The Second Bombardment Of Termonde
September 15th was our day with Henry Verhagen, the tall gray
alderman of the town that was once Termonde.
During all the time I was with him Verhagen did not speak a bitter
word. On the contrary, he was calm--particularly calm as he stood
beside the mound where the Belgian soldiers were buried in the
center of the ruined town, pointed to the pile of bricks where he had
lived, and told us how in two nights he had lost 340,000 francs, his
son, his factory, and his home. It was from him, from the
burgomaster's wife, and from a priest that we learned the story of the
city that had ceased to be.
It was the night before that I had wandered into Ghent alone, without
even the excitement of getting arrested. Luther, who became restive
early the next morning while I was jotting notes in the log-book, went
off in search of adventure. Because of the influence exerted by Vice-
Consul Van Hee an arrangement was very soon made whereby a Belgian
Government car and chauffeur were placed at our disposal. We had no
laissez-passer for the firing line; but we were accompanied by the
United States Consul and not governed by any stipulation as to our
destination. In our Belgian car, decorated with all the American flags
we could find, and "American Consular Service" pasted in huge letters on
the windshield and side flaps, we raced along the Boulevard de
l'lndustrie, swung into the southern suburbs, and, once outside the city
limits, we opened up the exhaust and threw down the throttle as Van Hee
shouted out the order:--"To Termonde!"
Termonde was at that time the scene of determined fighting between
units of the ninth German Corps and the Belgian defenders. Situated
as it is, twenty-one miles southeast of Ghent, it marks the southwest
corner of a square formed by Louvain and Termonde on the south,
by Ghent and Antwerp on the north. It controlled the bridge over the
River Scheldt and with it an important approach to Antwerp, the
capital at that time of Belgium. The heavy German siege guns,
capable of demolishing a first-class fort at a range of several miles,
could not have crossed the river so easily at any other point. For this
reason the Germans particularly wanted Termonde--an open bridge
to Antwerp was always worth the taking. The town had already at that
time been captured and recaptured; wounded and refugees were
swarming into Ghent full of battle stories and tales of terrible
atrocities. So it was Termonde that we vowed we would see.
We first saw Verhagen trudging in the same direction as ourselves on
the level, dusty road two miles southwest of Ghent. As we
approached a cross-road marked by a tavern, a couple of
direction-posts, and nondescript stucco buildings, we made out two
Belgian sentries, with their rifles lifted overhead and indulging in
some acrobatic exercises which we interpreted as a signal to halt. Van
Hee swapped cigarettes with them and gossiped in their native tongue, in
return for which they gave us some good advice. They warned us to pay
no attention to sign-posts, which, in order to fool the enemy, were
either marked with false names or else were pointed in the wrong
direction. While we were talking, a tall gray alderman came along the
road with a greasy package under his arm and at his side a priest--one
of those ubiquitous black-robed figures with a hat like an inverted
oatmeal bowl.
"Where to?" asked the Vice-Consul of Ghent.
"A Dendermonde," (to Termonde), answered Verhagen, sizing us up
as strangers, and using French instead of the local Flemish dialect.
"You know the road?"
"Yes, well," said Verhagen; and so, partly because of charity and
partly because we could have him as a useful guide, we took him into
the car.
As we sped through the level lanes of poplars, challenged as usual
by every Belgian regular or Garde Civique who could boast a uniform,
the smooth green meadows of Flanders with their trim hamlets of
stucco and tile seemed to deny the reports of savagery we had heard
the night before. We had been told, and we had read, of German
atrocities, and we had talked with survivors of Louvain. There was
pillage, burning, and looting in Louvain, we had agreed, but the
cruelty to women and children was the better part myth. And at all
events, there was a semblance of cause for that. Perhaps there had
been more resistance, more sniping by citizens than generally known,
and perhaps the German side had not been fully explained.
Then suddenly Termonde lay before us. The center of the bridge was
gone. Splintered timber sticking on end lay in the mud at the river's
side, along with iron beams torn by the charges of dynamite. The
current was choked with masses of steel and wood. We crawled
across some temporary beams reconstructed by Belgian engineers,
and entered the ruins with a handful of Termonde's citizens who had
come back for the first time to see what was left of their homes.
"I will take you to the center," said Verhagen. "That is where my
house was."
A quarter of a mile behind us, as the alderman sat upon a rock
beside the gravestone, lay the thin neck of the Upper Scheldt, less
than one hundred yards wide at this point, where it curved between
the lines of charred and flattened buildings. We could still see the
rush of water tumbling and splashing through the wreckage of the
bridge we had just crossed. Twice it had been dynamited and twice
rebuilt in part, so that at present a single line of slippery beams,
suspended a few feet above the water and supported by some heavy
wire, was all that remained between ourselves and the retreating road
to Ghent. From the direction of Alost came the desultory boom of
German guns; across the stream behind us the Belgian outposts
whiled away the time with cigarettes and cards. Shaggy horses dozed
against the gun trucks, and the men of artillery, some stretched at full
length in the sun, others sitting bolt upright with arms folded, slept
soundly on the gun carriages. We could hear the stream gurgling. We
could hear the creak of a lazy windmill, and, coming somewhere from
the smoking piles, the hideous howl of starving hounds. Of other
human sounds there were none except the voice of Verhagen.
Ten days before Termonde had been a thriving town; that day it was
a heap of smouldering ashes. America had heard a good deal about
Tirlemont and Louvain, but not much of Termonde. Because this was
a war of millions, it did not count in the news--for it was only a
community of twelve thousand inhabitants, as pretty and quaint as
the province of Flanders boasts, the prosperous center of its rope
and cordage manufacture, with fifteen hundred houses, barracks, two
statues, a town-hall, five churches, an orphan asylum, and a convent.
Now only one of the churches stood, as well as the building where the
officers were quartered, the Museum of Antiquity, and perhaps a
dozen others. Across the moat, which led to the gateway of what
were formerly the inner fortifications, were piles of rotting horseflesh.
The bronze statue of De Smet, the Jesuit missionary, looked calmly
on the scene. All the rest was blotted out. There was no sign of
hot-tempered impetuous work of a handful of drunken Uhlans, a fire
started in anger and driven by the wind throughout the entire town.
There was not a breath of wind. That the night was calm was shown
by the fact that here and there single houses, even houses built of
boards, were spared at the commander's word. The convent was
burnt and pillaged, stones and mortar littered the street in front of the
Hotel de Ville, and upon the sidewalk lay the famous bells which
came crashing to the street below when shells burst in the belfry.
From cellar to garret nearly every remaining house was
systematically drenched with naphtha and the torch applied, and
when all was over hundreds of gallons were tossed into the River
Scheldt. Over a small group of houses in the poorer section of the
city, where the prostitutes were quartered, grim Prussian humor, or
perhaps a sense of value received, had prompted the conquerors to
write in great white chalk marks in German script, "Gute Leute. Nicht
brennen!" (Good people. Do not burn!)
For an hour we walked through the silence of ashes and stone,
stumbling over timber and debris, tangled and twisted wire, a fallen
statue, broken bells or the cross-piece of a spire; we made our way
through piles of beds, chairs, singed mattresses, and stepped over
the carcass of a horse with its belly bloated and flies feasting on its
glassy eyes. We entered an apothecary shop where the clock still
ticked upon the counter. Thinking there could be no reason of war to
call for the destruction of the orphan asylum, we entered its portals to
investigate. Before us lay burnt beds and littered glass. We searched
what ten days before had been a convent, and crawled over heaps of
logs and brick into narrow alleys that reminded one of Naples or
Pompeii--alleys where the walls stood so close as to hide the light
of sun but not the odor of charred vats and sewage and smouldering,
smelling things, long dead. Not far from there the way widened into
the light, and before us, breaking the rays of sunset, stood the cross
above a heap of cobblestones.
"They are buried here," said Verhagen, "and here too is my house."
Another alderman, a friend of Verhagen, who had been allowed to remain
in Termonde most of the four days that the Germans stayed, had the story
detailed in his little pocket diary. On Thursday, September 3, he said,
he was just leaving his rope and twine factory when he heard the sounds
of musketry to the south. A small force of Belgian outposts were
completely surprised by a part of the Ninth German Army Corps under
General von Boehn. They were completely outclassed. Before retreating,
however, they let the enemy have a couple of volleys. In the return
fire they lost six of their men. They then retreated into the town and
across the bridge.
Nothing happened after dark, but the next morning at nine o'clock the
cannonading started. Inside of half an hour, according to the villagers,
the entire German force of the One Hundred and Sixty-second and
One Hundred and Sixty-third Uhlans and the Ninetieth Regiment of
infantry of the Ninth Army Corps were in the town. They entered
simultaneously by three different roads. The burgomaster was
ordered immediately to provide rations for the regiment. But the
burgomaster was away. He was given twelve hours to return. When
he did not return, the burning began, according to the townspeople.
"The soldiers did not wish to burn the town," said one man; "but the
orders were orders of war." He recounted that four Uhlans entered
his house with a bow, and a knock at the door, politely helped
themselves to his cellar, drank a toast to his wife, put his chairs in the
street, and sat there playing his phonograph. They said they were
sorry, but the house must be burnt. But before pouring on the
naphtha and lighting the flame they freed his canary bird. Verhagen
and the priest agreed that fright brought on an attack to a woman
about to become a mother, and that she fell in the Rue de l'Eglise.
A German lieutenant saw the trouble, put her on a stretcher made of
window shutters, and called the German army doctor. She was sent
to a field hospital and tenderly cared for until she and the child could
be moved. Such incidents in strange relief, told by men who had lost
everything, lent corroboration, if such were necessary, to the burden
of their story of the relentless destruction of the town itself.
Our little band was the first to enter the ruins of Termonde after its
abandonment by the Ninth German Army Corps. And by a coincidence, we
were the last to leave. That very evening, at precisely the time we
were crawling across the broken timbers that spanned the Scheldt and
connected us with Belgium-owned Belgium, the Germans again pumped heavy
artillery fire into the town. This was later known as the second German
bombardment and occupation of Termonde. Because of superior artillery
range, the attack had the cruel advantage of the man who can strike and
still stay out of reach. On that evening at six-thirty, the Teutons
sent a few warning shells into the debris, and then the first column of
scouts entered simultaneously by the two southern gates. It was just at
six-thirty that our party started back for Ghent.
As we crawled across on all fours the remaining beams cracked
beneath our feet and the Belgian engineers called on us to hurry.
"Oh, Tiber! Father Tiber," we thought as the last of us got across;
but unlike Horatius at the bridge, we were on the right side when
engineers applied the match to a small charge of dynamite, and the
beams crashed and the remaining planks of Termonde's bridge
writhed and twisted in the rushing waters.
Twenty-seven miles away, when we whirled through the gates of
Ghent later in the evening, we said "Au revoir" to Verhagen and the
mendicant priest, and went to our rooms. At midnight came a rap at
the door; my gray-haired alderman broke into the room, bursting with
the latest news, his eyes aflame with excitement.
"Revanche!" he exclaimed dramatically; "our enemies have paid for it
in blood!"
Sure enough, after a few preliminary shells--a sort of here-we-come
salvo--the head of the German column had entered, and a party of
staff officers, for purposes of reconnaissance, immediately mounted
the spire of the only remaining church. The officers of the Ninth
German Army Corps swept the landscape with their glasses, but the
level plains gave nothing to their sight. They saw only the ashes of
Termonde, the river, and the straight stretch of sandy roads and
stucco hamlets beyond.
They did not notice a valley of covered ground and a quarter-mile
stretch of trees and shrubbery, where three squads of Belgian field
artillery were neatly hidden. Here the men took cover at the first
sound of cannonade. Quietly in their retreat the Belgian artillery
officers had figured the range and elevation of the cathedral tower,
not over fifteen hundred yards away. Just as darkness was setting in
and the figures in the belfry were clearly visible, the battery sergeant
sharply dropped his arm.
"C-r-r-m-p-h!" coughed the field pieces as the gunners drew the
levers home. There were four sharp reports, four flashes of flame and
smoke, the crescendo moan of tons of flying steel--and the church
tower, the bells, and the German officers came crashing to the
ground.