agreeable fellow, that had we advanced ten feet further after the
command to halt was given, we should probably have been planted
in graves dug in a nearby potato field, as only an hour before our
arrival a Belgian mitrailleuse car had torn down the road with its
machine-gun squirting a stream of lead, and had smashed straight
through the German line, killing three men and wounding a dozen
others. They were burying them when we appeared. When our big
grey machine hove in sight they not unnaturally took us for another
armoured car and prepared to give us a warm reception. It was a
lucky thing for us that our brakes worked quickly.
We were the first foreigners to see Aerschot, or rather what was left
of Aerschot after it had been sacked and burned by the Germans. A
few days before Aerschot had been a prosperous and happy town
of ten thousand people. When we saw it it was but a heap of
smoking ruins, garrisoned by a battalion of German soldiers, and
with its population consisting of half a hundred white-faced women.
In many parts of the world I have seen many terrible and revolting
things, but nothing so ghastly, so horrifying as Aerschot. Quite
two-thirds of the houses had been burned and showed unmistakable
signs of having been sacked by a maddened soldiery before they
were burned. Everywhere were the ghastly evidences. Doors had
been smashed in with rifle-butts and boot-heels; windows had been
broken; furniture had been wantonly destroyed; pictures had been
torn from the walls; mattresses had been ripped open with bayonets in
search of valuables; drawers had been emptied upon the floors; the
outer walls of the houses were spattered with blood and pock-marked
with bullets; the sidewalks were slippery with broken wine-bottles;
the streets were strewn with women's clothing. It needed no one to
tell us the details of that orgy of blood and lust. The story was
so plainly written that anyone could read it.
For a mile we drove the car slowly between the blackened walls of
fire-gutted buildings. This was no accidental conflagration, mind you,
for scattered here and there were houses which stood undamaged
and in every such case there was scrawled with chalk upon their
doors "Gute Leute. Nicht zu plundern." (Good people. Do not
plunder.)
The Germans went about the work of house-burning as
systematically as they did everything else. They had various devices
for starting conflagrations, all of them effective. At Aerschot and
Louvain they broke the windows of the houses and threw in sticks
which had been soaked in oil and dipped in sulphur. Elsewhere they
used tiny, black tablets, about the size of cough lozenges, made of
some highly inflammable composition, to which they touched a
match. At Termonde, which they destroyed in spite of the fact that
the inhabitants had evacuated the city before their arrival, they used
a motor-car equipped with a large tank for petrol, a pump, a hose,
and a spraying-nozzle. The car was run slowly through the streets,
one soldier working the pump and another spraying the fronts of the
houses. Then they set fire to them. Oh, yes, they were very
methodical about it all, those Germans.
Despite the scowls of the soldiers, I attempted to talk with some of
the women huddled in front of a bakery waiting for a distribution of
bread, but the poor creatures were too terror-stricken to do more
than stare at us with wide, beseeching eyes. Those eyes will always
haunt me. I wonder if they do not sometimes haunt the Germans.
But a little episode that occurred as we were leaving the city did
more than anything else to bring home the horror of it all. We
passed a little girl of nine or ten and I stopped the car to ask the
way. Instantly she held both hands above her head and began to
scream for mercy. When we had given her some chocolate and
money, and had assured her that we were not Germans, but
Americans and friends, she ran like a frightened deer. That little
child, with her fright-wide eyes and her hands raised in supplication,
was in herself a terrible indictment of the Germans.
There are, as might be expected, two versions of the happenings
which precipitated that night of horrors in Aerschot. The German
version--I had it from the German commander himself--is to the
effect that after the German troops had entered Aerschot, the Chief
of Staff and some of the officers were asked to dinner by the
burgomaster. While they were seated at the table the son of the
burgomaster, a boy of fifteen, entered the room with a revolver and
killed the Chief of Staff, whereupon, as though at a prearranged
signal, the townspeople opened fire from their windows upon the
troops. What followed--the execution of the burgomaster, his son,
and several score of the leading townsmen, the giving over of the
women to a lust-mad soldiery, the sacking of the houses, and the
final burning of the town--was the punishment which would always
be meted out to towns whose inhabitants attacked German soldiers.
Now, up to a certain point the Belgian version agrees with the
German. It is admitted that the Germans entered the town
peaceably enough, that the German Chief of Staff and other officers
accepted the hospitality of the burgomaster, and that, while they
were at dinner, the burgomaster's son entered the room and shot
the Chief of Staff dead with a revolver. But--and this is the point to
which the German story makes no allusion--the boy killed the Chief
of Staff in defence of his sister's honour. It is claimed that toward the
end of the meal the German officer, inflamed with wine, informed
the burgomaster that he intended to pass the night with his young
and beautiful daughter, whereupon the girl's brother quietly slipped
from the room and, returning a moment later, put a sudden end to
the German's career with an automatic. What the real truth is I do
not know. Perhaps no one knows. The Germans did not leave many
eye-witnesses to tell the story of what happened. Piecing together
the stories told by those who did survive that night of horror, we
know that scores of the townspeople were shot down in cold blood
and that, when the firing squads could not do the work of slaughter
fast enough, the victims were lined up and a machine-gun was
turned upon them. We know that young girls were dragged from
their homes and stripped naked and violated by soldiers--many
soldiers--in the public square in the presence of officers. We know
that both men and women were unspeakably mutilated, that
children were bayoneted, that dwellings were ransacked and looted,
and that finally, as though to destroy the evidences of their horrid
work, soldiers went from house to house with torches, methodically
setting fire to them.
It was with a feeling of repulsion amounting almost to nausea that
we left what had once been Aerschot behind us. The road leading to
Louvain was alive with soldiery, and we were halted every few
minutes by German patrols. Had not the commanding officer in
Aerschot detailed two bicyclists to accompany us I doubt if we
should have gotten through. Whedbee had had the happy idea of
bringing along a thousand packets of cigarettes--the tonneau of the
car was literally filled with them--and we tossed a packet to every
German soldier that we saw. You could have followed our trail for
thirty miles by the cigarettes we left behind us. As it turned out,
they were the means of saving us from being detained within the
German lines.
Thanks to our American flags, to the nature of our mission, and to
our wholesale distribution of cigarettes, we were passed from
outpost to outpost and from regimental headquarters to regimental
headquarters until we reached Louvain. Here we came upon
another scene of destruction and desolation. Nearly half the city was
in ashes. Most of the principal streets were impassable from fallen
masonry. The splendid avenues and boulevards were lined on
either side by the charred skeletons of what had once been
handsome buildings. The fronts of many of the houses were
smeared with crimson stains. In comparison to its size, the
Germans had wrought more widespread destruction in Louvain than
did the earthquake and fire combined in San Francisco. The looting
had evidently been unrestrained. The roads for miles in either
direction were littered with furniture and bedding and clothing. Such
articles as the soldiers could not carry away they wantonly
destroyed. Hangings had been torn down, pictures on the walls had
been smashed, the contents of drawers and trunks had been
emptied into the streets, literally everything breakable had been
broken. This is not from hearsay, remember; I saw it with my own
eyes. And the amazing feature of it all was that among the Germans
there seemed to be no feeling of regret, no sense of shame.
Officers in immaculate uniforms strolled about among the ruins,
chatting and laughing and smoking. At one place a magnificent
mahogany dining-table had been dragged into the middle of the
road and about it, sprawled in carved and tapestry-covered chairs, a
dozen German infantrymen were drinking beer.
Just as there are two versions of the destruction of Aerschot, so
there are two versions, though in this case widely different, of the
events which led up to the destruction of Louvain. It should be borne
in mind, to begin with, that Louvain was not destroyed by
bombardment or in the heat of battle, for the Germans had entered
it unopposed, and had been in undisputed possession for several
days. The Germans assert that a conspiracy, fomented by the
burgomaster, the priests and many of the leading citizens, existed
among the townspeople, who planned to suddenly fall upon and
exterminate the garrison. They claim that, in pursuance of this plan,
on the night of August 26, the inhabitants opened a murderous fire
upon the unsuspecting troops from house-tops, doors and windows;
that a fierce street battle ensued, in which a number of women and
children were unfortunately killed by stray bullets; and that, in
retaliation for this act of treachery, a number of the inhabitants were
executed and a portion of the city was burned. Notwithstanding the
fact that, as soon as the Germans entered the city, they searched it
thoroughly for concealed weapons, they claim that the townspeople
were not only well supplied with rifles and ammunition, but that they
even opened on them from their windows with machine-guns.
Though it seems scarcely probable that the inhabitants of Louvain
would attempt so mad an enterprise as to attack an overwhelming
force of Germans--particularly with the terrible lesson of Aerschot
still fresh in their minds--I do not care to express any opinion as to
the truth of the German assertions.
The Belgians tell quite a different story. They say that, as the result
of a successful Belgian offensive movement to the south of Malines,
the German troops retreated in something closely akin to panic, one
division falling back, after nightfall, upon Louvain. In the inky
blackness the garrison, mistaking the approaching troops for
Belgians, opened a deadly fire upon them. When the mistake was
discovered the Germans, partly in order to cover up their disastrous
blunder and partly to vent their rage and chagrin, turned upon the
townspeople in a paroxysm of fury. A scene of indescribable terror
ensued, the soldiers, who had broken into the wine-shops and
drunk themselves into a state of frenzy, practically running amuck,
breaking in doors and shooting at every one they saw. That some of
the citizens snatched up such weapons as came to hand and
defended their homes and their women no one attempts to deny--
but this scattered and pitifully ineffectual resistance gave the
Germans the very excuse they were seeking. The citizens had
attacked them and they would teach the citizens, both of Louvain
and of other cities which they might enter, a lasting lesson. They did.
No Belgian will ever forget--or forgive--that lesson. The orgy of blood
and lust and destruction lasted for two days. Several American
correspondents, among them Mr. Richard Harding Davis, who were
being taken by train from Brussels to Germany, and who were held
for some hours in the station at Louvain during the first night's
massacre, have vividly described the horrors which they witnessed
from their car window. On the second day, Mr. Hugh S. Gibson,
secretary of the American Legation in Brussels, accompanied by the
Swedish and Mexican charges, drove over to Louvain in a taxi-cab.
Mr. Gibson told me that the Germans had dragged chairs and a
dining-table from a nearby house into the middle of the square in
front of the station and that some officers, already considerably the
worse for drink, insisted that the three diplomatists join them in a
bottle of wine. And this while the city was burning and rifles were
cracking, and the dead bodies of men and women lay sprawled in
the streets! From the windows of plundered and fire-blackened
houses in both Aerschot and Louvain and along the road between,
hung white flags made from sheets and tablecloths and pillow-
cases--pathetic appeals for the mercy which was not granted.
If Belgium wishes to keep alive in the minds of her people the
recollection of German military barbarism, if she desires to inculcate
the coming generations with the horrors and miseries of war, if she
would perpetuate the memories of the innocent townspeople who
were slaughtered because they were Belgians, then she can
effectually do it by preserving the ruins of Aerschot and Louvain,
just as the ruins of Pompeii are preserved. Fence in these
desolated cities; leave the shattered doors and the broken furniture
as they are; let the bullet marks and the bloodstains remain, and it
will do more than all the sermons that can be preached, than all the
pictures that can be painted, than all the books that can be written,
to drive home a realization of what is meant by that dreadful thing
called War.
The distance from Louvain to Brussels is in the neighbourhood of
twenty miles, and our car with its fluttering flags sped between lines
of cheering people all the way. Men stood by the roadside with
uncovered heads as they saw the Stars and Stripes whirl by;
women waved their handkerchiefs while tears coursed down their
cheeks. As we neared Brussels news of our coming spread, and
soon we were passing between solid walls of Belgians who waved
hats and canes and handkerchiefs and screamed, "Vive l'Amerique!
Vive l'Amerique!" I am not ashamed to say that a lump came in my
throat and tears dimmed my eyes. To these helpless, homeless,
hopeless people, the red-white-and-blue banner that streamed from
our windshield really was a flag of the free.
Brussels we found as quiet and orderly as London on a Sunday
morning. So far as streets scenes went we might have been in
Berlin. German officers and soldiers were scattered everywhere,
lounging at the little iron tables in front of the cafes, or dining
in the restaurants or strolling along the tree-shaded boulevards as
unconcernedly as though they were in the Fatherland. Many of the
officers had brought high, red-wheeled dogcarts with them, and
were pleasure-driving in the outskirts of the city; others,
accompanied by women who may or may not have been their
wives, were picnicking in the Bois. Brussels had become, to all
outward appearances at least, a German city. German flags
flaunted defiantly from the roofs of the public buildings, several of
which, including the Hotel de Ville, the Palais de Justice and the
Cathedral, were reported to have been mined. In the whole of the
great city not a single Belgian flag was to be seen. The Belgian
police were still performing their routine duties under German
direction. The royal palace had been converted into a hospital for
German wounded. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was occupied by
the German General Staff. The walls and hoardings were plastered
with proclamations signed by the military governor warning the
inhabitants of the penalties which they would incur should they
molest the German troops. The great square in front of the Gare du
Nord, which was being used as a barracks, was guarded by a line of
sentries, and no one but Germans in uniform were permitted to
cross it. One other person did cross it, however, German
regulations and sentries notwithstanding. Whedbee and I were
lunching on Sunday noon in the front of the Palace Hotel, when a
big limousine flying the American flag drew up on the other side of
the square and Mr. Julius Van Hee, the American Vice-Consul at
Ghent, jumped out. He caught sight of us at the same moment that
we saw him and started across the square toward us. He had not
gone a dozen paces before a sentry levelled his rifle and gruffly
commanded him to halt.
"Go back!" shouted the sentry. "To walk across the square
forbidden is."
"Go to the devil!" shouted back Van Hee. "And stop pointing that
gun at me, or I'll come over and knock that spiked helmet of yours
off. I'm American, and I've more right here than you have."
This latter argument being obviously unanswerable, the befuddled
sentry saw nothing for it but to let him pass.
Van Hee had come to Brussels, he told us, for the purpose of
obtaining some vaccine, as the supply in Ghent was running short,
and the authorities were fearful of an epidemic. He also brought with
him a package of letters from the German officers, many of them of
distinguished families, who had been captured by the Belgians and
were imprisoned at Bruges. When Van Hee had obtained his
vaccine, he called on General von Ludewitz and requested a safe
conduct back to Ghent.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Van Hee," said the general, who had married an
American and spoke English like a New Yorker, "but there's nothing
doing. We can't permit anyone to leave Brussels at present.
Perhaps in a few days--"
"A few days won't do, General," Van Hee interrupted, "I must go
back to-day, at once."
"I regret to say that for the time being it is quite impossible,"
said the general firmly.
"I have here," said Van Hee, displaying the packet, "a large number
of letters from the German officers who are imprisoned in Belgium. If
I don't get the pass you don't get these letters."
"You hold a winning hand, Mr. Van Hee," said the general, laughing,
as he reached for pen and paper.
But when Whedbee and I were ready to return to Antwerp it was a
different matter. The German authorities, though scrupulously polite,
were adamantine in their refusal to permit us to pass through the
German lines. And we held no cards, as did Van Hee, with which to
play diplomatic poker. So we were compelled to bluff. Telling the
German commander that we would call on him again, we climbed
into the car and quietly left the city by the same route we had
followed upon entering it the preceding day. All along the road we
found soldiers smoking the cigarettes we had distributed to them.
Instead of stopping us and demanding to see our papers they
waved their hands cheerily and called, "Auf wiedersehn!" As we
knew that we could not get through Louvain without being stopped,
we drove boldly up to headquarters and asked the general
commanding the division if he would detail a staff officer to
accompany us to the outer lines. (There seemed no need of
mentioning the fact that we had no passes.) The general said, with
profuse apologies, that he had no officer available at the moment,
but hoped that a sergeant would do. We carried the sergeant with
us as far as Aerschot, distributing along the way what remained of
our cigarettes. At Aerschot we were detained for nearly an hour, as
the officer who had visited Atlantic City, Niagara Falls and Coney
Island insisted on our waiting while he sent for another officer who,
until the outbreak of the war, had lived in Chicago. We tried not to
show our impatience at the delay, but our hair stood on end every
time a telephone bell tinkled. We were afraid that the staff in
Brussels, learning of our unauthorized departure, would telephone
to the outposts to stop us. It was with a heartfelt sigh of relief
that we finally shook hands with our hosts and left ruined Aerschot
behind us. I opened up the throttle, and the big car fled down the long,
straight road which led to the Belgian lines like a hunted cat on the
top of a backyard fence.
V. With The Spiked Helmets
It was really a Pittsburg chauffeur who was primarily responsible for
my being invited to dine with the commander of the Ninth German
Army. The chauffeur's name was William Van Calck and his
employer was a gentleman who had amassed several millions
manufacturing hats in the Smoky City. When war was declared the
hat-manufacturer and his family were motoring in Austria, with Van
Calck at the wheel of the car. The car being a large and powerful
one, it was promptly commandeered by the Austrian military
authorities; the hat-manufacturer and his family, thus dumped
unceremoniously by the roadside, made their way as best they
could to England; and Van Calck, who was a Belgian by birth,
though a naturalized American, enlisted in the Belgian army and
was detailed to drive one of the armoured motor-cars which so
effectively harassed the enemy during the early part of the
campaign in Flanders. Now if Van Calck hadn't come tearing into
Ghent in his wheeled fortress on a sunny September morning he
wouldn't have come upon a motor-car containing two German
soldiers who had lost their way; if he had not met them, the two
Germans would not have been wounded in the dramatic encounter
which ensued; if the Germans had not been wounded it would not
have been necessary for Mr. Julius Van Hee, the American Vice-Consul,
to pay a hurried visit to General von Boehn, the German commander,
to explain that the people of Ghent were not responsible for the
affair and to beg that no retaliatory measures be taken against
the city; if Mr. Van Hee had not visited General von Boehn the
question of the attitude of the American Press would not have
come up for discussion; and if it had not been discussed,
General von Boehn would not have sent me an invitation through
Mr. Van Hee to dine with him at his headquarters and hear the
German side of the question.
But perhaps I had better begin at the beginning. On September 8,
then, the great German army which was moving from Brussels on
France was within a few miles of Ghent. In the hope of inducing the
Germans not to enter the city, whose large and turbulent working
population would, it was feared, cause trouble in case of a military
occupation, the burgomaster went out to confer with the German
commander. An agreement was finally arrived at whereby the
Germans consented to march around Ghent if certain requirements
were complied with. These were that no Belgian troops should
occupy the city, that the Garde Civique should be disarmed and
their weapons surrendered, and that the municipality should supply
the German forces with specified quantities of provisions and other
supplies--the chief item, by the way, being a hundred thousand
cigars.
The burgomaster had not been back an hour when a military motor-
car containing two armed German soldiers appeared in the city
streets. It transpired afterwards that they had been sent out to
purchase medical supplies and, losing their way, had entered Ghent
by mistake. At almost the same moment that the German car
entered the city from the south a Belgian armoured motor-car,
armed with a machine-gun and with a crew of three men and driven
by the former Pittsburg chauffeur, entered from the east on a
scouting expedition. The two cars, both travelling at high speed,
encountered each other at the head of the Rue de l'Agneau, directly
in front of the American Consulate. Vice-Consul Van Hee, standing
in the doorway, was an eyewitness of what followed.
The Germans, taken completely by surprise at the sight of the grim
war-car in its coat of elephant-grey bearing down upon them, threw
on their power and attempted to escape, the man sitting beside the
driver opening an ineffectual fire with his carbine. Regardless of the
fact that the sidewalks were crowded with spectators, the Belgians
opened on the fleeing Germans with their machine-gun, which
spurted lead as a garden-hose spurts water. Van Calck, fearing that
the Germans might escape, swerved his powerful car against the
German machine precisely as a polo-player "rides off" his opponent,
the machine-gun never ceasing its angry snarl. An instant later the
driver of the German car dropped forward over his steering-wheel
with blood gushing from a bullet-wound in the head, while his
companion, also badly wounded, threw up both hands in token of
surrender.