talk--not with German sentries all about. She lifted her hand from
the suds and swung it out to the west toward England and France with an
eager, craving fire in her eyes, and then she swept it across in front
of her as if she were sweeping a spider off a table. When it stopped at
arm’s length there was the triumph of hate in her eyes. I thought of
the lid of a cauldron raised to let out a burst of steam as she asked:
“When?” When? When would the Allies come and turn the Germans out?
She was a kind, hard-working woman, who would help any stranger in
trouble the best she knew how. Probably that Saxon whose smile had
spread under his scarf had much the same kind of wife. Yet I knew that
if the Allies’ guns were driving the Germans past her house and her
husband had a rifle, he would put a shot in that Saxon’s back, or she
would pour boiling water on the enemy’s head if she could. Then, if the
Germans had time, they would burn the farmhouse and kill the husband
who had shot one of their comrades.
I recollect a youth who had been in a railroad accident saying: “That
was the first time I had ever seen death; the first time I realised
what death was.” Exactly. You don’t know death till you have seen it;
you don’t know invasion till you have felt it. However wise, however
able the conquerors, life under them is a living death. True, the
farmer’s property was untouched. But his liberty was gone. If you, a
well-behaved citizen, have ever been arrested and marched through the
streets of your home town by a policeman, how did you like it? Give
the policeman a rifle and a fixed bayonet and full cartridge boxes and
transform him into a foreigner and the experience would not be any more
pleasant.
That farmer could not go to the next town without the permission of the
sentries. He could not even mail a letter to his son who was in the
trenches with the Allies. The Germans had taken his horse; theirs the
power to take anything he had--the power of the bayonet. If he wanted
to send his produce to a foreign market, if he wanted to buy food in a
foreign market, the British naval blockade closed the sea to him. He
was sitting on a chair of steel spikes, hands tied and mouth gagged,
while his mind seethed, solacing its hate with hope through the long
winter months. If you lived in Kansas and could not get your wheat to
Chicago, or any groceries or newspapers from the nearest town, or learn
whether your son in Wyoming were alive or dead, or whether the man who
owned your mortgage in New York had foreclosed or not--well, that is
enough without the German sentry.
Only, instead of newspapers or word about the mortgage, the thing you
needed past that blockade was bread to keep you from starving. America
opened a window and slipped a loaf into the empty larder. Those Belgian
soldiers whom I had seen at Dixmude, wounded, exhausted, mud-caked,
shivering, were happy beside the people at home. They were in the
fight. It is not the destruction of towns and houses that impresses you
most, but the misery expressed by that peasant woman over her washtub.
A writer can make a lot of the burst of a single shell; a photographer
showing the ruins of a block of buildings or a church makes it appear
that all blocks and all churches are in ruins. Running through Antwerp
in a car, one saw few signs of destruction from the bombardment. You
will see them if you are specially conducted. Shops were open, the
people were moving about in the streets, which were well lighted. No
need of darkness for fear of bombs dropping here! German barracks had
safe shelter from aerial raids in a city whose people were the allies
of England and France. But at intervals marched the German patrols.
When our car stopped before a restaurant a knot gathered around it.
Their faces were like all the other faces I saw in Belgium--unless
German--with that restrained, drawn look of passive resistance,
persistent even when they smiled. When? When were the Allies coming?
Their eyes asked the question which their tongues dared not. Inside
the restaurant a score of German officers served by Belgian waiters
were dining. Who were our little party? What were we doing there and
speaking English--English, the hateful language of the hated enemy?
Oh, yes! We were Americans connected with the relief work. But between
the officers’ stares at the sound of English and the appealing inquiry
of the faces in the street lay an abyss of war’s fierce suspicion and
national policies and racial enmity, which America had to bridge.
Before we could help Belgium, England, blockading Germany to keep her
from getting foodstuffs, had to consent. She would consent only if
none of the food reached German mouths. Germany had to agree not to
requisition any of the food. Some one not German and not British must
see to its distribution. Those rigid German military authorities,
holding fast to their military secrets, must consent to scores of
foreigners moving about Belgium and sending messages across that
Belgo-Dutch frontier, which had been closed to all except official
German messages. This called for men whom both the German and the
British duellists would trust to succour the human beings crouched and
helpless under the circling flashes of their steel.
Fortunately, our Minister to Belgium was Brand Whitlock. He is no
Talleyrand or Metternich. If he were, the Belgians might not have
been fed, because he might have been suspected of being too much of a
diplomatist. When a German, or an Englishman, or a Hottentot, or any
other kind of a human being gets to know Whitlock, he recognises that
here is an honest man with a big heart. When leading Belgians came to
him and said that winter would find Belgium without bread, he turned
from the land that has the least food to his own land, which has the
most.
For Belgium is a great shop in the midst of a garden. Her towns are so
close together that they seem only suburbs of Brussels and Antwerp. She
has the densest population in Europe. She raises only enough food to
last her for two months of the year. The food for the other ten months
she buys with the products of her factories. In 1914-15 Belgium could
not send out her products; so we were to help feed her without pay, and
England and France were to give money to buy what food we did not give.
But with the British navy generously allowing food to pass the
blockade, the problem was far from solved. Ships laden with supplies
steaming to Rotterdam--this was a matter of easy organisation. How get
the bread to the hungry mouths when the Germans were using all Belgian
railroads for military purposes? Germany was not inclined to allow
a carload of wheat to keep a carload of soldiers from reaching the
front, or to let food for Belgians keep the men in the trenches from
getting theirs regularly. Horse and cart transport would be cumbersome,
and the Germans would not permit Belgian teamsters to move about with
such freedom. As likely as not they might be spies.
Anybody who can walk or ride may be a spy. Therefore, the way to
stop spying is not to let any one walk or ride. Besides, Germany had
requisitioned most of the horses that could do more than draw an empty
phaeton on a level. But she had not drawn the water out of the canals;
though the Belgians, always whispering jokes at the expense of the
conquerors, said that the canals might have been emptied if their
contents had been beer. There were plenty of idle boats in Holland,
whose canals connect with the web of canals in Belgium. You had only
to seal the cargoes against requisition, the seal to be broken only
by a representative of the Relief Commission, and start them to their
destination.
And how make sure that only those who had money should pay for their
bread, while all who had not should be reached? The solution was
simple compared to the distribution of relief after the San Francisco
earthquake and fire, for example, in our own land, where a scantier
population makes social organisation comparatively loose.
The people to be relieved were in their homes. Belgium is so old a
country, her population so dense, and she is so much like one big
workshop, that the Government must keep a complete set of books. Every
Belgian is registered and docketed. You know just how he makes his
living and where he lives. Upon marriage a Belgian gets a little book,
giving his name and his wife’s, their ages, their occupations, and
address. As children are born their names are added. A Belgian holds
as fast to this book as a woman to a piece of jewellery that is an
heirloom.
With few exceptions, Belgian local officials had not fled the country.
They realised that this was a time when they were particularly needed
on the job to protect the people from German exactions and from their
own rashness. There were also any number of volunteers. The thing was
to get the food to them and let them organise local distribution.
The small force of Americans required to oversee the transit must both
watch that the Germans did not take any of the food and retain both
British and German confidence in the absolute good faith of their
intentions. The volunteers got their expenses and the rest of their
reward was experience; and it was “some experience” as a Belgian said,
who was learning a little American slang. They talked about canal-boat
cargoes as if they had been from Buffalo to Albany on the Erie Canal
for years; they spoke of “my province” and compared bread lines and the
efficiency of local officials. And the Germans took none of the food;
orders from Berlin were obeyed. Berlin knew that any requisitioning of
relief supplies meant that the Relief Commission would cease work and
announce to the world the reason.
However many times the Americans were arrested they must be patient.
That exception who said, when he was put in a cell overnight because
he entered the military zone by mistake, that he would not have
been treated that way in England, needed a little more coaching in
preserving his mask of neutrality. For I must say that nine out of
ten of these young men, leaning over backward to be neutral, were
pro-Ally, including some with German names. But publicly you could
hardly get an admission out of them that there was any war. As for
Harvard, 1914, hand a passport carried around the Sphinx’s neck and you
have him done in stone.
Fancy any Belgian trying to get him to carry a contraband letter or a
German commander trying to work him for a few sacks of flour! When I
asked him what career he had chosen he said, “Business!” without any
waste of words. I think that he will succeed in a way to surprise his
family. It is he and all those young Americans of which he is a type,
as distinctive of America in manner, looks, and thought as a Frenchman
is of France or a German of Germany, who carried the torch of Peace’s
kindly work into war-ridden Belgium. They made you want to tickle
the eagle on the throat so he would let out a gentle, well-modulated
scream, of course, strictly in keeping with neutrality.
Red lanterns took the place of red flags swung by Landsturm sentries
on the run to Brussels as darkness fell. There was no relaxation
of watchfulness at night. All the twenty-four hours the systematic
conquerors held the net tight. Once when my companion repeated his
“Again!” and held out the pass in the lantern’s rays, I broke into a
laugh, which excited his curiosity, for you soon get out of the habit
of laughing in Belgium.
“It has just occurred to me that my guidebook states that passports are
not required in Belgium!” I explained.
The editor of that guidebook will have a busy time before he issues
the next edition. For example, he will have a lot of new information
about Malines, whose ruins were revealed by the motor lamps in shadowy,
broken walls on either side of the main street. Other places where
less damage had been done were equally silent. In the smaller towns
and villages the population must keep indoors at night; for egress and
ingress are more difficult to control there than in large cities, where
guards at every corner suffice--watching, watching, these disciplined
pawns of remorselessly efficient militarism; watching every human being
in Belgium.
“The last time I saw that statue of Liége,” I remarked, peering into
the darkness as we rode into the city, “the Legion of Honour conferred
by France on Liége for its brave defence was hung on its breast. I
suppose it is gone now.”
“I guess yes,” said Harvard, 1914.
We went to the hotel at Brussels which I had left the day before the
city’s fall. English railway signs on the walls of the corridor had
not been disturbed. More ancient relic still seemed a bulletin board
with its announcement of seven passages a day to England, traversing
the Channel in “fifty-five minutes _via_ Calais” and “three hours
_via_ Ostend,” with the space blank where the state of the weather
for the despair or the delight of intending voyagers had been chalked
up in happier days. The same men were in attendance at the office as
before; but they seemed older and their politeness that of cheerless
automatons. For five months they had been serving German officers as
guests with hate in their hearts and, in turn, trying to protect their
property.
A story is told of how that hotel had filled with officers after the
arrival of the Germanic flood and how one day, when it was learned
that the proprietor was a Frenchman, guards were suddenly placed at
the doors and the hall was filled with baggage as every officer,
acting with characteristic official solidarity, vacated his room and
bestowed his presence elsewhere. Then the proprietor was informed that
his guests would return if he would agree to employ German help and
buy his supplies from Germany. He refused, for practical as well as
for sentimental reasons. If he had consented, think what the Belgians
would have done to him after the Germans were gone! However, officers
were gradually returning, for this was the best hotel in town, and even
conquerors are human and German conquerors have particularly human
stomachs.
X
CHRISTMAS IN BELGIUM
“A man’s house is his castle” worth fighting for--Breakfast
in a Belgian hotel--Groups of the conquerors--“News” in
Belgium--Companionship at mass--Business at a standstill--A
Belgian bread line--Workers and no work--Methods of relief
distribution--German surveillance--Dinner at the American
legation--“When would the Allies come?”
Christmas in Belgium with the bayonet and the wolf at the door taught
one to value Christmas at home for more than its gifts and the cheer of
the fireside. It taught him what it meant to belong to a free people
and how precious is that old England saying that a man’s house is
his castle, which was the inception of so much in our lives that we
accept as a commonplace. If such a commonplace can be made secure only
by fighting, then it is best to fight. At any time a foreign soldier
might enter the house of a Belgian and take him away for trial before a
military court.
Breakfast in the same restaurant as before the city’s fall! Again
the big grapes which are a luxury of the rich man’s table or an
extravagance for a sick friend with us! The hothouses still grew them.
What else was there for the hothouses to do, though the export of their
products was impossible? A shortage of the long, white-leafed chicory
that we call endive in New York restaurants! There were piles of it
in the Brussels market and on the hucksters’ carts; nothing so cheap.
One might have excellent steaks and roasts and delicious veal; for the
heifers were being butchered, as the Germans had taken all fodder.
But the bread was the Commission’s brown, which every one had to eat.
Belgium, growing quality on scanty acres with intensive farming, had
food luxuries but not the staff of life.
One looked out of the windows on to the square which four months before
he had seen crowded with people bedecked with the Allies’ colours and
eagerly buying the latest editions containing the _communiqués_ of
hollow optimism. No flag in sight now except a German flag flying over
the station! But small revenges may be enjoyed. A German soldier tried
to jump on the tail of a cart driven by a Belgian; but the Belgian
whipped up his horse and the German fell off onto the pavement, while
the cart sped around a corner.
Out of the station came a score of German soldiers returning from the
trenches, on their way to barracks to regain strength so that they
could bear the ordeal of standing in icy water again. They were not
the kind exhibited on press tours to illustrate the “vigour of our
indomitable army.” Eyelids drooped over hollow eye-sockets; sore,
numbed feet moved like feet which are asleep in their vain effort to
keep step. Sensitiveness to surroundings, almost to existence, seemed
to have been lost.
One was a corporal, young, tall, and full-bearded. He might have been
handsome if he had not been so haggard. He gave the lead to the others;
he seemed to know where they were going, and they shuffled on after him
in dogged painfulness. Four months ago that corporal, with the spring
of the energy of youth when the war was young, was perhaps in the green
column that went through the streets of Brussels in the thunderous
beat of their regular tread on the way to Paris. The group was an
object lesson in how much the victor must suffer in war in order to
make his victim suffer.
Some officers were at breakfast, too. Mostly they were reservists;
mostly bespectacled, with middle age swelling their girth and hollowing
their chests, but sturdy enough to apply the regulations made for
conduct of the conquered. While stronger men were under shell-fire at
the front, they were under the fire of Belgian hate as relentless as
their own hate of England. You saw them always in the good restaurants,
but never in the company of Belgians, these ostracised rulers. In
four months they had made no friends; at least, no friends who
would appear with them in public. A few thousand guards in Belgium
in the companionship of conquest and seven million Belgians in the
companionship of a common helplessness! Bayonets may make a man silent,
but they cannot stop his thinking.
At the breakfast table on that Christmas morning in London, Paris,
or Berlin the patriot could find the kind of news that he liked. His
racial and national predilections and animosities were solaced. If
there were good news it was “played up”; if there were bad news, it was
not published, or it was explained. _L’Écho Belge_ and _L’Indépendence
Belge_, and all the Brussels papers were either out of business or
being issued as single sheets in Holland and England.
The Belgian, keenest of all the peoples at war for news, having less
occupation to keep his mind off the war, must read the newspapers
established under German auspices, which fed him with the pabulum
that German _chefs_ provided, reflective of the stumbling degeneracy
of England, French weariness of the war, Russian clumsiness, and the
invincibility of Germany. If an Englishman had to read German, or a
German English, newspapers every morning he might have understood how
the Belgian felt.
Those who had sons or fathers or husbands in the Belgian army could
not send or receive letters, let alone presents. Families scattered
in different parts of Belgium could not hold reunions. But at mass
I saw a Belgian standard in the centre of the church. That flag was
proscribed, but the priests knew it was safe in that sacred place and
the worshippers might feast their eyes on it as they said their _aves_.
A Bavarian soldier came in softly and stood a little apart from others,
many in mourning, at the rear, a man who was of the same faith as
the Belgians and who crossed himself with the others in the house of
brotherly love. He would go outside to obey orders; and the others
to nurse their hate of him and his race. This private in his faded
green, bowing his head before that flag in the shadows of the nave,
was war-sick, as most soldiers were; and the Belgians were heartsick.
They had the one solace in common. But if you had suggested to him to
give up Belgium, his answer would have been that of the other Germans:
“Not after all we have suffered to take it!” Christians have a peculiar
way of applying Christianity. Yet if it were not for Christianity and
that infernal thing called the world’s opinion, which did not exist in
the days of Cæsar and the Belgii, the Belgians might have been worse
off than they were. More of them might have been dead. When they were
saying, “Give us this day our daily bread” they were thinking, “An eye
for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” if ever their turn came.
A satirist might have repeated the apocryphal _naïveté_ of Marie
Antoinette, who asked why the people wanted bread when they could
buy such nice cakes for a sou. For all the _patisseries_ were open.
Brussels is famous for its French pastry. With a store of preserves,
why shouldn’t the bakeshops go on making tarts with heavy crusts of
the brown flour, when war had not robbed the bakers of their art? It
gave work to them; it helped the shops to keep open and make a show of
normality. But I noticed that they were doing little business. Stocks
were small and bravely displayed. Only the rich could afford such
luxuries, which in ordinary times were what ice cream cones are to us.
Even the jewellery shops were open, with diamond rings flashing in the
windows.
“You must pay rent; you don’t want to discharge your employees,” said a
jeweller. “There is no place to go except your shop. If you closed it
would look as if you were afraid of the Germans. It would make you blue
and the people in the street blue. One tries to go through the motions
of normal existence, anyway. But, of course, you don’t sell anything.
This week I have repaired a locket which carried the portrait of a
soldier at the front and I’ve put a mainspring in a watch. I’ll warrant
that is more than some of my competitors have done.”
Swing around the circle in Brussels of a winter’s morning and look at
the only crowds that the Germans allow to gather, and any doubt that
Belgium would have gone hungry if she had not received provisions from
the outside was dispelled. Whenever I think of a bread line again I
shall see the faces of a Belgian bread line. They blot out the memory
of those at home, where men are free to go and come; where war has not
robbed the thrifty of food.
It was fitting that the great central soup kitchen should be
established in the central express office of the city. For in Belgium
these days there is no express business except in German troops to the
front and wounded to the rear. The despatch of parcels is stopped, no
less than the other channels of trade, in a country where trade was so
rife, a country that lived by trade. On the stone floor, where once
packages were arranged for forwarding to the towns whose names are on
the walls, were many great cauldrons in clusters of three, to economise
space and fuel.
“We don’t lack cooks,” said a _chef_, who had been in a leading hotel.
“So many of us are out of work. Our society of hotel and restaurant
keepers took charge. We know the practical side of the business. I
suppose you have the same kind of a society in New York and would turn
to it for help if the Germans occupied New York.”
He gave me a printed report in which I read, for example, that “M.
Arndt, professor of the École Normale, had been good enough to take
charge of accounts,” and “M. Catteau had been specially appointed to
look after the distribution of bread.”