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Updated: June 1, 2025
I was conscious of great physical discomfort which reacted upon my brain. The noises were even more distressing to me than the risk of death. It was terrifying in its tumult. The German batteries were hard at work round Nieuport, Dixmude, Pervyse, and other towns and villages, forming a crescent, with its left curve sweeping away from the coast.
Once, creeping into a farm, which was islanded by water, "Jane Pervyse," our homeless dog, led us up to the wrecked bedroom. A bonnet and best dress were in the cupboard. A soldier put on the bonnet and grimaced. Always after that, in passing the house, "Jane Pervyse" trembled and whined as if it had been her home till the destruction came. In our house, we cleaned vegetables.
The party aboard the Arabella quickly assembled on deck, where little Maurie was found leaning over the rail. "They're at it," he remarked, wagging his head. "The Germans are at Nieuport, now, and some of them are over against Pervyse. I hear sounds from Dixmude, too; the rattle of machine guns. It will be a grand battle, this! I wonder if our Albert is there." "Who is he?" asked Patsy.
One excursion she had been permitted at the time I saw her, to the great anxiety of those who knew of the trip. She was quite fearless, and went into one of the trenches at the railroad embankment of Pervyse. I saw that trench afterward. It was proudly decorated with a sign that said: Repose de la Reine. And above the board was the plaster head of a saint, from one of the churches.
We were in Ypres on November first, the day after the most terrible battle in history, when fifty thousand English out of a hundred and twenty thousand fell. For three months my wife lived in Pervyse, with two British women. Not one house in the town itself is left untouched by shell-fire. The women lived in a cellar for the first weeks.
Courage is as infectious as fear, and I think that the soldiers, watching through the night in the trenches near by, must have blessed the women who were waiting there to help them, and must have felt braver men for their presence. Pervyse was protected by a wide screen of flood, and across this there was one way only a slightly raised road going straight across six miles of water.
Dixmude, quiet in its ruins, trembled again, and crumbled a little more, under the vibration of the enemy's shells, firing at long range towards the Franco-Belgian troops. Here and there, near Pervyse and Ramscapelle, guns, not yet located, fired "pot shots" on the chance of killing something soldiers or civilians, or the wounded on their stretchers.
I had a wholesome delight in a modest clean blouse and in buying a new frock. I returned to Pervyse. The Germans changed their range: an evening, a morning and an afternoon three separate bombardments with heavy shells. The wounded were brought in. Nearly every one died. We piled them together, anywhere that they wouldn't be tripped over. To the back kitchen we carried the bodies of two boys.
They gave the same care to German wounded as to Belgian, French and English wounded, and that though they knew they would not receive mercy if the enemy came across the fields and stormed the trenches. A couple of machine guns placed on the trench at Pervyse could have raked the ruined village and killed our three nurses.
On the morning of January 25, 1915, a demonstration along the front from Festubert to Vermelles and as far north as Ypres and Pervyse was inaugurated. The Germans began to shell Bethune, which was within the allied lines about eight or nine miles west of La Bassée.
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