War stories; World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Belgium; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Their first weeks were at Ghent, rather wild, disheveled weeks of
clutching at work. They had one objective: the battlefield; one purpose:
to make a series of rescues under fire. Cramped in a placid land,
smothered by peace-loving folk, they had been set quivering by the war.
The time had come to throw themselves at the Continent, and do or die
where action was thick. Nothing was quainter, even in a land of
astounding spectacles, than the sight of the rescuing ambulances rolling
out to the wounded of a morning, loaded to the gunwale with charming
women and several men. "Where will they put the wounded?" was the query
that sprang to every lip that gaped at their passing. There was room for
everybody but wounded. Fortunately there were few wounded in those early
days when rescuers tingled for the chance to serve and see. So the Ghent
experience was a probation rather than a fulfilled success. Then the
enemy descended from fallen Antwerp, and the Corps sped away, ahead of
the vast gray Prussian machine, through Bruges and Ostend, to Furnes.
Here, too, in Furnes, the Corps was still trying to find its place in
the immense and intricate scheme of war.
The man that saved them from their fogged incertitude was a Belgian
doctor, a military Red Cross worker. The first flash of him was of a
small silent man, not significant. But when you had been with him, you
felt reserves of force. That small person had a will of his own. He was
thirty-one years of age, with a thoughtful but kindly face. His eye had
pleasant lights in it, and a twinkle of humor. His voice was low and
even-toned. He lifted the wounded in from the trenches, dressed their
wounds, and sent them back to the base hospitals. He was regimental
dentist as well as Doctor, and accompanied his men from point to point,
along the battlefront from the sea to the frontier. Van der Helde was
his name. He called on the Corps soon after their arrival in Furnes, one
of the last bits of Belgian soil unoccupied by the invaders.
"You are wandering about like lost souls," he said to them; "let me tell
you how to get to work."
He did so. As the results of his suggestions, the six motor ambulances
and four touring cars ran out each morning to the long thin line of
troops that lay burrowed in the wet earth, all the way from the Baths of
Nieuport-on-the-Sea down through the shelled villages of the
Ramskappele-Dixmude frontier to the beautiful ancient city of Ypres.
The cars returned with their patient freight of wounded through the
afternoon and evening.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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