in the city. The meat and green vegetables in it were Belgian and the
peas American. Steaming hot in big cans it was sent to the communal
centres, where lines of people with pots, pitchers, and pails waited
to receive their daily allowance. A democracy was in that bread line
such as I have never seen anywhere except at San Francisco after the
earthquake. Each person had a blue or a yellow ticket, with numbers to
be punched, like a commuter. The blue tickets were for those who had
proved to the communal authorities that they could not pay; the yellow
for those who paid five centimes for each person served. A flutter of
blue and yellow tickets all over Belgium, and in return life! With each
serving of soup went a loaf of the American brown bread. The faces
in the line were not those of people starving--they had been saved
from starvation. There was none of the emaciation which pictures of
famine in the Orient have made familiar; but they were pinched faces,
bloodless faces, the faces of people on short rations.
To the Belgian bread is not only the staff of life; it is the legs.
At home we think of bread as something that goes with the rest of
the meal; to the poorer classes of Belgians the rest of the meal is
something that goes with bread. To you and me food has meant the
payment of money to the baker and the butcher and the grocer, or the
hotelkeeper. You get your money by work or from investments. What if
there were no bread to be had for work or money? Sitting on a mountain
of gold in the desert of Sahara would not quench thirst.
Three hundred grams, a minimum calculation--about half what the
British soldier gets--was the ration. That small boy sent by his
mother got five loaves; his ticket called for an allowance for a family
of five. An old woman got one loaf, for she was alone in the world.
Each one as he hurried by had a personal story of what war had meant to
him. They answered your questions frankly, gladly, with the Belgian
cheerfulness which was amazing considering the circumstances. A tall,
distinguished-looking man was an artist.
“No work for artists these days,” he said.
No work in a community of workers where every link of the chain of
economic life had been broken. No work for the next man, a chauffeur,
or the next, a brass worker; the next, a teamster; the next, a bank
clerk; the next, a doorkeeper of a Government office; while the wives
of those who still had work were buying in the only market they had.
But the husbands of some were not at home. Each answer about the absent
one had an appeal that nothing can picture better than the simple words
or the looks that accompanied the words.
“The last I heard of my husband he was fighting at Dixmude--two months
ago.”
“Mine is wounded, somewhere in France.”
“Mine was with the army, too. I don’t know whether he is alive or dead.
I have not heard since Brussels was taken. He cannot get my letters and
I cannot get his.”
“Mine was killed at Liége, but we have a son.”
So you out in Nebraska who gave a handful of wheat might know that said
handful of wheat reached its destination in an empty stomach. If you
sent a suit of clothes or a cap or a pair of socks, come along to the
skating-rink, where ice polo was played and matches and carnivals were
held in better days, and look on at the boxes, packed tight with gifts
of every manner of thing that men and women and children wear except
silk hats, which are being opened and sorted and distributed into
hastily constructed cribs and compartments.
A Belgian woman whose father was one of Belgium’s leading lawyers--
her husband was at the front--was the busy head of this organisation,
because, as she said, the busier she was the more it “keeps my mind
off--” and she did not finish the sentence. How many times I heard
that “keeps my mind off--” a sentence that was the more telling for
not being finished. She and some other women began sewing and patching
and collecting garments; “but our business grew so fast”--the business
of relief is the one kind in Belgium that does grow these days--“that
now we have hundreds of helpers. I begin to feel that I am what you
would call in America a captainess of industry.”
Some of the good mothers in America were a little too thoughtful in
their kindness. An odour in a box that had evidently travelled across
the Atlantic close to the ship’s boilers was traced to the pocket of a
boy’s suit, which contained the hardly distinguishable remains of a ham
sandwich, meant to be ready to hand for the hungry Belgian boy who got
that suit. Broken pots of jam were quite frequent. But no matter. Soap
and water and Belgian industry saved the suit, if not the sandwich.
Sweaters and underclothes and overcoats almost new and shiny, old frock
coats and trousers with holes in seat and knees might represent equal
sacrifice on the part of some American three thousand miles away, and
all were welcome. Needle-women were given work cutting up the worn-outs
of grown-ups and making them over into astonishingly good suits or
dresses for youngsters.
“We’ve really turned the rink into a kind of department store,” said
the lady. “Come into our boot department. We had some leather left in
Belgium that the Germans did not requisition, so we bought it and that
gave more Belgians work in the shoe factories. Work, you see, is what
we want to keep our minds off--”
Blue and yellow tickets here, too! Boots for children and thick-set
working women and watery-eyed old men! And each was required to leave
behind the pair he was wearing.
“Sometimes we can patch up the cast-offs, which means work for the
cobblers,” said the captainess of industry. “And who are our clerks?
Why, the people who put on the skates for the patrons of the rink, of
course!”
One could write volumes on this systematic relief work, the
businesslike industry of succouring Belgium by the businesslike
Belgians, with American help. Certainly one cannot leave out those old
men stragglers from Louvain and Bruges and Ghent--venerable children
with no offspring to give them paternal care--who took their turn in
getting bread, which they soaked thoroughly in their soup for reasons
that would be no military secret, not even in the military zone. On
Christmas Day an American, himself a smoker, thinking what class of
children he could make happiest on a limited purse, remembered the ring
around the stove and bought a basket of cheap briar pipes and tobacco.
By Christmas night some toothless gums were sore, but a beatific smile
of satiation played in white beards.
Nor can one leave out the very young babies at home, who get their
milk if grown people don’t, and the older babies beyond milk but not
yet old enough for bread and meat, whose mothers return from the bread
line to bring their children to another line, where they got portions
of a sirupy mixture which those who know say is the right provender.
On such occasions men are quite helpless. They can only look on with
a frog in the throat at pale, improperly nourished mothers with
bundles of potential manhood and womanhood in their arms. For this was
woman’s work for woman. Belgian women of every class joined in it: the
competent wife of a workman, or the wife of a millionaire who had to
walk like everybody else now that her automobile was requisitioned by
the army.
Pop-eyed children, ruddy-cheeked, aggressive children, pinched-faced
children, kept warm by sweaters that some American or English children
spared, happy in that they did not know what their elders knew! Not
the danger of physical starvation so much as the actual presence of
mental starvation was the thing that got on our nerves in a land where
the sun is seldom seen in winter and rainy days are the rule. It was
bad enough in the “zone of occupation,” so called, a line running from
Antwerp past Brussels to Mons. One could guess what it was like in the
military zone to the westward, where only an occasional American relief
representative might go.
This is not saying that the Germans were stricter than necessary, if
we excuse the exasperation of their militarism, in order to prevent
information from passing out when a multitude of Belgians would have
risked their lives gladly to help the Allies. One spy bringing accurate
information might cost the German army thousands of casualties; perhaps
decide the fate of a campaign. They saw the Belgians as enemies.
They were fighting to take the lives of their enemies and save their
own lives, which made it tough for them and for the French and the
British--tough all round, but very particularly tough for Belgians.
It was good for a vagrant American to dine at the American Legation,
where Mr. and Mrs. Whitlock were far, very far, from the days in
Toledo, Ohio, where he was mayor. Some said that the place of the
Minister to Belgium was at Havre, where the Belgian Government had its
offices; but neither Whitlock nor the Belgian people thought so, nor
the German Government, of late, since they had realised his prestige
with the Belgians and how they would listen to him in any crisis when
their passions might break the bonds of wisdom. Hugh Gibson, being the
omnipresent Secretary of Legation in four languages, naturally was also
present. We recalled dining together in Honduras, when he was in the
thick of vexations.
Trouble accommodatingly waits for him wherever he goes, because he has
a gift for taking care of trouble, in the ascendency of a cheerful
spirit and much knowledge of international law. His present for the
Minister who daily received stacks of letters from all sources asking
the impossible, as well as from Americans who wanted to be sure that
the food they gave was not being purloined by the Germans, was a rubber
stamp, “Blame-it-all--there’s-a-state-of-war-in-Belgium!” which he
suggested might save typewriting--a recommendation which the Minister
refused to accept, not to Gibson’s surprise.
On that Christmas afternoon and evening, the people promenaded the
streets as usual. You might have thought it a characteristic Christmas
afternoon or evening except for the Landsturm patrols. But there was an
absence of the old gaiety, and they were moving as if from habit and
moving was all there was to do.
They had heard the sound of the guns at Dixmude the night before.
Didn’t the sound seem a little nearer? No. The wind from that direction
was stronger. When? When would the Allies come?
XI
THE FUTURE OF BELGIUM
A buffer state divided in itself--Her ideals those of prosperity--
False sentiment regarding the Belgians--Not a war-like people--
Moral force of her plutocracy--Ruins exaggerated--German policy
of destruction--“Mass” logic--A military occupancy, merciless
and crafty--“Reprisals” of the Belgians--Louvain--The bread
line at Liége--Politics and German propaganda--Her Belgian
policy worthy of England at her best--England still true to her
ideals.
In former days the traveller hardly thought of Belgium as possessing
patriotic homogeneity. It was a land of two languages, French and
Flemish. He was puzzled to meet people who looked like well-to-do
mechanics, artisans, or peasants and find that they could not answer
a simple question in French. This explained why a people so close
to France, though they made Brussels a little Paris, would not join
the French family and enter into the spirit and body of that great
civilisation on their borders, whose language was that of their own
literature. Belgium seemed to have no character. Its nationality was
the artificial product of European politics; a buffer divided in
itself, which would be neither French nor German nor definitely Belgian.
In later times Belgium had prospered enormously. It had developed
the resources of the Congo in a way that had aroused a storm of
criticism. Old King Leopold made the most of his neutral position to
gain advantages which no one of the great powers might enjoy because
of jealousies. The International Sleeping-Car Company was Belgian and
Belgian capitalists secured concessions here and there, wherever the
small tradesman might slip into openings suitable to his size. Leopold
was not above crumbs; he made them profitable. Leopold liked to make
money and Belgium liked to make money.
Her defence guaranteed by neutrality, Belgium need have no thought
except of thrift. Her ideals were those of prosperity. No ambition of
national expansion stirred her imagination as Germany’s was stirred;
there was no fire in her soul as in that of France in apprehension of
the day when she should have to fight for her life against Germany; no
national cause to harden the sinews of patriotism. The immensity of
her urban population contributed its effect in depriving her of the
sterner stuff of which warriors are made. Success meant more comforts
and luxuries. In towns like Brussels and Antwerp this doubtless had its
effect on the moralities, which were hardly of the New England Puritan
standard. She had a small standing army; a militia system in the
process of reform against the conviction of the majority, unlike that
of the Swiss mountaineers, that Belgium would never have any need for
soldiers.
If militarism means conscription as it exists in France and Germany,
then militarism has improved the physique of races in an age when
people are leaving the land for the factory. The prospect of battle’s
test unquestionably developed certain sturdy qualities in a people
which can and ought to be developed in some other way than with the
prospect of spending money for shells to kill other people.
With the world making every Belgian man a hero and the unknowing
convinced that a citizen soldiery at Liége--defended by the Belgian
standing army--had rushed from their homes with rifles and beaten
German infantry, it is right to repeat that the _shipperke_ spirit
was not universal, that at no time had Belgium more than a hundred
and fifty thousand men under arms, and that on the Dixmude line she
maintained never more than eighty thousand men out of a population of
seven millions, which should yield from seven hundred thousand to a
million; while they lost a good deal of sympathy both in England and in
France through the number of able-bodied refugees who were disinclined
to serve. It was a mistaken idealism that swept over the world early in
the war, characterising a whole nation with the gallantry of its young
king and his little army.
The spirit of the Boers or of the Minute Men at Lexington was not in
the Belgian people. It could not be from their very situation and
method of life. They did not believe in war; they did not expect to
practice war; but war came to them out of the still blue heavens, as it
came to the prosperous Incas of Peru.
Where one was wrong was in his expectation that her bankers and
capitalists--an aristocracy of money not given to the simple life--
and her manufacturers, artisans, and traders, if not her peasants,
would soon make truce with Cæsar for individual profit. Therein,
Belgium showed that she was not lacking in the moral spirit which,
with the _shipperke’s_, became a fighting spirit. It seemed as if the
metal of many Belgians, struck to a white heat in the furnace of war,
had cooled under German occupation to the tempered steel of a new
nationalism.
When you travelled over Belgium after it was pacified, the logic of
German methods became clear. What was haphazard in their reign of
terror was due to the inevitable excesses of a soldiery taking the
calculated redress ordered by superiors as licence in the first red
passion of war to a war-mad nation, which was sullen because the
Belgians had not given up the keys of the gate to France.
The extent of the ruins in Belgium east of the Yser has been
exaggerated. They were the first ruins, most photographed, most
advertised; bad enough, inexcusable enough, and warrantedly causing
a spell of horror throughout the civilised world. We have heard all
about them, mind, while hearing nothing about those in Lorraine, where
the Bavarians exceeded Prussian ruthlessness in reprisals. I mean,
that to have read the newspapers in early September, 1914, one would
have thought that half the towns of Belgium were _débris_, while the
truth is that only a small percentage are--those in the path of the
German army’s advance. Two-thirds of Louvain itself is unharmed; though
the fact alone of its venerable library being in ashes is sufficient
outrage, if not another building had been harmed.
The German army planned destruction with all the regularity that it
billeted troops, or requisitioned supplies, or laid war indemnities. It
did not destroy by shells exclusively. It deliberately burned homes. No
matter whether the owners were innocent or not, the homes were burned
as an example. The principle applied was that of punishing half a dozen
or all the boys in the class in the hope of getting the real culprit.
Cold ruins mark blocks where sniping was thought to have occurred. The
Germans insist that theirs was the merciful way. _Krieg ist Krieg._
When a hundred citizens of Louvain were gathered and shot because they
were the first citizens of Louvain to hand, the purpose was security of
the mass at the expense of the individual, according to the war-is-war
machine reasoning. No doubt there was firing on German troops by
civilians. What did the Germans expect after the way that they had
invaded Belgium? If they had bothered with trials and investigations,
the conquerors say, sniping would have kept up. They may have taken
innocent lives and burned the homes of the innocent, they admit; but
their defence is that thereby they saved many thousands of their
soldiers and of Belgians, and prevented the feud between the rulers and
the ruled from becoming more embittered.
Sniping over, the next step in policy was to keep the population quiet
with the minimum of soldiery, which would permit a maximum at the
front. In a thickly-settled country, so easily policed, in a land with
the population inured to peace, the wisdom of keeping quiet was soon
evident to the people. What if Boers had been in the Belgians’ place?
Would they have attempted guerrilla warfare? Would you or I want to
bring destruction on neighbours in a land without any rural fastnesses
as a _rendezvous_ for operations? One could tell only if a section of
our country were invaded.
A burned block costs less than a dead German soldier. The system was
efficacious. It was mercilessness mixed with craft. When Prussian
brusqueness was found to be unnecessarily irritating to the population,
causing rash Belgians to turn desperate, the elders of the Saxon and
Bavarian co-religionists were called in. They were amiable fathers of
families, who would obey orders without taking the law into their own
hands. The occupation was strictly military. It concerned itself with
the business of national suffocation. All the functions of the national
Government were in German hands. But Belgian policemen guided the
street traffic, arrested culprits for ordinary misdemeanours, and took
them before Belgian judges. This concession, which also meant a saving
in soldiers, only aggravated to the Belgian the regulations directed
against his personal freedom.
“Eat, drink, and live as usual. Go to your own police courts for
misdemeanours,” was the German edict in a word; “but remember that ours
is the military power, and no act that aids the enemy, that helps the
cause of Belgium in this war, is permitted. Observe that particular
_affiche_ about a spy, please. He was shot.”
At every opportunity the Belgians were told that the British and the
French could never come to their rescue. The Allies were beaten. It
was the British who got Belgium into trouble; the British who were
responsible for the idleness, the penury, the hunger, and the suffering
in Belgium. The British had used Belgium as a cat’s-paw; then they
had deserted her. But Belgians remained mostly unconvinced. They were
making war with mind and spirit, if not with arms.
“We know how to suffer in Belgium,” said a Belgian jurist. “Our ability
to suffer and to hold fast to our hearths has kept us going through
the centuries. Flemish and French, we have stubbornness in common. Now
a ruffian has come into our house and taken us by the throat. He can
choke us to death, or he can slowly starve us to death, but he cannot
make us yield. No, we shall never forgive!”
“You, too, hate, then?” I asked.
“Of course I hate. For the first time in my life I know what it is to
hate; and so do my countrymen. I begin to enjoy my hate. It is one of
the privileges of our present existence. We cannot stand on chairs and
tables as they do in Berlin cafés and sing our hate, but no one can
stop our hating in secret.”
Beside the latest _verboten_ and regulation of Belgian conduct on the
city walls were posted German official news bulletins. The Belgians
stopped to read; they paused to reread. And these were the rare
occasions when they smiled, and they liked to have a German sentry see
that smile.
“_Pour les enfants!_” they whispered, as if talking to one another
about a _crèche_. Little ones, be good! Here is a new fairy tale!
When a German wanted to buy something he got frigid politeness and
attention--very frigid, telling politeness--from the clerk, which
said:
“Beast! Invader! I do not ask you to buy, but as you ask, I sell; and
as I sell I hate! I hate!! I hate!!!”
An officer entering a shop and seeing a picture of King Albert on the
wall, said:
“The orders are to take that down!”
“But don’t you love your Kaiser?” asked the woman, who kept the shop.
“Certainly!”
“And I love my King!” was the answer. “I like to look at his picture
just as much as you like to look at your Kaiser’s.”
“I had not thought of it in that way!” said the officer.
Indeed, it is very hard for any conqueror to think of it in that way.
So the picture remained on the wall.
How many soldiers would it take to enforce the regulation that no
Belgian was to wear the Belgian colours? Imagine thousands and
thousands of Landsturm men moving about and plucking King Albert’s
face or the black, yellow and red from Belgian buttonholes! No sooner
would a buttonhole be cleared in front than the emblem would appear
in a buttonhole in the rear. The Landsturm would face counter, flank,
frontal, and rear attacks in a most amusing military manœuvre, which
would put those middle-aged conquerors fearfully out of breath and be
rare sport for the Belgians. You could not arrest the whole population
and lead them off to jail; and if you bayoneted a few--which really
those phlegmatic, comfortable old Landsturms would not have the heart
to do for such a little thing--why, it would get into the American
press and the Berlin Foreign Office would say:
“There you are, you soldiers, breaking all the crockery again!”
In the smaller towns, where the Germans were billeted in Belgian
houses, of course the hosts had to serve their unwelcome guests.
“Yet we managed to let them know what was in our hearts,” said one
woman. “Some tried to be friendly. They said they had wives and
children at home; and we said: ‘How glad your wives and children would
be to see you! Why don’t you go home?’”
When a report reached the commander in Ghent that an old man had
concealed arms, a sergeant with a guard was sent to search the house.
“Yes, my son has a rifle.”
“Where is it?”
“In his hands on the Yser, if he is not dead, monsieur. You are welcome
to search, monsieur.”
Belgium was developing a new humour: a humour at the expense of the
Germans. In their homes they mimicked their rulers as freely as they
pleased. To carry mimicry into the streets meant arrest for the elders,
but not always for the children. You have heard the story, which is
true, of how some gamins put carrots in old bowler hats to represent
the spikes of German helmets, and at their leader’s command of “On to
Paris!” did a goose-step backwards. There is another which you may not
have heard of a small boy who put on grandfather’s spectacles, a pillow
under his coat, and a card on his cap, “Officer of the Landsturm.” The
conquerors had enough sense not to interfere with the battalion which
was taking Paris; but the pseudo-Landsturm officer was chased into a
doorway and got a cuff after his placard was taken away from him.
When a united public opinion faces bayonets it is not altogether
helpless to reply. By the atmospheric force of mass it enjoys a
conquest of its own. If a German officer or soldier entered a street
car, women drew aside in a way to indicate that they did not want their
garments contaminated. People walked by the sentries in the streets
giving them room as you would give a mangy dog room, yet as if they did
not see the sentries; as if no sentries existed.
The Germans said that they wanted to be friendly. They even expressed
surprise that the Belgians would not return their advances. They sent
out invitations to social functions in Brussels, but no one came--not
even to a ball given by the soldiers to the daughters of the poor.
Belgium stared its inhospitality, its contempt, its cynical drolleries
at the invader.