Part 2 (2/2)
”It is possible,” said the spider to the fly, ”zat I can get for you permission if you will come to ze guardhouse. Ze capitain is there.”
The ”guardhouse” proved a precinct police station, and the captain was not there: instead we found a mixed crowd of civilians and militaires who looked us over and shook their heads. Next we were taken to military headquarters n the center of the town. For fifteen minutes we hunted the evasive captain while I ran through my head the various sets of credentials stuffed in different pockets; for, being in Dutch territory, although only a few miles from the Belgian frontier on one side and the German frontier on the other, I was not quite certain which to produce. Among my letters I carried one from the German Amba.s.sador, Count von Bernstorff, to the Foreign Office in Berlin; one from Professor Hugo Munsterberg at Harvard, and a note from the secretary of the Belgian Legation at The Hague.
Unfortunately I did not have with me at the time a very helpful letter from Colonel Roosevelt, ending with the statement that the bearer ”is an American citizen, a non-combatant, and emphatically not a spy.” I had promised the Colonel to use this, my trump card, only in case of necessity--and once, on a later occasion, I did so with immediate effect. On the whole, I now decided in favor of a United States pa.s.sport decorated with my picture and enough vises to resemble the diplomatic history of the Continent.
”The captain is not here. We go to the commissaire at headquarters,”
said the polite politzei. It was then that we cut loose, told him to bring the commissaire or the burgomaster to us, and started to walk off.
It was a bad move. So far he had handled us with a velvet grip, but at the first sign of insurrection he showed his teeth, locked arms with each of us, and, signaling another officer to follow, forthwith marched us off to police headquarters and our ultimate resting-place, the guardroom cell.
How long we stayed there I don't know--long enough, at all events, to get a glimpse of the Dutch police system and the third degree as practiced in the Lowlands. There swung open a great iron door leading to the street and the market-place, not so large but fully as busy as Was.h.i.+ngton Market the week before Thanksgiving. Through it, sobbing and screaming, their hats gone and their hair torn, came two women, roughly handled by gendarmes and followed by a mob escort. They were thrown weeping and expostulating into an adjoining cell. A gendarme came out with trickles of blood on his face. He mopped his brow and complained of feminine finger-nails. Close behind him followed a male friend of the imprisoned women. He pleaded with the sergeant at the desk, while the moans of the women, under pressure to confess their crime, came from their cell.
But Jack Rose only scratched and scratched monotonously, and now and then gazed at the middle of the speaker's stomach.
In the mean time we fell back into our habit of talking for publication.
With an intimacy that would have surprised those gentlemen we referred casually to Brand Whitlock, Dr. van d.y.k.e, and the biggest Dutch and Belgian names we could think of. We suspected that Jack Rose and the man at our side understood more English than they pretended. At all events, it had its effect. In half an hour we were taken before the commissioner.
Two cigars lay on the edge of the table nearest us. I could see at a glance that we were free.
”Do you speak English?” I asked him.
”No,” he answered in our native tongue; ”only French, Flemish, German, and Italian--but not English.” And with a grin he asked for our pa.s.sports.
”You are for the American newspapers?”
”Yes,” I answered--”one of us is a lawyer who writes occasionally. I am correspondent for a New York and a Boston paper, but I won't cable anything from here.” For this reason, I explained, no movements of troops or news of military value could leak out.
”Ah, I see,” said the commissioner who could not talk English. ”An amateur correspondent and a slow correspondent. But correspondents are not at all tolerated in this province. It is five o'clock. You will board the train leaving this province at 5.16 P.M.”
From Maastricht to the Dutch capital is, under usual conditions, a four-hour run to the north. During this trip we pa.s.sed encampments and fortifications of the 400,000 well-drilled but poorly equipped troops which the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in the spirit of no negative neutrality, had mobilized along her borders. Whenever we crossed a bridge every window in the entire train was fastened down and there were strict orders against raising them. We discovered that under the boulders were carefully concealed large charges of dynamite ready for immediate use in case of invasion--so that Horatius need not be called upon while axe and crowbar were at work. The windows, it appears, were locked to prevent throwing out of lighted cigars or matches.
At one o'clock the next morning our train, delayed by war-time traffic, rolled into the Hague station, whence three days later, I was to start my lucky trip into Antwerp, the besieged.
Clog dancing and cognac helped to get me from The Hague back into Antwerp in time for its bombardment and capture by the German forces under General von Beseler. I happened to perform the clog dancing at a critical moment during a trip on a Scheldt River barge, thus diverting the attention of the river sentries from my lack of proper papers. While the pedal acrobatics were in progress my temporary friend, Mons. le Conducteur, reinforced the already genial pickets with many gla.s.ses of the warming fluid.
Willard Luther, my companion in and out of jail during the first part of the continental wanderings, was forced to leave for home the day after we got back to The Hague. He had five days to catch the Lusitania at Liverpool. Three of them he spent on a whirlwind trip trying to see action in northern Flanders, but, much to his disappointment, was called away before the final scrimmage at Antwerp. If he had succeeded in getting in, I rather fear the Ma.s.sachusetts Bar would have lost a valuable member. He had an insatiable pa.s.sion to be in the neighborhood of bullets and bombs-- not, as I take it, that he really wanted to get hit--merely that he would like to see how close he could come.
On October 2d, strictest regulations were pa.s.sed prohibiting entry within the fortifications of Antwerp without permit from the military governor, General de Guise. Three weeks earlier entry had been possible but difficult, and the feat was again easier after the German occupation. But during the city's days of trial the military lid was clamped and riveted. Except for those coming direct from England, the highest civil recommendations were valueless.
I had one of these,--a laissez-pa.s.ser from Prince d'Eline, Secretary of the Belgian Legation at The Hague,--issued because of the fact that I was carrying a large packet of mail from the American Legation at The Hague to Henry W. Diederick, United States Consul-General at Antwerp. I had also been entrusted with three hundred marks to be delivered to a German prisoner, Lieutenant Ulrici, known to have been wounded and captured in the fighting around Termonde, and believed to be lying in a hospital s.h.i.+p in the river or in Antwerp itself. The fact of carrying such money was of course against me as indicating German sympathy.
Because a large part of the railroad line between Eschen, Cappelen, and Antwerp had been torn up, because there would be many hold-ups, and because I couldn't speak a word of Flemish, I decided against the overland route. Hearing, however, that L. Braakman & Company, a grain and freight s.h.i.+pping concern, were running down barges from Rotterdam, I got a Belgian friend to call them up on my behalf. The result was a flat throw-down: without General de Guise's sanction I might not even cross the gangplank.
Nevertheless, I went to Rotterdam, crossed the river basin to the island from which the Braakman boats ran, and there saw a director of the company, who, fortunately, could speak both English and Flemish. He took me to the captain of the river barge, a low craft that looked a cross between a tugboat and a Hudson River scow. In less than three minutes my case was disposed of. Verdict: ”C'est absolument defendu.” It was time for a little ”bluff.” An hour later I returned with a new proposition, having in the mean time telegraphed Mr. Diederick either to meet me at the pier at Antwerp or to send a military permit. Displaying a copy of this telegram I suggested that I be allowed to board. If there was any one at Antwerp to meet and vouch for me, well and good; if not, they were at liberty to s.h.i.+p me back. That was my proposition.
”He may go as far as the border patrol, fifteen miles east of Antwerp,”
the captain said to my interpreter. ”If the river sentries permit it he may then go as far as the Antwerp pier, but he cannot land.”
We cast off Sunday, October 4th, at 6 A.M. The little Telegraaf III poked her nose through the blue-gray haze of a chilly October morning while the muddy waters of the Meuse slapped coldly against her bow. I stamped the deck a few times, wondering if there was an English-speaking soul aboard, and leaned up against the engine room until the odor of coffee and bacon lured me to the fo'castle hatch. A purple-faced giant, with thick lips that met like the halves of an English m.u.f.fin blocked the companion-way.
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