names to give them. After the treaty-makers have affixed their
signatures to a piece of parchment and the arm-chair historians
have settled down to the task of writing a connected account of the
campaign, the various engagements will doubtless be properly
classified and labelled--and under the names which they will receive
in the histories we, who were present at them, will probably not
recognize them at all. Until such time, then, as history has granted
them the justice of perspective, I can only refer to them as "the fight
at Sempst" or "the first engagement at Alost" or "the battle of
Vilvorde" or "the taking of Termonde." Not only this, but the
engagements that seemed to us to be battles, or remarkably lifelike
imitations of battles, may be dismissed by the historians as
unimportant skirmishes and contacts, while those engagements that
we carelessly referred to at the time as "scraps" may well prove, in
the light of future events, to have been of far greater significance
than we realized. I don't even know how many engagements I
witnessed, for I did not take the trouble to keep count. Thompson,
who was with me from the beginning of the campaign to the end,
told a reporter who interviewed him upon his return to London that
we had been present at thirty-two engagements, large and small.
Though I do not vouch, mind you, for the accuracy of this assertion,
it is not as improbable as it sounds, for, from the middle of August to
the fall of Antwerp in the early part of October, it was a poor day that
didn't produce a fight of some sort. The fighting in Belgium at this
stage of the war may be said to have been confined to an area
within a triangle whose corners were Antwerp, Aerschot and
Termonde. The southern side of this triangle, which ran somewhat
to the south of Malines, was nearly forty miles in length, and it was
this forty-mile front, extending from Aerschot on the east to
Termonde on the west, which, during the earlier stages of the
campaign, formed the Belgian battle-line. As the campaign
progressed and the Germans developed their offensive, the
Belgians were slowly forced back within the converging sides of the
triangle until they were squeezed into the angle formed by Antwerp,
where they made their last stand.
The theatre of operations was, from the standpoint of a professional
onlooker like myself, very inconsiderately arranged. Nature had
provided neither orchestra-stalls nor boxes. All the seats were bad.
In fact it was quite impossible to obtain a good view of the stage and
of the uniformed actors who were presenting the most stupendous
spectacle in all history upon it. The whole region, you see, was
absolutely flat--as flat as the top of a table--and there wasn't
anything even remotely resembling a hill anywhere. To make
matters worse, the country was criss-crossed by a perfect network
of rivers and brooks and canals and ditches; the highways and the
railways, which had to be raised to keep them from being washed
out by the periodic inundations, were so thickly screened by trees as
to be quite useless for purposes of observation; and in the rare
places where a rise in the ground might have enabled one to get a
comprehensive view of the surrounding country, dense groves of
trees or red-and-white villages almost invariably intervened. One
could be within a few hundred yards of the firing-line and literally not
see a thing save the fleecy puffs of bursting shrapnel. Indeed, I
don't know what we should have done had it not been for the church
towers. These were conveniently sprinkled over the landscape--
every cluster of houses seemed to have one--and did their best to
make up for the region's topographical shortcomings. The only
disadvantage attaching to the use of the church-spires as places to
view the fighting from was that the military observers and the
officers controlling the fire of the batteries used them for the same
purpose. The enemy knew this, of course, and almost the first thing
he did, therefore, was to open fire on them with his artillery and drive
those observers out. This accounts for the fact that in many
sections of Belgium there is not a church-spire left standing. When
we ascended a church tower, therefore, for the purpose of obtaining
a general view of an engagement, we took our chances and we
knew it. More than once, when the enemy got the range and their
shells began to shriek and yowl past the belfry in which I was
stationed, I have raced down the rickety ladders at a speed which,
under normal conditions, would probably have resulted in my
breaking my neck. In view of the restrictions imposed upon
correspondents in the French and Russian theatres of war, I
suppose that instead of finding fault with the seating arrangements I
should thank my lucky stars that I did not have to write my
dispatches with the aid of an ordnance-map and a guide-book in a
hotel bedroom a score or more of miles from the firing-line.
The Belgian field army consisted of six divisions and a brigade of
cavalry and numbered, on paper at least, about 180,000 men. I very
much doubt, however, if King Albert had in the field at anyone time
more than 120,000 men--a very large proportion of whom were, of
course, raw recruits. Now the Belgian army, when all is said and
done, was not an army according to the Continental definition; it
was not much more than a glorified police force, a militia. No one
had ever dreamed that it would be called upon to fight, and hence,
when war came, it was wholly unprepared. That it was able to offer
the stubborn and heroic resistance which it did to the advance of the
German legions speaks volumes for Belgian stamina and courage.
Many of the troops were armed with rifles of an obsolete pattern, the
supply of ammunition was insufficient, and though the artillery was
on the whole of excellent quality, it was placed at a tremendous
disadvantage by the superior range and calibre of the German field-
guns. The men did not even have the protection afforded by neutral-
coloured uniforms, but fought from first to last in clothes of blue and
green and blazing scarlet. As I stood one day in the Place de Meir in
Antwerp and watched a regiment of mud-bespattered guides clatter
past, it was hard to believe that I was living in the twentieth century
and not in the beginning of the nineteenth, for instead of serviceable
uniforms of grey or drab or khaki, these men wore the befrogged
green jackets, the cherry-coloured breeches, and the huge fur
busbies which characterized the soldiers of Napoleon.
The carabineers, for example, wore uniforms of bottle-green and
queer sugar-loaf hats of patent leather which resembled the
headgear of the Directoire period. Both the grenadiers and the
infantry of the line marched and fought and slept in uniforms of
heavy blue cloth piped with scarlet and small, round, visorless
fatigue-caps which afforded no protection from either sun or rain.
Some of the men remedied this by fitting their caps with green
reading-shades, such as undergraduates wear when they are
cramming for examinations, so that at first glance a regiment looked
as though its ranks were filled with either jockeys or students. The
gendarmes--who, by the way, were always to be found where the
fighting was hottest--were the most unsuitably uniformed of all, for
the blue coats and silver aiguillettes and towering bearskins which
served to impress the simple country-folk made splendid targets for
the German marksmen. This medley of picturesque and brilliant
uniforms was wonderfully effective, of course, and whenever I came
upon a group of lancers in sky-blue and yellow lounging about the
door of a wayside tavern or met a patrol of guides in their green
jackets and scarlet breeches trotting along a country-road, I always
had the feeling that I was looking at a painting by Meissonier or
Detaille.
At the beginning of the war the Belgian cavalry was as well mounted
as that of any European army, many of the officers having Irish
hunters, while the men were mounted on Hungarian-bred stock. The
almost incessant campaigning, combined with lack of proper food
and care, had its effect upon the horses, however, and before the
campaign in Flanders was half over the cavalry mounts were a raw-
boned and sorry-looking lot. The Belgian field artillery was horsed
magnificently: the sturdy, hardy animals native to Luxembourg and
the Ardennes making admirable material for gun-teams, while the
great Belgian draught-horses could scarcely have been improved
upon for the army's heavier work.
Speaking of cavalry, the thing that I most wanted to see when I went
to the war was a cavalry charge. I had seen mounted troops in
action, of course, both in Africa and in Asia, but they had brown
skins and wore fantastic uniforms. What I wanted to see was one of
those charges such as Meissonier used to paint--scarlet breeches
and steel helmets and a sea of brandished sword-blades and all
that sort of thing. But when I confided my wish to an American army
officer whom I met on the boat going over he promptly discouraged
me. "Cavalry charges are a thing of the past," he asserted. "There
will never be one again. The modern high-power rifle has made
them impossible. Henceforward cavalry will only be used for
scouting purposes or as mounted infantry." He spoke with great
positiveness, I remember, having been, you see, in both the Cuban
and Philippine campaigns. According to the textbooks and the
military experts and the armchair tacticians he was perfectly right; I
believe that all of the writers on military subjects agree in saying that
cavalry charges are obsolete as a form of attack. But the trouble
with the Belgians was that they didn't play the war-game according
to the rules in the book. They were very primitive in their
conceptions of warfare. Their idea was that whenever they got
within sight of a German regiment to go after that regiment and
exterminate it, and they didn't care whether in doing it they used
horse, foot, or guns. It was owing, therefore, to this total disregard
for the rules laid down in the textbooks that I saw my cavalry charge.
Let me tell you about it while I have the chance, for there is no doubt
that cavalry charges are getting scarce and I may never see
another.
It was in the region between Termonde and Alost. This is a better
country for cavalry to manoeuvre in than most parts of Flanders, for
sometimes one can go almost a mile without being stopped by a
canal. A considerable force of Germans had pushed north from
Alost and the Belgian commander ordered a brigade of cavalry,
composed of the two regiments of guides and, if I remember rightly,
two regiments of lancers, to go out and drive them back. After a
morning spent in skirmishing and manoeuvring for position, the
Belgian cavalry commander got his Germans where he wanted
them. The Germans were in front of a wood, and between them and
the Belgians lay as pretty a stretch of open country as a cavalryman
could ask for. Now the Germans occupied a strong position, mind
you, and the proper thing to have done according to the books
would have been to have demoralized them with shell-fire and then
to have followed it up with an infantry attack. But the grizzled old
Belgian commander did nothing of the sort. He had fifteen hundred
troopers who were simply praying for a chance to go at the
Germans with cold steel, and he gave them the chance they
wanted. Tossing away his cigarette and tightening the chin-strap of
his busby, he trotted out in front of his men. "Right into line!" he
bellowed. Two long lines--one the guides, in green and scarlet, the
other the lancers, in blue and yellow--spread themselves across the
fields. "Trot!" The bugles squealed the order. "Gallop!" The forest of
lances dropped from vertical to horizontal and the cloud of gaily
fluttering pennons changed into a bristling hedge of steel. "Charge!"
came the order, and the spurs went home. "Vive la Belgique! Vive la
Belgique!" roared the troopers--and the Germans, not liking the look
of those long and cruel lances, fell back precipitately into the wood
where the troopers could not follow them. Then, their work having
been accomplished, the cavalry came trotting back again. Of
course, from a military standpoint it was an affair of small
importance, but so far as colour and action and excitement were
concerned it was worth having gone to Belgium to see.
After the German occupation of Brussels, the first engagement of
sufficient magnitude to be termed a battle took place on August 25
and 26 in the Sempst-Elewyt-Eppeghem-Vilvorde region, midway
between Brussels and Malines. The Belgians had in action four
divisions, totalling about sixty thousand men, opposed to which was
a considerably heavier force of Germans. To get a clear conception
of the battle one must picture a fifty-foot-high railway embankment,
its steeply sloping sides heavily wooded, stretching its length across
a fertile, smiling country-side like a monstrous green snake. On this
line, in time of peace, the bloc trains made the journey from Antwerp
to Brussels in less than an hour. Malines, with its historic buildings
and its famous cathedral, lies on one side of this line and the village
of Vilvorde on the other, five miles separating them. On the 25th the
Belgians, believing the Brussels garrison to have been seriously
weakened and the German communications poorly guarded, moved
out in force from the shelter of the Antwerp forts and assumed a
vigorous offensive. It was like a terrier attacking a bulldog.
They drove the Germans from Malines by the very impetus
of their attack, but the Germans brought up heavy reinforcements,
and by the morning of the 26th the Belgians were in a most perilous
position. The battle hinged on the possession of the railway
embankment had gradually extended, each army trying to outflank
the other, until it was being fought along a front of twenty miles. At
dawn on the second day an artillery duel began across the
embankment, the German fire being corrected by observers in
captive balloons. By noon the Germans had gotten the range and a
rain of shrapnel was bursting about the Belgian batteries, which
limbered up and retired at a trot in perfect order. After the guns were
out of range I could see the dark blue masses of the supporting
Belgian infantry slowly falling back, cool as a winter's morning.
Through an oversight, however, two battalions of carabineers did
not receive the order to retire and were in imminent danger of being
cut off and destroyed.
Then occurred one of the bravest acts that I have ever seen. To
reach them a messenger would have to traverse a mile of open
road, swept by-shrieking shrapnel and raked by rifle-fire. There was
about one chance in a thousand of a man getting to the end of that
road alive. A colonel standing beside me under a railway-culvert
summoned a gendarme, gave him the necessary orders, and
added, "Bonne chance, mon brave." The man, a fierce-moustached
fellow who would have gladdened the heart of Napoleon, knew that
he was being sent into the jaws of death, but he merely saluted, set
spurs to his horse, and tore down the road, an archaic figure in his
towering bearskin. He reached the troops uninjured and gave the
order for them to retreat, but as they fell back the German gunners
got the range and with marvellous accuracy dropped shell after shell
into the running column. Soon road and fields were dotted with
corpses in Belgian blue.
Time after time the Germans attempted to carry the railway
embankment with the bayonet, but the Belgians met them with
blasts of lead which shrivelled the grey columns as leaves are
shrivelled by an autumn wind. By mid-afternoon the Belgians and
Germans were in places barely a hundred yards apart, and the rattle
of musketry sounded like a boy drawing a stick along the palings of
a picket-fence. During the height of the battle a Zeppelin slowly
circled over the field like a great vulture awaiting a feast. So heavy
was the fighting that the embankment of a branch railway from
which I viewed the afternoon's battle was literally carpeted with the
corpses of Germans who had been killed during the morning. One
of them had died clasping a woman's picture. He was buried with it
still clenched in his hand. I saw peasants throw twelve bodies into
one grave. One peasant would grasp a corpse by the shoulders and
another would take its feet and they would give it a swing as though
it were a sack of meal. As I watched these inanimate forms being
carelessly tossed into the trench it was hard to make myself believe
that only a few hours before they had been sons or husbands or
fathers and that somewhere across the Rhine women and children
were waiting and watching and praying for them. At a hamlet near
Sempst I helped to bury an aged farmer and his son, inoffensive
peasants, who had been executed by the Germans because a
retreating Belgian soldier had shot a Uhlan in front of their
farmhouse. Not content with shooting them, they had disfigured
them almost beyond recognition. There were twenty-two bayonet
wounds in the old man's face. I know, for I counted them.
By four o'clock all the Belgian troops were withdrawn except a thin
screen to cover the retreat. As I wished to see the German advance
I remained on the railway embankment on the outskirts of Sempst
after all the Belgians, save a picket of ten men, had been withdrawn
from the village. I had my car waiting in the road below with the
motor running. As the German infantry would have to advance
across a mile of open fields it was obvious that I would have ample
time in which to get away. The Germans prefaced their advance by
a terrific cannonade. The air was filled with whining shrapnel.
Farmhouses collapsed amid puffs of brown smoke. The sky was
smeared in a dozen places with the smoke of burning hamlets.
Suddenly a soldier crouching beside me cried, "Les Allemands! Les
Allemands!" and from the woods which screened the railway-
embankment burst a long line of grey figures, hoarsely cheering. At
almost the same moment I heard a sudden splutter of shots in the
village street behind me and my driver screamed, "Hurry for your
life, monsieur! The Uhlans are upon us!" In my desire to see the
main German advance it had never occurred to me that a force of
the enemy's cavalry might slip around and take us in the flank,
which was exactly what had happened. It was three hundred yards
to the car and a freshly ploughed field lay between, but I am
confident that I broke the world's record for the distance. As I leaped
into the car and we shot down the road at fifty miles an hour, the
Uhlans cantered into the village, the sunlight striking on their lance-
tips. It was a close call.
The retreat from Malines provided a spectacle which I shall never
forget. For twenty miles every road was jammed with clattering
cavalry, plodding infantry, and rumbling batteries, the guns, limbers,
and caissons still covered with the green boughs which had been
used to mask their position from German aeroplanes. Gendarmes in
giant bearskins, chasseurs in uniforms of green and yellow,
carabineers with their shiny leather hats, grenadiers, infantry of the
line, guides, lancers, sappers and miners with picks and spades,
engineers with pontoon-wagons, machine-guns drawn by dogs,
ambulances with huge Red Cross flags fluttering above them, and
cars, cars, cars, all the dear old familiar American makes among
them, contributed to form a mighty river flowing towards Antwerp.
Malines formerly had a population of fifty thousand people, and
forty-five thousand of these fled when they heard that the Germans
were returning. The scenes along the road were heart-rending in
their pathos. The very young and the very old, the rich and the well-
to-do and the poverty-stricken, the lame and the sick and the blind,
with the few belongings they had been able to save in sheet-
wrapped bundles on their backs or piled in push-carts, clogged the
roads and impeded the soldiery. These people were abandoning all
that they held most dear to pillage and destruction. They were
completely terrorized by the Germans. But the Belgian army was not
terrorized. It was a retreating army but it was victorious in retreat.
The soldiers were cool, confident, courageous, and gave me the
feeling that if the German giant left himself unguarded a single
instant little Belgium would drive home a solar-plexus blow.
For many days after its evacuation by the Belgians, Malines
occupied an unhappy position midway between the contending
armies, being alternately bombarded by the Belgians and the
Germans. The latter, instead of endeavouring to avoid damaging
the splendid cathedral, whose tower, three hundred and twenty-five
feet high, is the most conspicuous landmark in the region, seemed
to take a grim pleasure in directing their fire upon the ancient
building. The great clock, the largest in Belgium, was destroyed; the
famous stained-glass windows were broken; the exquisite carvings
were shattered; and shells, crashing through the walls and roof,
converted the beautiful interior into a heap of debris. As there were
no Belgian troops in Malines at this time, and as this fact was
perfectly well known to the Germans, this bombardment of an
undefended city and the destruction of its historic monuments struck
me as being peculiarly wanton and not induced by any military
necessity. It was, of course, part and parcel of the German policy of
terrorism and intimidation. The bombardment of cities, the
destruction of historic monuments, the burning of villages, and, in
many cases, the massacre of civilians was the price which the
Belgians were forced to pay for resisting the invader.
In order to ascertain just what damage had been done to the city,
and particularly to the cathedral, I ran into Malines in my car during a
pause in the bombardment. As the streets were too narrow to permit
of turning the car around, and as it was more than probable that we
should have to get out in a hurry, Roos suggested that we run in
backward, which we did, I standing up in the tonneau, field-glasses
glued to my eyes, on the look-out for lurking Germans. I don't recall
ever having had a more eerie experience than that surreptitious visit
to Malines. The city was as silent and deserted as a cemetery;
there was not a human being to be seen; and as we cautiously
advanced through the narrow, winding streets, the vacant houses
echoed the throbbing of the motor with a racket which was positively
startling. Just as we reached the square in front of the cathedral a
German shell came shrieking over the house-tops and burst with a
shattering crash in the upper story of a building a few yards away.
The whole front of that building came crashing down about us in a
cascade of brick and plaster. We did not stay on the order of our
going. No. We went out of that town faster than any automobile
every went out of it before. We went so fast, in fact, that we struck
and killed the only remaining inhabitant. He was a large yellow dog.
Owing to strategic reasons the magnitude and significance of the
great four days' battle which was fought in mid-September between
the Belgian field army and the combined German forces in Northern
Belgium was carefully masked in all official communications at the
time, and, in the rush of later events, its importance was lost sight
of. Yet the great flanking movement of the Allies in France largely
owed its success to this determined offensive movement on the part
of the Belgians, who, as it afterwards proved, were acting in close
co-operation with the French General Staff. This unexpected sally,
which took the Germans completely by surprise, not only compelled
them to concentrate all their available forces in Belgium, but, what
was far more important, it necessitated the hasty recall of their Third
and Ninth armies, which were close to the French frontier and
whose addition to the German battle-line in France might well have
turned the scales in Germany's favour. In addition the Germans had
to bring up their Landwehr and Landsturm regiments from the south
of Brussels, and a naval division composed of fifteen thousand
sailors and marines was also engaged. It is no exaggeration, then,
to say that the success of the Allies on the Aisne was in great
measure due to the sacrifices made on this occasion by the Belgian
army. Every available man which the Germans could put into the
field was used to hold a line running through Sempst, Weerde,
Campenhout, Wespelaer, Rotselaer, and Holsbeek. The Belgians
lay to the north-east of this line, their left resting on Aerschot and
their centre at Meerbeek. Between the opposing armies stretched
the Malines-Louvain canal, along almost the entire length of which
fighting as bloody as any in the war took place.