The Fall Of Antwerp
The storm which was to burst over Antwerp the following night was
gathering fast when we arrived on Tuesday morning. Army motor-trucks
loaded with dismantled aeroplanes, and the less essential impedimenta
screamed through the streets bound away from, not toward, the front. The
Queen, that afternoon, was seen in the Hotel St. Antoine receiving the
good-bys of various friends. Consuls suddenly locked their doors and
fled. And the cannon rumbling along the eastern horizon as they had
rumbled, nearer and nearer, for a fortnight, were now beyond the outer
line of forts and within striking distance of the town. That night, an
hour or two after midnight, in my hotel by the water-front, I awoke to
the steady clatter of hoofs on cobblestones and the rumble of wheels. I
went to the window, on the narrow side street, black as all streets had
been in Antwerp since the night that the Zeppelin threw its first bombs,
and looked out. It was a moonlight night, clear and cold, and there
along the Quai St. Michael, at the end of the street, was an army in
retreat. They were Belgians, battered and worn out with their unbroken
weeks of hopeless fighting; cavalrymen on their tired horses,
artillerymen, heads sunk on their chests, drowsing on their lurching
caissons; the patient little foot-soldiers, rifles slung across their
shoulders, scuffling along in their heavy overcoats.
In the dark shadow of the tall old houses a few people came out and
stood there watching silently, and, as one felt, in a sort of despair.
All night long men were marching by--and in London they were still
reading that it was but a "demonstration" the Germans were engaged in--
down the quay and across the pontoon bridge--the only way over the
Scheldt--over to the Tete-de-Flandres and the road to Ghent. They were
strung along the street next morning, boots mud-covered, mud-stained,
intrenching shovels hanging to their belts, faces unshaven for weeks,
just as they had come from the trenches; yet still patient and cheerful,
with that unshakable Flemish good cheer. Perhaps, after all, it was not
a retreat; they might be swinging round to the south and St. Nicholas to
attack the German flank...
But before they had crossed, another army, a civilian army, flowed down
on and over the quay. For a week people had been leaving Antwerp, now
the general flight began. From villages to the east and southeast, from
the city itself, people came pouring down. In wagons drawn by huge
Belgian draft-horses, in carts pulled by the captivating Belgian work
dogs, panting mightily and digging their paws into the slippery cobbles;
on foot, leading little children and carrying babies and dolls and
canaries and great bundles of clothes and household things wrapped in
sheets, they surged toward that one narrow bridge and the crowded
ferry-boats. I saw one old woman, gray-haired and tanned like an Indian
squaw with work in the fields, yet with a fine, well-made face, pushing
a groaning wheelbarrow. A strap went from the handles over her
shoulders, and, stopping now and then to ask the news, she would slip
off this harness, gossip for a time, then push on again. That afternoon
under my window there was a tall wagon, a sort of hay wagon, in which
there were twenty-two little tow-headed children, none more than eight
or ten and several almost babies in arms. By the side of the wagon a
man, evidently father of some of them, stood buttering the end of a huge
round loaf of bread and cutting off slice after slice, which the older
children broke and distributed to the little ones. Two cows were tied
to the back of the wagon and the man's wife squatted there milking them.
All along the quay and in the streets leading into it were people like
this--harmless, helpless, hard-working people, going they knew not
where. The entrance to the bridge was soon choked. One went away and
returned an hour later and found the same people waiting almost in the
same spot, and, with that wonderful calm and patience of theirs, feeding
their children or giving a little of their precious hay to the horses,
quietly waiting their turn while the cannon which had driven them from
their homes kept on thundering behind them.
That afternoon I walked up-town through the shuttered, silent streets--
silent but for that incessant rumbling in the southeast and the
occasional honking flight of some military automobile--to two of the
hospitals. In one, a British hospital on the Boulevard Leopold, the
doctor in charge was absent for the moment, and there was no one to
answer my offer of occasional help if an outsider could be of use. As I
sat waiting a tall, brisk Englishwoman, in nurse's uniform, came up and
asked what I wanted. I told her.
"Oh," she said, and in her crisp, English voice, without further ado,
"will you help me with a leg?"
She led the way into her ward, and there we contrived between us to
bandage and slip a board and pillow under a fractured thigh. Between
whispers of "Courage! Courage!" to the Belgian soldier, she said that
she was the wife of a British general and had two sons in the army, and
a third--"Poor boy!" she murmured, more to him than to me--on one of the
ships in the North Sea. I arranged to come back next morning to help
with the lifting, and went on to another hospital in the Rue Nerviens,
to find that little English lady who crossed with me in the Ostend boat
in August on the way to her sister's hospital in Antwerp.
Here in the quiet wards she had been working while the Germans swept
down on Paris and were rolled back again, and while the little nation
which she and her sister loved so well was being clubbed to its knees.
Louvain, Liege, Malines, Namur--chapters in all the long, pitiless story
were lying there in the narrow iron beds. There were men with faces
chewed by shrapnel, men burned in the explosion of the powder magazine
at Fort Waelhem, when the attack on Antwerp began--dragged out from the
underground passage in which the garrison had sought momentary refuge
and where most of them were killed, burned, and blackened. One strong,
good-looking young fellow, able to eat and live apparently, was shot
through the temples and blind in both eyes. It was the hour for
carrying those well enough to stand it out into the court and giving
them their afternoon's airing and smoke. One had lost an arm, another,
a whimsical young Belgian, had only the stump of a left leg. When we
started to lift him back into his bed, he said he had a better way than
that. So he put his arms round my neck and showed me how to take him by
the back and the well leg.
"Bon!" he said, and again "Bon!" when I let him down, and then, reaching
out and patting me on the back, "Bon!" he smiled again.
That night, behind drawn curtains which admitted no light to the street,
we dined peacefully and well, and, except for this unwonted seclusion,
just outside which were the black streets and still the endless
procession of carts and wagons and shivering people, one might have
forgotten, in that cheerfully lighted room, that we were not in times of
peace. We even loitered over a grate fire before going to bed, and
talked in drowsy and almost indifferent fashion of whether it was
absolutely sure that the Germans were trying to take the town.
It was almost exactly midnight that I found myself listening, half
awake, to the familiar sound of distant cannon. One had come to think
of it, almost, as nothing but a sound; and to listen with a detached and
not unpleasant interest as a man tucked comfortably in bed follows a
roll of thunder to its end or listens to the fall of rain.
It struck me suddenly that there was something new about this sound; I
sat up in bed to listen, and at that instant a far-off, sullen "Boom !"
was followed by a crash as if lightning had struck a house a little way
down the street. As I hurried to the window there came another far-off
detonation, a curious wailing whistle swept across the sky, and over
behind the roofs to the left there was another crash.
One after another they came, at intervals of half a minute, or screaming
on each other's heels as if racing to their goal. And then the crash
or, if farther away, muffled explosion as another roof toppled in or
cornice dropped off, as a house made of canvas drops to pieces in a
play.
The effect of those unearthly wails, suddenly singing in across country
in the dead of night from six--eight--ten miles away--Heaven knows
where--was, as the Germans intended it to be, tremendous. It is not
easy to describe nor to be imagined by those who had not lived in that
threatened city--the last Belgian stronghold--and felt that vast, unseen
power rolling nearer and nearer. And now, all at once, it was here,
materialized, demoniacal, a flying death, swooping across the dark into
your very room.
It was like one of those dreams in which you cannot stir from your
tracks, and meanwhile "Boom... Tzee-ee-ee-ee !"--is this one meant for
you?
Already there was a patter of feet in the dark, and people with white
bundles on their backs went stumbling by toward the river and the
bridge. Motors came honking down from the inner streets, and the quay,
which had begun to clear by this time, was again jammed. I threw on
some clothes, hurried to the street. A rank smell of kerosene hung in
the air; presently a petrol shell burst to the southward, lighting up
the sky for an instant like the flare from a blast-furnace, and a few
moments later there showed over the roofs the flames of the first fire.
Although we could hear the wail of shells flying across their wide
parabola both into the town and out from the first ring of forts, few
burst in our part of the city that night, and we walked up as far as the
cathedral without seeing anything but black and silent streets. Every
one in the hotel was up and dressed by this time. Some were for leaving
at once; one family, piloted by the comfortable Belgian servants--far
cooler than any one else--went to the cellar, some gathered about the
grate in the writing-room to watch the night out; the rest of us went
back to bed.
There wasn't much sleep for any one that night. The bombardment kept on
until morning, lulled slightly, as if the enemy might be taking
breakfast, then it continued into the, next day. And now the city--a
busy city of nearly four hundred thousand people--emptied itself in
earnest. Citizens and soldiers, field-guns, motor-trucks, wheelbarrows,
dog-carts, hay-ricks, baby-carriages, droves of people on foot, all
flowing down to the Scheldt, the ferries, and the bridge. They poured
into coal barges, filling the yawning black holes as Africans used to
fill slave-ships, into launches and tugs, and along the roads leading
down the river and southwestward toward Ostend.
One thought with a shudder of what would happen if the Germans dropped a
few of their shells into that helpless mob, and it is only fair to
remember that they did not, although retreating Belgian soldiers were a
part of it, and one of the German aeroplanes, a mere speck against the
blue, was looking calmly down overhead. Nor did they touch the
cathedral, and their agreement not to shell any of the buildings
previously pointed out on a map delivered to them through the American
Legation seemed to be observed.
Down through that mass of fugitives pushed a London motor-bus ambulance
with several wounded British soldiers, one of them sitting upright,
supporting with his right hand a left arm, the biceps, bound in a
blood-soaked tourniquet, half torn away. They had come in from the
trenches, where their comrades were now waiting, with their helpless
little rifles, for an enemy, miles away, who lay back at his ease and
pounded them with his big guns. I asked them how things were going, and
they said not very well. They could only wait until the German
aeroplanes had given the range and the trenches became too hot, then
fall back, dig themselves in, and play the same game over again.
Following them was a hospital-service motor-car, driven by a Belgian
soldier and in charge of a young British officer. It was his present
duty to motor from trench to trench across the zone of fire, with the
London bus trailing behind, and pick up wounded. It wasn't a
particularly pleasant job, he said, jerking his head toward the distant
firing, and frankly he wasn't keen about it. We talked for some time,
every one talked to every one else in Antwerp that morning, and when he
started out again I asked him to give me a lift to the edge of town.
Quickly we raced through the Place de Meir and the deserted streets of
the politer part of Antwerp, where, the night before, most of the shells
had fallen. We went crackling over broken glass, past gaping cornices
and holes in the pavement, five feet across and three feet deep, and
once passed a house quietly burning away with none to so much as watch
the fire. The city wall, along which are the first line of forts, drew
near, then the tunnel passing under it, and we went through without
pausing and on down the road to Malines. We were beyond the town now,
bowling rapidly out into the flat Belgian country, and, clinging there
to the running-board with the October wind blowing quite through a thin
flannel suit, it suddenly came over me that things had moved very fast
in the last five minutes, and that all at once, in some unexpected
fashion, all that elaborate barrier of laissez-passers, sauf-conduits,
and so on, had been swept aside, and, quite as if it were the most
ordinary thing in the world, I was spinning out to that almost mythical
"front."
Front, indeed! It was two fronts. There was an explosion just behind
us, a hideous noise overhead, as if the whole zenith had somehow been
ripped across like a tightly stretched piece of silk, and a shell from
the Belgian fort under which we had just passed went hurtling down long
aisles of air--farther--farther--to end in a faint detonation miles
away.
Out of sight in front of us, there was an answering thud, and--
"Tzee-ee-ee-er-r-r-ong!"--a German shell had gone over us and burst
behind the Belgian fort. Under this gigantic antiphony the motor-car
raced along, curiously small and irrelevant on that empty country road.
We passed great holes freshly made, neatly blown out of the macadam,
then a dead horse. There were plenty of dead horses along the roads in
France, but they had been so for days. This one's blood was not yet
dry, and the shell that had torn the great rip in its chest must have
struck here this morning.
We turned into the avenue of trees leading up to an empty chateau, a
field-hospital until a few hours before. Mattresses and bandages
littered the deserted room, and an electric chandelier was still
burning. The young officer pointed to some trenches in the garden. "I
had those dug to put the wounded in in case we had to hold the place,"
he said. "It was getting pretty hot."
There was nothing here now, however, and, followed by the London bus
with its obedient enlisted men doing duty as ambulance orderlies, we
motored a mile or so farther on to the nearest trench. It was in an
orchard beside a brick farmhouse with a vista in front of barbed-wire
entanglement and a carefully cleaned firing field stretching out to a
village and trees about half a mile away. They had looked very
interesting and difficult, those barbed-wire mazes and suburbs,
ruthlessly swept of trees and houses, when I had seen the Belgians
preparing for the siege six weeks before, and they were to be of about
as much practical use now as pictures on a wall.
There are, it will be recalled, three lines of forts about Antwerp--the
inner one, corresponding to the city's wall; a middle one a few miles
farther out, where the British now were; and the outer line, which the
enemy had already passed. Their artillery was hidden far over behind
the horizon trees, and the British marines and naval-reserve men who
manned these trenches could only wait there, rifle in hand, for an enemy
that would not come, while a captive balloon a mile or two away to the
eastward and an aeroplane sailing far overhead gave the ranges, and they
waited for the shrapnel to burst. The trenches were hasty affairs,
narrow and shoulder-deep, very like trenches for gas or water pipes, and
reasonably safe except when a shell burst directly overhead. One had
struck that morning just on the inner rim of the trench, blown out one
of those crater-like holes, and discharged all its shrapnel backward
across the trench and into one of the heavy timbers supporting a
bombproof roof. A raincoat hanging to a nail in this timber was
literally shot to shreds. "That's where I was standing," said the young
lieutenant in command, pointing with a dry smile to a spot not more than
a yard from where the shell had burst.
Half a dozen young fellows, crouched there in the bomb-proof, looked out
at us and grinned. They were brand-new soldiers, some of them, boys
from the London streets who had answered the thrilling posters and
signs, "Your King and Country Need You," and been sent on this ill-fated
expedition for their first sight of war. The London papers are talking
about it as I am writing this--how this handful of nine thousand men,
part of them recruits who scarcely knew one end of a rifle from another,
were flung across the Channel on Sunday night and rushed up to the front
to be shot at and rushed back again. I did not know this then, but
wondered if this was what they had dreamed of--squatting helplessly in a
ditch until another order came to retire--when they swung through the
London streets singing "It's a long, long way to Tipperary" two months
before.
Yet not one of the youngest and the greenest showed the least
nervousness as they waited there in that melancholy little orchard under
the incessant scream of shells. That unshakable British coolness, part
sheer pluck, part a sort of lack of imagination, perhaps, or at least of
"nerves," left them as calm and casual as if they were but drilling on
the turf of Hyde Park. And with it persisted that almost equally
unshakable sense of class, that touching confidence in one's superiors--
the young clerk's or mechanic's inborn conviction that whatever that
smart, clean-cut, imperturbable young officer does and says must
inevitably be right--at least, that if he is cool and serene you must,
if the skies fall, be cool and serene too.
We met one young fellow as we walked through an empty lateral leading to
a bomb-proof prepared for wounded, and the ambulance officer asked him
sharply how things had been going that morning.
"Oh, very well, sir," he said with the most respectful good humor,
though a shell bursting just then a stone's throw beyond the orchard
made both of us duck our heads. "A bit hot, sir, about nine o'clock,
but only one man hurt. They do seem to know just where we are, sir; but
wait till their infantry comes up--we'll clean them out right enough,
sir."
And, if he had been ordered to stay there and hold the trench alone, one
could imagine him saying, in that same tone of deference and chipper
good humor, "Yes, sir; thank you, sir," and staying, too, till the cows
came home.
We motored down the line to another trench--this one along a road with
fields in front and, about a couple of hundred yards behind, a clump of
trees which masked a Belgian battery. The officer here, a tall,
upstanding, gravely handsome young man, with a deep, strong, slightly
humorous voice, and the air of one both born to and used to command--the
best type of navy man--came over to meet us, rather glad, it seemed, to
see some one. The ambulance officer had just started to speak when
there was a roar from the clump of trees, at the same instant an
explosion directly overhead, and an ugly chunk of iron--a bit of broken
casing from a shrapnel shell--plunged at our very feet. The shell had
been wrongly timed and exploded prematurely.
"I say!" the lieutenant called out to a Belgian officer standing not far
away, "can't you telephone over to your people to stop that? That's the
third time we've been nearly hit by their shrapnel this morning. After
all"--he turned to us with the air of apologizing somewhat for his
display of irritation--"it's quite annoying enough here without that,
you know."
It was, indeed, annoying--very. The trenches were not under fire in the
sense that the enemy were making a persistent effort to clear them out,
but they were in the zone of fire, their range was known, and there was
no telling, when that distant boom thudded across the fields, whether
that particular shell might be intended for them or for somebody's house
in town.
We could see in the distance their captive balloon, and there were a
couple of scouts, the officer said, in a tower in the village, not much
more than half a mile away. He pointed to the spot across the barbed
wire. "We've been trying to get them for the last half-hour."
We left them engaged in this interesting distraction, the little
rifle-snaps in all that mighty thundering seeming only to accent the
loneliness and helplessness of their position, and spun on down the
transverse road, toward another trench. The progress of the motor
seemed slow and disappointing. Not that the spot a quarter of a mile
off was at all less likely to be hit, yet one felt conscious of a
growing desire to be somewhere else. And, though I took off my hat to
keep it from blowing off, I found that every time a shell went over I
promptly put it on again, indicating, one suspected, a decline in what
the military experts call morale.
As we bowled down the road toward a group of brick houses on the left, a
shell passed not more than fifty yards in front of us and through the
side of one of these houses as easily as a circus rider pops through a
tissue-paper hoop. Almost at the same instant another exploded--where,
I haven't the least idea, except that the dust from it hit us in the
face. The motor rolled smoothly along meanwhile, and the Belgian soldier
driving it stared as imperturbably ahead of him as if he were back at
Antwerp on the seat of his taxicab.
You get used to shells in time, it seems, and, deciding that you either
are or are not going to be hit, dismiss responsibility and leave it all
to fate. I must admit that in my brief experience I was not able to
arrive at this restful state. We reached at last the city gate through
which we had left Antwerp, and the motor came to a stop just at the
inner edge of the passage under the fort, and I said good-by to the
young Englishman ere he started back for the trenches again.
"Well," he called after me as I started across the open space between
the gate and the houses, a stone's throw away, "you've had an experience
anyway."
I was just about to answer that undoubtedly I had when--
"Tzee-ee-ee-er-r"--a shell just cleared the ramparts over our heads and
disappeared in the side of a house directly in front of us with a roar
and a geyser of dust. Neither the motor nor a guest's duty now detained
me, and, waving him good-by, I turned at right angles and made with true
civilian speed for the shelter of a side street.
The shells all appeared to be coming from a southeast direction, and in
the lee of houses on the south side of the street one was reasonably
protected. Keeping close to the house-fronts and dodging--rather
absurdly, no doubt--into doorways when that wailing whistle came up from
behind, I went zigzagging through the deserted city toward the hotel on
the other side of town.
It was such a progress as one might make in some fantastic nightmare--as
the hero of some eerie piece of fiction about the Last Man in the World.
Street after street, with doors locked, shutters closed, sandbags,
mattresses, or little heaps of earth piled over cellar windows; streets
in which the only sound was that of one's own feet, where the loneliness
was made more lonely by some forgotten dog cringing against the closed
door and barking nervously as one hurried past.
Here, where most of the shells had fallen the preceding night, nearly
all the houses were empty. Yet occasionally one caught sight of faces
peering up from basement windows or of some stubborn householder
standing in his southern doorway staring into space. Once I passed a
woman bound away from, instead of toward, the river with her big bundle;
and once an open carriage with a family in it driving, with peculiarly
Flemish composure, toward the quay, and as I hurried past the park,
along the Avenue Van Dyck--where fresh craters made by exploding shells
had been dug in the turf--the swans, still floating on the little lake,
placidly dipped their white necks under water as if it were a quiet
morning in May.
Now and then, as the shell's wail swung over its long parabola, there
came with the detonation, across the roofs, the rumble of falling
masonry. Once I passed a house quietly burning, and on the pavement
were lopped-off trees. The impartiality with which those far-off
gunners distributed their attentions was disconcerting. Peering down
one of the up-and-down streets before crossing it, as if a shell were an
automobile which you might see and dodge, you would shoot across and,
turning into a cosey little side street, think to yourself that here at
least they had not come, and then promptly see, squarely in front,
another of those craters blown down through the Belgian blocks.
Presently I found myself under the trees of the Boulevard Leopold, not
far from the British hospital, and recalled that it was about time that
promise was made good. It was time indeed, and help with lifting they
needed very literally. The order had just come to leave the building,
bringing the wounded and such equipment as they could pack into half a
dozen motor-buses and retire--just where, I did not hear--in the
direction of Ghent. As I entered the porte-cochere two poor wrecks of
war were being led out by their nurses--more men burned in the powder
explosion at Waelhem, their seared faces and hands covered with oil and
cotton just as they had been lifted from bed.
The phrase "whistle of shells" had taken on a new reality since
midnight. Now one was to learn something of the meaning of those equally
familiar words, "they succeeded in saving their wounded, although under
heavy fire."
None of the wounded could walk, none dress himself; most of them in
ordinary times would have lain where they were for weeks. There were
fractured legs not yet set, men with faces half shot away, men half out
of their heads, and all these had to be dressed somehow, covered up,
crowded into or on top of the buses, and started off through a city
under bombardment toward open country which might already be occupied by
the enemy.
Bundles of uniforms, mud-stained, blood-stained, just as they had come
from the trenches, were dumped out of the storeroom and distributed, hit
or miss.
British "Tommies" went out as Belgians, Belgians in British khaki; the
man whose broken leg I had lifted the day before we simply bundled in
his bed blankets and set up in the corner of a bus. One healthy-looking
Belgian boy, on whom I was trying to pull a pair of British trousers,
seemed to have nothing at all the matter with him, until it presently
appeared that he was speechless and paralyzed in both left arm and left
leg. And while we were working, an English soldier, shot through the
jaw and throat, sat on the edge of his bed, shaking with a hideous,
rattling cough.
The hospital was in a handsome stone building, in ordinary times a club,
perhaps, or a school; a wide, stone stairway led up the centre, and
above it was a glass skylight. This central well would have been a
charming place for a shell to drop into, and one did drop not more than
fifty feet or so away, in or close to the rear court. A few yards down
the avenue another shell hit a cornice and sent a ton or so of masonry
crashing down on the sidewalk. Under conditions like these the nurses
kept running up and down that staircase during the endless hour or two
in which the wounded were being dressed and carried on stretchers to the
street. They stood by the buses making their men comfortable, and when
the first buses were filled they sat in the open street on top of them,
patiently waiting, as calm and smiling as circus queens on their gilt
chariots. The behavior of the men in the trenches was cool enough, but
they at least were fighting men and but taking the chance of war. These
were civilian volunteers, they had not even trenches to shelter them,
and it took a rather unforeseen and difficult sort of courage to leave
that fairly safe masonry building and sit smiling and helpful on top of
a motor-bus during a wait of half an hour or so, any second of which
might be one's last. There was an American nurse there, a tall, radiant
girl, whom they called, and rightly, "Morning Glory," who had been
introduced to me the day before because we both belonged to that curious
foreign race of Americans. What her name was I haven't the least idea,
and if we were to meet to-morrow, doubtless we should have to be
carefully presented over again, but I remember calling out to her,
"Good-by, American girl!" as we passed in the hall during the last
minute or two, and she said good-by, and suddenly reached out and put
her hand on my shoulder and added, "Good luck!" or "God bless you!" or
something like that. And these seemed at the moment quite the usual
things to do and say. The doctor in charge and the general's wife
apologized for running away, as they called it, and the last I saw of
the latter was as she waved back to me from the top of a bus, with just
that look of concern over the desperate ride they were beginning which a
slightly preoccupied hostess casts over a dinner-table about which are
seated a number of oddly assorted guests.
The strange procession got away safely at last, and safely, too, so I
was told later, across the river; but where they finally spent the night
I never heard. I hurried down the street and into the Rue Nerviens. It
must have been about four o'clock by that time. The bright October
morning had changed to a chill and dismal afternoon, and up the western
sky in the direction of the river a vast curtain of greasy, black smoke
was rolling. The petrol-tanks along the Scheldt had been set afire. It
looked at the moment as if the whole city might be going, but there was
no time then to think of possibilities, and I slipped down the lee side
of the street to the door with the Red Cross flag. The front of the
hospital was shut tight. It took several pulls at the bell to bring any
one, and inside I found a Belgian family who had left their own house
for the thicker ceilings of the hospital, and the nuns back in the wards
with their nervous men. Their servants had left that morning, the three
or four sisters in charge had had to do all the cooking and housework as
well as look after their patients, and now they were keeping calm and
smiling, to subdue as best they could the fears of the Belgian wounded,
who were ready to jump out of bed, whatever their condition, rather than
fall into the hands of the enemy. Each had no doubt that if he were not
murdered outright he would be taken to Germany and forced to fight in
the east against the Russians. Several, who knew very well what was
going on outside, had been found by the nurses that morning out of bed
and all ready to take to the street.
Lest they should hear that their comrades in the Boulevard Leopold had
been moved, the lay sister--the English lady--and I withdrew to the
operating-room, closed the door, and in that curious retreat talked over
the situation. No orders had come to leave; in fact, they had been told
to stay. They did have a man now in the shape of the Belgian gentleman,
and from the same source an able-bodied servant, but how long these
would stay, where food was to be found in that desolate city, when the
bombardment would cease, and what the Germans would do with them--well,
it was not a pleasant situation for a handful of women. But it was not
of themselves she was thinking, but of their wounded and of Belgium, and
of what both had suffered already and of what might yet be in store. It
was of that this frail little sister talked that hopeless afternoon,
while the smoke in the west spread farther up the sky, and she would now
and then pause in the middle of a syllable while a shell sang overhead,
then take it up again.
Meanwhile the light was going, and before it became quite dark and my
hotel deserted, perhaps, as the rest of Antwerp, it seemed best to be
getting across town. I could not believe that the Germans could treat
such a place and people with anything but consideration and told the
little nurse so. She came to the edge of the glass-covered court,
laughingly saying I had best run across it, and wondering where we, who
had met twice now under such curious circumstances, would meet again.
Then she turned back to the ward--to wait with that roomful of more or
less panicky men for the tramp of German soldiers and the knock on the
door which meant that they were prisoners.
Hurrying across town, I passed, not far from the Hotel St. Antoine, a
blazing four-story building. The cathedral was not touched, and indeed,
in spite of the noise and terror, the material damage was comparatively
slight. Soldiers were clearing the quay and setting a guard directly in
front of our hotel--one of the few places in Antwerp that night where
one could get so much as a crust of bread--and behind drawn curtains we
made what cheer we could. There were two American photographers and a
correspondent who had spent the night before in the cellar of a house,
the upper story of which had been wrecked by a shell; a British
intelligence officer, with the most bewildering way of hopping back and
forth between a brown civilian suit and a spick-and-span new uniform;
and several Belgian families hoping to get a boat down-stream in the
morning.
We sat round the great fire in the hall, above which the architect,
building for happier times, had had the bad grace to place a skylight,
and discussed the time and means of getting away. The intelligence
officer, not wishing to be made a prisoner, was for getting a boat of
some sort at the first crack of dawn, and the photographers, who had had
the roof blown off over their heads, heartily agreed with him. I did
not like to leave without at least a glimpse of those spiked helmets nor
to desert my friends in the Rue Nerviens, and yet there was the
likelihood, if one remained, of being marooned indefinitely in the midst
of the conquering army.
Meanwhile the flight of shells continued, a dozen or more fires could be
seen from the upper windows of the hotel, and billows of red flame from
the burning petrol-tanks rolled up the southern sky. It had been what
might be called a rather full day, and the wail of approaching
projectiles began to get on one's nerves. One started at the slamming
of a door, took every dull thump for a distant explosion; and when we
finally turned in I carried the mattress from my room, which faced the
south, over to the other side of the building, and laid it on the floor
beside another man's bed. Before a shell could reach me it would have
to traverse at least three partitions and possibly him as well.
After midnight the bombardment quieted, but shells continued to visit us
from time to time all night. All night the Belgians were retreating
across the pontoon bridge, and once--it must have been about two or
three o'clock--I heard a sound which meant that all was over. It was
the crisp tramp--different from the Belgian shuffle--of British
soldiers, and up from the street came an English voice, "Best foot
forward, boys!" and a little farther on: "Look alive, men; they've just
picked up our range!"
I went to the window and watched them tramp by--the same men we had seen
that morning. The petrol fire was still flaming across the south, a
steamer of some sort was burning at her wharf beside the bridge--
Napoleon's veterans retreating from Moscow could scarcely have left
behind a more complete picture of war than did those young recruits.
Morning came dragging up out of that dreadful night, smoky, damp, and
chill. It was almost a London fog that lay over the abandoned town. I
had just packed up and was walking through one of the upper halls when
there was a crash that shook the whole building, the sound of falling
glass, and out in the river a geyser of water shot up, timbers and
boards flew from the bridge, and there were dozens of smaller splashes
as if from a shower of shot. I thought that the hotel was hit at last
and that the Germans, having let civilians escape over the bridge, were
turning everything loose, determined to make an end of the business. It
was, as a matter of fact, the Belgians blowing up the bridge to cover
their retreat. In any case it seemed useless to stay longer, and within
an hour, on a tug jammed with the last refugees, we were starting
down-stream.
Behind us, up the river, a vast curtain of lead-colored smoke from the
petrol-tanks had climbed up the sky and spread out mushroomwise, as
smoke and ashes sometimes spread out from a volcano. This smoke,
merging with the fog and the smoke from the Antwerp fires, seemed to
cover the whole sky. And under that sullen mantle the dark flames of
the petrol still glowed; to the right, as we looked back, was the
blazing skeleton of the ship, and on the left Antwerp itself, the rich,
old, beautiful, comfortable city, all but hidden, and now and then
sending forth the boom of an exploding shell like a groan.
A large empty German steamer, the Gneisenau, marooned here since the
war, came swinging slowly out into the river, pushed by two or three
nervous little tugs--to be sunk there, apparently, in midstream. From
the pontoon bridge, which stubbornly refused to yield, came explosion
after explosion, and up and down the river fires sprang up, and there
were other explosions, as the crushed Belgians, in a sort of rage of
devastation, became their own destroyers.
By following the adventures of one individual I have endeavored to
suggest what the bombardment of a modern city was like--what you might
expect if an invading army came to-morrow to New York or Chicago or San
Francisco. I have only coasted along the edges of Belgium's tragedy,
and the rest of the story, of which we were a part for the next two
days--the flight of those hundreds of thousands of homeless people--is
something that can scarcely be told--you must follow it out in
imagination into its countless uprooted, disorganized lives. You must
imagine old people struggling along over miles and miles of country
roads; young girls, under burdens a man might not care to bear, tramping
until they had to carry their shoes in their hands and go barefoot to
rest their unaccustomed feet. You must imagine the pathetic efforts of
hundreds of people to keep clean by washing in wayside streams or
ditches; imagine babies going without milk because there was no milk to
be had; families shivering in damp hedgerows or against haystacks where
darkness overtook them; and you must imagine this not on one road, but
on every road, for mile after mile over a whole countryside. What was to
become of these people when their little supply of food was exhausted?
Where could they go? Even if back to their homes, it would be but to
lift their hats to their conquerors, never knowing but that the next
week or month would sweep the tide of war back over them again.
Never in modern times, not in our generation at least, had Europe seen
anything like that flight--nothing so strange, so overwhelming, so
pitiful. And when I say pitiful, you must not think of hysterical women,
desperate, trampling men, tears and screams. In all those miles one saw
neither complaining nor protestation--at times one might almost have
thought it some vast, eccentric picnic. No, it was their orderliness,
their thrift and kindness, their unmistakable usefulness, which made the
waste and irony of it all so colossal and hideous. Each family had its
big, round loaves of bread and its pile of hay for the horses, the bags
of pears and potatoes; the children had their little dolls, and you
would see some tired mother with her big bundle under one arm and some
fluffy little puppy in the other. You could not associate them with
forty-centimetre shells or burned churches and libraries or anything but
quiet homes and peaceable, helpful lives. You could not be swept along
by that endless stream of exiles and retain at the end of the day any
particular enthusiasm for the red glory of war. And when we crossed the
Dutch border that afternoon and came on a village street full of Belgian
soldiers cut off and forced to cross the line, to be interned here,
presumably until the war was over, one could not mourn very deeply their
lost chances of martial glory as they unslung their rifles and turned
them over to the good-natured Dutch guard. They had held back that
avalanche long enough, these Belgians, and one felt as one would to see
lost children get home again or some one dragged from under the wheels.