders. The Belgian Army is retreating, and we are retreating with it.
If it had occurred to me to stay behind for the sake of one man who couldn’t be moved and who had the best surgeon in the Hospital and the pick of the nursing-staff to look after him, I think I should have disposed of the idea as sheer sentimentalism.
When I was with him tonight I could think of nothing but the wounded in the Convent of Saint Pierre. And afterwards there had been so much to do.
And now that there was nothing more to do, I couldn’t think of anything but that one man.
The night before came back to me in a vision, or rather an obsession, infinitely more present, more visible and palpable than this night that we were living in. The light with the red shade hung just over my head on my right hand; the blond walls were round me; they shut me in alone with the wounded man who lay stretched before me on the bed. And the moments were measured by the rhythm of his breathing, and by the closing and opening of his eyes.
I thought, he will open his eyes tonight and look for me and I shall not be there. He will know that he has been left to the Belgians, who cannot understand him, whom he cannot understand. And he will think that I have betrayed him.
I felt as if I had betrayed him.
I am sitting between Mr Riley [a stretcher-bearer] and Miss Ashley-Smith. Mr Riley is ill; he has got blood-poisoning through a cut in his hand. Every now and then I remember him, and draw the rug over his knees as it slips. Miss Ashley-Smith, tired with her night watching, has gone to sleep with her head on my shoulder, where it must be horribly jolted and shaken by my cough, which of course chooses this moment to break out again. I try to get into a position that will rest her better; and between her and Mr Riley I forget for a second.
Then the obsession begins again, and I am shut in between the blond walls with the wounded man.
I feel his hand and arm lying heavily on my shoulder in the attempt to support me as I kneel by his bed with my arms stretched out together under the hollow of his back, as we wait for the pillow that never comes.
It is quite certain that I have betrayed him.
It seems to me then that nothing that could happen to me in Ghent could be more infernal than leaving it. And I think that when the ambulance stops to put down the Belgian soldier I will get out and walk back with him to Ghent.
We have got to Ecloo before we seem to have put 3 miles between us and Ghent.
Still, though I’m dead tired when we get there, I can walk 3 miles easily. I do not feel at all insane with my obsession. On the contrary, these moments are moments of exceptional lucidity. While the Commandant goes to look for the Convent I get out and look for the Belgian soldier. I tell him I want to go back to Ghent. I ask him how far it is to walk, and if he will take me. And he says it is 20 kilometres. I am just sane enough to know that I can’t walk as far as that if I’m to be any good when I get there.
We wait in the village while they find the Convent and take the wounded men there; we wait while the Commandant goes off in the dark to find his friend’s house.
The house stands in a garden somewhere beyond the railway station, up a rough village street and a stretch of country road. It is about four in the morning when we get there …
Our kind Dutch host and our kind English hostess have got up out of their beds to receive us. This hospitality of theirs is not a little thing when you think that their house is to be invaded by Germans, perhaps today.
They have only one spare bedroom, which they offer; but they have filled their drawing-room with blankets; piles and piles of white fleecy blankets on chairs and sofas and on the floor. And they have built up a roaring fire. It is as if they were succouring fifteen survivors of shipwreck or of earthquake. To be sure, we are flying from Ghent, but we have only flown 20 kilometres as yet.
I don’t know how I got through the next three hours, for my obsession came back on me again and again, and as soon as I shut my eyes I saw the face and eyes of the wounded man.
I remember finding myself in the garden, at sunrise.
The next thing I remember is the Chaplain coming to me and our going together, into the dining-room, and Miss Ashley-Smith joining us there. My malady was contagious and she had caught it, but with no damage to her self-control.
She says very simply and quietly that she is going back to Ghent. And the infection spreads to the Chaplain. He says that neither of us is going back to Ghent, but that he is going. With difficulty we convince him that it would be useless for any man to go. He would be taken prisoner the minute he showed his nose in the ‘Flandria’ and set to dig trenches till the end of the War.
Then he says, if only he had his cassock with him. They would respect that (which is open to doubt).
We are a long time discussing which of us is going back to Ghent. Miss Ashley-Smith is fertile and ingenious in argument. She is a nurse and I and the Chaplain are not.
And while we are still arguing, we go out on the road that leads to the village, to find the ambulances and see if any of the chauffeurs will take us back to Ghent. I am not very hopeful about the means of transport. I do not think that Tom or any of the chauffeurs will move, this time, without orders from the Commandant. I do not think that the Commandant will let any of us go except himself.
And Miss Ashley-Smith says, if only she had a horse.
If she had a horse she would be in Ghent in no time. Perhaps, if none of the chauffeurs will take her back, she can find a horse in the village.
She keeps on saying very quietly and simply that she is going and explaining the reasons why she should go rather than anybody else. And I bring forward every reason I can think of why she should do nothing of the sort.
I abhor the possibility of her going back instead of me.
And in the end, with an extreme quietness and simplicity, she went.
We had not yet found the ambulance cars, and it seemed pretty certain that Miss Ashley-Smith would not get her horse any more than the Chaplain could get his cassock.
And then, just when we thought the difficulties of transport were insuperable, we came straight on the railway lines and the station, where a train had pulled up on its way to Ghent. Miss Ashley-Smith got on to the train. I got on too, to go with her, and the Chaplain, who is abominably strong, put his arms round my waist and pulled me off.
I have never ceased to wish that I had hung on to that train.
On our way back to the house we met the Commandant and told him what had happened. I said I thought it was the worst thing that had happened yet. It wasn’t the smallest consolation when he said it was the most sensible solution.
And when Mrs Torrence for fifteen consecutive seconds took the view that I had decoyed Miss Ashley-Smith out on to that accursed road in order to send her to Ghent, and deliberately persuaded her to go back to the ‘Flandria’ instead of me, for fifteen consecutive seconds I believed that this diobolical thing was what I had actually done.
And on circumstantial evidence the case was black against me. When last seen, Miss Ashley-Smith was entirely willing to be saved. She goes out for a walk with me along a quiet country road, and the next thing you hear is that she has gone back to Ghent. And since, actually and really, it was my obsession that had passed into her, I felt that if I had taken Miss Ashley-Smith down that road and murdered her in a dyke my responsibility wouldn’t have been a bit worse, if as bad.
And it seemed to me that all the people scattered among the blankets in that strange room, those that still lay snuggling down amiably in the warmth, and those that had started to their feet in dismay, and those that sat on chairs upright and apart, were hostile with a just and righteous hostility, that they had an intimate knowledge of my crime, and had risen up in abhorrence of the thing I was.
And somewhere, as if they were far off in some blessed place on the other side of this nightmare, I was aware of the merciful and pitiful faces of Mrs Lambert and Janet McNeil [Mairi Chisholm].
Then, close beside me, there was a sudden heaving of the Chaplain’s broad shoulders as he faced the room.
And I heard him saying, in the same voice in which he had declared that he was going to hold Matins, that it wasn’t my fault at all – that it was he who had persuaded Miss Ashley-Smith to go back to Ghent.
Then Mrs Torrence says that she is going back to protect Miss Ashley-Smith and Ursula Dearmer [Lady Dorothie Feilding] says that she is going back to protect Mrs Torrence.
And there can be no doubt that three motor ambulances, with possibly the entire Corps inside them, certainly with the five women and the Chaplain and the Commandant, would presently have been seen tearing along the road to Ghent, one in violent pursuit of the other, if we had not telephoned and received news of Miss Ashley-Smith’s safe arrival at the ‘Flandria’ and orders that no more women were to return to Ghent …
In 1910 Grace Ashley-Smith became one of the organisers of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps (FANYs). She was at sea on the way to South Africa when war was declared and sent a wireless message to Cape Town to book her a return passage as soon as possible after arrival.
By mid-September she was in a Belgian ambulance rescuing casualties from the battlefields round Antwerp and working in a 300-bed hospital in the city. After the retreat from Antwerp on 10 October 1914 she was based at Ghent.
My adventures have come thick and fast within the last ten days. I date the most thrilling from Monday a fortnight ago, on the 19th, my first day actually under fire. The English and Belgians were fighting in the trenches round Lierre, and I went out with a Belgian motor ambulance to look for wounded. I was accompanied by a Belgian gentleman who works for the Red Cross and a Belgian driver. We were bound for Buckerout, where a sort of collecting hospital was being run, about 7 kilometres from Lierre. On our way two cyclists stopped us – Belgian soldiers (one came on the car to show us the way), and told us of wounded at an outpost 3 kilometres from Lierre. They asked if I was afraid, and, of course, I said we must go. It was a quick run out along a lonely road, and we stopped the ambulance under cover of a brick building, stables or something. The trenches were 200 yards away, and my Belgian friend and the chauffeur, with our soldier guide ran off at once. I pelted after them, and suddenly realised that the noise all round was shells and shrapnel flying. For a moment terror seized me. I had a silver medal hanging from a button on my uniform, and I stopped to hide the glitter of it in my pocket. A mechanical action, naturally … Then I ran on hard, and whilst the men picked the worse wounded up I helped a man whose right leg was torn fearfully. He leant on my shoulder and hopped on the other leg. Suddenly there was a deafening crash, and for a few seconds I stood blinking my eyes, wondering where my man with the bad leg had vanished to. Looking round I saw him lying flat in a big ditch by the side of the field; and the other men all there too. Then it struck me a shell had burst close to us, and I ran and sat down in the ditch also. However, by this time they were crawling out, and with three soldiers I made a dash down the road and across to a thin tree. The three Belgians hung on to the tree, and I stood in front of them, and looking at their white faces and wild eyes I realised from the tension round my heart that I must be as white and scared looking and suddenly I laughed, for the absurdity of the little thin tree affording protection to four big people reminded me of a cinematograph film. Well, we made other dashes after that, and got to our motor ambulance and returned in triumph. This time we struck Buckerout and English marines and doctors, and filled up with more wounded. I rode into Antwerp standing on the step, as every seat was taken for wounded.
Next day we returned to Buckerout, and found a big rush of wounded to be patched up and sent to Antwerp.
I commandeered a big GS waggon full of bread, turned out the bread, got mattresses and pillows and blankets from an empty house, and filled it up with wounded. Two motor ’buses full of wounded went off also. The motor ambulance I was with went too, and still more arrived. Poor men, some were too far gone to be saved. All of them, English and Belgian, showed wonderful courage. They were brought in on waggons and motors etc. Then came a lull in the day’s work, and later a message came there were two wounded about 2 kilometres farther on. So off I went with my motor ambulance, and we met a motor car returning with one man on a stretcher. We got to a little house by itself, and found there a few Belgian soldiers and an Englishman who is attached to the Belgian Army. We took cover under a stone wall whilst a Priest and a soldier went to bring in the wounded. From where we stood we saw a shell explode quite close and tear up the road. The Englishman had a big shrapnel that had come down without bursting and was guarding it as a trophy! All round us in the air we saw the little clouds of smoke that denote the presence of shrapnel. The sound grew so familiar I miss it here in Ghent. The sharp, hissing shizz-zz-zz-boom and the moment’s suspense – the involuntary holding of one’s breath until the shrapnel has fallen.
The English doctors were splendid – so brave – and one I heard had worked all night long in the trenches in the most dangerous places. The others had had little or no sleep, and no time for food. The St John’s men were there too; brave and ready for any emergency. It was nice to work amongst our own men. The Belgians are splendid and cannot do enough for one, but one’s heart warms to the khaki and blue and our own men. One St John’s man insisted on my accepting a bar of chocolate from him and a sailor made me a present of two pears, and a soldier in khaki came to me with a shy smile and a bunch of mignonette. I think they, too, were glad to see my khaki uniform, and know I was their own countrywoman.
All the way into Antwerp we ran through lines of blue jackets just arrived, and how they cheered their little sister in khaki.
Next day (Wednesday) I ran out in my motor ambulance in the same direction, but alas, what a change. Troops coming into Antwerp retiring, and one lot of men coming back at the double. At Vieux Dieu what a contrast! Yesterday all had been activity – khaki everywhere – the English headquarters full of life and bustle. Today, empty streets, the whiz-zz-zz boom of shrapnel overhead; the English headquarters deserted. I met a car full of English staff officers coming towards Antwerp, and stopped to ask them if they knew where the collecting station was, or where there were wounded. One of them said abruptly, ‘There are no wounded, and it is not safe for an ambulance, the firing line is 200 yards further on.’ We went on a little further, and some Belgians told us there were wounded 8 kilometres farther on, so we ran on through Buckerout. But, what a desert! No hospital, no troops, no ambulances; a few stray dogs, and a few dead horses. We came on little groups of soldiers. One poured out his tale at once. Retreat. God knows I have seen dreadful things: the horrors and suffering of War, dead and dying. I have held my breath at the approach of shrapnel, but never till that moment had tears come to my eyes. My Belgian orderly and my Belgian chauffeur tried to check the narrator. They silently tried to show their sympathy with me. Then we got in the two wounded, and went off. We overtook a party of English marines (Red Cross mostly), wheeling a wounded Belgian on a barrow, and carrying their stretchers.
The run back was as thrilling as the run out, and right glad I was to get inside the barricades and see our sailors working on the trenches. We made a few excursions in all directions to find wounded but were happily disappointed.
That afternoon I spent at the forts – the ambulance being useful in fetching dressings and medical stores for the English doctors; and also I got some loaves of white bread, cheese and butter brought out, and very thankfully they were received after days of biscuits and bully beef. The poor Red Cross Company had no rations with them, as they had lost their own company – they were the men we had overtaken in the morning.
On our way back to Antwerp we overtook an English naval officer on his way to headquarters with a despatch, and we gave him a lift. We were stopped in the town of Vieux Dieu to deal with a Belgian thief who had looted a house where there were only two women. That little affair settled and the thief arrested and left with Belgian soldiers, we got to the English headquarters. There a jolly Jack Tar found me a cup of delicious coffee, and was quite sad because I wouldn’t have chicken broth prepared too. A trusting ADC, Vere Harmsworth, confided his sword to my charge, and we set off again with our despatch bearer – got him safely into a car to take him to his fort, and returned to Antwerp. We were late, and my Belgian hosts had fled, so I gratefully accepted a bed in the cellar of the house next to the hospital for the night. That was Wednesday. On Tuesday I had a suite of rooms – on Wednesday a cellar.
I was late and had hardly finished my journal when twelve o’clock struck, and whiz-zz-boom came the first shrapnel over Antwerp! I leapt up and turned on my light and had no time to don a dressing gown before father, mother, five sons, daughters, grandmother, servants, and another nurse from the hospital came tumbling into the cellar! I seized my clothes and bolted upstairs to dress. Then the other nurse and I went to the hospital and helped to carry down all the wounded to the cellars and kitchen passages. What a night it was! About 2.30 we had some coffee, and then scattered ourselves to try and rest. I went to the courtyard and lay on a wooden bench, and cringed at each whizz of shrapnel overhead. Later I went in and lay on the stone floor behind the front door near one of the doctors and sister. At 5.30 two cars left and took three wounded with them. The bombardment continued; at 10.30 three English soldiers came in wounded and said there were lots of wounded in the trenches, so I walked down to the Place de Meir (Red Cross Headquarters) to try and get my motor ambulance, which should have called for me at nine o’clock. It was a weird experience to walk along the almost empty streets and hear the shrapnel overhead and all round; see, too, houses falling, and poor people fleeing wildly away with a few belongings tied up roughly. At the Red Cross Headquarters all was confusion – nobody knew where anybody else was to be found. As I turned to leave two English doctors, Dr Soutter and Dr Beavis, came in, and almost at the same moment, a shell burst outside with a deafening crash, killing two people. I was more than grateful when they called to me they would take me back in their car. That ended the Red Cross for the moment; we three English were left alone, as everyone made a hurried exit.
The rest of that day we spent in loading wounded into motor ’buses – an unhappy proceeding, for instead of allowing the worst cases to be left with one or two people to take care of them, all were bundled in, and a sad procession left Antwerp. The roads were rough – the way was long, doubly so, for a wide detour was necessary to avoid Germans – the cold was intense – over that night it is better to draw a veil of silence. For we who were strong it was hard, for the wounded, God help them. Hell and the tortures of the damned used to be expressions conveying nothing to my mind – but now I can realise what hell means.
We arrived at Ghent at 5.30 on Friday morning, and panic seemed to prevail. Everyone declared the Germans would arrive in three hours. Wounded were left here and there – exhausted, tired out – after that night of horror, and the motor ’buses and the staff went on to Ostend.
In Ghent our troops and the French came in on Friday, and on Saturday everywhere the Belgians gave them of their best – coffee, tea, fruit, chocolates and cigarettes. Loud cheers greeted every British regiment. On Sunday it seemed likely the wounded might be moved. On Sunday afternoon the English Consul got a telephone message from Ostend to leave. On Sunday, at midnight, I was offered places for myself and the English wounded I was looking after in some English ambulances. Miss May Sinclair [qv] the novelist, kindly remembered me in that trying hour – she was with Dr Hector Munro’s Ambulance Fleet. At 2.30am Monday, they called for me [at the Convent de Saint Pierre], and at 5.30 we stopped at Ecloo, 25 kilometres away. There was a hard frost, the cold was intense. We were taken into an English house with a big fire blazing, and blankets and pillows were handed round. Then it appeared that the ambulance party had come away [from the auxiliary hospital in the Flandria Palace Hôtel] leaving behind an English officer [Lieutenant Richard Foote] who was too ill to be moved. There were seven women and about ten men in their personnel – and one lady, Miss Sinclair, wanted to return but knew nothing about nursing. A young clergyman also spoke of returning. They had been kind to think of me, a stranger, and I was grateful to them for their thought – but there was only one thing to do. I walked out and down the road – this lady and the clergyman with me – got to Ecloo Station, and luckily found a train just starting for Ghent, so I jumped in. I was frightened. I admit my heart was in my boots – I was cold and hungry and very tired – and I felt forlorn indeed. Two Flemish peasants came from a third class car and looked at my khaki uniform and my Red Cross and tried to be nice to me. I got out at Ghent, and all the people stared. I got to the Flandria; and the relief of the young Englishman when I entered repaid me tenfold for the terrors I had undergone. All was in disorder and confusion. I had to go and get water, and look for everything I wanted. There were a few Belgian ladies left. About eleven o’clock we carried my Englishman on a stretcher to a nursing home near, and there, to my intense relief, I found a Scotswoman, Miss Maud Fletcher of Guy’s Hospital. The reaction was almost too great. I suddenly realised I had had no breakfast; that I was no longer a forlorn Scotchwoman awaiting with horror the arrival of wicked enemies. I had found friends where I had looked for nothing but hard treatment.
The Germans came; but the wounded officer was in good hands, and I slept off all the night’s fatigue. Next night I sat up with him; and seven Germans were quartered in the house. Each time a footstep passed, I wondered, ‘Is this the end?’ But dawn came, and we had not been molested. What was more, he still lived, though the doctor had thought he would not see another day. Next night I watched again – but alas! Though the night passed, the morning brought death in its train. I wanted to go and ask the German General for a Military funeral. I wanted a Union Jack … and I was so strongly urged against both courses, I left it. I went out disguised in mufti to make the necessary arrangements. I asked the American Consul to come to the funeral, but he said he couldn’t. So next day a gallant officer was buried by three women – a Scotch nurse in Guy’s Hospital uniform, a Belgian nurse (also trained at Guy’s) in the same, and I, in my khaki First Aid Nursing Yeomanry uniform. We followed his hearse – we passed through lines of German soldiers, who eyed my khaki with amazement, but did not molest us – and there in a foreign cemetery we came to a plot of ground set aside for soldiers. There were ten graves already, and into one we lowered our countryman’s body, and I, a woman in my khaki British uniform, supported by two Guy’s nurses, read the burial service over him. It was a sad, and a strange scene, on a dismal autumn day, a group of poor Flemish people standing near in reverent silence, and German soldiers in their drab uniform all round. So we left him at rest; and my heart was very sad thinking how different this ending was to his dream of war when he left England ten days before. Two other Englishmen lie near him – one an ‘unknown’ ambulance man, the other a sailor.
After that my work was done, so I drove to the Spanish Consul, whom the American Consul said was entrusted with English interests, but there I was told the Spanish Consul had nothing to do with English interests; so I drove to the German Staff Headquarters, walked through the sentries in my khaki uniform, and asked to see the General. I was conducted to a group of officers, most of whom spoke perfect English. They opened their eyes wide at my khaki, and saluted me. I told them I had been here to nurse English wounded, and now I wanted to go back to England, and asked for a passport. They were very polite, and almost sympathetic, but said no one was allowed Eastwards. I must go to Brussels, and perhaps get papers there to permit me to go to Germany, and from thence to England. I assured them I had no wish to go to Brussels, and still less to go to Germany, and suggested that they should let me go to Holland. However, they assured me that was impossible. One young officer asked how I would go to Brussels – it was very far to walk. I politely assured him that I did not want to go to Brussels, and if they wanted me to go there they would have to send me. They assured me that they were grieved I could not go to England, but – it was war! We parted with salutes, and I swanked out through rows of Germans as if the earth was indeed mine, for being the only possessor of khaki in Ghent I felt I must live up to it.
Today I went out openly in my khaki. The Germans all looked wildly amazed when they caught sight of me; one man jumped violently. I think he thought me a British soldierman; only two have scowled on me. For the most part they seem to be ‘en bon camarade’. One Sergeant drew up his men to attention and saluted! And several of the soldiers saluted me in the streets. It is rather humorous to see me marching along in khaki, typically English, and hundreds of German soldiers swarming round me. The Belgians think me quite mad I expect; they come and ask me if I am not afraid: they cannot do enough for me; and to see me and German officers making purchases side by side or travelling on the same tramcars is decidedly funny. I am more than surprised they permit it; but I must say their behaviour is admirable. They open doors for women, they make way for women to pass. The soldiers quartered here actually go on tiptoes in the corridors because we have invalids who have just had operations.
At the German Headquarters yesterday, there was a jolly old General with twinkling eyes, who seemed hugely to enjoy the whole situation, and I am certain he would have let me go back to England if he could. I suppose really it was rather unique – a Scotch girl in khaki walking calmly into the enemy’s stronghold and demanding a pass to England!
Mrs Elsie Knocker, divorced from her husband, was a trained nurse and midwife, and an expert driver and mechanic by the time war was declared in August 1914. She had been one of the first women to take up motorcycling seriously and owned a Chater Lea motorcycle. She joined Dr Hector Munro’s Ambulance Corps which had already been rejected by the War Office, British, French and American Red Cross. When the Belgian Red Cross accepted their services the British Red Cross gave its blessings and paid for some ambulances to go to Belgium.
Helen Gleason, Lady Dorothie Feilding, May Sinclair [qv], and Mairi Chisholm [qv], an eighteen-year-old Scots girl, were also members of the corps. Miss Chisholm was a good driver and mechanic and before the unit set off for Belgium, she and Mrs Knocker, who were already friends, drove as despatch riders in London as part of the newly-formed Women’s Emergency Corps.
On the evening of 11 October, at the auxiliary hospital in the Flandria Palace Hôtel, Mrs Knocker was nursing a young British subaltern who had been riddled with machine-gun bullets. She was told that the Germans were expected in Ghent in five hours and that every British soldier in the hospital who could be moved was to be evacuated in the ambulances. However, the subaltern was too badly wounded to be moved, and although several members of the unit offered to stay with him, the Belgian doctors assured them he would be cared for by themselves and the Germans and that it would be too complicated and dangerous for the unit to stay. [See Grace Ashley-Smith’s and May Sinclair’s account of this incident].
The convoy of retreating ambulances also took Grace Ashley-Smith [qv] and the wounded British patients she was nursing in the Convent de Saint Pierre. They reached Ostend just before the Germans arrived, and managed to send the wounded off in a small ship sailing to England.
The ambulance unit was then based at a Hospital in Furnes which was housed in a Convent and a school and was ‘pitifully inadequate’.
The remnants of the Belgian army and a few French troops held the eastern end of the front line which stretched from Nieuport to Dixmude and on to Ypres, and the drivers of the Munro Ambulance Corps were immediately sent into action, driving the ambulances, day and night, in bitterly cold weather to gather casualties from the Dixmude sector. As soon as they set down the wounded Belgian and French soldiers and German prisoners at the hospital, they returned again to the battlefields.
Mrs Knocker drove a heavy Napier ambulance and ‘other strange vehicles at a moment’s notice – including Daimlers, Wolseleys, Mercedes, Pipes, Sunbeams, and Fiats’. She became increasingly appalled by the casualty rate, the lack of medical facilities, and the chaotic conditions in the hospital.
I wanted to set up a first-aid station (or Advanced Dressing Station, as it was called) where the wounded could rest and recuperate before being jolted over the roads to the operating table. I had noticed how many of them died of superficial hurts, a broken arm, perhaps, or a gash. They died on the way to hospital, or on the pavements or the floors, and I knew why this happened. They were the victims of shock – the greatest killer of them all.
At first it seemed that I would never get even a cellar to work in. I went to Dunkirk to badger Sir Bertrand Dawson, medical chief of the BEF, and talked to Prince Alexander of Teck. Both were sympathetic, and gave me all the support in their power then and later, but they were so busy with a multitude of things. Admiral Ronarch [commander of the French Fusilier Marin garrisoned at Dixmude] who happened to be present when I was pleading with Sir Bertrand, scoffed openly, and became very angry when I persisted. He had never heard anything quite so absurd. Surely I knew that women were not allowed in the trenches? They had to be at least 3 miles behind the lines. If I chose to disobey orders I could expect no assistance, and that meant no rations and no medical supplies.
I firmly believed in my mission – for such it had become to me after much thought – I would go, with or without assistance.
I made my preparations, undeterred by the fact of Dr Munro’s disapproval.
The next thing was to find a suitable place to start a post. I was fortunate to meet a Belgian Army doctor, Dr Van der Ghinst, who fully agreed with my plan. He had spent weeks in Dixmude and knew that I was not talking out of the back of my head. He suggested that a village called Pervyse might be the spot, and we drove out there to have a look. There was not a house which one could even pig it in – it was just one huge fallen mass, heaped-up bricks and stones. The dead horses, cows, and sheep looked so pathetic.
Yet behind the intervening floods the Belgians had set about fortifying the place. The crude earthworks thrown up in the heat and hurry of battle were being linked and converted into a system of trenches and dug-outs. Two houses, both with deep, damp but safe cellars, remained fairly intact. In one of them some Belgian officers had their quarters. The other one was offered to me, and with it went the good wishes and a promise of co-operation from the officers and men to whom Dr Van der Ghinst introduced me and explained my idea.
‘Our house’ – for it was soon settled that Mairi Chisholm, who had proved herself brave and steady as well as being an excellent driver, should accompany me – was a woeful sight. There was not a pane of glass left whole, the roof had fallen in, the walls were ominously cracked, and everything that was any good had been taken or looted. It was right at the edge of the village, nearest the tottering church and the trenches, and the stream of shells which the Germans lobbed across the water meant that we should have to sleep, cook, and nurse in the cellar.
The cellar was about ten feet by twelve, dimly lit by gratings set into the pavement above. Two soldiers, Alphonse and Désiré, who had been sleeping there on some straw, rustled up a table and a few chairs for us, and some boards to surround our sleeping straw, which they renewed as often as possible. The stove sometimes smoked badly, but in that icy winter of 1914 we were able to overlook such trifles. We slept in our clothes, and cut our hair short so that it would tuck inside our caps. Dressing meant simply putting on our boots. Most nights Tom Woffington, our Cockney driver, and Alexandre, the 18-year-old cook who was assigned to us, slept in the cellar too.
Ablutions were infrequent and difficult. Alexandre sometimes managed to heat some ditch water, and we would try to wash down in a huge old copper while he kept watch at the top of the steps and prevented any new patients from coming down before we were decent. Now and again we would get to Furnes or Dunkirk for a good soak, but there were times when we had to scrape the lice off with the blunt edge of a knife, and our underclothes stuck to us.
There was no sanitation, and for some time we had to go down a convenient shell-hole to relieve nature while Alphonse or Desire kept guard. Later, this devoted couple brought us a magnificent commode which they had somehow managed to find, complete with a screen which they had made out of some old sheets.
Disposing of soiled bandages was a problem, but after a while in Pervyse one forgot the niceties. The village had been taken and retaken several times in the Battle of the Yser, and the graveyard was choked with corpses of several nationalities, exposed by the heavy rains. Our only available water-supply ran through the middle of the courtyard, and even when it had been boiled it had a horrible taste.
We soon contrived to make the house cheery, by hanging on the walls the flags of Belgium, France, and Scotland and a fine defiant Union Jack. Spoons, forks, and crockery were discovered in a derelict farmhouse, and Alphonse and Desire scraped up some vegetables from the abandoned gardens. Alexandre boiled up a great soup stew in his copper in a lean-to outhouse at the back. Every night more horses were killed bringing up food and ammunition, and they provided the meat on the menu. Now that he had been appointed cook, Alexandre took on a new dignity. He was no longer a private – he was a chef, a man of importance.
The trenches were only five yards away, and in those first days we took jug after jug of soup or hot chocolate to the men on watch. When they were relieved the men would come over to the Cellar House, as it became known, and queue up with their mugs. At night we took hot drinks to the sentries in the outposts at the end of the causeways which ran out into the floods. An officer accompanied us through the icy and often misty darkness, giving the password as we were challenged. The machinegunners had scooped a dug-out of sorts: a hand would emerge, grasp the jug, and draw it in. In a few seconds it would be returned empty. All was done in silence, and when the odd star shell curved down towards us inquisitively we would have to stand stock still.
The soup and the chocolate made us known and welcome, but they were only a sideline.
The fearful winter of 1914 brought us more casualties than German bullets or shells. The men’s clothes were hopelessly inadequate for the intense cold. Frostbite, pneumonia, and bronchitis followed nights of exposure, and I spent many a spare moment writing to friends and acquaintances at home begging for warm clothes. Men came in with festering sores after scratching themselves on barbed wire, or in agony with swollen, inflamed feet. Sometimes a soldier would have no obvious symptoms, except that he was ‘quite done-up’ and incapable of any exertion. We put such cases of trench fatigue on clean straw in the corner, covered them with blankets, arranged a good supply of hot-water bottles, and let them sleep round the clock. More often than not they were new men when they got up.
There were curious accidents. One man fell down a deep crater in the dark, and gashed his head badly on a jagged piece of shell. Another came in with his hand in an appalling state: he had been wearing gloves at the time of the explosion, and bits of glove were mixed up with shredded flesh, and had to be picked out. Stray shrapnel and a moment of carelessness brought some horrible casualties. A piece of shell had penetrated one young fellow’s head and blinded him …
Mme Curie, who, with her daughter, was running an X-ray unit in Furnes, was most interested in the work, and did me the honour of visiting the Cellar House. She was only five feet tall, soft-spoken and gentle in manner. We had a long and most interesting technical talk about methods of treatment, and she agreed with me that the three great priorities of nursing were quiet, rest, and warmth.
The shelling got so bad that we were forced to move to the other house farther back in the village, while keeping our first cellar as a forward dressing-station. The Daimler ambulance was riddled with shrapnel, and we got quite sentimental over it, for it was like seeing an old friend wounded …
Our daily work taxed us to the limit of our physical strength. Mairi and I often went out to help bring in the wounded, and between us lifted a man in full field kit with rifle and tin-hat. There was the first wrenching jerk from off the ground to waist-level, and then the stumbling over mud and slush and cratered roads.
Many people, especially British officers, thoroughly disapproved of our being at Pervyse. It just did not fit in with their conventions, and they would start off by wasting a great deal of breath in arguments which simply ran like water off a duck’s back. I let them get on with it, and then asked them to contribute something to keep the work going, instead of grumbling about it. Most of them responded very well with gifts of food and drink – much needed in the first months when we had to depend on scrounging for our own food: Alphonse once spent a whole day shooting twelve sparrows which he brought to us for supper.
Naturally I was more concerned about getting official approval for our mission. Sir Bertrand Dawson visited us several times and told me that he had noticed that wounded who had been nursed at Pervyse arrived at hospital in far better condition. He had put in a favourable report but it was now up to the Allied Council in Paris to decide whether or not to let us continue.
Weeks later Sir Bernard called. I was particularly busy bandaging a nasty chestwound, and could not get away. I knew what his mission was, and he gave me such a wonderful warm smile that I guessed it was all right – and so it was. My work had been recognised, and in the most flattering terms. Mairi and I were to be allowed to stay where we were – the only exceptions on the whole of the Western Front. I was to have rations and any help I needed with medical supplies, and to be taken on the strength of whichever unit took over that part of the line.
Straight away I wrote to the British Red Cross Society, and from then on I had their full support, and could add the Red Cross flag to our array. They sent me a fine lot of equipment, even including a complete set of dental instruments. To my surprise I found them very easy to use. If you have a strong wrist, the right weapon, and a decisive mind the tooth comes out. My fame as a dentist spread far and wide, and I pulled out many teeth which were causing a lot of discomfort and even suffering. We had no anaesthetic, but for particularly nervous cases or tough pullings we would, if we had any, give the patient a swig of brandy or whisky.
Ours was an ever-open door. It was nothing unusual to be woken up in the early hours of the morning and to hear a voice saying, ‘Wake up, Sister; I’m wounded! …’