Yes: Miss ----, that clever novelist, who passes for a woman of the
world because she uses mundane appearances to hide herself from the
world's importunity--Miss ---- is here. The War caught her. Some people
were surprised. I wasn't.[5]
* * * * *
Walked through the town again--old quarter. Walked and walked and
walked, thinking about Antwerp all the time. Through streets of
grey-white and lavender-tinted houses, with very fragile balconies. Saw
the two Cathedrals[6] and the Town Hall--refugees swarming round it--and
the Rab--I can't remember its name: see Baedeker--with its turrets and
its moat. Any amount of time to see cathedrals in and no Mrs. Torrence
to protest. I wonder how much of all this will be left by next month, or
even by next week? Two of the Antwerp forts have fallen. They say the
occupation of Ghent will be peaceful; while of Antwerp I suppose they
would say, "_C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?_" They say the Germans will
just march into Ghent and march out again, commandeering a few things
here and there. But nobody knows, and by the stolid faces of these
civilians you might imagine that nobody cares. Certainly none of them
think that the fate of Antwerp can be the fate of Ghent.
And the faces of the soldiers, of the men who know? They are the faces
of important people, cheerful people, pleasantly preoccupied with the
business in hand. Only here and there a grave face, a fixed, drawn face,
a face twisted with the irritation of the strain.
Why, the very refugees have the look of a rather tired tourist-party,
wandering about, seeing Ghent, seeing the Cathedral.
Only they aren't looking at the Cathedral. They are looking straight
ahead, across the _Place_, up the street; they do not see or hear the
trams swinging down on them, or the tearing, snorting motors; they
stroll abstractedly into the line of the motors and stand there; they
start and scatter, wild-eyed, with a sudden recrudescence of the terror
that has driven them here from their villages in the fields.
* * * * *
It seems incredible that I should be free to walk about like this. It is
as if I had cut the rope that tied me to a soaring air-balloon and found
myself, with firm feet, safe on the solid earth. Any bit of earth, even
surrounded by Germans, seems safe compared with the asphyxiation of that
ascent. And when the air-balloon wasn't going up it was as if I had lain
stifling under a soft feather-bed for more than a year. Now I've waked
up suddenly and flung the feather-bed off with a vigorous kick.
[_[7]Sunday, 4th._]
(I have no clear recollection of Sunday morning, because in the
afternoon we went to Antwerp; and Antwerp has blotted out everything
that went near before it.)
The Ambulance has been ordered to take two Belgian professors (or else
they are doctors) into Antwerp. There isn't any question this time of
carrying wounded. It seems incredible, but I am going too. I shall see
the siege of Antwerp and hear the guns that were brought up from Namur.
Somewhere, on the north-west horizon, a vision, heavenly, but
impalpable, aerial, indistinct, of the Greatest Possible Danger.
I am glad I am going. But the odd thing is that there is no excitement
about it. It seems an entirely fit and natural thing that the vision
should materialize, that I should see the shells battering the forts of
Antwerp and hear the big siege-guns from Namur. For all its
incredibility, the adventure lacks every element of surprise. It is
simply what I came out for. For here in Belgium the really incredible
things are the things that existed and happened before the War. They
existed and happened a hundred years ago and the memory of them is
indistinct; the feeling of them is gone. You have ceased to have any
personal interest in them; if they happened at all they happened to
somebody else. What is happening now has been happening always. All your
past is soaking in the vivid dye of these days, and what you are now you
have been always. I have been a War Correspondent all my life--_blasee_
with battles. The Commandant orders me into the front seat beside the
chauffeur Tom, so that I may see things. Even Tom's face cannot shake me
in my conviction that I am merely setting out once more on my usual,
legitimate, daily job.
It is all so natural that you do not wonder in the least at this really
very singular extension of your personality. You are not aware of your
personality at all. If you could be you would see it undergoing
shrinkage. It is, anyhow, one of the things that ceased to matter a
hundred years ago. If you could examine its contents at this moment you
would find nothing there but that shining vision of danger, the siege of
Antwerp, indistinct, impalpable, aerial.
Presently the vision itself shrinks and disappears on the north-west
horizon. The car has shot beyond the streets into the open road, the
great paved highway to Antwerp, and I am absorbed in other matters: in
Car 1 and in the chauffeur Tom, who is letting her rip more and more
into her top speed with every mile; in M. C----, the Belgian Red Cross
guide, beside me on my left, and in the Belgian soldier sitting on the
floor at his feet. The soldier is confiding some fearful secret to
M. C---- about somebody called Achille. M. C---- bends very low to catch
the name, as if he were trying to intercept and conceal it, and when he
_has_ caught it he assumes an air of superb mystery and gravity and
importance. With one gesture he buries the name of Achille in his breast
under his uniform. You know that he would die rather than betray the
secret of Achille. You decide that Achille is the heroic bearer of
dispatches, and that we have secret orders to pick him up somewhere and
convey him in safety to Antwerp. You do not grasp the meaning of this
pantomime until the third sentry has approached us, and M. C---- has
stopped for the third time to whisper "Ach-ille!" behind the cover of
his hand, and the third sentry is instantly appeased.
(Concerning sentries, you learn that the Belgian kind is amiable, but
that the French sentry is a terrible fellow, who will think nothing of
shooting you if your car doesn't stop dead the instant he levels his
rifle.)
Except for sentries and straggling troops and the long trains of
refugees, the country is as peaceful between Ghent and Saint Nicolas as
it was last week between Ostend and Ghent. It is the same adorable
Flemish country, the same flat fields, the same paved causeway and the
same tall, slender avenues of trees. But if anything could make the
desolation of Belgium more desolate it is this intolerable beauty of
slender trees and infinite flat land, the beauty of a country formed for
the very expression of peace. In the vivid gold and green of its autumn
it has become a stage dressed with ironic splendour for the spectacle of
a people in flight. Half the population of Antwerp and the country round
it is pouring into Ghent.[8] First the automobiles, Belgian officers in
uniform packed tight between women and children and their bundles,
convoying the train. Then the carriages secured by the _bourgeois_ (they
are very few); then men and boys on bicycles; then the carts, and with
the coming on of the carts the spectacle grows incredible, fantastic.
You see a thing advancing like a house on wheels. It is a tall
hay-wagon--the tallest wagon you have ever seen in your life--piled with
household furniture and mattresses on the top of the furniture, and on
top of the mattresses, on the roof, as it were, a family of women and
children and young girls. Some of them seem conscious of the stupendous
absurdity of this appearance; they smile at you or laugh as the
structure goes towering and toppling by.
Next, low on the ground, enormous and grotesque bundles, endowed with
movement and with legs. Only when you come up to them do you see that
they are borne on the bowed backs of men and women and children. The
children--when there are no bundles to be borne these carry a bird in a
cage, or a dog, a dog that sits in their arms like a baby and is pressed
tight to their breasts. Here and there men and women driving their
cattle before them, driving them gently, without haste, with a great
dignity and patience.
These, for all the panic and ruin in their bearing, might be pilgrims or
suppliants, or the servants of some religious rite, bringing the votive
offerings and the sacrificial beasts. The infinite land and the avenues
of slender trees persuade you that it is so.
And wherever the ambulance cars go they meet endless processions of
refugees; endless, for the straight, flat Flemish roads are endless, and
as far as your eye can see the stream of people is unbroken; endless,
because the misery of Belgium is endless; the mind cannot grasp it or
take it in. You cannot meet it with grief, hardly with conscious pity;
you have no tears for it; it is a sorrow that transcends everything you
have known of sorrow. These people have been left "only their eyes to
weep with." But they do not weep any more than you do. They have no
tears for themselves or for each other.[9] This is the terrible thing,
this and the manner of their flight. It is not flight, it is the vast,
unhasting and unending movement of a people crushed down by grief and
weariness, pushed on by its own weight, by the ceaseless impact of its
ruin.
This stream is the main stream from Antwerp, swollen by its tributaries.
It doesn't seem to matter where it comes from, its strength and volume
always seem the same. After the siege of Antwerp it will thicken and
flow from some other direction, that is all. And all the streams seem to
flow into Ghent and to meet in the Palais des Fetes.[10]
I forget whether it was near Lokeren or Saint Nicolas that we saw the
first sign of fighting, in houses levelled to the ground to make way for
the artillery fire; levelled, and raked into neat plots without the
semblance of a site.
After the refugees, the troops. Village streets crowded with military
automobiles and trains of baggage wagons and regiments of infantry.
Little villas with desolate, surprised and innocent faces, standing back
in their gardens; soldiers sitting in their porches and verandahs,
soldiers' faces looking out of their windows; soldiers are quartered in
every room, and the grass grows high in their gardens. Soldiers run down
the garden paths to look at our ambulance as it goes by.
There is excitement in the village streets.
At Saint Nicolas we overtake Dr. Wilson and Mr. Davidson walking into
Antwerp. They tell us the news.
The British troops have come. At last. They have been through before us
on their way to Antwerp. Dr. Wilson and Mr. Davidson have seen the
British troops. They have talked to them.
Mr. Davidson cannot conceal his glee at getting in before the War
Correspondents. Pure luck has given into his hands _the_ great
journalistic scoop of the War in Belgium. And he is not a journalist. He
is a sculptor out for the busts of warriors, and for actuality in those
tragic and splendid figures that are grouped round memorial columns, for
the living attitude and gesture.
We take up Mr. Davidson and Dr. Wilson, and leave one of our professors
(if he is a professor) at Saint Nicolas, for the poor man has come
without his passport. He will have to hang about at Saint Nicolas, doing
nothing, until such time as it pleases Heaven to send us back from
Antwerp. He resigns himself, and we abandon him, a piteous figure
wrapped in a brown shawl.
After Saint Nicolas more troops, a few batteries of artillery, some
infantry, long, long regiments of Belgian cavalry, coming to the defence
of the country outside Antwerp. Cavalry halting at a fork of the road by
a little fir-wood. A road that is rather like the road just outside
Wareham as you go towards Poole. More troops. And after the troops an
interminable procession of labourers trudging on foot. At a distance you
take them for refugees, until you see that they are carrying poles and
spades. Presently the road cuts through the circle of stakes and barbed
wire entanglements set for the German cavalry. And somewhere on our left
(whether before or after Saint Nicolas I cannot remember), across a
field, the rail embankment ran parallel with our field, and we saw the
long ambulance train, flying the Red Cross and loaded with wounded, on
its way from Antwerp to Ghent. At this point the line is exposed
conspicuously, and we must have been well within range of the German
fire, for the next ambulance train--but we didn't know about the next
ambulance train till afterwards.
After the circle of the stakes and wire entanglements you begin to think
of the bombardment. You strain your ears for the sound of the siege-guns
from Namur. Somewhere ahead of us on the horizon there is Antwerp.
Towers and tall chimneys in a very grey distance. Every minute you look
for the flight of the shells across the grey and the fall of a tower or
a chimney. But the grey is utterly peaceful and the towers and the tall
chimneys remain. And at last you turn in a righteous indignation and
say: "Where is the bombardment?"
The bombardment is at the outer forts.