SHERMAN SAID IT
Undoubtedly Sherman said it. This is my text and as illustration for my
text I take the case of the town of La Buissière.
The Germans took the town of La Buissière after stiff fighting on
August twenty-fourth. I imagine that possibly there was a line in the
dispatches telling of the fight there; but at that I doubt it, because
on that same date a few miles away a real battle was raging between the
English rear guard, under Sir John French, of the retreating army of
the Allies, falling back into France, and the Germans. Besides, in the
sum total of this war the fall of La Buissière hardly counts. You might
say it represents a semicolon in the story of the campaign. Probably
no future historian will give it so much as a paragraph. In our own
Civil War it would have been worth a page in the records anyway. Here
upward of three hundred men on both sides were killed and wounded,
and as many more Frenchmen were captured; and the town, when taken,
gave the winners the control of the river Sambre for many miles east
and west. Here, also, was a German charge with bayonets up a steep and
well-defended height; and after that a hand-to-hand mêlée with the
French defenders on the poll of the hill.
But this war is so big a thing, as wars go, that an engagement of this
size is likely to be forgotten in a day or a week. Yet, I warrant you,
the people of La Buissière will not forget it. Nor shall we forget it
who came that way in the early afternoon of a flawless summer day.
Let me try to recreate La Buissière for you, reader. Here the Sambre, a
small, orderly stream, no larger or broader or wider than a good-sized
creek would be in America, flows for a mile or two almost due east and
west. The northern bank is almost flat, with low hills rising on beyond
like the rim of a saucer. The town--most of it--is on this side. On the
south the land lifts in a moderately stiff bluff, perhaps seventy feet
high, with wooded edges, and extending off and away in a plateau, where
trees stand in well-thinned groves, and sunken roads meander between
fields of hops and grain and patches of cabbages and sugar beets. As
for the town, it has perhaps twenty-five hundred people--Walloons and
Flemish folk--living in tall, bleak, stone houses built flush with the
little crooked streets. Invariably these houses are of a whitish gray
color; almost invariably they are narrow and cramped-looking, with very
peaky gables, somehow suggesting flat-chested old men standing in close
rows, with their hands in their pockets and their shoulders shrugged up.
A canal bisects one corner of the place, and spanning the river there
are--or were--three bridges, one for the railroad and two for foot
and vehicular travel. There is a mill which overhangs the river--the
biggest building in the town--and an ancient gray convent, not quite
so large as the mill; and, of course, a church. In most of the houses
there are tiny shops on the lower floors, and upstairs are the homes
of the people. On the northern side of the stream every tillable foot
of soil is under cultivation. There are flower beds, and plum and pear
trees in the tiny grass plots alongside the more pretentious houses,
and the farm lands extend to where the town begins.
This, briefly, is La Buissière as it looked before the war began--a
little, drowsy settlement of dull, frugal, hard-working, kindly
Belgians, minding their own affairs, prospering in their own small way,
and having no quarrel with the outside world. They lived in the only
corner of Europe that I know of where serving people decline to accept
tips for rendering small services; and in a simple, homely fashion are,
I think, the politest, the most courteous, the most accommodating
human beings on the face of the earth.
Even their misery did not make them forget their manners, as we found
when we came that way, close behind the conquerors. It was only the
refugees, fleeing from their homes or going back to them again, who
were too far spent to lift their caps in answer to our hails, and too
miserably concerned with their own ruined affairs, or else too afraid
of inquisitive strangers, to answer the questions we sometimes put to
them.
We were three days getting from Brussels to La Buissière--a distance,
I suppose, of about forty-five English miles. There were no railroads
and no trams for us. The lines were held by the Germans or had been
destroyed by the Allies as they fell back. Nor were there automobiles
to be had. Such automobiles as were not hidden had been confiscated by
one side or the other.
Moreover, our journey was a constant succession of stops and starts.
Now we would be delayed for half an hour while some German officer
examined the passes we carried, he meantime eying us with his
suspicious squinted eyes. Now again we would halt to listen to some
native's story of battle or reprisal on ahead. And always there was
the everlasting dim reverberation of the distant guns to draw us
forward. And always, too, there was the difficulty of securing means of
transportation.
It was on Sunday afternoon, August twenty-third, when we left Brussels,
intending to ride to Waterloo. There were six of us, in two ancient
open carriages designed like gravy boats and hauled by gaunt livery
horses. Though the Germans had held Brussels for four days now, life in
the suburbs went on exactly as it goes on in the suburbs of a Belgian
city in ordinary times. There was nothing to suggest war or a captured
city in the family parties sitting at small tables before the outlying
cafés or strolling decorously under the trees that shaded every road.
Even the Red Cross flags hanging from the windows of many of the larger
houses seemed for once in keeping with the peaceful picture. Of Germans
during the afternoon we saw almost none. Thick enough in the center
of the town, the gray backs showed themselves hardly at all in the
environs.
At the city line a small guard lounged on benches before a wine shop.
They stood up as we drew near, but changed their minds and squatted
down without challenging us to produce the safe-conduct papers that
Herr General Major Thaddeus von Jarotzky, sitting in due state in the
ancient Hôtel de Ville, had bestowed on us an hour before.
Just before we reached Waterloo we saw in a field on the right, near
the road, a small camp of German cavalry. The big, round-topped yellow
tents, sheltering twenty men each and looking like huge tortoises,
stood in a line. From the cook-wagons, modeled on the design of those
carried by an American circus, came the heavy, meaty smells of stews
boiling in enormous caldrons. The men were lying or sitting on straw
piles, singing German marching songs as they waited for their supper.
It was always so--whenever and wherever we found German troops at rest
they were singing, eating or drinking--or doing all three at once. A
German said to me afterwards:
"Why do we win? Three things are winning for us--good marching, good
shooting and good cooking; but most of all the cooking. When our troops
stop there is always plenty of hot food for them. We never have to
fight on an empty stomach--we Germans."
These husky singers were the last Germans we were to see for many
hours; for between the garrison force left behind in Brussels and the
fast-moving columns hurrying to meet the English and the French and a
few Belgians--on the morrow--a matter of many leagues now intervened.
Evidence of the passing through of the troops was plentiful enough
though. We saw it in the trampled hedges; in the empty beer bottles
that dotted the roadside ditches--empty bottles, as we had come to
know, meant Germans on ahead; in the subdued, furtive attitude of the
country folk, and, most of all, in the chalked legend, in stubby German
script--"_Gute Leute!_"--on nearly every wine-shop shutter or cottage
door. Soldiers quartered in such a house overnight had on leaving
written this line--"Good people!"--to indicate the peaceful character
of the dwellers therein and to commend them to the kindness of those
who might follow after.
The Lion of Waterloo, standing on its lofty green pyramid, was miles
behind us before realization came that fighting had started that day to
the southward of us. We halted at a _taverne_ to water the horses, and
out came its Flemish proprietor, all gesticulations and exclamations,
to tell us that since morning he had heard firing on ahead.
"Ah, sirs," he said, "it was inconceivable--that sound of the guns. It
went on for hours. The whole world must be at war down the road!"
The day before he had seen, flitting across, the cabbage patches and
dodging among the elm trees, a skirmish party, mounted, which he took
to be English; and for two days, so he said, the Germans had been
passing the tavern in numbers uncountable.
We hurried on then, but as we met many peasants, all coming the other
way afoot and all with excited stories of a supposed battle ahead, and
as we ourselves now began to catch the faint reverberations of cannon
fire, our drivers manifested a strange reluctance about proceeding
farther. And when, just at dusk, we clattered into the curious little
convent-church town of Nivelles, and found the tiny square before the
Black Eagle Inn full of refugees who had trudged in from towns beyond,
the liverymen, after taking off their varnished high hats to scratch
their perplexed heads, announced that Brussels was where they belonged
and to Brussels they would return that night, though their spent horses
dropped in the traces on the way.
We supped that night at the Black Eagle--slept there too--and it was at
supper we had as guests Raymond Putzeys, aged twelve, and Alfred, his
father. Except crumbs of chocolate and pieces of dry bread, neither of
them had eaten for two days.
The boy, who was a round-faced, handsome, dirty, polite little chap,
said not a word except "_Merci!_" He was too busy clearing his plate
clean as fast as we loaded it with ham and eggs and plum jam; and when
he had eaten enough for three and could hold no more he went to sleep,
with his tousled head among the dishes.
The father between bites told us his tale--such a tale as we had heard
dozens of times already and were to hear again a hundred times before
that crowded week ended--he telling it with rolling eyes and lifting
brows, and graphic and abundant gestures. Behind him and us, penning
our table about with a living hedge, stood the leading burghers of
Nivelles, now listening to him, now watching us with curious eyes.
And, as he talked on, the landlord dimmed the oil lamps and made fast
the door; for this town, being in German hands, was under martial law
and must lock and bar itself in at eight o'clock each night. So we sat
in a half light and listened.
They lived, the two Putzeys, at a hamlet named Marchienne-au-Pont, to
the southward. The Germans had come into it the day before at sunup,
and finding the French there had opened fire. From the houses the
French had replied until driven out by heavy odds, and then they ran
across the fields, leaving many dead and wounded behind them. As for
the inhabitants they had, during the fighting, hidden in their cellars.
"When the French were gone the Germans drove us out," went on the
narrator; "and, of the men, they made several of us march ahead of them
down the road into the next village, we holding up our hands and loudly
begging those within the houses not to fire, for fear of killing us
who were their friends and neighbors. When this town surrendered the
Germans let us go, but first one of them gave me a cake of chocolate.
"Yet when I tried to go to aid a wounded Frenchman who lay in the
fields, another German, I thought, fired at me. I heard the bullet--it
buzzed like a hornet. So then I ran away and found my son here; and we
came across the country, following the canals and avoiding the roads,
which were filled with German troops. When we had gone a mile we looked
back and there was much thick smoke behind us--our houses were burning,
I suppose. So last night we slept in the woods and all day we walked,
and to-night reached here, bringing with us nothing except the clothes
on our backs.
"I have no wife--she has been dead for two years--but in Brussels I
have two daughters at school. Do you think I shall be permitted to
enter Brussels and seek for my two daughters? This morning they told me
Brussels was burning; but that I do not believe."
Then, also, he told us in quick, eager sentences, lowering his voice
while he spoke, that a priest, with his hands tied behind his back, had
been driven through a certain village ahead of the Germans, as a human
shield for them; and that, in still another village, two aged women had
been violated and murdered. Had he beheld these things with his own
eyes? No; he had been told of them.
Here I might add that this was our commonest experience in questioning
the refugees. Every one of them had a tale to tell of German atrocities
on noncombatants; but not once did we find an avowed eyewitness to such
things. Always our informant had heard of the torturing or the maiming
or the murdering, but never had he personally seen it. It had always
happened in another town--never in his own town.
We hoped to hire fresh vehicles of some sort in Nivelles. Indeed,
a half-drunken burgher who spoke fair English, and who, because he
had once lived in America, insisted on taking personal charge of
our affairs, was constantly bustling in to say he had arranged for
carriages and horses; but when the starting hour came--at five o'clock
on Monday morning--there was no sign either of our fuddled guardian
or of the rigs he had promised. So we set out afoot, following the
everlasting sound of the guns.
After having many small adventures on the way we came at nightfall
to Binche, a town given over to dullness and lacemaking, and once
a year to a masked carnival, but which now was jammed with German
supply trains, and by token of this latter circumstance filled with
apprehensive townspeople. But there had been no show of resistance
here, and no houses had been burned; and the Germans were paying freely
for what they took and treating the townspeople civilly.
Indeed, all that day we had traveled through a district as yet
unharried and unmolested. Though sundry hundreds of thousands of
Germans had gone that way, no burnt houses or squandered fields marked
their wake; and the few peasants who had not run away at the approach
of the dreaded _Allemands_ were back at work, trying to gather their
crops in barrows or on their backs, since they had no work-cattle
left. For these the Germans had taken from them, to the last fit horse
and the last colt.
At Binche we laid up two nights and a day for the curing of our
blistered feet. Also, here we bought our two flimsy bicycles and our
decrepit dogcart, and our still more decrepit mare to haul it; and,
with this equipment, on Wednesday morning, bright and early, we made a
fresh start, heading now toward Maubeuge, across the French boundary.
Current rumor among the soldiers at Binche--for the natives, seemingly
through fear for their own skins, would tell us nothing--was that at
Maubeuge the onward-pressing Germans had caught up with the withdrawing
columns of the Allies and were trying to bottle the stubborn English
rear guard. For once the gossip of the privates and the noncommissioned
officers proved to be true. There was fighting that day near
Maubeuge--hard fighting and plenty of it; but, though we got within
five miles of it, and heard the guns and saw the smoke from them, we
were destined not to get there.
Strung out, with the bicycles in front, we went down the straight white
road that ran toward the frontier. After an hour or two of steady going
we began to notice signs of the retreat that had trailed through this
section forty-eight hours before. We picked up a torn shoulder strap,
evidently of French workmanship, which had 13 embroidered on it in
faded red tape; and we found, behind the trunk of a tree, a knapsack,
new but empty, which was too light to have been part of a German
soldier's equipment.
We thought it was French; but now I think it must have been Belgian,
because, as we subsequently discovered, a few scattering detachments
of the Belgian foot soldiers who fled from Brussels on the eve of the
occupation--disappearing so completely and so magically--made their way
westward and southward to the French lines, toward Mons, and enrolled
with the Allies in the last desperate effort to dam off and stem back
the German torrent.
Also, in a hedge, was a pair of new shoes, with their mouths gaping
open and their latchets hanging down like tongues, as though hungering
for feet to go into them. But not a shred or scrap of German
belongings--barring only the empty bottles--did we see.
The marvelous German system, which is made up of a million small things
to form one great, complete thing, ordained that never, either when
marching or after camping, or even after fighting, should any object,
however worthless, be discarded, lest it give to hostile eyes some hint
as to the name of the command or the extent of its size. These Germans
we were trailing cleaned up behind themselves as carefully as New
England housewives.
It may have been the German love of order and regularity that induced
them even to avoid trampling the ripe grain in the fields wherever
possible. Certainly, except when dealing out punishment, they did
remarkably little damage, considering their numbers, along their line
of march through this lowermost strip of Belgium.
At Merbes-Ste.-Marie, a matter of six kilometers from Binche, we came
on the first proof of seeming wantonness we encountered that day.
An old woman sat in a doorway of what had been a wayside wine shop,
guarding the pitiable ruin of her stock and fixtures. All about her on
the floor was a litter of foul straw, muddied by many feet and stained
with spilled drink. The stench from a bloated dead cavalry horse across
the road poisoned the air. The woman said a party of private soldiers,
straying back from the main column, had despoiled her, taking what they
pleased of her goods and in pure vandalism destroying what they could
not use.
Her shop was ruined, she said. With a gesture of both arms, as though
casting something from her, she expressed how utter and complete was
her ruin. Also she was hungry--she and her children--for the Germans
had eaten all the food in the house and all the food in the houses of
her neighbors. We could not feed her, for we had no stock of provisions
with us; but we gave her a five-franc piece and left her calling down
the blessings of the saints on us in French-Flemish.
The sister village of Merbes-le-Château, another kilometer farther
on, revealed to us all its doors and many of its windows caved in by
blows of gun butts and, at the nearer end of the principal street, five
houses in smoking ruins. A group of men and women were pawing about in
the wreckage, seeking salvage. They had saved a half-charred washstand,
a scorched mattress, a clock and a few articles of women's wear; and
these they had piled in a mound on the edge of the road.
At first, not knowing who we were, they stood mute, replying to
questions only with shrugged shoulders and lifted eyebrows; but when
we made them realize that we were Americans they changed. All were
ready enough to talk then; they crowded about us, gesticulating
and interrupting one another. From the babble we gathered that the
German skirmishers, coming in the strength of one company, had found
an English cavalry squad in the town. The English had swapped a few
volleys with them, then had fallen back toward the river in good order
and without loss.
The Germans, pushing in, had burned certain outlying houses from which
shots had come and burst open the rest. Also they had repeated the
trick of capturing sundry luckless natives and, in their rush through
the town, driving these prisoners ahead of them as living bucklers to
minimize the danger of being shot at from the windows.
One youth showed us a raw wound in his ear. A piece of tile, splintered
by an errant bullet, had pierced it, he said, as the Germans drove him
before them. Another man told us his father--and the father must have
been an old man, for the speaker himself was in his fifties--had been
shot through the thigh. But had anybody been killed? That was what we
wanted to know. Ah, but yes! A dozen eager fingers pointed to the house
immediately behind us. There a man had been killed.
Coming back to try to save some of their belongings after the Germans
had gone through, these others had found him at the head of the cellar
steps in his blazing house. His throat had been cut and his blood was
on the floor, and he was dead. They led us into the shell of the place,
the stone walls being still stanchly erect; but the roof was gone, and
in the cinders and dust on the planks of an inner room they showed us a
big dull-brown smear.
This, they told us, pointing, was the place where he lay. One man in
pantomime acted out the drama of the discovery of the body. He was
a born actor, that Belgian villager, and an orator--with his hands.
Somehow, watching him, I visualized the victim as a little man, old and
stoop-shouldered and feeble in his movements.
I looked about the room. The corner toward the road was a black ruin,
but the back wall was hardly touched by the marks of the fire. On a
mantel small bits of pottery stood intact, and a holy picture on the
wall--a cheap print of a saint--was not even singed. At the foot of
the cellar steps curdled milk stood in pans; and beside the milk, on a
table, was a half-moon of cheese and a long knife.
We wanted to know why the man who lived here had been killed. They
professed ignorance then--none of them knew, or, at least, none of them
would say. A little later a woman told us she had heard the Germans
caught him watching from a window with a pair of opera glasses, and
on this evidence took him for a spy. But we could secure no direct
evidence either to confirm the tale or to disprove it.
We got to the center of the town, leaving the venerable nag behind to
be baited at a big gray barn by a big, shapeless, kindly woman hostler
whose wooden shoes clattered on the round cobbles of her stable yard
like drum taps.
In the Square, after many citizens had informed us there was nothing
to eat, a little Frenchwoman took pity on our emptiness, and, leading
us to a parlor behind a shop where she sold, among other things, post
cards, cheeses and underwear, she made us a huge omelet and gave us
also good butter and fresh milk and a pot of her homemade marmalade.
Her two little daughters, who looked as though they had escaped from a
Frans Hals canvas, waited on us while we wolfed the food down.
Quite casually our hostess showed us a round hole in the window behind
us, a big white scar in the wooden inner shutter and a flattened chunk
of lead. The night before, it seemed, some one, for purposes unknown,
had fired a bullet through the window of her house. It was proof of the
rapidity with which the actual presence of war works indifference to
sudden shocks among a people that this woman could discuss the incident
quietly. Hostile gun butts had splintered her front door; why not a
stray bullet or two through her back window? So we interpreted her
attitude.
It was she who advised us not to try to ford the Sambre at
Merbes-le-Château, but to go off at an angle to La Buissière, where
she had heard one bridge still stood. She said nothing of a fight at
that place. It is possible that she knew nothing of it, though the two
towns almost touched. Indeed, in all these Belgian towns we found the
people so concerned with their own small upheavals and terrors that
they seemed not to care or even to know how their neighbors a mile or
two miles away had fared.
Following this advice we swung about and drove to La Buissière to find
the bridge that might still be intact; and, finding it, we found also,
and quite by chance, the scene of the first extended engagement on
which we stumbled.
Our first intimation of it was the presence, in a cabbage field beyond
the town, of three strangely subdued peasants softening the hard earth
with water, so that they might dig a grave for a dead horse, which,
after lying two days in the hot sun, had already become a nuisance
and might become a pestilence. When we told them we meant to enter La
Buissière they held up their soiled hands in protest.
"There has been much fighting there," one said, "and many are dead, and
more are dying. Also, the shooting still goes on; but what it means we
do not know, because we dare not venture into the streets, which are
full of Germans. Hark, m'sieurs!"
Even as he spoke we heard a rifle crack; and then, after a pause,
a second report. We went forward cautiously across a bridge that
spanned an arm of the canal, and past a double line of houses, with
broken windows, from which no sign or sound of life came. Suddenly
at a turn three German privates of a lancer regiment faced us. They
were burdened with bottles of beer, and one carried his lance, which
he flung playfully in our path. He had been drinking and was jovially
exhilarated. As soon as he saw the small silk American flag that
fluttered from the rail of our dogcart he and his friends became
enthusiastic in their greetings, offering us beer and wanting to
know whether the Americans meant to declare for Germany now that the
Japanese had sided with England.
Leaving them cheering for the Americans we negotiated another elbow
in the twisting street--and there all about us was the aftermath and
wreckage of a spirited fight.
Earlier in this chapter I told--or tried to tell--how La Buissière must
have looked in peaceful times. I shall try now to tell how it actually
looked that afternoon we rode into it.
In the center of the town the main street opens out to form an
irregular circle, and the houses fronting it make a compact ring.
Through a gap one gets a glimpse of the little river which one has
just crossed; and on the river bank stands the mill, or what is left
of it, and that is little enough. Its roof is gone, shot clear away in
a shower of shattered tiling, and its walls are breached in a hundred
places. It is pretty certain that mill will never grind grist again.
On its upper floor, which is now a sieve, the Germans--so they
themselves told us--found, after the fighting, the seventy-year-old
miller, dead, with a gun in his hands and a hole in his head. He had
elected to help the French defend the place; and it was as well for him
that he fell fighting, because, had he been taken alive, the Prussians,
following their grim rule for all civilians caught with weapons, would
have stood him up against a wall with a firing squad before him.
The houses round about have fared better, in the main, than the mill,
though none of them has come scatheless out of the fight. Hardly a
windowpane is whole; hardly a wall but is pocked by bullets or rent
by larger missiles. Some houses have lost roofs; some have lost side
walls, so that one can gaze straight into them and see the cluttered
furnishings, half buried in shattered masonry and crumbled plaster.
One small cottage has been blown clear away in a blast of artillery
fire; only the chimney remains, pointing upward like a stubby finger.
A fireplace, with a fire in it, is the glowing heart of a house; and
a chimney completes it and reveals that it is a home fit for human
creatures to live in; but we see here--and the truth of it strikes
us as it never did before--that a chimney standing alone typifies
desolation and ruin more fitly, more brutally, than any written words
could typify it.
Everywhere there are soldiers--German soldiers--in their soiled, dusty
gray service uniforms, always in heavy boots; always with their tunics
buttoned to the throat. Some, off duty, are lounging at ease in the
doors of the houses. More, on duty, are moving about briskly in squads,
with fixed bayonets. One is learning to ride a bicycle, and when he
falls off, as he does repeatedly, his comrades laugh at him and shout
derisive advice at him.
There are not many of the townsfolk in sight. Experience has taught
us that in any town not occupied by the enemy our appearance will be
the signal for an immediate gathering of the citizens, all flocking
about us, filled with a naïve, respectful inquisitiveness, and wanting
to know where we have come from and to what place we are going.
Here in this stricken town not a single villager comes near us. A
priest passes us, bows deeply to us, and in an instant is gone round
a jog in the street, the skirts of his black robe flicking behind
him. From upper windows faces peer out at us--faces of women and
children mostly. In nearly every one of these faces a sort of cow-like
bewilderment expresses itself--not grief, not even resentment, but
merely a stupefied wonderment at the astounding fact that their town,
rather than some other town, should be the town where the soldiers of
other nations come to fight out their feud. We have come to know well
that look these last few days. So far as we have seen there has been
no mistreatment of civilians by the soldiers; yet we note that the
villagers stay inside the shelter of their damaged homes as though they
felt safer there.
A young officer bustles up, spick and span in his tan boots and tan
gloves, and, finding us to be Americans and correspondents, becomes
instantly effusive. He has just come through his first fight, seemingly
with some credit to himself; and he is proud of the part he has played
and is pleased to talk about it. Of his own accord he volunteers to
lead us to the heights back of the town where the French defenses were
and where the hand-to-hand fighting took place.
As we trail along behind him in single file we pass a small paved court
before a stable and see a squad of French prisoners. Later we are to
see several thousand French prisoners; but now the sight is at once a
sensation and a novelty to us. These are all French prisoners; there
are no Belgians or Englishmen among them. In their long, cumbersome
blue coats and baggy red pants they are huddled down against a wall in
a heap of straw. They lie there silently, chewing straws and looking
very forlorn. Four German soldiers with fixed bayonets are guarding
them.
The young lieutenant leads us along a steeply ascending road over
a ridge and then stops; and as we look about us the consciousness
strikes home to us, with almost the jar of a physical blow, that we are
standing where men have lately striven together and have fallen and
died.
In front of us and below us is the town, with the river winding into
it at the east and out of it at the west; and beyond the town, to the
north, is the cup-shaped valley of fair, fat farm lands, all heavy and
pregnant with ungarnered, ungathered crops. Behind us, on the front of
the hill, is a hedge, and beyond the hedge--just a foot or so back of
it, in fact--is a deep trench, plainly dug out by hand, and so lately
done that the cut clods are still moist and fresh-looking. At the first
instant of looking it seems to us that this intrenchment is full of
dead men; but when we look closer we see that what we take for corpses
are the scattered garments and equipments of French infantrymen--long
blue coats; peaked, red-topped caps; spare shirts; rifled knapsacks;
water-bottles; broken guns; side arms; bayonet belts and blanket rolls.
There are perhaps twenty guns in sight. Each one has been rendered
useless by being struck against the earth with sufficient force to snap
the stock at the grip.
Almost at my feet is a knapsack, ripped open and revealing a card of
small china buttons, a new red handkerchief, a gray-striped flannel
shirt, a pencil and a sheaf of writing paper. Rummaging in the main
compartment I find, folded at the back, a book recording the name and
record of military service of one Gaston Michel Miseroux, whose home is
at Amiens, and who is--or was--a private in the Tenth Battalion of the
---- Regiment of Chasseurs à Pied. Whether this Gaston Michel Miseroux
got away alive without his knapsack, or whether he was captured or
was killed, there is none to say. His service record is here in the
trampled dust and he is gone.
Before going farther the young lieutenant, speaking in his broken
English, told us the story of the fight, which had been fought, he
said, just forty-eight hours before. "The French," he said, "must have
been here for several days. They had fortified this hill, as you see;
digging intrenchments in front for their riflemen and putting their
artillery behind at a place I shall presently show you. Also they
had placed many of their sharpshooters in the houses. It was a strong
position, commanding the passage of the river, and they should have
been able to hold it against twice their number.
"Our men came, as you did, along that road off yonder; and then our
infantry advanced across the fields under cover of our artillery fire.
We were in the open and the French were above us here and behind
shelter; and so we lost many men.
"They had mined the bridge over the canal and also the last remaining
bridge across the river; but we came so fast that we took both bridges
before they could set off the mines.
"In twenty minutes we held the town and the last of their sharpshooters
in the houses had been dislodged or killed. Then, while our guns moved
over there to the left and shelled them on the flank, two companies of
Germans--five hundred men--charged up the steep road over which you
have just climbed and took this trench here in five minutes of close
fighting.
"The enemy lost many men here before they ran. So did we lose many. On
that spot there"--he pointed to a little gap in the hedge, not twenty
feet away, where the grass was pressed flat--"I saw three dead men
lying in a heap.
"We pushed the French back, taking a few prisoners as we went, until on
the other side of this hill our artillery began to rake them, and then
they gave way altogether and retreated to the south, taking their guns.
Remember, they outnumbered us and they had the advantage of position;
but we whipped them--we Germans--as we always do whip our enemies."
His voice changed from boasting to pity:
"_Ach_, but it was shameful that they should have been sent against us
wearing those long blue coats, those red trousers, those shiny black
belts and bright brass buttons! At a mile, or even half a mile, the
Germans in their dark-gray uniforms, with dull facings, fade into the
background; but a Frenchman in his foolish monkey clothes is a target
for as far as you can see him.
"And their equipment--see how flimsy it is when compared with ours! And
their guns--so inferior, so old-fashioned alongside the German guns! I
tell you this: Forty-four years they have been wishing to fight us for
what we did in 1870; and when the time comes they are not ready and we
are ready. While they have been singing their Marseillaise Hymn, we
have been thinking. While they have been talking, we have been working."
Next he escorted us back along the small plateau that extended south
from the face of the bluff. We made our way through a constantly
growing confusion of abandoned equipment and garments--all the flotsam
and jetsam of a rout. I suppose we saw as many as fifty smashed French
rifles, as many as a hundred and fifty canteens and knapsacks.
Crossing a sunken road, where trenches for riflemen to kneel in and
fire from had been dug in the sides of the bank--a road our guide said
was full of dead men after the fight--we came very soon to the site of
the French camp. Here, from the medley and mixture of an indescribable
jumble of wreckage, certain objects stand out, as I write this,
detached and plain in my mind; such things, for example, as a straw
basket of twelve champagne bottles with two bottles full and ten empty;
a box of lump sugar, broken open, with a stain of spilled red wine on
some of the white cubes; a roll of new mattresses jammed into a natural
receptacle at the root of an oak tree; a saber hilt of shining brass
with the blade missing; a whole set of pewter knives and forks sown
broadcast on the bruised and trampled grass. But there was no German
relic in the lot--you may be sure of that. Farther down, where the
sunken road again wound across our path, we passed an old-fashioned
family carriage jammed against the bank, with one shaft snapped off
short. Lying on the dusty seat-cushion was a single silver teaspoon.
Almost opposite the carriage, against the other bank, was a
cavalryman's boot; it had been cut from a wounded limb. The leather
had been split all the way down the leg from the top to the ankle, and
the inside of the boot was full of clotted, dried blood. And just as
we turned back to return to the town I saw a child's stuffed cloth
doll--rag dolls I think they call them in the States--lying flat in the
road; and a wagon wheel or a cannon wheel had passed over the head,
squashing it flat.
I am not striving for effect when I tell of this trifle. When you write
of such things as a battlefield you do not need to strive for effect.
The effects are all there, ready-made, waiting to be set down. Nor do
I know how a child's doll came to be in that harried, up-torn place.
I only know it was there, and being there it seemed to me to sum up
the fate of little Belgium in this great war. If I had been seeking a
visible symbol of Belgium's case I do not believe I could have found a
more fitting one anywhere.
Going down the hill to the town we met, skirting across our path, a
party of natives wearing Red Cross distinguishments. The lieutenant
said these men had undoubtedly been beating the woods and grain fields
for the scattered wounded or dead. He added, without emotion, that from
time to time they found one such; in fact, the volunteer searchers had
brought in two Frenchmen just before we arrived--one to be cared for at
the hospital, the other to be buried.
We had thanked the young lieutenant and had bade him good-by, and
were starting off again, hoping to make Maubeuge before night, when
suddenly it struck me that the one thing about La Buissière I should
recall most vividly was not the sight of it, all stricken and stunned
and forlorn as it was, but the stench of it.
Before this my eyes had been so busy recording impressions that my nose
had neglected its duty; now for the first time I sensed the vile reek
that arose from all about me. The place was one big, horrid stink. It
smelled of ether and iodoform and carbolic acid--there being any number
of improvised hospitals, full of wounded, in sight; it smelled of sour
beef bones and stale bread and moldy hay and fresh horse dung; it
smelled of the sweaty bodies of the soldiers; it smelled of everything
that is fetid and rancid and unsavory and unwholesome.
And yet, forty-eight hours before, this town, if it was like every
other Belgian town, must have been as clean as clean could be. When
the Belgian peasant housewife has cleaned the inside of her house she
issues forth with bucket and scrubbing brush and washes the outside of
it--and even the pavement in front and the cobbles of the road. But the
war had come to La Buissière and turned it upside down.
A war wastes towns, it seems, even more visibly than it wastes nations.
Already the streets were ankle-deep in filth. There were broken lamps
and broken bottles and broken windowpanes everywhere, and one could
not step without an accompaniment of crunching glass from underfoot.
Sacks of provender, which the French had abandoned, were split open and
their contents wasted in the mire while the inhabitants went hungry.
The lower floors of the houses were bedded in straw where the soldiers
had slept, and the straw was thickly covered with dried mud and already
gave off a sour-sickish odor. Over everything was the lime dust from
the powdered walls and plastering.
We drove away, then, over the hill toward the south. From the crest of
the bluff we could look down on ruined La Buissière, with its garrison
of victorious invaders, its frightened townspeople, and its houses full
of maimed and crippled soldiers of both sides.
Beyond we could see the fields, where the crops, already overripe, must
surely waste for lack of men and teams to harvest them; and on the edge
of one field we marked where the three peasants dug the grave for the
rotting horse, striving to get it underground before it set up a plague.
Except for them, busy with pick and spade, no living creature in sight
was at work.
Sherman said it!