_An American at the Battlefront_
_Told by Albert Rhys Williams, War Correspondent_
This narrator tells of his experiences with the spy hunters of
Belgium. He was swept into the war-stricken country where he was
arrested by the Germans, sweating under the German third degree,
spending a fearful night on a prison floor, suffering with his
fellow prisoners the torments of a trial as a spy in a German
military court in Brussels, and finally securing his liberty. He
has collected his experiences in a volume under title "In the Claws
of the German Eagle," thus preserving in book form his remarkable
articles which were first published in The Outlook. A few episodes
from his amazing adventures are here given by permission of the
publishers, _E. P. Dutton and Company_: Copyright 1917.
[7] I--STORY OF AN AMERICAN IN GHENT
In the last days of September, the Belgians moving in and through Ghent
in their rainbow-colored costumes, gave to the city a distinctively
holiday touch. The clatter of cavalry hoofs and the throb of racing
motors rose above the voices of the mobs that surged along the streets.
Service was normal in the cafés. To the accompaniment of music and
clinking glasses the dress-suited waiter served me a five-course lunch
for two francs. It was uncanny to see this blaze of life while the city
sat under the shadow of a grave disaster. At any moment the gray German
tide might break out of Brussels and pour its turbid flood of soldiers
through these very streets. Even now a Taube hovered in the sky, and
from the skirmish-line an occasional ambulance rumbled in with its
crimsoned load.
I chanced into Gambrinus' café and was lost in the babbling sea of
French and Flemish. Above the mêlée of sounds, however, I caught a
gladdening bit of English. Turning about, I espied a little group of
men whose plain clothes stood out in contrast to the colored uniforms
of officers and soldiers crowded into the café. Wearied of my efforts
at conversing in a foreign tongue, I went over and said:
"Do you really speak English?"
"Well, rather!" answered the one who seemed to act as leader of the
group. "We are the only ones now and it will be scarcer still around
here in a few days."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because Ghent will be in German hands."
This brought an emphatic denial from one of his confrères who insisted
that the Germans had already reached the end of their rope. A certain
correspondent, joining in the argument, came in for a deal of banter
for taking the war _de luxe_ in a good hotel far from the front.
"What do you know about the war?" they twitted him. "You've pumped all
your best stories out of the refugees ten miles from the front, after
priming them with a glass of beer."
They were a group of young war-photographers to whom danger was a
magnet. Though none of them had yet reached the age of thirty, they
had seen service in all the stirring events of Europe and even around
the globe. Where the clouds lowered and the seas tossed, there they
flocked. Like stormy petrels they rushed to the center of the swirling
world. That was their element. A freelance, a representative of the
Northcliffe press, and two movie-men comprised this little group and
made an island of English amidst the general babel.
Like most men who have seen much of the world, they had ceased to
be cynics. When I came to them out of the rain, carrying no other
introduction than a dripping overcoat, they welcomed me into their
company and whiled away the evening with tales of the Balkan wars.
They were in high spirits over their exploits of the previous day, when
the Germans, withdrawing from Melle on the outskirts of the city, had
left a long row of cottages still burning. As the enemy troops pulled
out the further end of the street, the movie men came in at the other
and caught the pictures of the still blazing houses. We went down to
view them on the screen. To the gentle throbbing of drums and piano,
the citizens of Ghent viewed the unique spectacle of their own suburbs
going up in smoke.
At the end of the show they invited me to fill out their automobile
on the morrow. Nearly every other motor had been commandeered by the
authorities for the "Service Militaire" and bore on the front the
letters "S. M." Our car was by no means in the blue-ribbon class. It
had a hesitating disposition and the authorities, regarding it as more
of a liability than an asset, passed it over.
But the correspondents counted it a great stroke of fortune to have any
car at all; and, that they might continue to have it, they kept it at
night carefully locked in a room in the hotel. They had their chauffeur
under like supervision. He was one of their kind, and with the cunning
of a diplomat obtained the permit to buy petrol, most precious of all
treasures in the field of war. Indeed, gasoline, along with courage and
discipline, completed the trinity of success in the military mind.