GERMANS ON THE LINE
I was coming back with my luggage from Ostend next day when the train,
which had been running along at a beautiful speed, came to a standstill
somewhere near Bruges.
There was a long wait, and at last it became evident that something was
wrong.
A brilliant-looking Belgian General, accompanied by an equally brilliant
Belgian Captain, who had travelled up in the train with me from Ostend,
informed me courteously, that it was doubtful if the train would go on
to-day.
"What has happened?" I asked.
"_Les Allemands sont sur la ligne!_" was the graphic answer.
With the Belgians' courteous assistance, I got down my suit-case, and a
large brown paper parcel, for of course in those day, no one thought
anything of a brown paper parcel; in fact it was quite the correct thing
to be seen carrying one, no matter who you were, king, queen, general,
prince, or War-Correspondent.
"Do you see that station over there?" Le Capitaine said. "Well, in a few
hours' time, a train _may_ start from there, and run to Antwerp But it
will not arrive at the ordinary station. It will go as far as the river,
and then we shall get on board a steamer, and cross the river, and shall
arrive at Antwerp from the quay."
Picking up my suit-case he started off, with the old General beside him
carrying my parasols, while I held my brown paper parcel firmly under
one arm, and grasped my hand-bag with the other hand. I was just
thinking to myself how nice it was to have a General and a Capitaine
looking after me, when, to my supreme disgust, my brown paper parcel
burst open, and there fell out an evening shoe. And such a shoe! It was
a brilliant blue and equally brilliant silver, with a very high heel,
and a big silver buckle. It was a shoe I loved, and I hadn't felt like
leaving it behind. And now there it fell on the station, witness to a
woman's vanity. However, the Belgian Captain was quite equal to the
occasion. He picked it up, and presented it to me with a bow, and said,
in unexpected English, "Yourra Sabbath shoe!"
It was good to have little incidents like that to brighten one's
journey, for a very long and tedious time elapsed before we arrived at
Antwerp that night. The crowded, suffocating train crawled along, and
stopped half an hour indiscriminately every now and then, and we
wondered if the Germans were out there in the flat fields to either side
of us.
When we arrived at the Scheldt, I trudged wearily on to the big river
steamboat, more dead than alive. The General was still carrying my
parasols, and the Capitaine still clung to my suit-case, and at last we
crossed the great blue Scheldt, and landed on the other side, where a
row of armed sentinels presented their bayonets at us, and kept us a
whole hour examining our passports before they would allow us to enter
the city.
Thanks to the kindly General, I got a lift in a motor car, and was taken
straight to the Hotel Terminus. I had eaten nothing since the morning.
But the sleepy hotel night-porter told me it was impossible to get
anything at that hour; everything was locked up; "_C'est la guerre!_" he
said.
Well, he was right; it was indeed the War, and I didn't feel that I had
any call to complain or make a fuss, so I wearily took the lift up to my
bedroom on the fourth floor, and speedily fell asleep.
When I awoke, _it was three o'clock in the morning_, and a most terrific
noise was going on.
It was pitch dark, darker than any words can say, up there in my
bedroom, for we were forbidden lights for fear of Zeppelins.
All day long I had been travelling through Belgium, and all day long, it
seemed to me, I had been turned out of one train into another, because
"les Allemands" were on the line.
So, when the noise awoke me, I knew at once it was those Germans that I
had been running away from all day long, between Ostend and Bruges, and
Bruges and Ghent, and Ghent and Boom, and Antwerp.
I lay quite still.
"They're come at last," I thought. "This is the real thing."
Vaguely I wondered what to do.
The roar of cannon was enormous, and it seemed to be just outside my
window.
And cracking and rapping through it, I heard the quick, incessant fire
of musketry--crack, crack, crack, a beautiful, clean noise, like
millions of forest boughs sharply breaking in strong men's hands.
Vaguely I listened.
And vaguely I tried to imagine how the Germans could have got inside
Antwerp so quickly.
Then vaguely I got out of bed.
In the pitch blackness, so hot and stifling, I stood there trying to
think, but my room seemed full of the roar of cannon, and I experienced
a queer sensation as though I was losing consciousness in the sea, under
the loud beat of waves.
"I mustn't turn up the light," I said to myself, "or they will see where
I am! That's the _one_ thing I mustn't do."
Again I tried to think what to do, and then suddenly I found myself
listening, with a sub-consciousness of immense and utter content, to the
wild outcry of those cannons and muskets, and I felt as if I must
listen, and listen, and listen, till I knew the sounds by heart.
As for fear, there was none, not any at all, not a particle.
Instead, there was something curiously akin to rapture.
It seemed to me that the supreme satisfaction of having at last dropped
clean away from all the make-believes of life, seized upon me, standing
there in my nightgown in the pitch-black, airless room at Antwerp, a
woman quite alone among strangers, with danger knocking at the gate of
her world.
Make-believe! Make-believe! All life up to this minute seemed nothing
else but make-believe. For only Death seemed real, and only Death seemed
glorious.
All this took me about two minutes to think, and then I began to move
about my room, stupidly, vaguely.
I seemed to bump up against the noise of the cannons at every step.
But I could not find the door, and I could not find a wrapper.
My hands went out into the darkness, grabbing, reaching.
But all the while I was listening with that deep, undisturbed content to
the terrific fire that seemed to shake the earth and heaven to pieces.
All I could get hold of was the sheet and blankets.
I had arrived back at my bed again.
Well, I must turn away, I must look elsewhere.
And then I quietly and unexpectedly put out my hand and turned up the
light in a fit of desperate defiance of the German brutes outside.
In a flash I saw my suit-case. It was locked. I saw my powder puff. I
saw my bag. Then I put out the light and picked up my powder-puff, got
to my bag, and fumbled for the keys, and opened my suit-case and dragged
out a wrapper, but no slippers came under my fingers, and I wanted
slippers in case of going out into the streets.
But by this time I had discovered that nothing matters at all, and I
quietly turned up the light again, being by then a confirmed and age-old
fatalist.
Standing in front of the looking-glass, I found myself slowly powdering
my face.
Then the sound of people rushing along the corridor reached me, and I
opened my door and went out.
"C'est une bataille! Ce sont les Allemands, n'est-ce-pas?" queried a
poor old lady.
"Mais non, madame," shouts a dashing big aeronaut running by. "Ce n'est
pas une bataille. C'est le Zeppelin!"
And so it was.
The Zeppelin had come, for the second time, to Antwerp! And the cannons
and musketry were the onslaughts upon the monster by the Belgian
soldiers, mad with rage at the impudent visit, and all ready with a hot
reception for it.
Down the stairs I fled, snatched away now from those wonderful moments
of reality, alone, with the noise of the cannons in the pitch-blackness
of that stifling bedroom; down the great scarlet-carpeted stairs, until
we all came to a full stop in the hotel lounge below.
One dim light, shaded half into darkness, revealed the silhouettes of
tall, motionless green palms and white wicker chairs and scarlet carpets
and little tables, and the strangest crowd in all the world.
The Zeppelin was sailing overhead just then, flinging the ghastliest of
all ghastly deaths from her cages as she sped along her craven way
across the skies, but that crowd in the foyer of the great Antwerp Hotel
remained absolutely silent, absolutely calm.
There was a tiny boy from Liège, whose trembling pink feet peeped from
the blankets in which he had been carried down.
There was a lovely heroic Liège lady whose gaiety and sweetness, and
charming toilettes had been making "sunshine in a shady place" for us
all in these dark days.
Everyone remembered afterwards how beautiful the little Liège lady
looked with her great, black eyes, still sparkling, and long red-black
hair falling over her shoulders, and a black wrapper flung over her
white nightgown.
And her husband, a huge, fair-haired Belgian giant with exquisite
manners and a little-boy lisp--a daring aviator--never seen except in a
remarkable pair of bright yellow bags of trousers. His lisp was
unaffected, and his blue eyes bright and blue as spring flowers, and his
heart was iron-strong.
And there was Madame la Patronne, wrapped in a good many things; and an
Englishman with a brown moustache, who must have had an automatic
toilette, as he is here fully dressed, even to his scarf-pin, hat, boots
and all; and some War-Correspondents, who always, have the incontestable
air of having arranged the War from beginning to end, especially when
they appear like this in their pyjamas; and a crowd of Belgian ladies
and children, and all the maids and garçons, and the porters and the
night-porters, and various strange old gentlemen in overcoats and bare
legs, and strange old ladies with their heads tied, who will never be
seen again (not to be recognised), and the cook from the lowest regions,
and the chasseur who runs messages--there we all were, waiting while the
Zeppelin sailed overhead, and the terrific crash and boom and crack and
deafening detonations grew fainter and fainter as the Belgian soldiers
fled along through the night in pursuit of the German dastard that was
finally driven back to Cologne, having dashed many houses to bits.
Then the little "chass," who has run through the street-door away down
the road, comes racing back breathless across the flagged stone
courtyard.
"Oh, mais c'est chic, le Zepp," he cries enthusiastically, his young
black eyes afire. "C'est tout à fait chic, vous savez!"
And if that's not truly Belge, I really don't know what is!
[Illustration: AN ORDER FROM THE BELGIAN WAR OFFICE.]