The Record of a Woman's Work on the Western Front.
"When the great history of this almost untellable War comes to be told, historians will find themselves faced with a collection of evidence so devious, so at variance, that their task will be well-nigh stupendous. Whether, when they come to sift their data, they will have time to cast more than a passing glance at the great military bases that sprung up in an allied country, where once an invading army had stood, remains to be seen. That these bases, and in especial the largest and nearest to the firing line, Boulogne, have played a large rôle in the scheme of things cannot be denied.
Yet, of all the many thousands who lived and passed through Boulogne, there remains not one who can tell of the gradual development of that once insignificant fishing town into one of the greatest bases in the War Zone.
Surely, therefore, it behoves those of us who love every inch of her harassing cobblestones; to whom her picturesque squalor is a thing of everlasting joy; those of us who see in the sun-bathed masts, half-hidden in grey mists, pictures whose[Pg 10] Turneresqueness vies with Turner; who can clasp fisherfolk, peasants and townsmen by the hand and be proud to claim them friends—it behoves us to recapture what can never be recaptured again, because there is none left to tell the tale—a picture of Anglicised Boulogne in war-time.
True, our Boulognese coast is not riddled with fortifications like the approaches to an English naval port, nor are our fields honeycombed with trenches (though go past Calais, northward, towards Dunkirk, and you shall see what you shall see!). Yet there were days in 1914 when Boulogne promised to play a larger rôle in the history of England than she had ever played before—days when hospitals stood empty and all were prepared to evacuate the town at a moment's notice, in reply to the mayor's already printed mandates—days when, had the enemy but known how efficiently he had pierced the British lines, he might have realised his dream of devastating our island home and sweeping the coast with his long-range guns from Calais to Boulogne.
Those days will never return. Between us at the base and our enemies are a myriad valiant lives and countless guns of every size and device, a force, in fact, which no German strategy in the[Pg 11] world, scrupulous or unscrupulous, can overcome; and still the little temporary British city grows and grows, a city of tents and red crosses and corrugated iron huts; and still stalwart British forms, marching along the winding white roads, cast longing glances at the dim coast of distant Albion.
But it is not for those who heard the call in the later months so much as in memory of those early heroes of Mons, who knew the bitterness of a valiant retreat, the horror of forced marches along parched roads, with only the prod of the next man's bayonet to keep him awake, and only a flap cut from the tail of his shirt between the pitiless sun and the dreaded delirium that would leave him a prey to the Huns' barbarities; in memory of these it is that I take up the pen to run the gauntlet of a thousand critical eyes on a way fraught with difficulties.
My acknowledgments are due to Mr. A. M. James for permission to use his photograph of the cemetery, and to my brother Edgar, whose patience in putting together what is of necessity a piecy document has made the publication of this diary possible."
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Amicalement
Armand
's first experience with 1:4800 scale naval models.
