At times, at the front, it gets frightfully dull. When there is an attack and, in consequence, plenty of work to do, it is all right in a field hospital.1 But when there are no attacks, when there are no new patients and all the old ones become convalescent, when there is practically no work, it becomes insupportable. Nothing but the green hedge on all sides of us, shutting us into ourselves, into our little, gossiping enclosure, with no news and no newspapers, with no aeroplane to fly overhead, with nothing to do but walk down to the little pond and sail boats. There is a fleet of boats on our little pond, all made by our chief surgeon, in moments of ennui, and every day he goes down to the pond, sets his boats afloat on one side, picks them up on the other, and walks around and sets them going again. All because of supreme boredom, because there are no attacks, no work, nothing but convalescent patients, to be discharged in a day or two. It often gets like this, and at such times we can stand it no longer, and ask to be sent out in the motor, on joy rides, or any other rides, anywhere, just for a change.
There is a distinction between rides and joy rides. One means going away from the front, the other means going toward it. Thus, for a ride, we are often sent back to the English base, Hazebrouck, to send futile telegrams, just as an excuse; or else we are sent into Dunkirk, to buy white enamel basins, or oranges—anything. But a real joy ride consists in going toward the front, or in that direction. So on this particular day I was bored to extinction, because of lack of work, and to the Directrice,2 who is my friend, I made loud and bitter complaint. I wanted to escape from the hospital for a few hours, to see something outside and beyond the thorn hedge which shuts us in.
The Directrice was sympathetic and she understood. So she told me I might go with one of the Canadian nurses to hunt up her nephew, who is in the Princess Pat’s regiment,3 off somewhere near Poperinghe.4 The médecin chef,5 in charge of the hospital, gave us a laissez passer6 for Poperinghe, and the Directrice lent us her car, a limousine, painted gray. From a distance it looks like a staff car,7 but near at hand, one sees that it is just a Ford. Nevertheless, as a Ford limousine, painted gray, war-color, it seems rather imposing. Williamson, a little English parson, was our chauffeur.
The Directrice wished us Godspeed. “Take a good joy ride, my dear!” she exclaimed. “Get cheered up! Go with Miss MacAlister, who has a nephew somewhere in the Canadian contingent; go and help her find him! It will do you good!”
I protested. “They will never let me through the English lines,” I said. “They will spot my American accent. I’ll be turned back.”
But the Directrice was firm.
“Nonsense! The English can’t tell the difference between American and Canadian accents,” she replied. “You help MacAlister find her nephew. It won’t be easy. Go and ask for him. She’s shy. You aren’t. Find him for her.”
So we set out, Williamson driving, MacAlister and I inside, going to Poperinghe on a joy ride. A real joy ride, with a good, definite excuse for getting well to the front! It was good to leave our stupid little hospital behind. We are a French military hospital, situated ten kilometres behind the French lines, and distant from Poperinghe, and the English lines, about five miles.8 As we reached the English lines we presented our laissez passer to the sentries, both French and English, who scanned our papers, found them all right, and permitted us to go on.
It is a well-known fact that the nearer you go to the front, the less difficulty you have. It is tremendously difficult to get out of Paris, for example, into the zone of the armies, but once having achieved that, once having entered the war zone, the Forbidden Zone, as the English call it, you can circulate freely. All obstacles seem to melt away. The nearer the front, the easier it becomes. The sentries in the war zone seem to be more lenient, as if they felt that by the time you had got to them you must be all right. Otherwise, you would never have got so far. Your papers must of necessity have been examined so many times before, have been proved so absolutely correct, that it is hardly worth while to reëxamine them. So we traveled along the highroad toward Poperinghe, showed our papers to the sentries, and passed without difficulty into the English lines and were no more molested.
It was a gray afternoon, rather cold, the end of May. I like gray weather, preferably rainy weather, as it means less bombarding, less activity on the part of the guns. I hate the guns. We had telephoned to Poperinghe before we left, and found the town was not being shelled that day—a precaution I wished to take, for, as I say, I hate the guns, and could foresee no joy in a joy ride that led to a village under bombardment. So it was quiet enough as we drove along, and we were free to take interest in the movements of the English army. We had become so used to French troops, French transport wagons, French methods, that the sight of these things within the English lines was of great interest. The parson-chauffeur seemed interested in this too, and slowed down to a very easy pace, and we drove along, marveling at the immense, intricate ramifications and coördination of army activity in the rear of the firing lines.
Along the road, great munition convoys stood at rest—trains of giant trucks, either loaded with ammunition, or else empty and returning to base for more. We passed long lines of brown, battered London omnibuses, used for transporting troops to the trenches. Batteries of light and heavy artillery jogged by, and in the fields by the roadside we saw groups of heavy guns, halted and resting. Innumerable companies of soldiers passed along the road, some in full marching kit, others evidently resting, and bound for their baths, as they carried towels slung across their shoulders. Then we passed their bathing places, erected in fields, by brooks—little canvas enclosures, roofless. The highroad was crowded with convoys of all sorts, and wagons, guns, munitions, horses, men, passed us in steady streams, flowing each way. It was the complex life of organization and preparation, back of the front.
Our road lay between rows of Belgian refugee houses, dozens of them, close together, bordering the roadsides. An occasional one was made of wood, but for the most part they consisted of frame supports, with sides made of interwoven boughs, like those used in trench-making, and filled in with clay. Most of them were neatly painted, and nearly all were thatched—little rows of one- and two-room houses, springing up mushroom-like, under the guns. Now and then an old brick farmhouse showed amongst the trees. It was a glorious May day—no dust, everything very clean and green and new as to foliage. I wanted a pet lamb. It would have been an addition to the hospital. Once we passed one in a field, lying by an armchair, in which some one had left some knitting. The vacant chair, the little lamb chewing its cud, made a pleasant picture, and it was so obviously the kind of pet lamb I wanted, that I rapped on the glass and told Williamson to remember about that lamb, and its farm, so that we could stop and buy it on the way back.
By and by we reached Poperinghe. I am not naturally what one would call brave, and since last summer, after our fourteen-hour bombardment in Dunkirk,9 the sight of a shelled town makes me feel quite sick. They shell Poperinghe every day or so, as it is an important base and filled with troops, but, as I say, we had telephoned over just before we left, and found they were not shelling it to-day. Still, the sight of the battered houses filled me with dismay—a sort of nervous dread. The big public square in the centre of the town was surrounded by houses riddled with holes, pockmarked by bits of flying shell, stone, or brick. Hardly a pane of glass was intact, and some windows were entirely gone. Only an occasional house, however, was totally destroyed. The shells, apparently, were not heavy enough for wholesale damage, but the whole town was splintered, gashed, and bitten, from end to end, and the sight of it made me nervous. The streets were crowded—wagons, trucks, convoys, troops, officers’ cars, coming and going in incessant streams. Military police stood in the centre of the little main street, to direct traffic as constant and heavy as on the Strand.10 Think of it, a little town like this, of only a few thousand inhabitants, shattered and battered by shells, with an army traffic so heavy that it required as much guiding and regulating as in the centre of London!
We drew up in the square, inquired for the Canadian troops, and were directed to a bureau in the town hall, where they said we could get all the information we wanted. When we had set off on our joy ride, I never expected to see anything more than Poperinghe, or to go anywhere else, and the sight of the shell-holes had rapidly allayed my curiosity. I found that MacAlister, however, had interpreted the matter differently. To find her nephew was not merely an excuse to get to Poperinghe: in her mind, the object of this excursion was actually to find him! However, I kept thinking that this would be impossible, that we would surely be turned back. We had no papers to authorize us to search for this boy. Such a thing was not allowed. Even mothers are not permitted to come to the war zone to look for their sons. So at this bureau, to which we addressed ourselves for information, I fully expected to be turned back. Not at all. The man inside was very nice. He could not tell us the whereabouts of the Canadian troops, but suggested that we go down the road about two miles, to Abele, the Canadian headquarters, where we could find out all we wanted. He asked us for no papers, nothing by which to establish our identity—he merely took our word that we were hunting for a nephew in the Princess Pat’s and facilitated our search by suggesting Abele. I was relieved to find that Abele was away from the front, on the other side of Poperinghe; and here I thought our joy ride would reach an abrupt end.
So we continued on through the high street, through rows and rows of battered houses, with here and there an occasional one that was destroyed. The aspect of the town spoke of continual shelling, and it was good to leave it behind, and run out into the green country and look for lambs in the fields. We reached Abele finally, a quiet little village, and drew up before a large building, looking like a convent, which we were told was Canadian headquarters. I hoped the officers would prove exacting, would ask for our papers, and want to know who we were, and by what right we were trying to get to a Canadian camp. We crossed a paved inner courtyard, and found ourselves before the door of a handsome old house, guarded by a group of soldiers who made no objection to our entering. They said that inside we could find out everything we wished.
On the left of the courtyard was an absurd little sentry, prancing back and forth on sentry-go, evidently guarding some big military dignitary whose quarters occupied the entire wing of the building. We asked for the headquarters bureau; a ubiquitous Tommy directed us toward it, politely opened the door for us, and ushered us into an untidy little office, filled with crude office furniture. There were filing cases made of crates, typewriters stood on empty boxes, and the walls were covered with elaborate maps, photographs, and official orders and notices. Headquarters, and no mistake. Moreover, the polite little officer could tell us exactly what we wanted to know, the whereabouts of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. He did not question us, demand any papers, or proofs or guaranties of any sort. Here, just behind the firing lines, two strange women suddenly appeared, and the young officer spread himself to give us the information we desired.
“The Princess Pat’s is right here,” he explained, laying his finger on the most beautiful map I’ve ever seen—a map, I suppose, issued by the War Office, a big, official map of some kind, with each little village and farmhouse taking up as much room as a province in Central China.
“Here,” he continued, “is the camp of the Princess Pat’s. You go back to Poperinghe, pass through the town, and take the highroad on the other side, toward Ypres—”11
“To where?” I gasped.
“Ypres,” he repeated. “Take the highroad going from Poperinghe to Ypres, and then turn off at the third road to the right—turn off the highroad from Poperinghe to Ypres,” he went on, repeating it over and over again, to impress it upon our minds; “turn off at the third road to the right, then go on for a bit, and you’ll come to it.”
MacAlister was drinking in every word. I was aghast to think that an innocent joy ride should lead toward Ypres! This certainly was overdoing it!
“And in case you forget, in case you should turn off at the second or fourth, instead of the third turning,” went on that terrible, accurate, inexorable young man, “here is a piece of paper for you, with the directions written down. Show it to any one who has a map like this, and tell him to direct you to Square H, 19; Sheet 28. Princess Pat’s is in that square.”
Until then I had had a wild hope of being able to forget those clear and lucid directions, of becoming confused and forgetful, and in consequence, because of the lateness of the afternoon, suggesting that we turn toward home. Poperinghe was a joy ride, if you like, but any adventuring on the road to Ypres was sheer folly. But what could I do with MacAlister, with that bit of paper clutched firmly in her hand! She was tracking down that young nephew of hers, and the light of success and of devotion burned in her eyes. She left the bureau, and gave Williamson the verbal directions about the third turning to the right, and then pressed the bit of paper upon him.
“H, 19; Sheet 28.”
We certainly were in for it!
Poperinghe gave me the same sick feeling again, as we drove through it. Moreover, by now the sun had penetrated the clouds, and a charming summer afternoon was upon us—and they always bombard in fine weather! Ten minutes more, and we had left Poperinghe behind us, and were bowling along the highroad toward Ypres!
This road likewise was full of traffic, crowded with the same sinister, wasteful, mighty traffic that we had encountered all afternoon. We noticed that all the horses had fringes over their eyes, whether they were gun horses or attached to water-carts—thick rope fringes, hanging well down over their eyes, evidently for a purpose. We also passed many Red Cross ambulances. Presently I noticed that we were drawing very close to the captive balloons, the observation balloons that mark the lines, and are anchored three or four miles behind them.12 Captive balloons are shelled, now and then, and we were getting much too close to them. They loomed bigger and bigger, and then, to my horror, we passed them! They were behind us, tugging at their anchors behind us, instead of in front! And still we sped on toward Ypres!
I had one more card to play. I rapped on the window, and Williamson slowed down, while I put my head out the window and called to him.
“Don’t forget to stop at that farm, on our way back, so I can buy that pet lamb—leave time for that,” I exclaimed.
Williamson said he’d remember. He also added that we had plenty of time.
We finally reached the third turning to the right, where we stopped and asked the traffic soldier if we were going straight. Here, far away on a Belgian highroad, traffic is so thick that a soldier with a red flag stands in the middle of the road, at a crossroads, to direct it.
This third turning to the right was awful. It was just a track through fields. Williamson slowed the car down to a walk, and we bumped along over tremendous holes and ruts, over the roughest road I have ever seen. The clay was dry and hard; in wet weather it must have been a bog. At intervals, at crossroads, we came upon notice boards reading, “No Road.” British humor, perhaps, for how could anything have been less of a road than that we were traversing? I wondered what these “no roads” could have been like, in comparison to our thoroughfare!
We jolted on for half a mile or so, through fenceless fields, over this frightful track, and then came to a huge encampment. There were hundreds of little, conical wooden huts, like Indian tepees, and then there were still other huts or shacks, of the kind called portable. Soldiers lounged about in the doorways of these huts, and we could see a little way in through these openings, into bare, dirty, desolate interiors, devoid of every beauty and comfort, just like animal pens, in which animals wait to be slaughtered.
Only the lounging soldiers did not seem like animals awaiting slaughter, or perhaps they were unconscious of their fate, just like animals. They seemed gay and cheerful enough, and smiled and waved to us as we passed, and when we asked if this camp was the Princess Pat’s a dozen voices shouted that it wasn’t, that we must go farther along. So we continued to bounce along at a snail’s pace, through many thousands of soldiers en repos, released for two weeks from the trenches, to rest. We passed a field full of hundreds of them, watching a baseball game. They played in a bare field by the roadside, though the surrounding fields were green, full of summer grain. Only their playing field was fallow, just bare brown mud, unploughed, unplanted. But their dingy khaki uniforms were mud-color too. Such is the value of protective coloring.
Williamson would have sworn, had he not been a parson. He piloted us along that villainous road for something like two miles, expecting a spring to break any minute. MacAlister was exalted. She was coming nearer and nearer to her nephew, and she leaned out and scrutinized every dusty face that passed, hoping it might be Donald. For myself, the captive balloons in our rear kept worrying me. They were steadily receding to the rear, as we were going forward. Undoubtedly we were drawing very close to the trenches.
Suddenly a blinding flash, a deafening explosion! Another flash and crash, and another! Three shells, in as many seconds, burst a hundred feet to our left. The detonation was terrific, the concussion tremendous. They were shelling us! This was too much!
I rapped on the glass. Rapped sharply for Williamson to stop. Rapped, just as you’d rap on a taxi glass, on rue de Rivoli,13 and tell the man to stop at Rumpelmayer’s.14 I leaned out.
“For heaven’s sake, go back, man! They’re shelling the road! Go back quick!”
“Eh?” said Williamson in his slow, British way. “Are they?” Another terrific explosion cut off my words, so I had to repeat. Then I heard MacAlister saying, “Oh, go on! I want to see Donald!”
A three-sided discussion followed, about a point on which there should have been no discussion. Williamson leaned round from his seat, while MacAlister and I talked to him from the door. MacAlister wanted to see Donald. I had no wish whatever to see Donald, especially under these circumstances. A group of six or eight Tommies crowded round us, intensely amused at this excited squabble, utterly surprised at the sight of a strange car, and two unknown women, almost up to the trenches.
“Go back quick!” I commanded. “Can’t you see they’re shelling the road?”
“Eh?” said Williamson; while MacAlister kept repeating, “I want to see Donald.”
Between that slow-witted parson-chauffeur and that devoted girl, I got exasperated. I hate shells and am desperately afraid of them. It is so refreshing to admit the truth.
I got out of the car. “Oh, go on!” I exclaimed. “You two go on, if you like. Go see Donald. For myself, I’ll wait here till you come back again! You can pick me up here when you’ve had enough!”
The Tommies crowded close, delighted.
“May I stay here with you?” I asked, turning to them. “Till they come back for me?”
A chorus of “Oh, certainly, sister!” greeted me.
MacAlister banged the door shut, Williamson glared at me, and the car jolted painfully away.
So I stood in a large field in Flanders, surrounded by half-a-dozen grinning Canadian soldiers, and considered the situation. It was a little unusual. However, the shock of those shells had been terrible. Donald was not my nephew, anyhow, and I don’t pay calls under shell-fire. That’s gratuitous.
A little wooden hut stood by the roadside, the roof of which sloped steeply to the ground, like an inverted V. The hut was separated from the road by a deep ditch, like a trench, which was spanned by a wooden bridge. On all sides stretched bare, brown fields of unploughed earth, not a sprout of green anywhere to be seen. The sergeant stood beside me, politely hospitable, pointing out objects of interest in the landscape. Over there, he said, was Ypres. That was the ruins of the Cloth Hall. Next it was the ruins of the church.
Ypres! That terrible Ypres, where they all died like flies! That shambles, that place of death! So that was Ypres, off there on the horizon, beyond the near green treetops, beyond the brown surrounding fields. Next, that little row of Noah’s Ark trees was St. Eloi,15 just beside Ypres, a little to the right. And away beyond, in the distance, like little black spots in the sunlight, were the German captive balloons. And over yonder—
Guns banged forth on all sides, a dozen at once.
“Taube,” said the sergeant.
Overhead it came, just a little way behind us, very high, very slow, inexorable, coming in our direction. As it flew slowly toward us, anti-aircraft guns burst forth on every hand, and as the shells exploded in the air, little puffs of smoke hung there, in the sky, below the Taube. They never came anywhere near it, those futile puffs of smoke, while the high, disdainful Danger flew serenely on, invulnerable, as unavoidable as Fate.
“Step into the shelter, sister, quick,” called the sergeant. “It’s the rule.” He pointed to the flimsy little wooden hut.
I cleared the ditch at a bound, into the good, protecting darkness of that frail shelter, where one could not stand upright under the low ridge-pole. The men came in too, but with less haste. We all stood crouching, under the low roof, awaiting the bomb. It was a hideous sensation. The futility of that frail shelter—it was just like the fringes over the horses’ eyes, so that they could not see. We just could not see, that was all. But it helped.
The sergeant showed me a ham. He picked it up from a pile, and passed it to me, remarking that the men were well fed. I don’t know whether he really thought so, or whether he was conversing to distract my attention. Hams could not do it. Nothing could, with that Thing flying slowly, inexorably overhead. That tense dread, that horror of the Terror that flies filled my consciousness to the exclusion of all else.
“We’re well fed,” he repeated. The Thing must be directly above us now—yet I had a mental vision of a very lean ham, and of rows of canned fruit lying along one side of the tent, and next them, heaps of tins of condensed milk. I saw these things, subconsciously, and heard the sergeant tell of them, while all the time that Thing was flying overhead. All around, the little cannon roared, and across the road a mitrailleuse pattered, like some one drawing a stick along a picket fence.
There was a rattling and popping on the roof—shrapnel bullets, and bits of shell falling back from those futile anti-aircraft guns. That’s what the shelter was for, a protection from bits of falling shell. A bomb would have crashed clean through it.
“Will they drop a bomb?” I asked. In those tense seconds, I had seen and admired every bit of food in the place. I simply had to interrupt.
“She may—or she mayn’t,” was the guarded reply.
The noise was incessant. We were the centre of a ring of fire, surrounded by a circle of anti-aircraft guns.
“She’s gone over!” cried a Tommy; and instantly there was a rush from the shelter, a rush to look upward at the disappearing Taube.
“Don’t look up, men!” cried the sergeant, for little scraps of iron continued to rain downward. But a minute later we were all standing in the roadside, while the Taube sailed away, backward over the English lines, untouched, unscathed.
I took breath again. Just “Whew!” There wasn’t anything else to say. Just “Whew!” and then things seemed to go on again, inside. That’s what it’s like to be afraid. I had not behaved one whit differently from the men, yet the difference was, they had not seemed to mind. I had minded, dreadfully. But outwardly, we acted just the same. The question is not whether one is afraid or not. It is what one does when one is afraid that counts.
Suddenly a big, bald-headed man ran from the shelter, and fell on his knees a hundred feet away, and began digging with his hands. Others ran toward him as he dug in the earth, and so did I. I did not want to miss anything.
“Shell, sister,” explained some one. “From one of our guns.”
“Has it exploded?” I asked prudently.
“Can’t tell yet,” replied the man on his knees, digging. I beat a hasty retreat. There was nothing glorious about it; it was just a strategic retreat. Unexploded shells explode, and after the crisis of the past ten minutes, I was not up to another. A few minutes later, however, the man returned and handed me a three-inch shell, the nose gone, empty inside, and covered with mud. It was an English shell, from an anti-aircraft gun, which had fallen not a hundred feet from where we stood, burying itself in three feet of earth. As the danger was over for the moment, the sergeant allowed himself to remark that had that shell struck us, it would have smashed up the shelter completely.
Then the sergeant proposed tea. I had a singular lack of appetite, but he was trying to entertain me, a guest who had suddenly stepped out of a motor, and demanded his hospitality, apparently for an indefinite period. So while he busied himself over the preparation of tea, I stood on the roadside, contemplating the landscape. It was not reassuring in the least. The sun had come out brightly by this time, the last of the rain clouds being wafted off to the rear of the English balloons, and in the clear, dry air the sinister ruins of Ypres stood out with appalling distinctness. Still more visible were the Noah’s Ark trees which marked St. Eloi. Out of that still, bright, smiling air came puffs of smoke, and following the puffs, a few seconds later, roared deep, sullen detonations. The sergeant stopped his tea-making for an instant and came to my side to point out certain features of the landscape: the puffs of smoke were bursting shells, falling just back of a red-tiled barn, about three miles away. Then, seeing that I was well entertained, he went back to the shelter again and said he would call me when all was ready. So there I stood, in the fresh sunshine of a late May afternoon, watching shells burst, just over yonder!
I began to realize that as a guest I was rather hopeless, and that this polite little soldier was trying to make the best of the situation. It is hard to realize that people are trying to make the best of you, but he did it well, and presently announced that everything was ready and would I please come in? A turned-up soap-box served as chair, and a similar one as table, upon which latter rested a plate of enormous thick slices of heavily buttered bread. I received a giant white enameled mug containing strong hot tea, while the little man opened a tin of condensed milk from the stock of that article to which he had drawn my attention a short while before. Next he opened a can of peaches, and here my war knife, with its hundred blades, came into play for stirring and spreading. Thus we sat opposite each other, with a good, substantial English tea spread before us, and the guns booming in the distance. Just back of us, a hundred feet to the rear, the ground was torn up by those four shells which had been aimed at us, and which had stopped our, that is, my, progress. A hundred feet in the other direction was the hole in which the English shell had buried itself, while on the floor at my side lay the shell itself, a mud-covered souvenir of this joy ride! And as we ate and drank, we watched shells bursting behind the red-tiled barn, over the rims of our teacups!
Up and down the road officers cantered by, on well-groomed, handsome horses, while many soldiers came and went on foot. I found myself the object of considerable curiosity and attention, and soon became rather fearful as to what would happen if the others failed to return. I had visions of being arrested and taken to headquarters, and I also reflected that the same thing might easily happen to them—to Williamson and MacAlister. In either case, I was in a bad plight. It would be impossible for me to make my way back on foot, through all those sentries, even to Poperinghe, to say nothing of being able to walk five miles farther back, to our hospital. My pocket was full of identification papers, but with no pass or explanation to account for my being so near Ypres. It was not my fault that I had got this far—Heaven knows I had not meant to—but this fact would not suffice in case of arrest. An hour ago, I had been amused and pleased at their lack of vigilance, but I suddenly realized that this lack of vigilance might prove extremely disagreeable for me. They would make up for it in sudden strictness should I attempt to pass the lines again, to set out on a ten-mile walk toward home. The same thoughts were evidently passing through the sergeant’s mind, and he seemed to become uneasy and conscious of my presence; therefore I retired deeply into the tent every time an officer passed by. Every moment I expected to be arrested as a spy.
Just then, when the sergeant and I had about run out of conversation, and were given up to anxiety, came the welcome toot of the motor-horn, and Williamson and MacAlister were back again, complacent and satisfied. They had accomplished their object, and had found the little nephew, a twenty-year-old private in the Princess Pat’s. Nor had they met with adventures of any sort,—no shells, no Taubes, no tea-party,—nothing but a grateful, dirty little nephew, who was overjoyed to see his aunt. All the adventures had befallen me, the prudent one, who, in planning what seemed the safest course, had found herself in the centre of a rousing fire!
That night, after dinner, when we were safely back in the French lines again, some of the young Canadian engineers came up to spend the evening. We recounted our adventures, and they seemed incredulous beyond words that we had been able to penetrate so far into the English lines, had found it so easy to approach the front, unchallenged in any way. One of them remarked,—
“You know you were in a limousine, on a back road. From a distance, it looked like a staff car. You were probably shelled on purpose.”
Then the other youth spoke up.
“Just accident,” he said emphatically. “There was no attack to-day, and on days when there are no attacks, the roads back of the lines are always shelled. On such days, it is far more dangerous two or three miles behind the lines than in the trenches. They shell roads and crossroads indiscriminately, hoping to catch something by accident—troops, convoy trains, ammunition wagons, anything! On days like this, there are always three or four casualties a day, from this desultory shelling. Didn’t you notice anything like that—dead horses lying by the roadside, shot to pieces, mangled? Horses from transport wagons, hit by chance shells.”
MacAlister’s eyes grew round with excitement.
“Why yes, I saw that once—just as we were reaching Poperinghe! I wondered what had happened!”
“I didn’t see anything like that!” I exclaimed. “If I had, we’d have turned back at once! But why didn’t I see it? How did I happen to miss it?”
“At that moment,” said MacAlister with intense significance, “you were looking about for a pet lamb!”
This essay appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in October 1916.
1. The events in this essay begin at the same field hospital in Belgium that La Motte writes about in The Backwash of War.
2. Mary Borden, the American heiress who was the benefactor and director of the field hospital. She also appears in The Backwash of War.
3. Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, a regiment established in August 1914.
4. A town in the Belgian province of West Flanders.
5. Chief doctor.
6. Travel pass.
7. A car used by a senior military officer.
8. The English and French armies each held sectors of the Belgian front.
9. The bombardment is the subject of her essay “Under Shell-Fire at Dunkirk.”
10. A major thoroughfare in London.
11. The strategically located city of Ypres was the site of intense fighting, including, the First Battle of Ypres (October 19–November 22, 1914) and Second Battle of Ypres (April 22–May 25, 1915). At the time of La Motte’s “joy ride,” German shelling and aerial bombing of the area had recently intensified.
12. Manned observation balloons provided an aerial view of the enemy’s position.
13. A fashionable shopping street in Paris.
14. A famous Parisian tea room.
15. A battle had recently been fought at St. Eloi, from March 27 to April 16, 1916.