I. To Antwerp

When, one Saturday afternoon in September, we stepped on board the boat for Ostend, it was with a thrill of expectation.  For weeks we had read and spoken of one thing only—­the War—­and now we were to see it for ourselves, we were even in some way to be a part of it.  The curtain was rising for us upon the greatest drama in all the lurid history of strife.  We should see the armies as they went out to fight, and we should care for the wounded when their work was done.  We might hear the roar of the guns and the scream of the shells.  To us, that was War.

And, indeed, we have seen more of war in these few weeks than has fallen to the lot of many an old campaigner.  We have been through the siege of Antwerp, we have lived and worked always close to the firing-line, and I have seen a great cruiser roll over and sink, the victim of a submarine.  But these are not the things which will live in our minds.  These things are the mere framing of the grim picture.  The cruiser has been blotted out by the weary faces of an endless stream of fugitives, and the scream of the shells has been drowned by the cry of a child.  For, though the soldiers may fight, it is the people who suffer, and the toll of war is not the life which it takes, but the life which it destroys.

I suppose, and I hope, that there is not a man amongst us who has not in his heart wished to go to the front, and to do what he could.  The thought may have been only transitory, and may soon have been blotted out by self-interest; and there is many a strong man who has thrust it from him because he knew that his duty lay at home.  But to everyone the wish must have come, though only to a few can come the opportunity.  We all want to do our share, but it is only human that we should at the same time long to be there in the great business of the hour, to see war as it really is, to feel the thrill of its supreme moments, perhaps in our heart of hearts to make quite certain that we are not cowards.  And when we return, what do we bring with us?  We all bring a few bits of shell, pictures of ruined churches, perhaps a German helmet—­and our friends are full of envy.  And some of us return with scenes burnt into our brain of horror and of pathos such as no human pen can describe.  Yet it is only when we sit down in the quiet of our homes that we realize the deeper meaning of all that we have seen, that we grasp the secret of the strange aspects of humanity which have passed before us.  What we have seen is a world in which the social conventions under which we live, and which form a great part or the whole of most of our lives, have been torn down.  Men and women are no longer limited by the close barriers of convention.  They must think and act for themselves, and for once it is the men and women that we see, and not the mere symbols which pass as coin in a world at peace.  To the student of men and women, the field of war is the greatest opportunity in the world.  It is a veritable dissecting-room, where all the queer machinery that goes to the making of us lies open to our view.  On the whole, I am very glad that I am a mere surgeon, and that I can limit my dissections to men’s bodies.  Human Anatomy is bad enough, but after the last three months the mere thought of an analysis of Human Motives fills me with terror.