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Updated: June 1, 2025
Pervyse was of course entirely deserted by its inhabitants, but it could scarcely be called dull. We went out one afternoon to see what was going on, and found a party of the Corps at lunch.
We commandeered it. Winter came. The soldiers needed a dressing station somewhere along the front from Nieuport to Dixmude. Mrs. Knocker established one thirty yards behind the front line of trenches at Pervyse. Miss Chisholm and I joined her. In its cellar we found a rough bedstead of two pieces of unplaned lumber, with clean straw for a mattress, awaiting us.
At night they retired to the cellar, as the house itself was far too dangerous. The Germans shelled Pervyse almost every night, and sometimes in the day as well, and this particular house was the most exposed of any in the town. But shells were not the only trouble, and when a few weeks later the cellars were filled with water, it was evident that other quarters must be found.
The town of Furnes, in Belgium, into which I came when dusk crept into its streets and squares, was the headquarters of King Albert and his staff, and its people could hear all day long the roll of guns a few kilometres away, where the remnant of their army held the line of the Yser canal and the trenches which barred the roads to Dixmude, Pervyse and other little towns and villages on the last free patch of Belgian soil.
So we lived that day in the front bedroom. If they shelled from Ramscappelle, the back kitchen became the better room, for we had a house in between. We were so near their guns, that we could plot the arc of flight. Pervyse seemed to visitors full of death, simply because it received a daily dose of shell-fire, like a little child sitting up and gulping its medicine.
At the end of the long avenue by which one approaches the village, Pervyse church stands, like a sentinel with both eyes shot out. Nothing is left but a blind stare. Hardly any of the church remains, and the churchyard is as if some devil had stalked through it, tearing up crosses and kicking down graves. Even the dead are not left undisturbed in this awful war. To Mrs. Charles Percival.
And the helpers of the army have shown good heart. Breaking the silence of Rome, the splendid priesthood of Belgium, from the cardinal to the humblest curé, has played the man. On the front line near Pervyse, where my wife lived for three months, a soldier-monk has remained through the daily shell-fire to take artillery observations and to comfort the fighting men.
Knocker and two women helpers, one Scotch and one American, fitted up a miniature hospital in the cellar of a house in ruined Pervyse. They were within three minutes of the trenches. Here, as soon as the soldiers were wounded, they could be brought for immediate treatment. A young private had received a severe lip wound. Unskilful army medical handling had left it gangrened, and it had swollen.
He was giving me a loophole and I responded with fervour, "Yes, yes, assuredly it is 'Arras' with the English," and he waved us past. I thought regretfully how easily a German spy might bluff the sentry in a similar manner. Time being precious I salved my conscience about it as we drew up in Pervyse and decided to make tea.
"The same thing happened at Pervyse when an ammunition train went through. They had the place, and what is more they had the time. Of course there are the airmen." "It did not leave the main road until too late for observation from the air," Henri put in shortly. "Yet any one who saw it waiting at the crossroads might have learned its destination. The drivers talk sometimes."
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