ANTWERP--THE DEAD CITIES OF BRABANT
One must have known Belgium before the war, and have travelled through
that rich and beautiful country in times of peace, to realise how great
is the change. All that has been written up to now about what has
happened there is in reality much less than the truth.
Every town, large and small, every country village, one might almost
say every inch of Belgian soil, bears the heavy mark of the invaders.
What nobody dared to touch they have destroyed; what was believed to be
protected by religion and tradition they have profaned; what centuries
had made sacred for any thinking being they have demolished.
We send to prison and often take the life of the man who kills another
man. Here defenceless old folk, women, and children have been killed by
thousands without a motive, even without a pretext. We rage impotently
at the earthquake which destroys towns and takes the toll of life.
Here human beings have surpassed the earthquake. We shiver at the idea
that a fire could destroy the treasures of art which are often the
only chain which links us to past generations. Here men who proclaimed
themselves the greatest admirers of all the arts stood by and watched
the treasures of the world burn by the flames they themselves had
lighted.
I have been practically across the whole of Belgium, from east to west,
from north to south. From Antwerp to Liége, from Namur to Tournai and
to Ghent, by road and by rail, but mostly on foot, on horseback, or
by prehistoric vehicles, as it is impossible to get a motor-car at
any price. Always the same sight. A population that hardly dares to
hope, aching for real news--a population that is feeling a grief too
deep for tears, and is plunged into a tragic, dumb sorrow. There it
lives and works under the mocking eye of the Conqueror. Sometimes this
Conqueror is frankly rude and violent, as he loves to feel and to look
like the real descendants of that Attila he has glorified. Sometimes he
takes on a mask of scoffing politeness which is still more unbearable.
During the first month or so the Germans tried to make friends with the
population; the men tried to mix with the people; the officers with the
best families. Their advances always received an icy though more or
less polite reception, so now the enemy has assumed an air of disdain
for the weak little nation it is keeping under its heel.
The little steamboat which took me from Flushing to Antwerp all across
the Escaut was laden with a pathetic crowd. There were mothers going
back to see their sons, who, being of age liable to military service,
had not been allowed to leave Belgium; parents whose only desire was
to discover the grave of their son; people who, having come to an end
of their resources, were going back to their deserted ruined homes, to
their little piece of land which is now covered by water two feet deep.
* * *
When we sight Antwerp it is already dusk, and round us is the large
harbour, which has completely lost its wonderful multiform life.
Carcases of old boats, breasts and keels of sunken ships, emerge from
the lead-like water, suggesting the terrific curves of prehistoric
monsters. Some of these boats were sunk by the British before they
left. Others were sunk by the Germans, who madly shelled their own
mercantile ships together with those of the Allies. On the top of a
mast a French flag is still being washed continuously by the waves.
The complicated landing formalities distract my attention from the
contemplation of this cemetery of ships. We are searched three times.
Every scrap of paper in our pockets, every single article in our
luggage, is carefully examined. Then our passports. Very few of these
seem complete enough to please the German authorities. A man who is
travelling with somebody else's pass is discovered and taken away.
Two ladies are not allowed to land, and they are taken back on board
screaming and crying; in two days they will be sent back to Holland.
Only German is spoken here, though nearly all the officials know French
perfectly. If one does not understand German, one cannot possibly get
on. After a couple of hours we are allowed to go into the town. No more
taxi-cabs are running owing to the shortage of petrol, and also to the
fact that all vehicles have been taken up by the German Government. The
town is dark for fear of an aerial attack. Patrols of Landsturm men
pass continuously across the principal street, and fill the town with
the squeaky noise of their nailed boots. The password is loudly shouted
when they meet another patrol.
At the hotel everybody is German, from the manager to the liftman and
to the chambermaids. As for the guests, they are all German officers.
Every good hotel in Belgium is at the present moment inhabited almost
exclusively by German officers, and outside the main doors a white,
black, and red striped sentry-box has taken the place of the majestic
doorkeeper.
Most of the officers are not alone; they have sent for their wives, and
very often even their children, nursemaids, servants, and dogs.
I am told the German Government is encouraging this kind of thing,
and offers special travel facilities for wives and families. Lately
non-commissioned officers and men have been allowed to send for their
families. I don't know the real reason of all this, but it is certain
that the Germans are trying hard to give the Belgians the impression
that they have come to stay. In many places they have taken houses or
flats for a year, and have paid for them in advance, and in some small
towns in which it is not possible to get a comfortable residence they
have started the construction of new villas and cottages.
I walk down the Avenue de Keyzer and enter a very large restaurant,
which seems also completely in German hands. Even the menu is printed
in German, and hardly a single Belgian enters the huge establishment. I
ask for some newspapers, and I am told they can only get German ones;
at ten o'clock every light must be out. People walking in the street
without special permits after half-past ten are likely to be arrested.
Antwerp is probably the most Germanised town in all Belgium, owing to
the fact, I believe, that even before the war any amount of German
people lived here, and nearly all the hotels were already in German
hands. The town itself does not appear much damaged by the bombardment.
Now and again a large hole or a burnt ruin shows the spot were a bomb
has burst, but to see real destruction one must go to the southern
suburbs, outside the Porte de Berckem.
Here are the old forts, some half destroyed by shells, some still
untouched, and most of the houses show wide open wounds, red with
freshly smashed bricks. Most of the forts are now converted into
barracks for the German troops, and near every one of them is a small
cemetery, with many a glorious name written on the rough, white wooden
crosses.
Though most of the actual fighting took place outside the old
fortification near the new fortresses, at about three miles' distance
from the town, some of the old seventeenth-century forts have received
their share of shells, and do not seem to have done at all badly,
considering the very modern artillery which has beaten them.
Antwerp has lost more than three-quarters of its usual population, a
large part of which joined the army or escaped to Holland and England.
That is why, perhaps, foodstuff is still comparatively cheap here, and
everything except bread and vegetables seems fairly plentiful. Flour is
very scarce, and all sort of ingredients are used in its place.
Curiously enough, while bread is scarce and very bad even in the best
restaurants, and while in most villages people are forbidden to buy
more than a small ration per head, confectioners' shops are full of
cakes and sweets of all descriptions. I could not help thinking of the
words attributed to a fine lady of France: "Il n'y a plus de pain?
Pourquoi ne mangent-ils pas de la brioche?"
As for vegetables, the Belgian gardens have been completely swamped by
the inundations, and the produce imported from Germany does not seem to
go very far.
There has been apparently a quiet exodus of works of art from Antwerp's
famous museums to Germany, though apparently most of the Rubens,
Rembrandts, Van Dycks, and Teniers, which were the gems of the Antwerp
collections, were taken away before the arrival of the Huns, and are
said to be now in a very safe place. Some of the remainder have now
found their way to Germany. By the way, some of the rarest specimens
of the Zoo animals have shared the fate of the old masters, and now
languish behind alien bars.
The town is infested with spies, who are relentlessly hunting down
Frenchmen and Englishmen. As a matter of fact, everyone who comes into
Belgium is provided straight away with a sort of guardian angel, who
very often does not leave him for many days, and possibly not before he
has given him some trouble with the German Kommandantur.
This has happened to me, as I will relate later on, and also to most
American and Dutch subjects who get into Belgium at the present moment.
Some of them, for the simple fact that they are journalists, are taken
to Germany and interned there, and when the Embassies of the different
countries protest and claim their subjects, the Government of Berlin
answers that the captured journalists are not considered as prisoners,
but are only detained for a certain time--that is to say, for as long
as the news they have gathered remains important if made public.
Another variety of the so-called German Secret Service is the
agent-provocateur, who generally speaks perfect French and Flemish,
and gets a fixed sum for every arrest effected by the police on his
initiative.
In Antwerp I saw one of these spies approach an old gentleman who had
a Belgian rosette in his buttonhole. He was on a tramcar platform, and
the spy said to him, "Very bitter weather for our poor little soldiers
at the front, isn't it, sir?" The old gentleman evidently knew the
identity of his companion, for he simply stared at the rascal and
turned his face the other way.
The favourite ground of action of this army of spies is the railway
carriage. There acquaintances are easily and quickly made. I very often
saw people taken away at the station by two soldiers, while the hero
of this beautiful deed was following at a short distance with his face
wreathed in the happiest of smiles.
To travel in Belgium now is a complicated task; railways are completely
taken over by the German War Office, and only Germans are employed.
Not even the old porters are allowed in the stations. No tickets are
given without a special pass from the Kommandantur of the town, saying
where the applicant wishes to go, for how long, and for what reason.
Then you pay for your ticket, provided you make yourself understood by
the German employees, and you have the exact amount in marks and not
in Belgian money. There are only third-class carriages at first-class
fares--für Zivilpersonen--all the other first and second class
carriages are marked Nur für Heeresangehorige--those who don't pay
evidently.
Before arriving on the platform you are searched by very rude soldiers
wearing a large crescent-shaped brass plate with the word "polizei"
suspended to their necks by a chain, like a metal label on a brandy
bottle.
After this you carry your own luggage to the train, which is
thoughtfully kept waiting a quarter of a mile outside the station, in
rain or snow, and sit down in a freezing carriage without any light or
heating, but possibly with one or more windows smashed. Half an hour
or so after the fixed time the train begins to move; a little notice,
in German naturally, tells you not to put your head outside the window
while crossing a bridge because sentries will shoot at you, and another
notice says that, owing to the crisis, you may be asked to step out of
the carriage at any moment and without any right to protest, even if
you happen to have the pluck to do so.
And ultimately, after hours waiting in intermediate railway stations,
after changing trains two or three times on a ten miles' fare, you
sometimes arrive; you and your luggage are searched once again, and
then you are let out.
I feel sure most of those gentlemen got their iron crosses for much
less than this Odyssey.
* * *
It was five o'clock in the afternoon when I walked out of Louvain
station on to a muddy piece of uneven ground surrounded by ruins which
were once the station square. It was a grey day, and a few stray flakes
of snow were blown by the icy whirlwind in all directions. The weather
was perfectly consonant with the general aspect of the town.
Right and left I could discover nothing but ruins; it was hard to
tell which was the road and which the site of former buildings.
Enormous masses of calcinated bricks and stones are all that remain
of the houses which have collapsed; as for the others which are still
standing, their appearance is still more tragic. All the inside part,
the ceilings, the staircases, the roofs, have been burned away, and the
outer wall, all out of perpendicular, still shows the pots of flowers,
the iron bars, and the metallic parts of the shutters which were burned
away.
Entire rows of houses protrude on the street as if they are going to
collapse at any minute; others lean backwards just as if they were
frightened; others are all leaning on the right or the left side as if
a terrible wind had forced them into that unnatural position.
Here at another spot the walls of two houses touch each other at the
top, forming a sort of pointed arch. The steeple of a little church
leans far more than the famous Pisa Tower.
From every window there hangs a curious sort of transparent stalactite,
which at first sight looks like an icicle, and is formed by the
window glass melted in the dreadful heat. A three-floor house has
collapsed completely except for the wall facing the street, and at
one of the second-floor windows a bird-cage, suspended by a chain, is
still hanging, and the blizzard rattles it continuously to and fro.
For the fire has got a sort of sinister humour of its own. Here it
has destroyed completely the powerful masonry of a fifteenth-century
house whose walls were four feet thick, and next door it has blackened
without burning a fragile-looking cottage, and even left a white and
red check curtain hanging from the window. Further down, a butcher's
shop has completely disappeared, but a large metallic sign with an
enormous bull painted on it is still at its place, sustained, a miracle
of balance, by the frame of the burned awning.
I walk down the Rue de la Station to the Grand' Place. Here was the
fine theatre in Italian renaissance; now only the four pillars of the
front mark the place where it was standing. Farther down, near the
gigantic ruins of the University and the Library, is the once-famous
Cathedral of St. Peter.
Up to a few months ago this building was one of the most beautiful
examples of the Flemish florid-Gothic. All lovers of old things
remember its windows, made more elegant than those of any other
Gothic cathedral by a sort of carved balcony, its steep roof, its
solid-looking, severe front without the traditional portals. Now all
this has disappeared. The roof has collapsed. The wonderfully painted
stained windows are no more. The carvings have been reduced to
shapeless calcinated stones, and the bricks underneath, re-baked by
the flames, show themselves as red as a fresh wound. A notice stuck on
what was a beautifully carved oak door tells me that the entrance to
the cathedral is strictly "verboten." But a couple of marks make the
soldier on guard close both eyes, and he lets me in after having warned
me not to say a word or make any noise, as pieces of burned wood and of
cornice are dropping down at the slightest movement.
Inside one walks on a bed of rubbish four to seven feet deep. The huge
pillars stand without supporting any vault, like useless date trees.
The famous tabernacle of Mathieu de Layens has been cracked by the
heat, and tattered blackened pieces of canvas hang from the walls once
covered with paint. As for the twenty-four little statues which used to
decorate the choir, they have disappeared. I don't know if they were
taken away by the priests before the destruction of the cathedral or
stolen by the Germans after it.
Outside, the streets are nearly deserted. A few soldiers, a few
ragged people begging for a copper or a piece of bread, these I see;
a few of the old inhabitants searching the remains of their homes and
contemplating, with the look of somebody who sees an old friend, every
bit of metal, every fragment of pottery they happen to find. They have
constructed temporary shelters and collected therein what the flames
have spared. Some are looking under their house ruins for a member of
the family who has disappeared. Every day a new corpse is found. In
every square are fresh graves, and the very day of my visit five more
victims of German violence had been buried right in the middle of the
station square, all round the statue of Van der Weyer, which has been
respected probably as an homage to its ugliness. The Kommandant of
Louvain insisted that the victims should be buried there, and not in
the cemetery, "to set a good example!"
In this phrase is the reason of the destruction of the harmless little
town--a reason which has puzzled the whole world.
For the most dreadful part of the destruction of Louvain is that
there has been no fighting, no shelling, nothing of what we generally
understand by the word war. The town had been quietly occupied by the
Germans, and they forced the population to leave their houses without
carrying anything with them. People who tried to save anything were
robbed of what they had taken with them, the earrings were pulled out
of the women's ears (I have seen a body with both the ear-lobes torn in
two), the pockets searched, and in more than one case anybody who was
found to be carrying something was immediately shot.
Petrol and some other new liquid combustible quite recently discovered
in a Berlin laboratory, and which the Louvain people have christened
"Colofogne du Diable," were poured abundantly on the whole town,
except, perhaps, on twenty houses inhabited by Germans. I saw, in
one of the station rooms, the fire engines which have been used for
this purpose, fire engines which bear the arms of the City of Louvain,
and which, with cruel irony, were used to set fire to the town they
had been created to save. Specially made bombs were thrown into every
house, and the Germans retired outside the town on the great boulevard
to enjoy a spectacle really worthy of Nero.
But at Louvain the Germans have surpassed Nero. While the town was
still burning all the population, regardless of age or sex, was
arranged in a single line near Mont César. And then the most dreadful
thing happened.
The Romans, to subdue soldiers' rebellions, invented a punishment which
always seemed to the world the limit of cruelty--decimation.
The Germans at Louvain did the same thing, but they beat the Romans.
Every third man was the victim. I met a gentleman who had been twice
through this ordeal. He was still young, but his hair was grey, and
his eyes had in them a far-off expression of terror. Near the cathedral
somebody pointed out to me a young woman gone mad through having lost
her husband and brother in this way.
* * *
From Louvain to Malines the country shows all the signs of dreadful
desolation. Flooded land covered with ice, under which the dead lie by
hundreds, pieces of wood crowned by Belgian képis or Prussian helmets
marking the grave of officers--this is the sight. Flooded trenches
and rusty wirework, burned or cut trees, telegraphic poles smashed by
shells, and again burned houses and windmills, some of the large wings
of which have been amputated, and little ruined châteaux on the top of
which waves a German flag.
The train passes the Dyle on a temporary bridge constructed at the side
of the old one destroyed by the retreating Belgians. Here were many
large greenhouses in which the cultivation of the orchid had reached
its highest degree of perfection. Now they look like enormous cages,
every one of their windows having been smashed.
Malines station gives you an idea of what the whole town looks like.
A large placard tells you that the town is now called Mecheln, and
underneath it is a large picture of the general who ordered the
shelling of the town, but met his death the same day. German soldiers
keep the frame constantly decorated with laurel branches. The glass
roof is torn by an enormous hole, through which the snow enters freely.
The waiting-room has also an extra aperture, and a bomb has taken
away every bit of the stucco work and left the walls completely bare.
Malines was not set on fire; all the ruin brought on it was due to
the blind violence of the high explosives. Evidently they are not as
destructive as the people who have invented them, and the town does not
look half as bad as Louvain.
Though very few of the houses are untouched, the general aspect of the
quiet town has not changed much. Only one or two of the large domes and
steeples which used to emerge from the roofs of the small houses have
disappeared, and the unfinished tower of St. Rombaut has altered its
massive silhouette a little.
Now and again I see deep holes, caused by shells, and houses which
have lost a corner, and allow a glance of their domestic life through
a large crevice. Here a quiet "béguinage" has received a projectile
in full, and from the street I can see a whitewashed room with a
decapitated painted crucifix, and hanging to a nail a black bonnet of
the old Brabant country woman.
I think of the tragedy of the poor old lady who received that
unexpected visit in the very room in which she had chosen to end her
life. The "béguinages" of Malines are said to be the most strict of
the whole of Belgium, and in some of them the old women live for years
without seeing an outsider. Where are now the poor old things who
thought every day's life full enough of private worries, and have now
been reached in their seclusion by this dreadful catastrophe?
Curiously enough, Malines, which can be considered as the religious
metropolis of Belgium, establishes a real record in the way of sieges,
pillages, and plunders. French, English, Dutch have often taken and
half destroyed the town, and ultimately Napoleon dismantled it in 1804.
Some old twelfth and thirteenth century houses which have resisted all
previous trials have been fatally hit now. The Grand' Place, which
used to delight the lovers of old Flemish constructions, has greatly
suffered, and the shells with subtle perversity have spared some ugly
modern buildings and raged on what centuries had respected.
Alas! these descriptions of destroyed towns, of murder and pillage;
the stories of unbelievable atrocities, even only those which I know
are true, the pictures of misery and famine which nobody would have
believed possible in our times, could be continued page after page.
But what happened in the towns is nothing compared with what happened
in the country. There, far from the control of high officers, the
blonde beast has given way to all the brutal follies of which the Hun
is now known to be capable.
I have seen and heard things that disgust keeps me from writing;
things compared with which the excesses of the French Revolution, the
bloodthirsty pleasures of some barbarian kings, the exploits of some
notorious brigands, are but the A B C of an art in which the German
army has certainly reached the highest possible standard of perfection.