honest physical death through the agony of the bayonet and the flame
than that they should go on bartering away their nationality by
piece-meal. Who knows but Albert saw in his silent heart that the only
thing to weld his people together, honeycombed as they were, was the
shedding of blood? Perhaps nothing short of a supreme sacrifice,
amounting to a martyrdom, could restore a people so tangled in German
intrigue, so netted into an ever-encroaching system of commerce,
carrying with it a habit of thought and a mouthful of guttural phrases.
Let no one underestimate that power of language. If the idiom has passed
into one, it has brought with it molds of thought, leanings of sympathy.
Who that can even stumble through the "_Marchons! Marchons_!" of the
"Marseillaise" but is a sharer for a moment in the rush of glory that
every now and again has made France the light of the world? So, when the
German phrase rings out, "Was wir haben bleibt Deutsch"--"What we are
now holding by force of arms shall remain forever German"--there is an
answering thrill in the heart of every Antwerp clerk who for years has
been leaking Belgian government gossip into German ears in return for a
piece of money. Secret sin was eating away Belgium's vitality--the sin
of being bought by German money, bought in little ways, for small bits
of service, amiable passages destroying nationality. By one act of full
sacrifice Albert has cleared his people from a poison that might have
sapped them in a few more years without the firing of one gun.
That sacrifice to which they are called is an utter one, of which they
have experienced only the prelude. I have seen this growing sadness of
Belgium almost from the beginning. I have seen thirty thousand refugees,
the inhabitants of Alost, come shuffling down the road past me. They
came by families, the father with a bag of clothes and bread, the mother
with a baby in arms, and one, two, or three children trotting along.
Aged women were walking, Sisters of Charity, religious brothers. A
cartful of stricken old women lay patiently at full length while the
wagon bumped on. They were so nearly drowned by suffering that one more
wave made little difference. All that was sad and helpless was dragged
that morning into the daylight. All that had been decently cared for in
quiet rooms was of a sudden tumbled out upon the pavement and jolted
along in farm-wagons past sixteen miles of curious eyes. But even with
the sick and the very old there was no lamentation. In this procession
of the dispossessed that passed us on the country road there was no one
crying, no one angry.
I have seen 5000 of these refugees at night in the Halle des Fêtes of
Ghent, huddled in the straw, their faces bleached white under the glare
of the huge municipal lights. On the wall, I read the names of the
children whose parents had been lost, and the names of the parents who
reported a lost baby, a boy, a girl, and sometimes all the children
lost.
A little later came the time when the people learned their last
stronghold was tottering. I remember sitting at dinner in the home of
Monsieur Caron, a citizen of Ghent. I had spent that day in Antwerp, and
the soldiers had told me of the destruction of the outer rim of forts.
So I began to say to the dinner guests that the city was doomed. As I
spoke, I glanced at Madame Caron. Her eyes filled with tears. I turned
to another Belgian lady, and had to look away. Not a sound came from
them.
[Illustration: BELGIAN OFFICER ON THE LAST STRIP OF HIS COUNTRY.]
When the handful of British were sent to the rescue of Antwerp, we went
up the road with them. There was joy on the Antwerp road that day.
Little cottages fluttered flags at lintel and window. The sidewalks were
thronged with peasants, who believed they were now to be saved. We rode
in glory from Ghent to the outer works of Antwerp. Each village on all
the line turned out its full population to cheer us ecstatically. A
bitter month had passed, and now salvation had come. It is seldom in a
lifetime one is present at a perfect piece of irony like that of those
shouting Flemish peasants.
As Antwerp was falling, a letter was given to me by a friend. It was
written by Aloysius Coen of the artillery, Fort St. Catherine Wavre,
Antwerp. He died in the bombardment, thirty-four years old. He wrote:
Dear wife and children:
At the moment that I am writing you this the enemy is before us,
and the moment has come for us to do our duty for our country. When
you will have received this I shall have changed the temporary life
for the eternal life. As I loved you all dearly, my last breath
will be directed toward you and my darling children, and with a
last smile as a farewell from my beloved family am I undertaking
the eternal journey.
I hope, whatever may be your later call, you will take good care of
my dear children, and always keep them in mind of the straight
road, always ask them to pray for their father, who in sadness,
though doing his duty for his country, has had to leave them so
young.
Say good-by for me to my dear brothers and sisters, from whom I
also carry with me a great love.
Farewell, dear wife, children, and family.
Your always remaining husband, father, and brother.
ALOYS.
Then Antwerp fell, and a people that had for the first time in memory
found itself an indivisible and self-conscious state broke into sullen
flight, and its merry, friendly army came heavy-footed down the road to
another country. Grieved and embittered, they served under new leaders
of another race. Those tired soldiers were like spirited children who
had been playing an exciting game which they thought would be applauded.
And suddenly the best turned out the worst.
Sing, Belgians, sing, though our wounds are bleeding.
writes the poet of Flanders; but the song is no earthly song. It is the
voice of a lost cause that cries out of the trampled dust as it
prepares to make its flight beyond the place of betrayal.
For the Belgian soldiers no longer sang, or made merry in the evening. A
young Brussels corporal in our party suddenly broke into sobbing when he
heard the chorus of "Tipperary" float over the channel from a transport
of untried British lads. The Belgians are a race of children whose
feelings have been hurt. The pathos of the Belgian army is like the
pathos of an orphan-asylum: it is unconscious.
They are very lonely, the loneliest men I have known. Back of the
fighting Frenchman, you sense the gardens and fields of France, the
strong, victorious national will. In a year, in two years, having made
his peace with honor, he will return to a happiness richer than any that
France has known in fifty years. And the Englishman carries with him to
the stresses of the first line an unbroken calm which he has inherited
from a thousand years of his island peace. His little moment of pain and
death cannot trouble that consciousness of the eternal process in which
his people have been permitted to play a continuing part. For him the
present turmoil is only a ripple on the vast sea of his racial history.
Behind the Tommy is his Devonshire village, still secure. His mother and
his wife are waiting for him, unmolested, as when he left them. But the
Belgian, schooled in horror, faces a fuller horror yet when the guns of
his friends are put on his bell-towers and birthplace, held by the
invaders.
"My father and mother are inside the enemy lines," said a Belgian
officer to me as we were talking of the final victory. That is the
ever-present thought of an army of boys whose parents are living in
doomed houses back of German trenches. It is louder than the near guns,
the noise of the guns to come that will tear at Bruges and level the
Tower of St. Nicholas. That is what the future holds for the Belgian. He
is only at the beginning of his loss. The victory of his cause is the
death of his people. It is a sacrifice almost without a parallel.
[Illustration: A BELGIAN BOY SOLDIER IN THE UNIFORM OF THE FIRST ARMY
WHICH SERVED AT LIEGE AND NAMUR.
In the summer of 1915 this costume was exchanged for khaki (see page
148). The present Belgian Army is largely made up of boys like this.]
And now a famous newspaper correspondent has returned to us from his
motor trips to the front and his conversations with officers to tell us
that he does not highly regard the fighting qualities of the
Belgians. I think that statement is not the full truth, and I do not
think it will be the estimate of history on the resistance of the
Belgians. If the resistance had been regarded by the Germans as
half-hearted, I do not believe their reprisals on villages and towns and
on the civilian population would have been so bitter. The burning and
the murder that I saw them commit throughout the month of September,
1914, was the answer to a resistance unexpectedly firm and telling. At a
skirmish in September, when fifteen hundred Belgians stood off three
thousand Germans for several hours, I counted more dead Germans than
dead Belgians. The German officer in whose hands we were as captives
asked us with great particularity as to how many Belgians he had killed
and wounded. While he was talking with us, his stretcher-bearers were
moving up and down the road for his own casualties. At Alost the street
fighting by Belgian troops behind fish-barrels, with sods of earth for
barricade, was so stubborn that the Germans felt it to be necessary to
mutilate civilian men, women, and children with the bayonet to express
in terms at all adequate their resentment. I am of course speaking of
what I know. Around Termonde, three times in September, the fighting of
Belgians was vigorous enough to induce the Germans on entering the town
to burn more than eleven hundred homes, house by house. If the Germans
throughout their army had not possessed a high opinion of Belgian
bravery and power of retardation, I doubt if they would have released so
widespread and unique a savagery.
At Termonde, Alost, Balière, and a dozen other points in the Ghent
sector, and, later, at Dixmude, Ramscappelle, Pervyse, Caeskerke, and
the rest of the line of the Yser, my sight of Belgians has been that of
troops as gallant as any. The cowards have been occasional, the brave
men many. I still have flashes of them as when I knew them. I saw a
Belgian officer ride across a field within rifle range of the enemy to
point out to us a market-cart in which lay three wounded. On his horse,
he was a high figure, well silhouetted. Another day, I met a Belgian
sergeant, with a tousled red head of hair, and with three medals for
valor on his left breast. He kept going out into the middle of the road
during the times when Germans were reported approaching, keeping his men
under cover. If there was risk to be taken, he wanted first chance. My
friend Dr. van der Ghinst, of Cabour Hospital, captain in the Belgian
army, remained three days in Dixmude under steady bombardment, caring
unaided for his wounded in the Hospital of St. Jean, just at the Yser,
and finally brought out thirty old men and women who had been frightened
into helplessness by the flames and noise. Because he was needed in that
direction, I saw him continue his walk past the point where fifty feet
ahead of him a shell had just exploded. I watched him walk erect where
even the renowned fighting men of an allied race were stooping and
hiding, because he held his life as nothing when there were wounded to
be rescued. I saw Lieutenant Robert de Broqueville, son of the prime
minister of Belgium, go into Dixmude on the afternoon when the town was
leveled by German guns. He remained there under one of the heaviest
bombardments of the war for three hours, picking up the wounded who lay
on curbs and in cellars and under debris. The troops had been ordered
to evacuate the town, and it was a lonely job that this youngster of
twenty-seven years carried on through that day.
I have seen the Belgians every day for several months. I have seen
several skirmishes and battles and many days of shell-fire, and the
impression of watching many thousand Belgians in action is that of
excellent fighting qualities, starred with bits of sheer daring as
astonishing as that of the other races. With no country left to fight
for, homes either in ruin or soon to be shelled, relatives under an
alien rule, the home Government on a foreign soil, still this second
army, the first having been killed, fights on in good spirit. Every
morning of the summer I have passed boys between eighteen and
twenty-five, clad in fresh khaki, as they go riding down the poplar lane
from La Panne to the trenches, the first twenty with bright silver
bugles, their cheeks puffed and red with the blowing. Twelve months of
wounds and wastage, wet trenches and tinned food, and still they go out
with hope.
[Illustration: BELGIANS IN THEIR NEW KHAKI UNIFORM. IN PRAISE OF WHICH
THEY WROTE A SONG.
Albert's son, the Crown Prince Leopold, has been a common soldier in
this regiment.]
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. Just before leaving Flanders, I called on the sisters in
the convent school of Furnes. They were still cheery and busy in their
care of sick and wounded civilians. Every few days the Germans shell the
town from seven miles away, but the sisters will continue there through
the coming months as through the last year. The spirit of the best of
the race is spoken in what King Albert said recently in an unpublished
conversation to the gentlemen of the English mission:
"The English will cease fighting before the Belgians. If there is talk
of yielding, it will come from the English, not from us."
That was a playful way of saying that there will be no yielding by any
of the Western Allies. The truth is still as true as it was at Liège
that the Belgians held up the enemy till France was ready to receive
them. And the price Belgium paid for that resistance was the massacre
of women and children and the house-to-house burning of homes.
Since rendering that service for all time to France and England, through
twenty months of such a life as exiles know, the Belgians have fought on
doggedly, recovering from the misery of the Antwerp retreat, and showing
a resilience of spirit equaled only by the Fusiliers Marins of France.
One afternoon in late June my friend Robert Toms was sitting on the
beach at La Panne, watching the soldiers swimming in the channel.
Suddenly he called to me, and aimed his camera. There on the sand in the
sunlight the Belgian army was changing its clothes. The faithful suits
of blue, rained on and trench-worn, were being tossed into great heaps
on the beach and brand-new yellow khaki, clothes and cap, was buckled
on. It was a transformation. We had learned to know that army, and their
uniform had grown familiar and pleasant to us. The dirt, ground in till
it became part of the texture; the worn cloth, shapeless, but yet molded
to the man by long association--all was an expression of the stocky
little soldier inside. The new khaki hung slack. Caps were overlarge for
Flemish heads. To us, watching the change, it was the loss of the last
possession that connected them with their past; with homes and country
gone, now the very clothing that had covered them through famous fights
was shuffled off. It was as if the Belgian army had been swallowed up in
the sea at our feet, like Pharaoh's phalanx, and up from the beach to
the barracks scuffled an imitation English corps.
We went about miserable for a few days. But not they. They spattered
their limp, ill-fitting garments with jest, and soon they had produced a
poem in praise of the change. These are the verses which a Belgian
soldier, clad in his fresh yellow, sang to us as we grouped around him
on a sand dune:
EN KHAKI
I
Depuis onze mois que nous sommes partis en guerre,
A tous les militaires,
On a décidé de plaire.
Aussi depuis ce temps là, à l'intendance c'est dit,
De nous mettr' tous en khaki.
Maint'nant voilà l'beau temps qui vient d' paraître
Aussi répètons tous le coeur en fête.
REFRAIN
Regardez nos p'tits soldats,
Ils ont l'air d'être un peu là,
Habilles
D'la tête jusqu'aux pieds
En khaki, en khaki,
Ils sont contents de servir,
Mais non pas de mourir,
Et cela c'est parce qu' on leur a mis,
En quelque sorte, la t'nue khaki.
II
Maintenant sur toutes les grand's routes vous pouvez voir
Parcourant les trottoirs
Du matin jusqu'au soir
Les défenseurs Belges, portant tous la même tenue
Depuis que l'ancienne a disparue,
Aussi quand on voit I'9e défiler
C' n'est plus régiment des panachés.
Même Refrain.
III
Nous sommes tous heureux d'avoir le costume des Anglais
Seul'ment ce qu'il fallait,
Pour que ça soit complet.
Et je suis certain si l'armée veut nous mettre à l'aise
C'est d'nous donner la solde Anglaise.
Le jour qu'nous aurions ça, ah! quell' affaire
Nous n' serions plus jamais dans la misère.
REFRAIN
Vous les verriez nos p'tits soldats,
J'vous assure qu'ils seraient un peu là,
Habilles,
D'la tête jusqu'aux pieds,
En khaki, en khaki,
Ils seraient fiers de repartir,
Pour le front avec plaisir,
Si les quatre poches étaient bien games
De billets bleus couleur khaki.
FLIES: A FANTASY
Outside the window stretched the village street, flat, with bits of dust
and dung rising on the breaths of wind and volleying into rooms upon the
tablecloth and into pages of books. It was a street of small yellow
brick houses, a shapeless church, a convent school--freckled buildings,
dingy. Up and down the length of it, it was without one touch of beauty.
It gave back dust in the eyes. It sounded with thunder of transports,
rattle of wagons, soft whirr of officers' speed cars, yelp of motor
horns, and the tap-tap of wooden shoes on tiny peasants, boys and girls.
A little sick black dog slunk down the pavement, smelling and staring. A
cart bumped over the cobbles, the horse with a great tumor in its
stomach, the stomach as if blown out on the left side, and the tumor
with a rag upon it where it touched the harness.
Inside the window, a square room with a litter of six-penny novels in a
corner, fifty or sixty books flung haphazard, some of them open with the
leaves crushed back by the books above. In another corner, a heap of
commissariat stuff, tins of bully beef, rabbit, sardines, herring, and
glasses of jam, and marmalade. On the center table, a large jug of
marmalade, ants busy in the yellow trickle at the rim. Filth had worked
its way into the red table-cover. Filth was on every object in the room,
like a soft mist, blurring the color and outlines of things. In the
corners, under books and tins, insects moved, long, thin, crawling. A
hot noon sun came dimly through the dirty glass of the closed window,
and slowly baked a sleeping man in the large plush armchair. Around the
chair, as if it were a promontory in a heaving sea, were billows of
stale crumpled newspapers, some wadded into a ball, others torn across
the page, all flung aside in _ennui_.
The face of the man was weary and weak. It showed all of his forty-one
years, and revealed, too, a great emptiness. Flies kept rising and
settling again on the hands, the face, and the head of the man--moist
flies whose feet felt damp on the skin. They were slow and languid flies
which wanted to settle and stay. It was his breathing that made them
restless, but not enough to clear them away, only enough to make a low
buzzing in the sultry room. Across the top of his head a bald streak ran
from the forehead, and it was here they returned to alight, after each
twitching and heave of the sunken body.
In the early months he had fought a losing fight with them. The walls
and ceiling and panes of glass were spotted with the marks of his long
battle. But his foes had advanced in ever-fresh force, clouds and swarms
of them beyond number. He had gone to meet them with a wire-killer, and
tightly rolled newspapers. He had imported fly paper from Dunkirk. But
they could afford to sacrifice the few hundreds, which his strokes could
reach, and still overwhelm him. Lately, he had given up the struggle,
and let them take possession of the room. They harassed him when he
read, so he gave up reading. They got into the food, so he ate less.
Between his two trips to the front daily at 8 A.M. and 2
P.M., he slept. He found he could lose himself in sleep. Into
that kingdom of sleep, they could not enter. As the weeks rolled on, he
was able to let himself down more and more easily into silence. That
became his life. A slothfulness, a languor, even when awake, a
half-conscious forcing of himself through the routine work, a looking
forward to the droning room, and then the settling deep into the old
plush chair, and the blessed unconsciousness.
He drove a Red Cross ambulance to the French lines at Nieuport,
collected the sick and wounded soldiers and brought them to the Poste de
Secours, two miles back of the trenches. He lived a hundred feet from
the Poste, always within call. But the emergency call rarely came. There
were only the set runs, for the war had settled to its own regularity. A
wonderful idleness hung over the lines, where millions of men were
unemployed, waiting with strange patience for some unseen event. Only
the year before, these men were chatting in cafés, and busy in a
thousand ways. Now, the long hours of the day were lived without
activity in thoughtless routine. Under the routine there was always the
sense of waiting for a sudden crash and horror.
The man was an English gentleman. It was his own car he had brought,
paid for by him, and he had offered his car and services to the
Fusiliers Marins. They had been glad of his help, and for twelve months
he had performed his daily duty and returned to his loneliness. The men
under whom he worked were the French doctors of the Poste--the chief
doctor, Monsieur Claude-Marie Le Bot, with four stripes on his arm, and
the courteous, grave administrator, Eustache-Emmanuel Couillandre, a
three-stripes man, and a half dozen others, of three stripes and two.
They had welcomed him to their group when he came to them from London.
They had found him lively and likable, bringing gossip of the West End
with a dash of Leicester Square. Then slowly a change had come on him.
He went moody and silent.
"What's the matter with you?" asked Doctor Le Bot one day.
"Nothing's the matter with me," answered the man. "It's war that's the
matter."
"What do you mean by that?" put in one of the younger doctors.
"The trouble with war," began the man slowly, "isn't that there's danger
and death. They are easy. The trouble with war is this. It's dull,
damned deadly dull. It's the slowest thing in the world. It wears away
at your mind, like water dripping on a rock. The old Indian torture of
letting water fall on your skull, drop by drop, till you went raving
crazy, is nothing to what war does to the mind of millions of men. They
can't think of anything else but war, and they have no thoughts about
that. They can't talk of another blessed thing, and the result is they
have nothing to say at all."
As he talked a flush came into his face. He gathered speed, while he
spoke, till his words came with a rush, as if he were relieving himself
of inner pain.
"Have you ever heard the true inside account of an Arctic expedition?"
he went on. "There's a handful of men locked up inside a little ship for
thirteen or fourteen months. Nothing to look out on but snow and ice,
one color and a horizonful of it. Nothing to dream of but arriving at a
Pole--and that is a theoretical point in infinite space. There's no such
thing. The midnight sun and the frozen stuff get on their nerves--same
old sun in the same old place, same kind of weather. What happens? The
natural thing, of course. They get so they hate each other like poison.
They go around with a mad on. They carry hate against the commander and
the cook and the fellow whose berth creaks every time he shifts. Each
man thinks the shipload is the rottenest gang ever thrown together. He
wonders why they didn't bring somebody decent along. He gets to scoring
up grudges against the different people, and waits his chance to get
back."
He stopped a minute, and looked around at the doctors, who were giving
him close attention. Then he went on with the same intensity.