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Updated: June 13, 2025
I knew the three Belgian Sisters would be all right, as they have a good cellar at their house, and I could trust Lady Bagot's staff to look after her. All the same, it was a horrible night, full of anxiety, and there seems little doubt that La Panne will be shelled any day. My one wish is let's all behave well.
The abbé's eyes were desperate but his posture firm. One felt that there would be no surrender. Another picture, and I shall leave La Panne for a time. I was preparing to go. A telephone message to General Melis, of the Belgian Army, had brought his car to take me to Dunkirk. I was about to leave the protection of the Belgian Red Cross and place myself in the care of the ministry of war.
FROM MY JOURNAL: LA PANNE, January 25th, 10 P.M. I am at the Belgian Red Cross hospital to-night. Have had supper and have been given a room on the top floor, facing out over the sea. This is the base hospital for the Belgian lines. The men come here with the most frightful injuries.
The rest of us are at La Panne, a cold seaside place amongst the dunes. In summer-time I fancy it is fashionable, but now it contains nothing but soldiers. They are quartered everywhere, and one never knows how long one will be able to keep a room. The station is at Adinkerke, where I have my kitchen. It is about two miles from La Panne, and it also is crammed with soldiers.
Two incidents stand out with distinctness from those first days in La Panne, when, thrust with amazing rapidity into the midst of war, my mind was a chaos of interest, bewilderment and despair. One is of an old abbé, talking earnestly to a young Belgian noblewoman who had recently escaped from Brussels with only the clothing she wore. The abbé was round of face and benevolent.
Our visit to Furnes had delayed us, so it was well into the evening before we drew up before the hotel in La Panne, where a room had been reserved for me by the Belgian État-Major. A seaside resort in midwinter is always a peculiarly depressing place, and La Panne was no exception.
There is a light railway, the 'Vicinal, which runs along the whole coast, at a short distance from the shore, from Knocke, on the east, to La Panne in the extreme west, and which is connected with the system of State railways at various points.
Near Coxyde, and at the corner where the road from Furnes turns in the direction of La Panne, is a piece of waste ground which travellers on the Vicinal railway pass without notice. But here once stood the famous Abbey of the Dunes.
Here, in six villas facing the sea, live King Albert and Queen Elisabeth and their household, and here the Queen, grief-stricken at the tragedy that has overtaken her innocent and injured people, visits the hospital daily. La Panne has not been bombarded. Hostile aëroplanes are always overhead. The Germans undoubtedly know all about the town; but it has not been touched.
So I was glad to meet him again at La Panne glad and surprised, for he was fifty miles north of where we had met before. But the abbé was changed. He was without the smile, without the cigarette. And he was speaking beseechingly to the smiling young refugee. This is what he was saying: "I am glad, daughter, to help you in every way that I can.
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