The Gray Hordes Out Of The North
The outbreak of the Great War found me in Europe as a general
tourist, and not in the capacity of war-correspondent. Hitherto I had
essayed a much less romantic role in life, belonging rather to the
crowd of uplifters who conduct the drab and dreary battle with the
slums. The futility of most of these schemes for badgering the poor
makes one feel at times that these battles are shams and
unavailing. This is depressing. It is thrilling, then, suddenly to
acquire the glamorous title of war-correspondent, and to have
before one the prospect of real and actual battles.
Commissioned thus and desiring to live up to the code and
requirement of the office, I naturally opined that war-
correspondents rushed immediately into the thick of the fight. Later
I discovered what a mistake that was. Only very young and green
ones do so. The seasoned correspondent is inclined to view the
whole affair more dispassionately and with a larger perspective.
But being of the verdant variety, I naturally figured that if the
Germans were smashing down through Belgium onto Liege that
that was where I should be. By entering gingerly through the back
door of Holland, I planned to join them in their march down the
Meuse River.
To The Hague came descriptions of the hordes pressing down out
of the north through the fire-swept, blood-drenched plain of
northern Belgium. This could be seen from the Dutch frontier at
Maastricht. But passage thereto was interdicted by the military
authorities. Ambassador Van Dyke's efforts were unavailing.
Possessing a red-card, I enlisted the help of Troelstra, the socialist
leader of the Netherlands.
He had just returned from an audience with the Queen. The
government, seeking to rally all classes to face a grave crisis, was
paying court to the labor leaders. Accordingly, the war department,
at Troelstra's behest, received me with a handsome show of
deference. I was escorted from one gold-laced officer to another.
Each one smiled kindly, listened attentively and regretted
exceedingly that the granting of the desired permission lay outside
his own particular jurisdiction. They were polite, ingratiating,
obsequious even, but quite unanimous. At the end I came out by
the same door wherein I went--minus a permission.
Up till now my progress through the fringes of the war zone had
been in defiance of all orders and advice. Having failed here
officially, I took the matter in my own hands. Finding a seat in a
military train, I stuck steadfastly by it so long as our general
direction was south. At Eindhoven hunger compelled me to alight.
As I was stepping up to the hotel-bar, I felt a tap on my shoulder
and some one in excellent English said:
"You are under suspicion, sir. Follow me. Don't look around. Don't
get excited. If you are all right you don't need to get excited; if you
aren't it won't do you any good to get excited."
With this running fire of comment he led me into a side-room
where a half-hour's examination satisfied him of my good intent.
Without further untoward incident I came to Maastricht in
Limbourg. Limbourg is the name of the narrow strip of Dutch
territory which runs down between Germany and Belgium. At one
place this tongue of land is but a few miles wide. If the Germans
could have marched their troops directly across this they might
have been spared the two weeks' slaughter at the forts of Liege
and Paris, in all probability, would have fallen before them. It was a
great temptation to the Germans. That's the reason the Dutch
troops had been massed here by the tens of thousands--to
prevent Germany succumbing to that temptation.
At our approach to the great Meuse bridge an officer shouted into
each compartment:
"Every window closed. All cigars and pipes extinguished."
"Why?" we asked.
"The bridge is mined with explosives and a stray spark might set
them off," a soldier informed us.
The first German attempt to set foot on the bridge would be the
signal for sending the great structure crashing skywards.
The end of the run was Maastricht, now become a town of crucial
interest. It was like a city besieged. Barricades of barbed wire and
paving stones ripped from street ran everywhere. Iron rails and
ties blocked the exits and the small cannon disconcertingly thrust
their nozzles down upon one out of the windows.
I lingered here long enough to secure a carriage and with it made
quick time across the harvest fields. We were soon up on the little
hill back of Meuse. The sun was sinking and for the first time war,
in all its terrible spectacular splendor, smote me hard. From the hill
at my feet there stretched away a great plain filled with a dense
mass of German soldiery. One could scarcely believe that there
were men there so well did their gray-green coats blend with the
landscape. One would think that they were indeed a part of it,
could he not feel the atmosphere vibrant with the mass personality
of the myriad warriors tramping down the crops of the peasants. In
the rear the commissariat vans and artillery still came lumbering
up, while in the very front pranced the horses of the dreaded
Uhlans, who looked with contempt, I imagined, on the Dutch
soldiers as they stood there with the warning that here was
Netherlands soil.
In the fighting German and Belgian troops had already been
pushed up against this line. Here they were greeted with the
challenge: "Lay down your arms. This is the neutral soil of
Holland." Thus many were interned until the end of the war.
As even darkened into night, the endless plain became stippled
over with points of flame from countless campfires. There were
beauty and mystery in this vast menace sweeping the soul of the
onlooker now with horror, and now with admiration. There was a
terrible background to the spectacle--glowing red and luminous. It
was made of the still blazing towns of Mouland and Vise, burned to
the ground by order of the invaders. The fire had been set as a
warning to the inhabitants round about. They were taking the
warning and hastening by the thousands across the border into
Holland, their only haven of safety.
When we drove down from the hill into Eysden, we were in the
midst of these peasants, fleeing before the red wrath rolling up into
the sky. They came shambling in with a few possessions on which
they had hurriedly laid their hands, singly or in families, a pitiful
procession of the disinherited.
Some of the men were moaning as they marched along, but most
of them were taking it with the tragic oxlike resignation of the
peasant, stupefied more than terrified, puzzled why these soldiers
were coming down into their quiet little villages to fight out their
quarrels. The women were crying out to Mary and all the saints.
Indeed all the little crosses along the waysides or in the walls were
decked with flowers in gratitude for what had been spared them. In
most cases it was little more than their lives, their brood of
children, and their dogs that followed on.
My driver finally landed me in a shack on the outskirts of Eysden,
which boasted the name of a hotel. It had the worst bed I ever
slept in, and the only window was a hole in the roof.
I wandered out among the unfortunates, now herded in halls and
schools and packed in the homes of the friendly villagers. They
were full of the weirdest tales of loot and murder. And while there
were no tears in their eyes there was tragedy in their voices.
"It would be worth while getting over to the sources and verifying
the truth of these stories," I remarked.
"A sheer impossibility, and only a fool would want to go," was one
laconic commentary.
I kept up my plaint and was overheard by Souten, head of the
Limbourg police.
"American, aren't you?" he interjected. "Well, I have done more
work here in the last five days than I did in the five years that I lived
in New York. Had the best time in my life there. If you want to go
sight-seeing in Belgium, take this paper and get it countersigned at
the German consulate. It's the only one I've given out to-day."
I hurried off to the consul who, in return for six marks, duly
impressed it with the German seal. Later on I would gladly have
given six hundred marks to disown it.
"Of course you understand that this is simply a paper issued by
the civil authorities," said the consul, as he passed it out. "Use it at
your own risk. If you go ahead and get shot by the military
authorities, don't come back and blame us."
I promised that I wouldn't and was off again to my hotel.
As darkness deepened, with two Hollanders come to view the
havoc of war, I sat on the stoop of our little inn. A great rumbling of
cannon came from the direction of Tongres. A sentry shot rang out
on the frontier just across the river which flowed not ten rods away.
This was the Meuse, which ran red with the blood of the
combatants, and from which the natives drew the floating corpses
to the shore. Now its gentle lapping on the stones mingled with the
subdued murmur of our talk. In such surroundings my new friends
regaled me with stories of pillage and murder which the refugees
had been bringing in from across the border. All this produced a
distinct depreciation in the value that I had hitherto attached to my
permit to go visiting across that border. Souten's declarations of
friendship for America had been most voluble. It began dawning
on me that his apparently generous and impulsive action might
bear a different interpretation than unadulterated kindness.
At this juncture, I remember, a great light flared suddenly up. It
was one of the fans of a wind-mill fired by the Germans. In the
foreground we could see the soldiers standing like so many gray
wolves silhouetted against the red flames. In that light it did seem
that motives other than pure affection might have prompted the
Police Commissioner's action. The hectic sleep of the night was
broken by the endless clatter of the hoofs of the German cavalry
pushing south.
My courage rose, however, with the rising sun. In the morning I
climbed to the lookout on the hill. The hosts had vanished. A
trampled, smoldering fire-blackened land lay before me. But there
was the lure of the unknown. I walked down to where the great
Netherlands flag proclaimed neutral soil. The worried Dutch
pickets honored the signature of Souten and with one step I was
over the border into Belgium, now under German jurisdiction. The
helmeted soldiers across the way were a distinct disappointment.
They looked neither fierce nor fiery. In fact, they greeted me with a
smile. They were a bit puzzled by my paper, but the seal seemed
echt-Deutsch and they pronounced it "gut, sehr gut." I explained
that I wished to go forwards to Liege.
"Was it possible?"
For answer they shrugged their shoulders.
"Was it dangerous?"
"Not in the least," they assured me.
The Germans were right. It was not dangerous--that is, for the
Germans. By repeatedly proclaiming the everlasting friendship of
Germany and America, and passing out some chocolate, I made
good friends on the home base. They charged me only not to
return after sundown, giving point to their advice by relating how,
on the previous night, they had shot down a peasant woman and
her two children who, under the cloak of darkness, sought to
scurry past the sentinels. They told this with a genuine note of grief
in their voices. So, with a hearty hand-shake and wishes for the
best of luck, they waved adieu to me as I went swinging out on the
highroad to Liege.