Kings, Queens, and Pawns | Page 9

I wish I could remember it, for I left there a perfectly good and
moderately expensive pair of field glasses. I have been in Calais since,

and have had the wild idea of driving about the streets until I find it and
my glasses. But a close scrutiny of the map of Calais has deterred me.
Age would overtake me, and I should still be threading the maze of
those streets, seeking an old house in an old garden, both growing older
all the time.
A very large house it was, large and cold. I found that I was expected;
but an air of unreality hung over everything. I met three or four most
kindly Belgian people of whom I knew nothing and who knew nothing
of me. I did not know exactly why I was there, and I am sure the others
knew less. I went up to my room in a state of bewilderment. It was a
huge room without a carpet, and the tiny fire refused to light. There was
a funeral wreath over the bed, with the picture of the deceased woman
in the centre. It was bitterly cold, and there was a curious odor of
disinfectants in the air.
By a window was a narrow black iron bed without a mattress. It looked
sinister. Where was the mattress? Had its last occupant died and the
mattress been burned? I sniffed about it; the odour of disinfectant
unmistakably clung to it. I do not yet know the story of that room or of
that bed. Perhaps there is no story. But I think there is. I put on my fur
coat and went to bed, and the lady of the wreath came in the night and
talked French to me.
I rose in the morning at seven degrees Centigrade and dressed. At
breakfast part of the mystery was cleared up. The house was being used
as a residence by the chief surgeon of the Ambulance Jeanne d'Arc, the
Belgian Red Cross hospital in Calais, and by others interested in the
Red Cross work. It was a dormitory also for the English nurses from
the ambulance. This explained, naturally, my being sent there, the
somewhat casual nature of the furnishing and the odour of disinfectants.
It does not, however, explain the lady of the wreath or the black iron
bed.
After breakfast some of the nurses came in from night duty at the
ambulance. I saw their bedroom, one directly underneath mine, with
four single beds and no pretence at comfort. It was cold, icy cold.

"You are very courageous," I said. "Surely this is not very comfortable.
I should think you might at least have a fire."
"We never think of a fire," a nurse said simply. "The best we can do
seems so little to what the men are doing, doesn't it?"
She was not young. Some one told me she had a son, a boy of nineteen,
in the trenches. She did not speak of him. But I have wondered since
what she must feel during those grisly hours of the night when the
ambulances are giving up their wounded at the hospital doors. No
doubt she is a tender nurse, for in every case she is nursing vicariously
that nineteen-year-old boy of hers in the trenches.
That morning I visited the various Calais hospitals. It was a bright
morning, sunny and cold. Lines of refugees with packs and bundles
were on their way to the quay.
The frightful congestion of the autumn of 1914 was over, but the
hospitals were all full. They were surgical hospitals, typhoid hospitals,
hospitals for injured civilians, hospital boats. One and all they were
preparing as best they could for the mighty conflict of the spring, when
each side expected to make its great onward movement.
As it turned out, the terrible fighting of the spring failed to break the
deadlock, but the preparations made by the hospitals were none too
great for the sad by-products of war.
The Belgian hospital question was particularly grave. To-day, several
months later, it is still a matter for anxious thought. In case the
Germans retire from Belgium the Belgians will find themselves in their
own land, it is true, but a land stripped of everything. It is for this
contingency that the Allies are preparing. In whichever direction the
line moves, the arrangements that have served during the impasse of
the past year will no longer answer. Portable field hospital pavilions,
with portable equipment, will be required. The destructive artillery fire,
with its great range, will leave no buildings intact near the battle line.
One has only to follow the present line, fringed as it is with destroyed

or partially destroyed towns, to realise what the situation will be if a
successful offensive movement