known to future generations--would be to usurp the duties of the
historian, and I shall only attempt, therefore, to tell you of that
portion of it which I saw with my own eyes. On the morning of
September 13 four Belgian divisions moved southward from
Malines, their objective being the town of Weerde, on the Antwerp-
Brussels railway. It was known that the Germans occupied Weerde
in force, so throughout the day the Belgian artillery, masked by
heavy woods, pounded away incessantly. By noon the enemy's
guns ceased to reply, which was assumed by the jubilant Belgians
to be a sign that the German artillery had been silenced. At noon the
Belgian First Division moved forward and Thompson and I, leaving
the car in front of a convent over which the Red Cross flag was
flying, moved forward with it. Standing quite by itself in the middle of
a field, perhaps a mile beyond the convent, was a two-story brick
farmhouse. A hundred yards in front of the farmhouse stretched the
raised, stone-paved, tree-lined highway which runs from Brussels to
Antwerp, and on the other side of the highway was Weerde.
Sheltering ourselves as much as possible in the trenches which
zigzagged across the field, and dashing at full speed across the
open places which were swept by rifle-fire, we succeeded in
reaching the farmhouse. Ascending to the garret, we broke a hole
through the tiled roof and found ourselves looking down upon the
battle precisely as one looks down on a cricket match from the
upper tier of seats at Lord's. Lying in the deep ditch which bordered
our side of the highway was a Belgian infantry brigade, composed of
two regiments of carabineers and two regiments of chasseurs a
pied, the men all crouching in the ditch or lying prone upon the
ground. Five hundred yards away, on the other side of the highway,
we could see through the trees the whitewashed walls and red
pottery roofs of Weerde, while a short distance to the right, in a
heavily wooded park, was a large stone chateau. The only sign that
the town was occupied was a pall of blue-grey vapour which hung
over it and a continuous crackle of musketry coming from it, though
occasionally, through my glasses, I could catch glimpses of the lean
muzzles of machine-guns protruding from the upper windows of the
chateau.
Now you must bear in mind the fact that in this war soldiers fired
from the trenches for days on end without once getting a glimpse of
the enemy. They knew that somewhere opposite them, in that bit of
wood, perhaps, or behind that group of buildings, or on the other
side of that railway-embankment, the enemy was trying to kill them
just as earnestly as they were trying to kill him. But they rarely got a
clear view of him save in street fighting and, of course, when he was
advancing across open country. Soldiers no longer select their man
and pick him off as one would pick off a stag, because the great
range of modern rifles has put the firing-lines too far apart for that
sort of thing. Instead, therefore, of aiming at individuals, soldiers aim
at the places where they believe those individuals to be. Each
company commander shows his men their target, tells them at what
distance to set their sights, and controls their expenditure of
ammunition, the fire of infantry generally being more effective when
delivered in bursts by sections.
What I have said in general about infantry being unable to see the
target at which they are firing was particularly true at Weerde owing
to the dense foliage which served to screen the enemy's position.
Occasionally, after the explosion of a particularly well-placed Belgian
shell, Thompson and I, from our hole in the roof and with the aid of
our high-power glasses, could catch fleeting glimpses of scurrying
grey-clad figures, but that was all. The men below us in the trenches
could see nothing except the hedges, gardens, and red-roofed
houses of a country town. They knew the enemy was there,
however, from the incessant rattle of musketry and machine-guns
and from the screams and exclamations of those of their fellows
who happened to get in the bullets' way.
Late in the afternoon word was passed down the line that the
German guns had been put out of action, that the enemy was
retiring and that at 5.30 sharp the whole Belgian line would advance
and take the town with the bayonet. Under cover of artillery fire so
continuous that it sounded like thunder in the mountains, the
Belgian infantry climbed out of the trenches and, throwing aside
their knapsacks, formed up behind the road preparatory to the
grand assault. A moment later a dozen dog batteries came trotting
up and took position on the left of the infantry. At 5.30 to the minute
the whistles of the officers sounded shrilly and the mile-long line of
men swept forward cheering. They crossed the roadway, they
scrambled over ditches, they climbed fences, they pushed through
hedges, until they were within a hundred yards of the line of
buildings which formed the outskirts of the town. Then hell itself
broke loose. The whole German front, which for several hours past
had replied but feebly to the Belgian fire, spat a continuous stream
of lead and flame. The rolling crash of musketry and the ripping
snarl of machine-guns were stabbed by the vicious pom-pom-pom-
pom-pom of the quick-firers. From every window of the three-storied
chateau opposite us the lean muzzles of mitrailleuses poured out
their hail of death. I have seen fighting on four continents, but I have
never witnessed so deadly a fire as that which wiped out the head of
the Belgian column as a sponge wipes out figures on a slate.
The Germans had prepared a trap and the Belgians had walked--or
rather charged--directly into it. Three minutes later the dog batteries
came tearing back on a dead run. That should have been a signal
that it was high time for us to go, but, in spite of the fact that a storm
was brewing, we waited to see the last inning. Then things began to
happen with a rapidity that was bewildering. Back through the
hedges, across the ditches, over the roadway came the Belgian
infantry, crouching, stooping, running for their lives, Every now and
then a soldier would stumble, as though he had stubbed his toe,
and throw out his arms and fall headlong. A bullet had hit him. The
road was sprinkled with silent forms in blue and green. The fields
were sprinkled with them too. One man was hit as he was struggling
to get through a hedge and died standing, held upright by the thorny
branches. Men with blood streaming down their faces, men with
horrid crimson patches on their tunics, limped, crawled, staggered
past, leaving scarlet trails behind them. A young officer of
chasseurs, who had been recklessly exposing himself while trying to
check the retreat of his men, suddenly spun around on his heels,
like one of those wooden toys which the curb vendors sell, and then
crumpled up, as though all the bone and muscle had gone out of
him. A man plunged into a half-filled ditch and lay there, with his
head under water. I could see the water slowly redden.
Bullets began to smash the tiles above us. "This is no place for two
innocent little American boys," remarked Thompson, shouldering his
camera. I agreed with him. By the time we reached the ground the
Belgian infantry was half a mile in our rear, and to reach the car we
had to cross nearly a mile of open field. Bullets were singing across
it and kicking up little spurts of brown earth where they struck. We
had not gone a hundred yards when the German artillery, which the
Belgians so confidently asserted had been silenced, opened with
shrapnel. Have you ever heard a winter gale howling and shrieking
through the tree-tops? Of course. Then you know what shrapnel
sounds like, only it is louder. You have no idea though how
extremely annoying shrapnel is, when it bursts in your immediate
vicinity. You feel as though you would like nothing in the world so
much as to be suddenly transformed into a woodchuck and have a
convenient hole. I remembered that an artillery officer had told me
that a burst of shrapnel from a battery two miles away will spread
itself over an eight-acre field, and every time I heard the moan of an
approaching shell I wondered if it would decide to explode in the
particular eight-acre field in which I happened to be.
As though the German shell-storm was not making things
sufficiently uncomfortable for us, when we were half-way across the
field two Belgian soldiers suddenly rose from a trench and covered
us with their rifles. "Halt! Hands up!" they shouted. There was
nothing for it but to obey them. We advanced with our hands in the
air but with our heads twisted upward on the look-out for shrapnel.
As we approached they recognized us. "Oh, you're the Americans,"
said one of them, lowering his rifle. "We couldn't see your faces and
we took you for Germans. You'd better come with us. It's getting too
hot to stay here." The four of us started on a run for a little cluster of
houses a few hundred yards away. By this time the shells were
coming across at the rate of twenty a minute.
"Suppose we go into a cellar until the storm blows over," suggested
Roos, who had joined us. "I'm all for that," said I, making a dive for
the nearest doorway. "Keep away from that house!" shouted a
Belgian soldier who suddenly appeared from around a corner. "The
man who owns it has gone insane from fright. He's upstairs with a
rifle and he's shooting at every one who passes." "Well, I call that
damned inhospitable," said Thompson, and Roos and I heartily
agreed with him. There was nothing else for it, therefore, but to
make a dash for the car. We had left it standing in front of a convent
over which a Red Cross flag was flying on the assumption that there
it would be perfectly safe. But we found that we were mistaken. The
Red Cross flag did not spell protection by any means. As we came
within sight of the car a shell burst within thirty feet of it, a fragment
of the projectile burying itself in the door. I never knew of a car
taking so long to crank. Though it was really probably only a matter
of seconds before the engine started it seemed to us, standing in
that shell-swept road, like hours.
Darkness had now fallen. A torrential rain had set in. The car slid
from one side of the road to the other like a Scotchman coming
home from celebrating Bobbie Burns's birthday and repeatedly
threatened to capsize in the ditch. The mud was ankle-deep and the
road back to Malines was now in the possession of the Germans, so
we were compelled to make a detour through a deserted country-
side, running through the inky blackness without lights so as not to
invite a visit from a shell. It was long after midnight when, cold, wet
and famished, we called the password to the sentry at the gateway
through the barbed-wire entanglements which encircled Antwerp
and he let us in. It was a very lively day for every one concerned
and there were a few minutes when I thought that I would never see
the Statue of Liberty again.
VII. The Coming Of The British
Imagine, if you please, a professional heavy-weight prize-fighter,
with an abnormally long reach, holding an amateur bantam-weight
boxer at arm's length with one hand and hitting him when and where
he pleased with the other. The fact that the little man was not in the
least afraid of his burly antagonist and that he got in a vicious kick or
jab whenever he saw an opening would not, of course, have any
effect on the outcome of the unequal contest. Now that is almost
precisely what happened when the Germans besieged Antwerp, the
enormously superior range and calibre of their siege-guns enabling
them to pound the city's defences to pieces at their leisure without
the defenders being able to offer any effective resistance.
Though Antwerp was to all intents and purposes a besieged city for
many weeks prior to its capture, it was not until the beginning of the
last week in September that the Germans seriously set to work of
destroying its fortifications. When they did begin, however, their
great siege pieces pounded the forts as steadily and remorselessly
as a trip-hammer pounds a bar of iron. At the time the Belgian
General Staff believed that the Germans were using the same giant
howitzers which demolished the forts at Liege, but in this they were
mistaken, for, as it transpired later, the Antwerp fortifications owed
their destruction to Austrian guns served by Austrian artillerymen.
Now guns of this size can only be fired from specially prepared
concrete beds, and these beds, as we afterwards learned, had been
built during the preceding month behind the embankment of the
railway which runs from Malines to Louvain, thus accounting for the
tenacity with which the Germans had held this railway despite
repeated attempts to dislodge them. At this stage of the investment
the Germans were firing at a range of upwards of eight miles, while
the Belgians had no artillery that was effective at more than six. Add
to this the fact that the German fire was remarkably accurate, being
controlled and constantly corrected by observers stationed in
balloons, and that the German shells were loaded with an explosive
having greater destructive properties than either cordite or shimose
powder, and it will be seen how hopeless was the Belgian position.
The scenes along the Lierre-St. Catherine-Waelhem sector, against
which the Germans at first focussed their attack, were impressive
and awesome beyond description. Against a livid sky rose pillars of
smoke from burning villages. The air was filled with shrieking shell
and bursting shrapnel. The deep-mouthed roar of the guns in the
forts and the angry bark of the Belgian field-batteries were answered
at intervals by the shattering crash of the German high-explosive
shells. When one of these big shells--the soldiers dubbed them
"Antwerp expresses"--struck in a field it sent up a geyser of earth
two hundred feet in height. When they dropped in a river or canal,
as sometimes happened, there was a waterspout. And when they
dropped in a village, that village disappeared from the map.
While we were watching the bombardment from a rise in the
Waelhem road a shell burst in the hamlet of Waerloos, whose red-
brick houses were clustered almost at our feet. A few minutes later
a procession of fugitive villagers came plodding up the cobble-
paved highway. It was headed by an ashen-faced peasant pushing
a wheelbarrow with a weeping woman clinging to his arm. In the
wheelbarrow, atop a pile of hastily collected household goods, was
sprawled the body of a little boy. He could not have been more than
seven. His little knickerbockered legs and play-worn shoes
protruded grotesquely from beneath a heap of bedding. When they
lifted it we could see where the shell had hit him. Beside the dead
boy sat his sister, a tot of three, with blood trickling from a flesh-
wound in her face. She was still clinging convulsively to a toy lamb
which had once been white but whose fleece was now splotched
with red. Some one passed round a hat and we awkwardly tried to
express our sympathy through the medium of silver. After a little
pause they started on again, the father stolidly pushing the
wheelbarrow, with its pathetic load, before him. It was the only home
that family had.
One of the bravest acts that I have ever seen was performed by an
American woman during the bombardment of Waelhem. Her name
was Mrs. Winterbottom; she was originally from Boston, and had
married an English army officer. When he went to the front in
France she went to the front in Belgium, bringing over her car, which
she drove herself, and placing it at the disposal of the British Field
Hospital. After the fort of Waelhem had been silenced and such of
the garrison as were able to move had been withdrawn, word was
received at ambulance headquarters that a number of dangerously
wounded had been left behind and that they would die unless they
received immediate attention. To reach the fort it was necessary to
traverse nearly two miles of road swept by shell-fire. Before anyone
realized what was happening a big grey car shot down the road with
the slender figure of Mrs. Winterbottom at the wheel. Clinging to the
running-board was her English chauffeur and beside her sat my little
Kansas photographer, Donald Thompson. Though the air was filled
with the fleecy white patches which look like cotton-wool but are
really bursting shrapnel, Thompson told me afterwards that Mrs.
Winterbottom was as cool as though she were driving down her
native Commonwealth Avenue on a Sunday morning. When they
reached the fort shells were falling all about them, but they filled the
car with wounded men and Mrs. Winterbottom started back with her
blood-soaked freight for the Belgian lines.
Thompson remained in the fort to take pictures. When darkness fell
he made his way back to the village of Waelhem, where he found a
regiment of Belgian infantry. In one of the soldiers Thompson
recognized a man who, before the war, had been a waiter in the St.
Regis Hotel in New York and who had been detailed to act as his
guide and interpreter during the fighting before Termonde. This man
took Thompson into a wine-shop where a detachment of soldiers
was quartered, gave him food, and spread straw upon the floor for
him to sleep on. Shortly after midnight a forty-two centimetre shell
struck the building. Of the soldiers who were sleeping in the same
room as Thompson nine were killed and fifteen more who were
sleeping upstairs, the ex-waiter among them. Thompson told me
that when the ceiling gave way and the mangled corpses came
tumbling down upon him, he ran up the street with his hands above
his head, screaming like a madman. He met an officer whom he
knew and they ran down the street together, hoping to get out of the
doomed town. Just then a projectile from one of the German siege-
guns tore down the long, straight street, a few yards above their
heads. The blast of air which it created was so terrific that it threw
them down. Thompson said that it was like standing close to the
edge of the platform at a wayside station when the Empire State
Express goes by. When his nerve came back to him he pulled a
couple of cigars out of his pocket and offered one to the officer.
Their hands trembled so, he said afterwards, that they used up half
a box of matches before they could get their cigars lighted.
I am inclined to think that the most bizarre incident I saw during the
bombardment of the outer forts was the flight of the women inmates
of a madhouse at Duffel. There were three hundred women in the
institution, many of them violently insane, and the nuns in charge,
assisted by soldiers, had to take them across a mile of open
country, under a rain of shells, to a waiting train. I shall not soon
forget the picture of that straggling procession winding its slow way
across the stubble-covered fields. Every few seconds a shell would
burst above it or in front of it or behind it with a deafening explosion.
Yet, despite the frantic efforts of the nuns and soldiers, the women
would not be hurried. When a shell burst some of them would
scream and cower or start to run, but more of them would stop in
their tracks and gibber and laugh and clap their hands like excited
children. Then the soldiers would curse under their breath and push
them roughly forward and the nuns would plead with them in their
soft, low voices, to hurry, hurry, hurry. We, who were watching the
scene, thought that few of them would reach the train alive, yet not
one was killed or wounded. The Arabs are right: the mad are under
God's protection.
One of the most inspiring features of the campaign in Belgium was
the heroism displayed by the priests and the members of the
religious orders. Village cures in their black cassocks and shovel
hats, and monks in sandals and brown woollen robes, were
everywhere. I saw them in the trenches exhorting the soldiers to
fight to the last for God and the King; I saw them going out on to the
battlefield with stretchers to gather the wounded under a fire which
made veterans seek shelter; I saw them in the villages where the
big shells were falling, helping to carry away the ill and the aged; I
saw them in the hospitals taking farewell messages and administering
the last sacrament to the dying; I even saw them, rifle in hand, on the
firing-line, fighting for the existence of the nation. To these soldiers
of the Lord I raise my hat in respect and admiration. The people of
Belgium owe them a debt that they can never repay.
In the days before the war it was commonly said that the Church
was losing ground in Belgium; that religion was gradually being
ousted by socialism. If this were so, I saw no sign of it in the nation's
days of trial. Time and time again I saw soldiers before going into
battle drop on their knees and cross themselves and murmur a
hasty prayer. Even the throngs of terrified fugitives, flying from their
burning villages, would pause in their flight to kneel before the little
shrines along the wayside. I am convinced, indeed, that the ruthless
destruction of religious edifices by the Germans and the brutality
which they displayed toward priests and members of the religious
orders was more responsible than any one thing for the desperate
resistance which they met with from the Belgian peasantry.
By the afternoon of October 3 things were looking very black for
Antwerp. The forts composing the Lierre-Waelhem sector of the
outer line of defences had been pounded into silence by the
German siege-guns; a strong German force, pushing through the
breach thus made, had succeeded in crossing the Nethe in the face
of desperate opposition; the Belgian troops, after a fortnight of
continuous fighting, were at the point of exhaustion; the hospitals
were swamped by the streams of wounded which for days past had
been pouring in; over the city hung a cloud of despondency and
gloom, for the people, though kept in complete ignorance of the true
state of affairs, seemed oppressed with a sense of impending
disaster.
When I returned that evening to the Hotel St. Antoine from the
battle-front, which was then barely half a dozen miles outside the
city, the manager stopped me as I was entering the lift.
"Are you leaving with the others, Mr. Powell?" he whispered.
"Leaving for where? With what others?" I asked sharply.
"Hadn't you heard?" he answered in some confusion. "The
members of the Government and the Diplomatic Corps are leaving
for Ostend by special steamer at seven in the morning. It has just
been decided at a Cabinet meeting. But don't mention it to a soul.
No one is to know it until they are safely gone."
I remember that as I continued to my room the corridors smelled of
smoke, and upon inquiring its cause I learned that the British
Minister, Sir Francis Villiers, and his secretaries were burning papers
in the rooms occupied by the British Legation. The Russian Minister,
who was superintending the packing of his trunks in the hall,
stopped me to say good-bye. Imagine my surprise, then, upon
going down to breakfast the following morning, to meet Count
Goblet d'Alviella, the Vice-President of the Senate and a minister of
State, leaving the dining-room.
"Why, Count!" I exclaimed, "I had supposed that you were well on
your way to Ostend by this time."
"We had expected to be," explained the venerable statesman, "but
at four o'clock this morning the British Minister sent us word that Mr.
Winston Churchill had started for Antwerp and asking us to wait and
hear what he has to say."