The day was cold and had turned grey and lowering. It was pleasant after our tour of the station to go into the long living room and sit by the fire. But the fire smoked. One after another those dauntless British officers attacked it, charged with poker, almost with bayonet, and retired defeated. So they closed it up finally with a curious curved fire screen and let it alone. It was ten minutes after I began looking at the fire screen before I recognised it for what it was--the hood from an automobile!

Along one side of the wall was a piano. It had been brought back from a ruined house at the front. It was rather a poor piano and no one had any music, but some of the officers played a little by ear. The top of the piano was held up by a bandage! It was a piano of German make, and the nameplate had been wrenched off!

A long table filled the centre of the room. One end formed the press censorship bureau, for it was part of the province of the station to censor and stamp letters going out. The other end was the dining table. Over the fireplace on the mantel was a baby's shoe, a little brown shoe picked up on the street of a town that was being destroyed.

Beside it lay an odd little parachute of canvas with a weighted letter-carrier beneath. One of the officers saw me examining it and presented it to me, as it was worn and past service.

"Now and then," he explained, "it is impossible to use the wireless, for one reason or another. In that case a message can be dropped by means of the parachute."

I brought the message-carrier home with me. On its weighted canvas bag is written in ink: "Urgent! You are requested to forward this at once to the inclosed address. From His Majesty's airship ----."

The sight of the press-censor stamp reminded an English officer, who had lived in Belgium, of the way letters to and from interned Belgians have been taken over the frontier into Holland and there dispatched.

Men who are willing to risk their lives for money collect these letters. At one time the price was as high as two hundred francs for each one. When enough have been gathered together to make the risk worth while the bearer starts on his journey. He must slip through the sentry lines disguised as a workman, or perhaps by crawling through the barbed wire at the barrier. For fear of capture some of these bearers, working their way through the line at night, have dragged their letters behind them, so that in case of capture they could drop the cord and be found without incriminating evidence on them. For taking letters into Belgium the process is naturally reversed. But letters are sent, not to names, but to numbers. The bearer has a list of numbers which correspond to certain addresses. Thus, even if he is taken and the letters are found on him, their intended recipients will not be implicated. I saw a letter which had been received in this way by a Belgian woman. It was addressed simply to Number Twenty-eight.

The fire was burning better behind its automobile hood. An orderly had brought in tea, white bread, b.u.t.ter, a pitcher of condensed cream, and an English teacake. We gathered round the tea table. War seemed a hundred miles away. Except for the blue uniforms and bra.s.s b.u.t.tons of the officers who belonged to the naval air service, the orderly's khaki and the bayonet from a gun used casually at the other end of the table as a paperweight, it was an ordinary English tea.

CHAPTER XXII

THE WOMEN AT THE FRONT

It was commencing to rain outside. The rain beat on the windows and made even the reluctant fire seem cosy. Some one had had a box of candy sent from home. It was brought out and presented with a flourish.

"It is frightful, this life in the trenches!" said the young officer who pa.s.sed it about.

Shortly afterward the party was increased. An orderly came in and announced that an Englishwoman, whose automobile had broken down, was standing on the bridge over the ca.n.a.l and asked to be admitted. She did not know the pa.s.sword and the sentry refused to let her pa.s.s by.

One of the officers went out and returned in a few moments with a small lady much wrapped in veils and extremely wet. She stood blinking in the doorway in the accustomed light. She was recognised at once as a well-known English novelist who is conducting a soup kitchen at a railroad station three miles behind the Belgian front.

"A car was to have picked me up," she said, "but I have walked and walked and it has not come. And I am so cold. Is that tea? And may I come to the fire?"

So they settled her comfortably, with her feet thrust out to the blaze, and gave her hot tea and plenty of bread and b.u.t.ter.

"It is like the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice in Wonderland," said one of the officers gaily. "When any fresh person drops in we just move up one place."

The novelist sipped her tea and told me about her soup kitchen.

"It is so very hard to get things to put into the soup," she said. "Of course I have no car, and now with the new law that no women are to be allowed in military cars I hardly know what to do."

"Will you tell me just what you do?" I asked. So she told me, and later I saw her soup kitchen.

"Men come in from the front," she explained, "injured and without food. Often they have had nothing to eat for a long time. We make soup of whatever meat we can find and any vegetables, and as the hospital trains come in we carry it out to the men. They are so very grateful for it."

That was to be an exceptional afternoon at the naval air-station. For hardly had the novelist been settled with her tea when two very attractive but strangely attired young women came into the room. They nodded to the officers, whom they knew, and went at once to the business which had brought them.

"Can you lend us a car?" they asked. "Ours has gone off the road into the mud, and it looks as though it would never move again."

That was the beginning of a very strange evening, almost an extraordinary evening. For while the novelist was on her way back to peace these young women were on their way home.

And home to them was one room of a shattered house directly on the firing line.

Much has been said about women at the front. As far as I know at that time there were only two women absolutely at the front. Nurses as a rule are kept miles behind the line. Here and there a soup kitchen, like that just spoken of, has held its courageous place three or four miles back along the lines of communication.

I have said that they were extraordinarily dressed. Rather they were most practically dressed. Under khaki-coloured leather coats these two young women wore khaki riding breeches with puttees and flannel shirts. They had worn nothing else for six months. They wore knitted caps on their heads, for the weather was extremely cold, and mittens.

The fire was blazing high and we urged them to take off their outer wraps. For a reason which we did not understand at the time they refused. They sat with their leather coats b.u.t.toned to the throat, and coloured violently when urged to remove them.

"But what are you doing here?" said one of the officers. "What brings you so far from P----"

They said they had had an errand, and went on drinking tea.

"What sort of an errand?" a young lieutenant demanded.

They exchanged glances.

"Shopping," they said, and took more tea.

"Shopping, for what?" He was smilingly impertinent.

They hesitated. Then: "For mutton," one of them replied. Both looked relieved. Evidently the mutton was an inspiration. "We have found some mutton." They turned to me. "It is a real festival. You have no idea how long it is since we've had anything of the sort."

"Mutton!" cried the novelist, with frankly greedy eyes. "It makes wonderful soup! Where can I get it?"

They told her, and she stood up, tied on her seven veils and departed, rejoicing, in a car that had come for her.

When she was gone Colonel M---- turned to one of the young women.

"Now," he said, "out with it. What brings you both so far from your thriving and prosperous little community?"

The irony of that was lost on me until later, when I discovered that the said community was a destroyed town with the advance line of trenches running through it, and that they lived in the only two whole rooms in the place.

"Out with it," said the colonel, and scowled ferociously.

Driven into a corner they were obliged to confess. For three hours that afternoon they had stood in a freezing wind on a desolate field, while King Albert of Belgium decorated for bravery various officers and--themselves. The jealously fastened coats were thrown open.

Gleaming on the breast of each young woman was the star of the Order of Leopold!

"But why did you not tell us?" the officers demanded.

"Because," was the retort, "you have never approved of us; you have always wanted us sent back to England. The whole British Army has objected to our being where we are."

"Much good the objecting has done!" grumbled the officers. But in their hearts they were very proud.

Originally there had been three in this valiant little group of young aristocrats who have proved as true as their brothers to the traditions of their race. The third one was the daughter of an earl.

She, too, had been decorated. But she had gone to a little town near by a day or two before.