patient queue outside the savings bank and money-order offices. The
cashiers pay out the new five-franc notes; fresh and crisp, obviously
and attractively new, they are fingered with distrustful fingers. Then
the fingers grow suddenly ashamed of their distrust in the star of
Belgium, stuff their notes into their wallets, and step briskly out to
the music of the drums that beat in all hearts.
The English declaration of war has evoked extraordinary enthusiasm,
and at the same time brought so near the sombre and terrible crisis as
to still the expression of that enthusiasm. It was no light-hearted
crowd that stood to watch the Red Cross go to the front this morning.
They streamed by in commandeered or volunteered motor-cars. Soldiers,
unshaven and unslept, lounged with their boots upon cushions that a few
days ago ministered to the very dainty masters of luxury. Limousines,
taxis, trade-cars all went by laden with stretchers and medicine-cases.
Everywhere the smell of rubber and antiseptics. And everywhere the
desolating thought that before midnight these snowy bandages will be
bloodied, and these stretchers laden with human debris. À la guerre
comme à la guerre!
Everywhere girls are hurrying through the streets with tin
collecting-boxes. We subscribe to the Red Cross, to funds to support
those about to become widows of the sword, to buy milk for the infants.
Many of the great hotels have already been offered as hospitals. The
gleaming symbol of Geneva--that inexplicable lapse of the soldiers
of Europe into plain Christian mercy--is already displayed on them.
Shops, big and small, are being prepared to serve as depots for the
distribution of food in case of need.
It is impossible not to be with Belgium in the struggle. It is
impossible any longer to be passive. Germany has thrown down
a well-considered challenge to all the deepest forces of our
civilisation. War is hell, but it is only a hell of suffering, not a
hell of dishonour. And through it, over its flaming coals, Justice must
walk, were it on bare feet.
II.--“EUROPE AGAINST THE BARBARIANS”
_Brussels, August 8._
We may well doubt whether any imagination is large enough to contain
the issues of the war. It overwhelms us and freezes our blood fast
like a vision of terror from the Apocalypse. What is, perhaps, most
terrible of all is the complete and necessary banishment of peace from
the scene of Europe. Hereafter there may be a time for such a word, but
not now. The arbitration movement to which we had committed so many
hopes has gone up in flames like a cardboard Elysium. Europe, we said,
was a monstrous contradiction in terms--an armed peace. There is no
contradiction now, it is a manual of pure logic after Krupp. The Norman
Angell evangel to the money-masters has failed; there is even something
noble in the sudden appeal of the financiers of every country to a
higher plane of values. You may suspend your International Bureau of
Labour which used to function at Brussels. Jaurès is dead; Vandervelde,
cherishing _la patrie_ beyond everything else, has joined the Ministry;
in Germany, as in France, Belgium, and Great Britain, the comrades are
with the colours. When next the committee-room of the Maison du Peuple
receives the European chiefs of labour what a change will be there!
As for Serbia, it seems probable that nobody will have time to go to
war with her. Her function has been that of the electric button which
discharges the great gun of a fortress. And now that the lightnings
have been released, what is the stake for which we are playing? It is
as simple as it is colossal. It is Europe against the barbarians. The
authentic Teuton touch betrayed itself in the gross proposition of
bribes, followed by the instant violation of the Belgian frontier. The
“big blonde brute” stepped from the pages of Nietzsche out on to the
plains about Liége. Brought suddenly to think of it, one realises the
corruption of moral standards for which Germany has in our time been
responsible. Since Schopenhauer died nothing has come from her in the
region of philosophy except that gospel of domination.
And now we suddenly understand that the Immoralists meant what they
said. We were reading, not as we thought a string of drawing-room
paradoxes, but the advance proof-sheets of a veritable Bullies’ Bible.
The General Bernhardis who have been teaching Germany to desire war,
to provoke it, to regard it as a creative and not a destructive act,
to accept it as merely the inevitable prologue to German domination,
have proved to be not only brutal, but formidable. Since Belgium, and
its protecting treaty, barred the way, both simply had to go. “Nothing
is true, everything is permitted to the strong.” Afterwards it will be
the turn of the others. And at the end of the process a monster, gorged
with blood and with the torn limbs of civilisation, is to lie sprawled
over all Central Europe, while some new metaphysician from Berlin booms
heavily into his self-intoxicated brain some new fable of preordination.
I do not wish in any way to exaggerate. France has her corruptions.
But the whole set of her thought, even when it abjured Christian
“illusions,” was towards solidarity, towards reasonableness, and
co-operation. Russia has her vile tyrannies. But from all Russian
literature there comes an immense and desolating sob of humility and
self-reproach. Great Britain has not yet liquidated her account with
Ireland, nor altogether purified her relations with India and Egypt.
But Great Britain does not, at any rate, throw aside all plain,
pedestrian Christian standards as rubbish. In the Rhineland, too, and
in the south there are millions of hearty men and women who are not
yet Prussified, and who still think it possible that there may exist a
Being greater in some respects than the Imperial Kaiser. But all the
central thought of Germany has been for a generation corrupt. It has
been foul with the odour of desired shambles.
The issue, then, is Europe against the barbarians. It is not easy,
perhaps, for anyone living at home in our islands to develop fully
What may be called the European sense. You acquire it as you get your
sea legs, quickly, but not without actual experience. There underlies
the whole Continent a minutely reticulated system of nerves which
convey, and multiply, every shock of feeling from one end of it to the
other. Here in Brussels we are, for the time at least, at the central
_sensorium_. The élan of Belgium takes possession of you. The courage
and anguish of this glorious little nation, fighting now for its very
life, stir one to something like the clear mood of its own heroism. In
every direction there opens a vista of waste and suffering. Already the
long trail of wounded has begun to wind its sorrowful way back to the
capital. Prisoners arrive, too simple of aspect, one would think, to
be the instruments by which Europe is to be tortured to the pattern of
a new devilry. You say to yourself, as you hear all the world saying:
C’est incroyable! It is not to be believed. It is a nightmare! And then
the conviction shapes itself clearly, settles upon and masters your
mind, that this German assault on civilisation has got to be repelled
and utterly shattered once and for all.
Had Belgium consented to a free passage across her territory so that
the French forts might be evaded, the problem was simply to profit by
the slow mobilisation of France, and to strike straight and hard at
Paris. On her refusal the problem was to hamstring Belgium. Liége was
to be carried by a _coup de main_, and the advance pushed right on to
Antwerp. This would have cut the country in two, made anything like an
effective Belgian mobilisation impossible, detached outlying places
from their supply depots, and left Belgium helpless under the heel
of a comparatively small section of the German forces. Both gambits
have been countered. There has been no free passage and no surprise
victory. The Belgian mobilisation has not been even hampered. The
whole German plan was founded on a swift and invincible dash; in the
actual event both characteristics are lacking. General Leman and Liége
have given the Allies day on invaluable day to come up. The prestige
which since 1871 has enveloped the Prussians and their war methods has
disappeared at a blow. “Ah!”, says the Belgian pioupiou to you, “those
great Prussian teeth that chewed up France in the ’70, they have bitten
themselves to fragments against the forts of Liége. Nous sommes un peu
là! Eh?”
The great outstanding pinnacle of a fact is, perhaps, the definitive
entrance of England into the comity of Europe. Regret it or not, there
can be no more isolation. And the other fact, noted here also as of
main importance, is the attitude of Ireland. Mr. Redmond’s proffer of
friendship, in return for justice, had been made often before, but
never in such dramatic circumstances. I am appalled to hear rumours
to the effect that Sir Edward Carson proposes at this moment to force
Mr. Bonar Law to bedevil the whole situation by a political trick.
He actually proposes, one hears, that a course should be followed
depriving Ireland of the Home Rule Bill, which is coming to her
automatically by the mere efflux of a few weeks. Can such madness still
be possible? Is there any imagination left in England?
Here, at the opening of this vast and bloody epic, Great Britain
is right with the conscience of Europe. It is assumed that she has
reconciled Ireland. A reconciled Ireland is ready to march side by
side with her to any desperate trial. And suddenly the lawyer, with
the Dublin accent, who had been the chief architect of destruction in
the whole Empire, and who was thought to have come to reason, proposes
for Ireland what I can only call a Prussian programme. England goes
to fight for liberty in Europe and for Junkerdom in Ireland. It is
incredible. Were it to come true it would become utterly impossible to
act on Mr. Redmond’s speech. Another dream would have gone down into
the abyss. Ireland, wounded anew, would turn sullenly away from you. Is
that what a sound Tory ought to desire? Will Tory England, enlightened
at last as to the real attitude of Ireland, allow such a fatal crime to
be committed?
III.--TERMONDE
The fate of Termonde is already known. But I do not apologise for
adding to the literature of its devastation an account of a visit
which I paid to-day. Imagination lacks the stringency of the scandal
actually seen, and we have got, by repeated strokes, to hammer into the
imagination of the world the things that Prussia has done in Belgium.
I went from Ghent to Zele by train this morning, and from Zele to
Termonde by carriage. They call Ghent the flower-town, and not without
some reason. It lies in that part of Flanders in which cultivation
is at its most intensive. That is to say, it is the centre of one
of the greatest agricultural areas in the world. Near Ghent it was
nursery-gardens all the way, a checker-board of colour. The geraniums,
we thought, will never again look like fire; they will look like blood.
Further into the country fewer flowers and more crops and cattle.
Not a square millimetre wasted. All the familiar Flemish picture;
the windmill that looks like two combs crossed, and revolving on a
pepper-box; the old churches, the old castles, reminiscent of the
Spanish persecution; the strong peasant-faces--like those of my own
“Ulster,” but Catholic--lined with labour; the wayside statues; the
villages, with little beauty save that of fruitful effort.
It is a flat country all the way to Termonde, and especially as one
nears the Scheldt. It is well timbered. I noticed again a contrast I
have often noticed before. In England the trees look like gentlemen of
leisure. If they do any good it is by a sort of graceful accident. In
Belgium they look like soldiers. They stand there in planned ranks,
repelling the infantry of the winds, drawing the artillery of the rain,
sheltering, protecting. Add to them the waving patches of hemp, the
corn-stacks, the rich herbage, and you get a closely-tufted and almost
impenetrable country. It is striped everywhere also with little canals
and ditches, so that any sort of military movement, except over the
cobbled roads, must be almost impossible. If one remembers that the
environs of the towns are almost the only places open enough for a
conflict between any substantial forces, a good many events become more
intelligible.
WHAT TERMONDE WAS
But, for the moment, I am concerned with the impression of remoteness
and quiet labour which such a country gives. The peasants yield to it.
At Zele, at Lokeren, they feel the war as some great demon that has
mysteriously passed them by. And then, eight kilometres away, you turn
the bend of a country road at the Bridge of Termonde and drive, let us
say, from something that looks very like Kent into something that looks
very like Hell.
Termonde was---- Let me recall what it was. It was a not unprosperous
town of some eleven or twelve thousand people. Though not destitute of
commerce and industries, it lived mainly on law (for it was an assize
town), on education, and on the army. The two handsomest residences
that I saw--one in puce-coloured brick at the approach to the bridge,
the other more grandiose in stone and inexplicably saved in the
principal street--belonged one to a judge, the other to an avocat.
Termonde, like many other places in the Low Countries, had already been
lifted into history by war. It repelled Louis XIV with its dykes, but
Marlborough took it dry. Such was Termonde.
To-day it is a tumbled avalanche of brick, stone, twisted iron and
shattered glass, over which the remaining public buildings rise like
cliffs over a flood. I walked every foot of every street. Of the Rue
de l’Eglise, the chief street, the Porte de Boom and Church of Notre
Dame at one end, and the Hôtel de Ville, Palais de Justice, and Museum
at the other are untouched. So is the avocat’s house, of which I have
spoken, chalked over with that piteous legend to which one has become
so accustomed. Friends here! Please spare! (in German and German
characters). The rest of the street is as if the breath of Armageddon
had withered it. The post office, the chapel and convent of the Poor
Clares, the hospital, the orphanage have all disappeared.
There is no need to multiply descriptive details. It is always the same
capricious devastation, the same arabesques of ruin, with which flame
searches its mad way through architecture. About one-half of the Grand’
Place has been saved owing to the fact that the Germans were gathered
there, drinking champagne, when fire was being sown through the town.
The Marché au Bétail, a pretty little boulevard, has also disappeared.
The great College, at its corner, like the other schools, is gone.
Each of its façades resembles nothing so much as an X-ray photograph.
Through the charred ribs of what was a house the green-red-and-white of
a flower-garden flashes the eternal tricolour of nature.
CULTURE AND THE SICK
In the Marché au Lin the Church of the Récolletes and the National Bank
lie disembowelled. It was here that the Germans laid on the pavements
the sick and wounded while they burned the beds from which they had
dragged them and the roof that had sheltered them.
A few small factory buildings on the left bank of the river and the
poorest section of the workmen’s quarter remain. The rest of Termonde
is a mere heap of bricks. It was; it no longer is. Walking out towards
the southern side of the town I came suddenly--everything here happens
suddenly--upon a note of desolation, not the most desolate, but the
most crying of all. Through a chasm in a shattered façade I saw the
white walls of little houses, the white coifs of nuns, and the waving
green of trees. It was the Béguinage. Anyone who knows Flanders
knows these remote pools of silence, these quiet backwaters where no
oar breaks the surface, where the old and spent await death as one
courteously awaits an honoured visitor. I stepped in and found myself
in an irregular triangle of almshouses. At first nothing seemed to have
been touched. But in the centre there was a church, fringed with dwarf
cypress. Walking over, I found that it was, like Termonde, a skeleton.
The Germans, a nun told me, had on the entreaty of two Dutch ladies,
members of the community, consented to spare the cottages. But they
insisted on making a bonfire of the “cottage of the Bon Dieu!”
Nothing was lacking in this abomination of desolation. I determined
to have some photographs made. Yes! our guide--a big country farmer,
who had out of pure courtesy accompanied us from Zele--knew of a
photographer who would doubtless be able to do our business. We went
to look for him. His street had disappeared, his house with it. We
walked back to the _estaminet_ to ask where he might be found.
“But, monsieur! he was one of the first to be shot by the Germans!”
Later, on one of the quays we saw a white wooden cross, with lime
stamped down about its base. Bystanders told us that it marked the
grave of two Belgian civilians. “Ah!” said our farmer, “it is perhaps
there!”
ORGANISED INFAMY
Now as to the procedure of the Germans. The facts admit of no doubt. I
set aside forthwith any damage caused to Termonde by the bombardment.
The bridge was dynamited, a number of houses on the outskirts were
shattered by shells. Nobody is childish enough to complain about that.
War is war, and, technically, Termonde is a fortified town--though
the old fortifications have been dismantled. But the burning was
deliberate, scientific, selective, devoid of military purpose.
The German commander demanded a levy of two million francs. The money
was not there in the public treasury, and the Burgomaster was not there
to save his town as Braun saved Ghent. General Sommerfeld--that is the
name that now wears such a nimbus of infamy--had a chair brought from
an inn into the centre of the Grand Place. He sat down on it, crossed
his legs, and said: “It is our duty to burn the town!”
The inhabitants were allowed two hours to clear out. Then the soldiers
went to work. Their apparatus is in the best tradition of German
science--patented, for all I know, from Charlottenburg. It consists
of a small portable pressure-caisson filled with benzine and fitted
with a spray. Other witnesses said that there was also a great caisson
on wheels. With this they sprinkled the doors, the ground storeys of
the houses--as doorposts were once fatally sprinkled with blood in
Egypt--and set fire to the buildings.
Others used a sort of phosphorus-paste with which they smeared
the object to be destroyed. They completed the work by flinging
hand-grenades and prepared fuses into the infant flames.
The selective power of this apparatus was remarkable. Remembering
Louvain, and how the burning of the University had destroyed German
prestige for a century, General Sommerfeld had evidently given
directions that public monumental buildings were to be spared. Thus the
Museum and the Hôtel de Ville both stand; but right between them his
petroleurs picked out and destroyed a hotel as neatly as you pick a
winkle out of a shell. Similarly they cut the avocat’s house, of which
I have spoken, out of their sea of destruction.
General Sommerfeld’s soldiery stole, pillaged, and drank everything
on which they could lay hands. Witnesses on this point are many, and
unshakable. Their moderation must impress anybody who talks to them. A
citizen of Termonde who had himself been held as a hostage said to me,
standing amid the ruins of his town--
“Monsieur! there is human nature also among the Germans. I saw many
officers in tears. A lieutenant came and shook me by the hand, crying:
‘It is not our fault! It is a shame!’”
“HE MUST BE HANGED”
Do not think that the evil, written here in the debris of Belgium, will
be cancelled and blotted out by subscriptions and indemnities. It calls
also for that holy vengeance without which all public law is a nullity.
Sommerfeld has got to be hanged. When are the Allies going to issue a
proclamation placing definitely outside the privilege of military law
Sommerfeld and his kind?
The more one sees of Belgium the more deeply her magnificent courage
pierces into the soul. I saw women weeping amid the ruins of Termonde.
But I also saw builders’ men stolidly smoking their pipes as they
shovelled out the bricks and rubble to make room for new foundations.
I talked with the pioupious. They had torn up half the pavement on the
southern road and stretched barbed wire and brambles over the loose
stones... to encourage the Uhlans. As you approached from without you
saw the wicked eyes of the street trenches, and the grass-grown mounds
of the old fortifications, winking down at you. The town was held by an
outpost of three or four companies.
“Sir! American Sir!” said one of the pioupious, in the sort of English
which an Antwerp Fleming who has spent two years among Scotchmen in the
United States may be expected to speak. “Fourth Infantry of the Line
at your service! We have two things only which we greatly much desire:
Cigarettes and Revenge!”
IRISH HORSES
On the other side of the town a battery of artillery, magnificently
horsed, was waiting under the trees for any alarm. Most of the horses
were Irish. I felt a little _nostalgia_ as I rubbed the sensitive nose
of a roan mare. I wished that I had with me a poet or two of the Celtic
renaissance to make a poem telling her how she had begun at the fair
of Ballina, or Moy, or perhaps Ballsbridge itself, and how she would
wander the white roads of Europe--not white now, but red--and die at
last over there on the banks of the Rhine near pleasant Coblenz, or
many-pinnacled Cologne. There being no poet about, I could but scratch
the butt of her ears and give her some chocolate.
Two hours in the tram, five on the carriage-trip, three and a half to
accomplish the hour’s train journey from Lokeren to Antwerp. I am now
writing this impression of Termonde in this besieged city (in which
no light is permitted after eight) by the light of two most excellent
candles.
IV.--MALINES
The prompt, creative courage of these Belgians is admirable. No sooner
have the soldiers “cleaned” an invaded district than the engineers
hurry along to rebuild bridges, repair railways, to open again the
encumbered channels of intercourse. It was therefore without surprise
that I found trains running again from Antwerp to Malines, crowded but
comfortable, and sharp almost to the minute. Their resuscitating effect
on the town, however, was not very great. It looked too much like
pumping blood into a corpse.
The journey is right across one of the most important sectors of
the Antwerp defences. The countryside shows the aspect of a sort of
terrible security. It has been stripped not only to the skin, but
to the skeleton. Woods, houses, where necessary, crops, have been
sacrificed to the impregnability of the war capital. The typical
prepared position shows a criss-cross entanglement of barbed wire,
a long stretch of level ground, now entirely naked, more wire or
_chevaux-de-frise_ of pointed stakes, raised trenches, defended in
front by artificial ditches, and glaring grimly down on the whole
scene of the forts of Brialmont, with death lying couched in its guns.
Of Malines little of the material fabric of the town has suffered,
with the exception of the cathedral. Through about twenty other houses
shells had torn gashes as erratic as those which apparently a bullet
tears through living tissue. But most of the streets remain unchanged.
This statement is not, perhaps, as reassuring as it sounds. It is as
if you were to say, in speaking of an attack on Oxford, that only
the colleges had suffered. Malines is not only a cathedral city;
the cathedral, situated geographically at its heart, dominates its
whole economy. It is the spiritual centre of Belgium. The Cardinal
Archbishop’s palace, unpretentious between its thick trees and its
quiet canal, is in some sense the moral capital of this valorous people.