pane, stared out across the fog-hung lowlands. He so stood for some
minutes and when he turned I noticed that tears were glistening in his
eyes.
"My wife and children are over there in Ostend," he explained, in a
voice which he tried pathetically hard to control. "At least, they
were there two years ago last August. They had gone there for the
summer. I was in Brussels when the Germans crossed the frontier, and I
at once joined the army. I have never heard from my family since. It
is very hard, monsieur, to be so near them--they are only thirty
kilometres away--and not be able to see them or to hear from them, or
even be able to learn whether they are well or whether they have
enough to eat."
It is a terrible thing, this prison wall within which the Germans have
shut up the people of Belgium. How terrible it is one cannot realize
until he has known those whose dear ones are confined _incommunicado_
within that prison. I wish I might bring home to you, my friends, just
what it means. How would _you_ feel to stand on the banks of the
Hudson and look across into New Jersey and know that, though over
there, a few miles away, were your homes and those that you hold most
dear, you could no more get word to them, or they to you, than if they
were in Mars? And how would you feel if you knew that Englewood and
Morristown and Plainfield and the Oranges, and a dozen other of the
pretty Jersey towns, were but heaps of blackened ruins, that the
larger cities were garrisoned by brutal German soldiery and ruled by
heartless-German governors, and that thousands of women and
girls--perhaps _your_ wife, _your_ daughters among them--had been
dragged from their homes and taken God knows where? How would you feel
then, Mr. American?
* * * * *
After an hour's wait my officer, profuse in his apologies, arrived in
a beautifully appointed limousine, beside which the British staff-car
in which I had come looked cheap and very shabby. At the very
beginning of the war the Belgian military authorities commandeered
every car they could lay their hands on, and though many have been
worn out and hundreds were lost during the retreat, they are still
rather better supplied with luxurious cars than any of the other
armies.
"There will be a moon to-night," said my cicerone, "so before going to
La Panne, where quarters have been reserved for you, I shall take you
to Furnes. The Grande Place is pure Spanish--it was built in the Duke
of Alva's time, you know--and it is very beautiful by moonlight."
The road to Furnes took us through what had been, a few years before,
quaint Flemish villages, but German _Kultur_, aided by the products of
Frau Bertha Krupp, had transformed the beautiful sixteenth-century
architecture into heaps of brick and stone. And nowhere did I see a
church left standing. Whether the Germans shelled the churches because
they honestly believed that their towers were used for observation
purposes, or from sheer lust for destruction, I do not know. In any
event, the churches are gone. In one little shell-torn village my
companion pointed out to me the ruins of a church, amid which a
company of infantry, going up to the trenches, had camped for the
night. Just as the men were falling in at daybreak a German shell of
large caliber exploded among them. Sixty-four--I think that was the
number--were killed outright or died of their wounds. But not even the
dead are permitted to sleep in peace. I saw several churchyards on
which German shells had rained so heavily that the corpses had been
disinterred, and whitened bones and grinning skulls littered the
ploughed-up ground.
Darkness had fallen when we came to Furnes. In passing through the
outskirts, we stopped to call on two young women--an Irish girl and a
Canadian--who, undismayed by the periodic shell-storms which visit it,
have pluckily stayed in the town ever since the battle of the Yser,
caring for the few hundred townspeople who remain, nursing the
wounded, and even conducting a school for the children. They live in a
small bungalow which the military authorities have erected for them on
the edge of the town. A few yards from their front door is a
bomb-proof, looking exactly like a Kansas cyclone-cellar, in which
they find refuge when one of the frequent bombardments begins. We
found that the young women were not at home. I was disappointed,
because I wanted to tell them how much I admired them.
My companion was quite right in saying that the Grande Place of Furnes
by moonlight is worth seeing. It certainly is. The exquisite
fifteenth-century buildings which face upon the square have, by some
miracle, remained almost undamaged. There were no lights, of course,
and the only person in sight was a sentry, on whose bayonet and steel
helmet the moonbeams played fitfully. The darkness, the silence, the
suggestion of mystery, the ancient buildings with their leaded windows
and their carved façades, the steel-capped soldier, all made me feel
that I had stepped back five hundred years and was in the Furnes of
Inquisition times.
Our visit to Furnes had delayed us, so it was well into the evening
before we drew up before the hotel in La Panne, where a room had been
reserved for me by the Belgian _État-Major_. A seaside resort in
midwinter is always a peculiarly depressing place, and La Panne was no
exception. Though every hotel and villa in the place was chock-a-block
with staff-officers, with nurses, and with wounded, the street-lamps
were extinguished, not a ray of light escaped from the heavily
curtained windows, and, to add to the general sense of melancholy, a
cold, raw wind was blowing down from the North Sea and a drizzling
rain had set in. Though La Panne is within easy range of the German
batteries, which could eliminate it with neatness and despatch, it
has, singularly enough, never been bombarded, nor has it been
subjected to any serious air raids. This is the more surprising as all
the neighboring towns, as well as Dunkirk, a dozen miles beyond, have
been repeatedly shelled and bombed. The only explanation of this
phenomenon is that the Germans do not wish to kill the Queen of the
Belgians--she was Princess Elisabeth of Bavaria, remember--who lives
with the King at La Panne. It is possible that this may be the correct
explanation. I remember that when I was in Brussels during the early
days of the German occupation, there occurred a serious collision
between Prussian and Bavarian troops, the latter asserting that the
ill-mannered North German soldiery had shown some disrespect to a
portrait of "unsere Bayerische Prinzessin." Why the Germans should
have any consideration for the safety of the Queen after the fashion
in which they have treated her country and her people, only a Teutonic
intellect could understand. But the exemption which La Panne has thus
far enjoyed has not induced its inhabitants to omit any precautions.
An ample number of bomb-proofs and dugouts have been constructed, and
at night over all the windows are tacked thick black curtains. For
they know the Germans.
La Panne is the last town on the Belgian littoral before you reach the
French frontier and the last villa in the town is occupied by the King
and Queen. It stands amid the sand-dunes, looking out across the
Channel toward England. It is just such a square, plastered,
eight-room villa as might be rented for the summer months by a family
with an income of five thousand a year. The sentries who are on duty
at its gates and the mounted gendarmes who constantly patrol its
immediate vicinity, are the only signs that it is the residence of
royalty. Almost any morning you can see the King and Queen--he tall
and soldierly, with all griefs and anxieties which the war has brought
him showing in his face; she small and trim and girlishly
slender--riding on the hard sands of the beach, or strolling,
unaccompanied, amid the dunes. What must it mean to them to know that
though over there to the eastward lies Belgium, _their_ Belgium, they
cannot ride five miles toward it before they are halted by the German
bar; to know that beyond that little river where the trenches run
their people are suffering and waiting for help, and that, after
nearly three years, they are not a yard nearer to them?
How clearly I remembered the last time that I had seen the Queen. It
was in the Hotel St. Antoine, in Antwerp, the night before the flight
of the Government and the royal family to Ostend, and less than a week
before the fall of the city itself. For days past the grumble of the
guns had constantly been growing louder, the streams of wounded had
steadily increased; every one knew that the end was almost at hand. It
was just before the dinner-hour and the great lobby of the hotel was
crowded with officers--Belgian, French, and British--with members of
the fugitive Government and Diplomatic Corps, and a few unofficial
foreigners like myself. Then, unannounced and unaccompanied, the Queen
entered. She had come to say farewell to the invalid wife of the
Russian Minister, who was unable to go to the palace. She remained in
the Russians' apartments (during the bombardment, a few days later,
they were completely wrecked by a German shell) half an hour perhaps.
Then she came down the winding stairs, a pathetically girlish figure
in the simplest of white suits, leaning on the arm of the gallant old
diplomat. Quite automatically the throng in the lobby separated, so as
to form an aisle down which she passed. To those of us who were
nearest she put out her hand and, bending low, we kissed it. Then the
great doors were opened and she passed out into the darkness and the
rain--a Queen without a country.
* * * * *
No one comes away from La Panne, at least no one should, without
having visited the great hospital founded by Dr. Léon du Page, the
famous Belgian surgeon. It started in one of the big tourist hotels
facing on the sea, but it has gradually expanded until it now occupies
a whole congeries of buildings. It has upward of a thousand beds, but,
as the fighting was comparatively light at the time I was there, only
about two-thirds of them were occupied. Though the American Ambulance
at Neuilly, and some of the hospitals at the British base-camps are
larger, Dr. du Page's hospital is the most complete and self-contained
that I have seen on any front. To mend the broken men who are brought
there no device of medical science has been left untried. There are
giant magnets which are used to draw minute steel fragments from the
brains of men wounded by shrapnel; there are beds, heated by hundreds
of electric lights, for soldiers whose vitality has been dangerously
lowered by shock or exhaustion; there is a department of facial
surgery where men who have lost their noses or their jaws or even
their faces are given new ones. The hospital is, as I have said,
self-contained. The operating-tables, the beds, all the furniture, in
fact, is made on the premises. It is the only hospital I know of which
provides those patients who have lost their legs with artificial
limbs. And they are by far the best artificial limbs that I have seen
anywhere. Each one is made to order to match the man's remaining limb.
They are shaped over plaster casts, according to a system originated
by Dr. du Page, in alternate layers of glue and ordinary shavings, and
the articulation of the joints almost equals that of nature. As a
result the soldiers are sent out into the world provided with legs
which are symmetrical, almost unbreakable, amazingly light, and so
admirably constructed that the owner rarely requires the assistance of
a cane. Another detail for which Dr. du Page has made provision is the
manufacture of his own instruments. Before the war the best surgical
instruments were made in Germany. There were, so far as Dr. du Page
knew, only five first-class instrument-makers in Belgium. Three of
these were, he ascertained, in the army, so through the King he
obtained their release from military duty. Now they work in a
completely equipped shop in the rear of the hospital making the shiny,
terrifying instruments which the white-clad surgeons wield with such
magical effect.
Should you feel like giving up the theatre this evening, or taking a
street-car instead of a taxi, or not opening that bottle of champagne,
the money would be very welcome to Dr. du Page and his wounded. Should
you feel that that is too much to give, it might be well for you to
remember that he has given something, too. He gave his wife. She was
returning from America, where she had gone to collect funds to carry
on the work of the hospital. She sailed on the _Lusitania_....
* * * * *
To reach the Belgian firing-line is not easy because, the country
being as flat as a ballroom floor, the Germans see and shoot at you.
So one needs to be cautious. So dangerous is the terrain in this
respect that the ambulances and motor-lorries and ammunition-trains
could not get up to the trenches at all had not the Belgians, with
great foresight, done wholesale tree-planting. Most people do not
number nursery work among the duties of an army, but nowadays it is.
From France and England the Belgians imported many saplings, thousands
if not tens of thousands of them, and set them out along the roads
exposed to German fire, and now their foliage forms a screen behind
which troops and transport can move with comparative safety. In places
where trees would not grow the roads have been masked for miles with
screens made from branches. To have one of these screens between you
and the Germans is very comforting.
On our way up to the front we made a détour in order that I might call
on a friend, Mrs. A. D. Winterbottom, who, before her marriage to a
British officer, was Miss Appleton of Boston. In "Fighting in
Flanders" I told about a very brave deed which I saw performed by Mrs.
Winterbottom. She was quite angry with me for mentioning it, but
because she is an American of whom her countrypeople have every reason
to be proud, I am going to tell about it again. It was during the last
days of the siege of Antwerp. The Germans had methodically pounded to
pieces with their great guns the chain of barrier forts encircling the
city. Waelhem was one of the last to fall. When at length the remnant
of the garrison evacuated the fort they brought back word that a score
of their comrades, too badly wounded to walk, remained within the
battered walls. So Mrs. Winterbottom, who had brought over from
England her big touring-car and was driving it herself, said quietly
that she was going to bring them out. The only way to reach the fort
was by a straight and narrow road, a mile long, on which German shells
were bursting with great accuracy and frequency. To me and to the
Belgian officers who were with me, it looked like a short-cut to the
cemetery. But that didn't deter Mrs. Winterbottom. She climbed into
her car and threw in the clutch and jammed her foot down on the
accelerator, and went tearing down that shell-spattered highway at top
speed. She filled her car with wounded men and brought them safely
back, and then returned and gathered up the others who were still
alive. I have seen few braver deeds.
Mrs. Winterbottom remained with the Belgian army throughout the great
retreat into Flanders, and when it settled down into the trench life
on the Yser, she was officially attached to a division, with which she
has remained ever since, moving when her division moves. She lives in
a one-room shack which the soldiers have built her immediately in the
rear of the trenches and within range of the enemy's guns. Her only
companion is a dog, yet she is as safe as though she were on Beacon
Hill, for she is the idol of the soldiers. She has a large recreation
tent, like the side-show tent of a circus, but painted green to escape
the attention of the German airmen, and in this tent she entertains
the men during their brief periods of leave from the trenches. She
gives them coffee, cocoa, milk, and biscuits; she provides them with
writing materials--I forget how many thousand sheets of paper and
envelopes she told me that they used each week; and she keeps them
supplied with reading matter. Three times a week she gives "her boys"
a phonograph concert in the first-line trenches. You must have
experienced the misery and monotony of existence in the trenches to
understand what these "concerts" mean to the tired and homesick men. I
asked her if there was anything that the people at home could send
her, and she replied rather hesitantly (for she is personally bearing
the entire expense of this work) that she understood that some small
metal phonographs were procurable which could easily be carried about
and would not warp from dampness, for the trenches on the Yser are
very wet. She also said that she would welcome phonograph records of
any description and French books. The last I saw of her she was wading
through a sea of mud, in rubber boots and a rubber coat and a
sou'wester, to carry her "canned music" to the men on the firing-line.
They ought to be very proud of Mrs. Winterbottom back in her own home
town.
The Belgian trenches are very much like those on other sectors of the
Western Front, except that they are made of sand-bags instead of
earth, are muddier and are nearer the enemy, being separated from the
German positions, for a considerable distance, only by the Yser, which
in places is only forty yards across. In fact, a baseball player could
easily sling a stone across the river into Dixmude, or what remains
of it, for, like most of the other Flemish towns, it is now only a
blackened skeleton. Many cities have been destroyed in the course of
this war, but none of them, unless it be Ypres, so nearly approaches
complete obliteration as Dixmude. Pompeii is a living, breathing city
compared to it. Despite all that has been printed about the
devastation in the war zone, I believe that when the war is over and
the hordes of curious Americans flock Europeward, they will be stunned
by the completeness of the desolation which the Germans have wrought
in northeastern France and Belgium.
By far the most interesting day I spent on the Belgian front was not
in the trenches but in a long, low, wooden building well to the rear.
Over the door was a sign which read: "Section Photographique de
l'Armée Belge." Here are brought to be developed and enlarged and
scrutinized the hundreds of photographs which are taken daily by
Belgian aviators flying over the German lines. In no department of
war work has there been greater progress during recent months than in
photography by airplane. Every morning at break of dawn scores of
Belgian machines--and the same is true all down the Western
Front--rise into the air, and for hour after hour swoop and circle
over the enemy's lines, taking countless photographs of his positions
by means of specially made cameras fitted with telescopic lenses. (The
Allied fliers on the Somme took seventeen hundred photographs during a
single day.) Most of these photographs are taken at a height of eight
thousand to ten thousand feet,[F] though very much lower, of course,
when an opportunity presents itself, and always with the camera as
nearly vertical as possible. As soon as an aviator has secured a
sufficient number of pictures of the locality or object which he has
been ordered to photograph, he wings his way back to his own lines,
the plates are immediately developed at the headquarters of the
Section Photographique or in a dark room on wheels. If the first
examination of the negative reveals anything of interest, it is at
once enlarged, often to eight times the size of the original. As a
result of this remarkable system of aerial espionage, there is nothing
of importance which the Germans can long conceal from the Allies. They
cannot extend their trench lines by so much as a yard, they cannot
construct new positions, they cannot mount a machine-gun without the
fact being registered by those eyes which, from dawn to dark, peer
down at them from the clouds. At all of the divisional headquarters
are large plans of the opposing enemy trenches, which are corrected
daily by means of these airplane photographs and by the information
collected through the elaborate system of espionage which the Allies
maintain behind the German lines. To deceive the aerial observers,
each side resorts to all manner of ingenious tricks. To suggest an
impending retirement, columns of men are marched down the roads which
lead to the rear; trenches which are not intended to be used are dug;
and there are, of course, hundreds of dummy guns, some of which
actually fire. The officer in command of the Belgian Photographic
Section had heard that I was in Dunkirk in May, 1915, when it was
shelled by a German naval gun, at a range of twenty-three and one-half
miles.[G] So he gave me as a souvenir of the experience a photograph,
taken from the air, of the gun emplacement after it had been
discovered and bombed by the Allied aviators, and the gun removed to a
place of safety. I reproduce the photograph herewith. The numerous
white spots all about the emplacement are the craters caused by the
bombs which were rained upon it.
Another of these monster guns was so ingeniously concealed in an
imitation thicket that for a fortnight or more it defied the efforts
of scores of airmen to locate it. Though hundreds of airplane
photographs of the country behind the German trenches were brought in
and minutely examined, there was nothing about them to suggest the
hiding-place of a gun of so large a caliber until some one called
attention to the deep ruts left by motor-trucks which had left the
highway at a certain point and turned into the innocent-looking patch
of woods. Why were the wheel-ruts shown on the plate so black? Because
the vehicle must have sunk deep into the soft soil. Why did it sink so
deeply? Because it was heavily laden. Laden with what? With
large-caliber shells, perhaps. But still it was only a supposition. A
few days later, however, it was noticed that at a certain point on the
westward edge of that patch of woods there seemed to be a slight
discoloration. This discoloration became more pronounced on later
photographs which were brought in. Every one in the Section
Photographique hazarded a guess as to its cause. At length some one
suggested that it looked as though the leaves of the trees had been
burned. But what burned them? There was only one answer. The fiery
blast from a big gun hidden amid those trees, of course! Acting on
that hypothesis, a score of aviators were sent out with orders to pour
upon the wood a torrent of high explosive. The next few hours must
have been very uncomfortable for the German gun-crew. In any event,
the big piece was hauled out of danger under cover of darkness and the
bombardments of the towns behind the Belgian lines abruptly ceased.
The Allied air service does not confine its observations to the
trenches; it keeps an ever-wakeful eye on all that is in progress in
the regions for many miles behind the front. To illustrate how little
escapes the eye of the camera, the officer in charge of the
Photographic Section showed me a series of photographs which had been
taken of a village at the back of Dixmude, a few days previously, from
a height of more than a mile. The first picture showed an ordinary
Flemish village with its gridiron of streets and buildings. Cutting
diagonally across the picture was a straight white streak which I knew
to be a road leading into the country. At one point on this road were
a number of tiny squares--evidently a row of workmen's cottages. The
commandant handed me a powerful magnifying-glass. "Look very closely
on that road," he said, "and you will see three specks." I saw them.
They were about the size of pin-points.
"Those are three men," he continued. "The man at the right lives in
the first of this row of cottages. The man in the middle lives in the
fourth house in the row. But the man at the left is a farmer, and
lives in this isolated farmhouse out here in the country."
"A very clever guess," I remarked, scepticism showing in my tone, I
fear.