In relating my adventures, extending over more than fifteen months,
I cannot do better than begin with the starting-point of the whole
affair--the Battle of Charleroi. To describe the events which grouped
themselves around August 22nd, 23rd, 24th, and 25th, 1914, seems like
telling old news, but, as a matter of fact, the gigantic struggle named
after the Belgian town of ironworks and mines has yet to be recorded.
The French Staff has published nothing, unofficial historians--eager
to be the first to place their researches before the public--have only
given general and often erroneous descriptions of the advance of Von
Kluck, Von Buelow, and Von Hausen against Sir John French's forces on
the Condé-Mons-Binche line and the Fifth French Army holding the line
of the Sambre, and the newspaper accounts are sometimes contradictory.
I am not going to weary you with military technicalities; we will leave
questions of strategy and tactics alone and direct our attention to the
battlefield as seen from two points of view: that of myself, an officer
in the French Army, and that of an inhabitant of Charleroi, with whom
I was later thrown into contact, and by whose observations, made from
the roof of his house, I was fortunate in benefiting.
Picture to yourself the sinuous Sambre, flowing in its deep bed
through the densely-populated suburbs of Charleroi and the southern
end of this formerly fortified town. The town itself, imprisoned by
its walls, is but a small place of some thirty thousand inhabitants,
but the population is swelled to five hundred thousand by the
contiguous suburbs of Montigny, Couillet, Marcinelle, Gilly, Châtelet,
Marchiennes, Roux, Jumet, Gosselies, and others which cluster around
the ancient nucleus and stretch principally northwards. To fight
a battle on such a ground as this was impossible, so the German
forces, descending from the north and the east in unknown hundreds of
thousands, determined to make for the open-wooded country which lies
beyond the southern suburbs of the town. Two tremendous obstacles
stood in their way--the closely-packed houses of the suburbs and the
strongly-held river. The inhabitants soon learnt to their cost how
the first of these was to be overcome. Suddenly, shortly after the
appearance of the advance-guard of the German army, violent explosions
were heard, accompanied by the pop! pop! pop! of machine-guns and the
discharge of musketry. The Huns were blasting a broad way through the
suburbs, setting fire to the houses, and--under pretense that they
were being fired upon by civilians--shooting the people down in their
houses and in the streets. Right through the quarters of Gosselies and
Jumet they penetrated; then branched off to the right and left, one
band of incendiaries reaching the river through Marchiennes, the other
cutting its way through the town and reaching the bridge which connects
Montigny and Couillet. These two points were where the enemy first
succeeded in crossing the Sambre. Later, when we had begun our retreat
southwards, owing to pressure from Von Hausen's army massed in the
Northern Ardennes, they crossed at two other places, east of Charleroi.
Thus, on Sunday, August 23rd, the preliminaries of the great battle
were carried out.
South of the river the ground rises gently until it reaches the wooded
heights in the neighbourhood of Beaumont, Thuillies, Nalinnes, and
Somzée. I was stationed at the first of these places--a little village
on high ground, with a commanding view of the green countryside. Who
would have thought, but for the deafening roar of cannon, the incessant
rattle of the machine-guns, the occasional whir of an aeroplane
overhead, and the puffs and rings of white smoke high in air, that we
were looking on a battlefield? How empty it was! We could see from the
flashes of the carefully-hidden guns whence death was springing; but in
the early stages of the struggle only small bodies of the enemy, whose
greenish-grey uniforms mingled well with the verdure, were from time
to time visible. At night, however, it was different. The red glare of
burning villages and farms, set on fire by shells, lit up the sky and
provided a terrifying spectacle, night after night, for the anxious
watchers of Charleroi.