Kings, Queens, and Pawns | Page 3

London, and was moving
smoothly through the English fields, so green even in winter, he still sat
in the same attitude.
I drew a long breath, and ordered luncheon. I was off to the war. I
might be turned back at Folkstone. There was more than a chance that I
might not get beyond Calais, which was under military law. But at least

I had made a start.
This is a narrative of personal experience. It makes no pretensions,
except to truth. It is pure reporting, a series of pictures, many of them
disconnected, but all authentic. It will take a hundred years to paint this
war on one canvas. A thousand observers, ten thousand, must record
what they have seen. To the reports of trained men must be added a bit
here and there from these untrained observers, who without military
knowledge, ignorant of the real meaning of much that they saw, have
been able to grasp only a part of the human significance of the great
tragedy of Europe.
I was such an observer.
My errand was primarily humane, to visit the hospitals at or near the
front, and to be able to form an opinion of what supplies were needed,
of conditions generally. Rumour in America had it that the medical and
surgical situation was chaotic. Bands of earnest and well-intentioned
people were working quite in the dark as to the conditions they hoped
to relieve. And over the hospital situation, as over the military, brooded
the impenetrable silence that has been decreed by the Allies since the
beginning of the war. I had met everywhere in America tales from both
the German and the Allies' lines that had astounded me. It seemed
incredible that such conditions could exist in an age of surgical
enlightenment; that, even in an unexpected and unprepared-for war,
modern organisation and efficiency should have utterly failed.
On the steamer crossing the Atlantic, with the ship speeding on her
swift and rather precarious journey windows and ports carefully closed
and darkened, one heard the same hideous stories: of tetanus in
uncounted cases, of fearful infections, of no bandages--worst of all, of
no anæsthetics.
I was a member of the American Red Cross Association, but I knew
that the great work of the American Red Cross was in sending supplies.
The comparatively few nurses they had sent to the western field of war
were not at the front or near it. The British, French, Belgian and Dutch
nursing associations were in charge of the field hospitals, so far as I

could discover.
To see these hospitals, to judge and report conditions, then, was a part
of my errand. Only a part, of course; for I had another purpose. I knew
nothing of strategy or tactics, of military movements and their
significance. I was not interested in them particularly. But I meant to
get, if it was possible, a picture of this new warfare that would show it
for the horror that it is; a picture that would give pause to that certain
percentage of the American people that is always so eager to force a
conservative government into conflict with other nations.
There were other things to learn. What was France doing? The great
sister republic had put a magnificent army into the field. Between
France and the United States were many bonds, much reciprocal good
feeling. The Statue of Liberty, as I went down the bay, bespoke the
kindly feeling between the two republics. I remembered Lafayette.
Battle-scarred France, where liberty has fought so hard for life--what
was France doing? Not saying much, certainly. Fighting, surely, as the
French have always fought. For certainly England, with her gallant but
at that time meagre army, was not fighting alone the great war.
But there were three nations fighting the allied cause in the west. What
had become of the heroic Belgian Army? Was it resting on its laurels?
Having done its part, was it holding an honorary position in the great
line-up? Was it a fragment or an army, an entity or a memory?
The newspapers were full of details that meant nothing: names of
strange villages, movements backward and forward as the long battle
line bent and straightened again. But what was really happening
beyond the barriers that guarded the front so jealously? How did the
men live under these new and strange conditions? What did they think?
Or fear? Or hope?
Great lorries and transports went out from the French coast towns and
disappeared beyond the horizon; motor ambulances and hospital trains
came in with the grim harvest. Men came and, like those who had gone
before, they too went out and did not come back. "Somewhere in
France," the papers said. Such letters as they wrote came from

"somewhere in France." What was happening