The Piano of Pervyse

War

The Chevalier

The American

The War Baby

[1]

[1]

 EXPERIENCE

(By way of Preface)

(By way of Preface)

Of these sketches that tell of ruined Belgium, I must say that I saw what I have told of. They are not meditations in a library. Because of the great courtesy of the Prime Minister of Belgium, who is the war minister, and through the daily companionship of his son, our little group of helpers were permitted to go where no one else could go, to pass in under shell fire, to see action, to lift the wounded out of the muddy siding where they had fallen. Ten weeks of Red Cross work showed me those faces and torn bodies which I have described. The only details that have been altered for the purpose of story-telling are these: The Doctor who rescued the thirty aged at Dixmude is still alive; Smith did not receive the decoration, but[2] Hilda did; it was a candlestick on the piano of Pervyse that vibrated to shell fire; the spy continues to signal without being caught; "Pervyse," the war-baby, was not adopted by an American financier; motor ambulances were given to the Corps, not to an individual. With these exceptions, the incidents are lifted over from the experience of two English women and my wife in Pervyse, and my own weeks as stretcher-bearer on an ambulance.

[2]

In that deadlock of slaughter where I worked, I saw no pageantry of war, no glitter and pomp, at all. Nothing remains to me 

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