Fighting in FlandersPowell, E. Alexander (Edward Alexander)
History
Fighting in Flanders
Powell, E. Alexander (Edward Alexander)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Belgium
While we were watching the bombardment from a rise in the
Waelhem road a shell burst in the hamlet of Waerloos, whose red-
brick houses were clustered almost at our feet. A few minutes later
a procession of fugitive villagers came plodding up the cobble-
paved highway. It was headed by an ashen-faced peasant pushing
a wheelbarrow with a weeping woman clinging to his arm. In the
wheelbarrow, atop a pile of hastily collected household goods, was
sprawled the body of a little boy. He could not have been more than
seven. His little knickerbockered legs and play-worn shoes
protruded grotesquely from beneath a heap of bedding. When they
lifted it we could see where the shell had hit him. Beside the dead
boy sat his sister, a tot of three, with blood trickling from a flesh-
wound in her face. She was still clinging convulsively to a toy lamb
which had once been white but whose fleece was now splotched
with red. Some one passed round a hat and we awkwardly tried to
express our sympathy through the medium of silver. After a little
pause they started on again, the father stolidly pushing the
wheelbarrow, with its pathetic load, before him. It was the only home
that family had.
One of the bravest acts that I have ever seen was performed by an
American woman during the bombardment of Waelhem. Her name
was Mrs. Winterbottom; she was originally from Boston, and had
married an English army officer. When he went to the front in
France she went to the front in Belgium, bringing over her car, which
she drove herself, and placing it at the disposal of the British Field
Hospital. After the fort of Waelhem had been silenced and such of
the garrison as were able to move had been withdrawn, word was
received at ambulance headquarters that a number of dangerously
wounded had been left behind and that they would die unless they
received immediate attention. To reach the fort it was necessary to
traverse nearly two miles of road swept by shell-fire. Before anyone
realized what was happening a big grey car shot down the road with
the slender figure of Mrs. Winterbottom at the wheel. Clinging to the
running-board was her English chauffeur and beside her sat my little
Kansas photographer, Donald Thompson. Though the air was filled
with the fleecy white patches which look like cotton-wool but are
really bursting shrapnel, Thompson told me afterwards that Mrs.
Winterbottom was as cool as though she were driving down her
native Commonwealth Avenue on a Sunday morning. When they
reached the fort shells were falling all about them, but they filled the
car with wounded men and Mrs. Winterbottom started back with her
blood-soaked freight for the Belgian lines.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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