EIGHTEEN MONTHS IN THE WAR ZONE
EIGHTEEN MONTHS IN
THE WAR ZONE
THE RECORD OF A WOMAN'S WORK ON
THE WESTERN FRONT
BY
KATE JOHN FINZI
With an Introduction by
Major-General Sir Alfred Turner, K.C.B.
With Sixteen Plates
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1916
Dedicated
To the Memory of those
whom I have lost
FOREWORD
When the great history of this almost untellableWar comes to be told, historians will find themselvesfaced with a collection of evidence so devious,so at variance, that their task will be well-nighstupendous. Whether, when they come to sifttheir data, they will have time to cast more thana passing glance at the great military bases thatsprung up in an allied country, where once an invadingarmy had stood, remains to be seen. Thatthese bases, and in especial the largest and nearestto the firing line, Boulogne, have played a largerôle in the scheme of things cannot be denied.
Yet, of all the many thousands who lived andpassed through Boulogne, there remains not onewho can tell of the gradual development of thatonce insignificant fishing town into one of thegreatest bases in the War Zone.
Surely, therefore, it behoves those of us wholove every inch of her harassing cobblestones; towhom her picturesque squalor is a thing of everlastingjoy; those of us who see in the sun-bathedmasts, half-hidden in grey mists, pictures whose[Pg 10]Turneresqueness vies with Turner; who can claspfisherfolk, peasants and townsmen by the handand be proud to claim them friends—it behoves usto recapture what can never be recaptured again,because there is none left to tell the tale—a pictureof Anglicised Boulogne in war-time.
True, our Boulognese coast is not riddled withfortifications like the approaches to an Englishnaval port, nor are our fields honeycombed withtrenches (though go past Calais, northward, towardsDunkirk, and you shall see what you shall see!).Yet there were days in 1914 when Boulognepromised to play a larger rôle in the history ofEngland than she had ever played before—dayswhen hospitals stood empty and all were preparedto evacuate the town at a moment's notice, inreply to the mayor's already printed mandates—dayswhen, had the enemy but known howefficiently he had pierced the British lines, hemight have realised his dream of devastating ourisland home and sweeping the coast with hislong-range guns from Calais to Boulogne.
Those days will nev