Furnes is not on the coast, but three miles inland.
So we turned sharp to the left toward La Panne, our
destination, a small seaside resort in times of peace,
but now the capital of Belgium. It was dark now,
and the roads were congested with the movements of
troops, some going to the trenches, those out of the
trenches going back to their billets for twenty-four
hours’ rest, and the men who had been on rest
moving up as pickets or reserves. Even in the
darkness it was easy to tell the rested men from the
ones newly relieved. Here were mostly Belgians,
and the little Belgian soldier is a cheery soul.
He asks very little, is never surly. A little
food, a little sleep—on straw, in a stable
or a church—and he is happy again.
Over and over, as I saw the Belgian Army, I was impressed
with its cheerfulness under unparalleled conditions.
Most of them have been fighting since Liege.
Of a hundred and fifty thousand men only fifty thousand
remain. Their ration is meagre compared with
the English and the French, their clothing worn and
ragged. They are holding the inundated district
between Nieuport and Dixmude, a region of constant
struggle for water-soaked trenches, where outposts
at the time I was there were being fought for through
lakes of icy water filled with barbed wire, where their
wounded fall and drown. And yet they are inveterately
cheerful. A brave lot, the Belgian soldiers,
brave and uncomplaining! It is no wonder that
the King of Belgium loves them, and that his eyes
are tragic as he looks at them.
La Panne at last, a straggling little town of one
street and rows of villas overlooking the sea.
La Panne, with the guns of Nieuport constantly in
one’s ears, and the low, red flash of them along
the sandy beach; with ambulances bringing in their
wounded now that night covers their movements; with
English gunboats close to the shore and a searchlight
playing over the sea. La Panne, with just over
the sand dunes the beginning of that long line of
trenches that extends south and east and south again,
four hundred and fifty miles of death.
It was two weeks and four days since I had left America,
and less than thirty hours since I boarded the one-o’clock
train at Victoria Station, London. Later on I
beat the thirty-hour record twice, once going from
the Belgian front to England in six hours, and another
time leaving the English lines at Bethune, motoring
to Calais, and arriving in my London hotel the same
night. Cars go rapidly over the French roads,
and the distance, measured by miles, is not great.
Measured by difficulties, it is a different story.
CHAPTER IV
“’Twas A famousvictory”
FROM MY JOURNAL:
Lapanne, January 25th, 10 P.M.
I am at the Belgian Red Cross hospital to-night.
Have had supper and have been given a room on the
top floor, facing out over the sea.
