Innes Logan

“ Yet in a hospital there is much ground for believing that shining qualities which amid the refinements of civilisation are often absent—staunch, and even tender comradeship, readiness to judge kindly if judge at all, resolute endurance, and absence of self-seeking, so typical of our fighting men—have their root in a genuine religious experience more often [Pg 54] than is, in the battalions, immediately evident. It has been my experience, again and again, that with dying men who have sunk into the last lethargy, irresponsive to every other word, the Name of Jesus still can penetrate and arouse. ”

“ The striking comradeship of soldiering, the common experience of audience and actors, and the abandonment of all thought for the morrow, gave that impression of cheerful carelessness the root of which is not happiness but the conviction that the future is so uncertain and the possibilities so dreadful that he is wise who lives for the hour only, even as the hour may snatch life from him. ”

“ The doctor was quite peevish about it, as the saying is!
When an attack is being made or repelled, the concentration of batteries in action turns the country in front of them into a nightmare of noise—'a terrific and intolerable noise' in Froissart's phrase. The incessant slamming of the guns makes it impossible to hear enemy shells coming. The first intimation is their arrival. But the orderlies go backwards and forwards through it all with superb courage. Wounded trickle down the trolley line to the dressing station, and an occasional group of prisoners come through. ”

“ Surely so long as great deeds appeal to the British race those weary miles will be always sacred. Within them lie the unnumbered British dead, 'the dear, pitiful, august dead.' Comrades of the dauntless warriors of Gallipoli, comrades of the sailors who have gone down fighting in the cold waters of the North Sea, brothers of all brave men suffering for a clean cause, they leave the issue with us. As long [Pg 138] as the British Empire endures, and it will endure so long as it works for God and no longer, the memory of the heroes of the Ypres salient will live and glow. ”

“ The transport, pitched in the filthy morass known as 'Scottish Lines,' saw its labour of three weeks thrown away in a couple of nights. For the human beings there were a few tents and huts, but in face of the searching wind canvas seemed quite porous, and the huts were badly built and had a hundred openings to the bitter air. But up at the Bluff conditions were terrible. The trenches had disappeared under repeated bombardments, and had become mere chains of shell holes in which the men stood up to their thighs in liquid mud. ”

“ When we have beaten Germany, who stands for the old, rotten, pagan belief [Pg 139] in old, rotten, pagan things we must see that we do not betray the men who died fighting because they hated war.
But war has good in it too, they say. Yes, and amid its hideous wrong no doubt there was good in slavery, as there is in cancer or blindness. Almost any evil or agony may be the root of noble qualities, and war is no exception. ”

“ He found it in a German officer's dug-out, but probably it came originally from some ruined French chapel. All souvenirs taken from dead enemies are loathsome to me. It is merciful that so many people have no imagination. I have never been able to understand, either, the carrying home of bits of shell and mementoes of that kind. Any memento of these unspeakable scenes of bloodshed is repulsive. Yet the British soldier is as chivalrous as he is brave. He speaks terrible words about what he will do to his foes, but when they are beaten and in his power he can never carry it through. ”

“ It was very peaceful that Sunday afternoon—no sign of war anywhere, except the maimed results of it—as those men remembered with tears those whom it had 'pleased Almighty God to take out of this transitory world into His mercy.'
Every wounded man has a letter to write or to have written for him, and it was essential that since the people at home knew there was heavy fighting going on all messages should be sent off at once. This is one of the chaplain's voluntary tasks, and we were kept close to it every afternoon for some weeks after the offensive began. ”

“ The fate of Belgium had a far more moving influence with the ranks of the new army than the officer class, I think, quite realised. Indeed, with the later recruits I gathered the impression that indignation at the German atrocities in Belgium was the prevailing motive in their enlistment. There can be no question in the mind of any one who worked intimately among the men of the new armies in the autumn and winter of 1914 that the invasion of Belgium was the one shocking stroke that rallied the country as one man, and that nothing else in the situation, as it was known, would have done this. ”

“ Amid all that battered, bleeding, shattered flesh and bone, the human spirit showed itself a very splendid thing that night. The reception room at last filled to overflowing and could not be emptied. All the wards and lofts and tents were crammed. By the time the other station was filled the two had taken in three thousand men. They remained with us for a week, because the hospital trains were too busy behind Loos to come our way. Every day every man had to have his wounds dressed. Some were covered with wounds; many of the wounds were dangerous, all were painful ”

“ I cannot believe that any one who has knelt beside life after life passing forth in weariness and pain, cut short so untimely, far from mothers' hands that would have ministered love to them as they lay, and who has listened to the broken words of trust, will ever allow his vision of the fundamental union of those who are resting in the Eternal Love of God in Christ to be overshadowed by lesser truths. ”

“ The answer is one that is a real comfort to those at home. The most shattering wounds are not those which cause the greatest immediate pain. It is as though a tree fell across telegraph wires. The wires are down, and no message, or, at worst, a confused jangling message can come through to the brain. ”

“ A candle gave light, and whenever a shell burst above the flame jerked out. The sergeant-major and the orderlies and servants lived in the tunnel, squatting on their haunches in the mud. Outside there were no other dug-outs at all. The shelling was continuous, but the cold was far worse. Men sank in the mud and remained motionless for hours. Many fell into shell holes and had to be hauled out with twisted telephone wires. The wounded suffered horribly. Owing to the mud and the German barrage no supplies could be brought up, and it was impossible to light braziers. ”

“ We took our funerals to that so quickly growing cemetery with its six hundred little wooden crosses, separately, though up the road those from the other clearing station were taken by each chaplain on alternate days, irrespective of denomination. We dispensed the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper to our own people, using the beautiful little Communion set issued by the War Office, and having as Table a stretcher covered with a white cloth and set on trestles.
The drawing power of nationality is immense in the field. It is far more emphatic and real than the sense of particular church connection. ”

“ A clearing station is the first resting-place he has. He has had a terrible shaking, seen his chum killed perhaps, taken part in savagery let loose. He is often all broken up, seeking again for a foundation. The difficulty is that his stay is so short, as a rule only a few days. Our record patient was poor Burke, an Irishman from an Irish regiment. He had been wounded when out with a wiring party which scattered under machine-gun fire. He crawled into a Jack Johnson hole and lay there out of sight of either side, between the trenches, for eight days and eight nights. ”

“ But the British soldier hates manœuvres and marches and drills and inspections. He would rather be left in peace in his trenches, in a 'quiet' part of the line at least, than bothered about those things. Movement, too, has an exhilarating effect on him, and so when orders come to go back into action he tramps off with remarkable goodwill. I remember one battalion of Royal Welsh Fusiliers, suddenly rushed up from rest, [Pg 111] pulled out of the station singing a song of which the refrain is something like 'Ai, ai! Vot a game it is!' at the top of their voices. ”

“ These men might well glory in their infirmities. This was heroism, the real thing, the spirit rising to incredible heights of patient endurance in the foreseen possible result of positive action for an ideal. The reaction from battle is overwhelming. Passions that the civilised man simply does not know, so colourless is his experience of them in ordinary days, are let loose, anger and terror and horror and lust to kill. So for a while, as nearly always happens, even wounds lost their power to pain in the [Pg 74] sleep of bottomless exhaustion. ”

“ The beginning of March found me with a battalion of The Royals in a rather battered Belgian town. Its centre received a good deal of attention from enemy artillery, but it offered two attractions which brought in officers from divisions all around. After all, to men accustomed to living in the trenches, the atmosphere was one of almost Sabbath peace. The hall where 'The Fancies' made much of the humours of trench life to uproariously delighted audiences [Pg 118] was crowded out night after night. You could not find anywhere greater zest and enjoyment. ”

“ There is a kind of warlike genius in him which makes him do the right thing in the right way, so that he appeals to humour and comradeship as well as to gallantry. It was one of our sergeant-majors who before a battalion attack offered £5 to the man of his company who was first in the enemy's trench. Think of it for a moment. He appealed to their sporting instinct; he turned their thoughts from death and wounds and introduced a jest into every dug-out that night ”

“ The camp commandant was insistent that the ground round the tents and huts should be turned into gardens, and before long the valley was bright with flowers. There was peace over all the landscape here. Sometimes a train of horse trucks, crowded with men standing [Pg 20] at the sliding doors or sitting with legs dangling over the rails, panted up the long slope past the foot of the valley, and every evening the supply trains pulled slowly off on their way to the front, each laden with one day's rations for twelve thousand men. ”

“ By the time the realisation of the pain has come into full play the sufferer, in ordinary times, is in the clearing station or, at least, the field ambulance, and has the resources of science at his disposal. ”

“ Our fighting men hate to be beaten, and the story was of confusion and lack of support. Our own gas, too, had lingered on the ground and then drifted back on our own trenches. A young German student who was brought in wounded admitted the gallantry of the first rush, but he said, 'We always understood those trenches could be rushed, [Pg 65] but we also know that they cannot be held on so small a front. They are commanded on either side.' In all seven hundred wounded and gassed were brought in from the British regiments of this division, and there was much work to be done. ”

“ There are hurried good-byes, gathering together of souvenirs, wistful eyes of those who cannot yet go, watching those who can. Cars are brought round to the side entrance, stretchers slipped into their grooves, and the convoy is off to the station. The long train, already half filled, lies waiting. There is a last little passage across the platform, coming and going of bearers, the inevitable argument with the R.T.O., a warning shriek from the engine, and the train to the base has gone. [Pg 45]
II
'Do you think that sort of thing matters now?'
A clearing station is just what its name denotes. ”

“ There is not, and never has been a religious revival, in the usual sense of the term, on the Flanders front, and I am afraid it is true that modern war knocks and smashes any faith he ever had out of many a man. ”

“ Jock cannot go by train because he could not stand the jolting, so he must wait for a barge. He listens with evident pleasure to the description of the electric lights and fans and white sheets and pillows. There are six sisters in the station. They are the first English women he has seen since his last leave, and he is glad to hear there will be two on the barge. A barge comes and goes, but no one tells Jock that. He is told [Pg 44] the barges are always a long time coming, which is true too. ”

“ From this time onwards the German guns had the range of the roads, and such a superiority of fire that they could do almost as they pleased. The infantry, at first furious at the necessity of retreat, turned again and again—as did the guns—on their pursuers, but even so the pressure was perilously near breaking point. The enemy had every means of mechanical transport, and was able to find time for rest. Our men had to press on to the last point of human endurance. ”