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Page 5
The same day they explored endless camps and the wards of a Red Cross
hospital. It was impossible to take in everything at once, and our ladies
retired at night, bewildered by mingled impressions of "human energy,
human intelligence, human suffering," but full of pride and exultation at
the efficiency of their country and of the good relations of their
soldiers with the French. They carried with them as a last impression of
the day the picture of a canteen worked day and night in three shifts by a
heroic band of women close by the railway station, full of soldiers just
departing for the front, young, gay and full of spirits; then came the
train to take the soldiers off for the fighting line, and the women, left
behind, set up the song, already familiar in the Midlands, "Keep the home
fires burning till the boys come home."
In the village where they stopped, some forty miles from the actual front,
a special messenger from the general headquarters brings the amazing news
that General Headquarters invites Mrs. Ward and her daughter for two days,
and will send a motor for them, if they accept, which, of course, they did
upon the instant, looking forward with eagerness to the great mysteries of
the front, its camps, its men, and its hospitals, that they were to see
with their own eyes to-morrow.
The remainder of the day before they are to start for the front suffices
for the visit to a camp set down in one of the pleasantest spots in
France, a favorite haunt of French artists before the war, now occupied by
a British reinforcement camp, the trees having all been cut away, by long
lines of hospitals, by a convalescent depot, and by the training grounds,
to which we have already referred.
I must copy the bare catalogue of what this vast camp contained: "Sleeping
and mess quarters for those belonging to the new armies; sixteen hospitals
with twenty-one thousand beds" (and this shows now what it was to be near
the front); "rifle ranges; training camps; a vast laundry, worked by
French women under British organization, which washes for all the
hospitals thirty thousand pieces a day; recreation huts of every possible
kind; a cinema theatre seating eight hundred men, with performances twice
a day; nurses clubs; officers clubs; a supply depot for food; an ordnance
depot for everything that is not food; railroad sidings on which every
kind of man and thing can go out and come in without interruption; a
convalescents' depot of two thousand patients; and a convalescent horse
depot of two thousand horses; all this in one camp, established since last
April."
Ah! But the deepest impression left on the minds of our ladies is of the
terrible sufferings in the hospitals, of the smiling endurance with which
they were borne, of the timely skill, pity, and devotion of the doctors
and nurses, taking care of the twenty thousand wounded. Realizing the
sympathy of America with all these scenes and sufferings, they do not fail
to note the hospitals organized by the Universities of Chicago and of
Harvard, staffed by American sisters and doctors, each providing
thirty-four doctors and eighty nurses, and dealing with a thousand
patients, and a convalescent depot of two thousand beds. Every day the
ambulance train comes in, and splendid hospital ships are taking the
brave wounded back to England for home and rest.
And now came the day in which they were to motor forty miles to be the
guests of the G.H.Q. Soon they seemed to be in the midst of the battle,
"our own guns were thundering away behind us, and the road was more and
more broken up by shell holes." The British lines are just beyond,
cottages close by, and the German lines just in front of a wood near them,
three-quarters of a mile away. Already they had been nearer than any
woman, even a nurse, had been in this war, to the actual fighting on the
English line, and the cup of impressions was full. They actually saw the
brave boys whom they had passed an hour before, sitting in the fields
waiting for orders, now marching into the trenches to take their turn
there--they knew that they were marching into the jaws of death, but they
walked as quietly and as cheerfully as if they were going to a parade, the
guns crashing close by them all the time. The firing being too hot for the
women, the captain in charge of them was relieved when they elected to
turn back.
The next day, their second as guests of G.H.Q., as they came down from
breakfast, our ladies were surprised to find the motor at the door, a
simple lunch being packed up, and gas-helmets got ready for them to use,
for the captain greeted them in the best of spirits with the news that a
very successful action had been fought that morning, "we had taken back
some trenches on the Ypres-Comines Canal that we lost, a little while ago,
and captured about two hundred prisoners; and if we go off at once we
shall be in time to see the German counter attack." The one impossible
thing for any woman ever to have hoped to see!
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