RUIN AND DEATH
In the course of my travels I happened to run across two Belgians, one
of whom had a brother at Andenne. Upon learning that I was an American
he became very friendly and confidential and requested that I call upon
his brother, giving me a card to him and assuring me that I would find a
cordial reception. He said Andenne presented one of the saddest
spectacles of the entire district and his brother had passed through the
whole ordeal. At the time he told me this I was on my way from Liége to
Namur. It was necessary to take a horse conveyance a part of the
distance, between Flémalle and Huy, and I had this conversation with him
in the hack. I was very glad to act upon his suggestion and instead of
going into Namur that evening I got off at Andenne. It was not difficult
to find the man's brother and when I gave him the card and told him I
was an American he certainly did treat me royally. That evening we
talked far into the night. He showed me the destruction which the
Germans had wrought in his own home and told me of the things they had
stolen from him. Incidentally, the desk in his front room had been
locked when the Germans broke into the house, but they had overturned
it, smashed the drawers in from the bottom and thoroughly looted it.
The next morning he took me for a walk through the town. As we went
through the streets I noticed that every house in the place had been
riddled with bullet holes. There were hundreds of holes right through
the solid brick. The German machine gunners had simply gone through the
place and raked every house so that if there was a single person in it,
even asleep in his bed, those bullets would seek him out and send him to
meet his God. Besides this, every house had the front doors and windows
smashed in and now temporary boardings were nailed up in the place of
them. By and by in the progress of our walk we came to the edge of the
town.
There, along the side of the road, he showed me two tremendous graves
side by side. I am sure they were not less than fifteen by twenty-five
feet in dimension and piled up a couple of feet high with quicklime.
"There are sixty of my fellow-townsmen buried in each one of those
graves," said my escort. "Piled in there three deep. These men were shot
down by the German soldiers when they entered the town for no other
offense than that of being Belgian citizens."
The thing seemed incredible. "Are you certain about this?" I asked him.
"Were you personally acquainted with these innocent people who were
murdered?"
"I have lived here all my life," he replied, "and I am thirty-five years
old. This was a place of four thousand people before the war and
naturally I must have known almost everybody in the town."
I then said to him, "Would you be willing to give me a list of the names
of some of the people whom you know to have been innocently murdered?"
He said he would be very glad to do so, and when we got back to his
house he took a piece of paper and in a very few minutes' time wrote out
a list of fifteen or twenty names, bracketing those which belonged to
the same family. In some instances whole families of three to five
people were annihilated by the Germans.
That little piece of paper later on came very nearly getting me
executed. But it served to show the deliberate policy of terrorism and
frightfulness which the Huns pursued. The man pointed out house after
house, naming the owner and his occupation where these murders had been
committed.
Later on I went to Aerschot. I had read in the Bryce report of Aerschot.
When I entered the town on the electric tram car I saw the old familiar
sight. It was the spectacle of gable ends of houses and stores sticking
up toward heaven, the roofs having fallen in, all burned out inside and
gaping at me from the smoke-blackened window holes where formerly the
faces of the little children smiled. The whole town was in ruins. I
entered a little shack where a woman was keeping store. We had a short
conversation about the tragic experiences there and finally when I
started to leave she became excited and frantic. I saw anger and tears
coming into her eyes and she shot forth her hand and almost screamed,
"Yes, and my own husband was shot down by my side also, as we were
hiding in the cellar! We saw the German soldiers coming and we rushed
below for refuge. They broke into our house, stole what they wanted, and
then hunted us out in the cellar and shot my husband by my side. They
then seized my own father, sixty-eight years of age, handcuffed him and
dragged him out to the public square where with numbers of others of our
townsmen he was shot down in cold blood and left lying unburied on the
open square for two nights and two days. They wouldn't even let me bury
him."
And so it was that this kind of experience was repeated over and over
again as I journeyed through desolated Belgium. The Germans put a
deliberate policy of murder and of vandalism into awful execution.
They laid low the country on every hand. The traveler sees a remarkable
country and a wonderful civilization, but one which has been annihilated
by the unappreciative Hun, a brother to the beast. I have seen
marvelously beautiful cathedrals, adorned by the conceptions of the
greatest masters, built in honor of the one great Master who said, "All
ye are brethren," shot to pieces by cannon, riddled by machine guns,
burned up by flaming projectiles, thrown with terribly deliberate and
accurate aim; cathedrals where the Christ had once been worshiped, and
where the holy instincts of gentleness and love were inculcated. Now the
figures of the Christ have sword thrusts in their sides and the hands
and feet and face are pierced with bullets from the machine guns. I
have seen widows wearing crape, with babies in their arms who cried for
food and have been told by them as their eyes flamed up, how their loved
ones were shot down by their sides or taken out and bayoneted in their
sight; loved ones who had no part in the battle.
When the people learned that the German Army had entered the town they
frequently took refuge in the cellar, but the relentless soldiers sought
them out. They broke in the doors and windows of the houses, stole the
goods which they could carry, shot the men and then set fire to the
home, and in not a few cases they shot and bayoneted the women and the
babies. Priests also were made a special object of attack and the
repeated narratives of particular cruelty toward them could not but
carry conviction. A priest of Louvain who had escaped to Holland, later
told me of forty of his fellow-priests being trapped in their
headquarters and every one shot down.
At the little town of B---- the soldiers demanded the keys to the church
from the Belgian priest, in order that they could go in and burn it.
When the priest refused they dragged him out of the house, over to the
steps of the church, where they cut off his ears and nose and left him
there alone, where Death shortly found him. These facts are corroborated
by witnesses, who take solemn oath to the truth of them; and to anyone
who has been in Belgium during the present war, no tale of savagery
would sound too wild for belief. The Huns have forgotten that they ever
were human beings and have reverted to the wolf, and so they swarmed
through Belgium and through northern France, this scourge of God, two
million strong, blasting and withering everything they touched.
As I traveled through the country I saw houses by the scores and
hundreds upon which machine guns had been turned, while occupied by
unarmed and innocent people, and the tragedy was fearful. These things I
have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. The high power of
these modern shooting devices is almost beyond conception. At L---- I
saw two rapid-fire guns as I got off the train at the station, little
gray, innocent looking things, a sort of rifle barrel mounted on a
tripod, with a shield for the operator to stand behind, yet those guns
could shoot seven hundred times a minute and when equipped with an
electric motor they shoot four times that number, and they shoot to
kill. Often with a range of two to three miles, they will deal sure
death at a distance of a mile and a half. They are constantly trained on
the city. Then their big guns astound the reason!
The Springfield rifle has a range of five miles and the bullet on
leaving the gun goes at a velocity of half a mile a second, or enough
momentum to drive it through four and one-half feet of white pine. The
siege guns which the Germans dragged up before the forts of Liége could
drive a tremendous hole a foot and a half in diameter through twelve
feet of solid concrete or four feet of solid steel.
Yet, notwithstanding this, having all the hellish machinery of war that
the mind is capable of devising, they want still more and are ready to
pay handsome sums to clever inventors who will turn out new and unheard
of instruments of torture and death. They build boats which submerge
themselves beneath the ocean, and from this position of vantage hurl
deadly missiles and send to the bottom giant ships carrying thousands of
innocent human lives; they experiment until they find deadly gases which
can be projected at the enemy, causing indescribable agony as they are
breathed into the lungs, while the unhappy victim writhes in pain and
shortly dies; that they may be more terrible than Attila, the Hun, in
their policy of frightfulness, in order to subjugate the world, yet they
have failed, in that they have neglected to take into view the eternal
laws of God. They have forgotten that the race is not always to the
swift nor the battle to the strong. Eternal laws cannot be frustrated,
and Germany has failed! Again I say, Germany has failed! History teaches
him who is able to learn, that the Creator never meant one régime to
rule the world. The Hun has failed. The Kaiser does not govern the
Almighty nor run this universe. Man is dust and God alone is great.