A Woman's Experiences in the Great WarMack, Louise
History
A Woman's Experiences in the Great War
Mack, Louise
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
Here, at the world's end, as near the Front as anyone can get, driving
about in that old car with the broken windows, is our eminent
journalist, in baggy grey knee breeches and laced-up boots.
"Having a look round," says the journalist simply. "Seeing things for
myself a bit!"
"How splendid!"
"Well, to tell you the truth, I can't keep away. I've been out before,
but never so near as this. The sordidness and suffering of it all makes
me feel I simply can't stay quietly over there in London. I want to see
for myself how things are going."
Then, dropping the subject of himself swiftly, but easily, the
journalist begins courteously to ask questions; what am I doing here?
where have I come from? where am I going?
"Well, at the present moment," I answer, "I'm trying to get to La Panne.
I want to see the Queen of the Belgians waiting for the King, and
walking there on the yellow, dreamy sands by the North Sea. But the tram
isn't running any longer, and the roads are bad to-day, very bad
indeed!"
All in an instant, the journalistic instinct is alive in him, and
crying.
I watch, fascinated.
I can see him seeing that picture of pictures, the sweet Queen walking
on the lonely winter sands, waiting for her hero to come back from the
battlefields, just over there.
"Let us take you in our car! What are we doing? Where were we going?
Anyway, it doesn't matter. We'll take the car to La Panne!"
And after luncheon off we go.
Every now and then I turn the corner of my eye on the man beside me as
he sits there, hunched up in a heavy coat with a big cigar between his
babyish lips, talking, talking; and what is so glorious about it all is
that this isn't the journalist talking, it is the idealist, the
practical dreamer, who, by sheer belief in his ideals has won his way to
the top of his profession.
I see a face that is one of the most curiously fascinating in Europe. A
veiled face, but with its veil for ever shifting, for ever lifting, for
ever letting you get a glimpse of the man behind. Power and will are
sunk deep within the outer veil, and when you look at him at first you
say to yourself, "What a nice big boy of a man!" For those lips are
almost babyish in their curves, the lips of a man who would drink the
cold pure water of life in preference to its coloured vintages, the lips
of an idealist. Who but an idealist could keep a childish mouth through
the intense worldliness of the battle for life as this man has fought
it, right from the very beginning?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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