Part 3 (1/2)
There wasn't much sleep for any one that night. The bombardment kept on until morning, lulled slightly, as if the enemy might be taking breakfast, then it continued into the, next day. And now the city--a busy city of nearly four hundred thousand people--emptied itself in earnest. Citizens and soldiers, field-guns, motor-trucks, wheelbarrows, dog-carts, hay-ricks, baby-carriages, droves of people on foot, all flowing down to the Scheldt, the ferries, and the bridge. They poured into coal barges, filling the yawning black holes as Africans used to fill slave-s.h.i.+ps, into launches and tugs, and along the roads leading down the river and southwestward toward Ostend.
One thought with a shudder of what would happen if the Germans dropped a few of their sh.e.l.ls into that helpless mob, and it is only fair to remember that they did not, although retreating Belgian soldiers were a part of it, and one of the German aeroplanes, a mere speck against the blue, was looking calmly down overhead. Nor did they touch the cathedral, and their agreement not to sh.e.l.l any of the buildings previously pointed out on a map delivered to them through the American Legation seemed to be observed.
Down through that ma.s.s of fugitives pushed a London motor-bus ambulance with several wounded British soldiers, one of them sitting upright, supporting with his right hand a left arm, the biceps, bound in a blood-soaked tourniquet, half torn away. They had come in from the trenches, where their comrades were now waiting, with their helpless little rifles, for an enemy, miles away, who lay back at his ease and pounded them with his big guns. I asked them how things were going, and they said not very well. They could only wait until the German aeroplanes had given the range and the trenches became too hot, then fall back, dig themselves in, and play the same game over again.
Following them was a hospital-service motor-car, driven by a Belgian soldier and in charge of a young British officer. It was his present duty to motor from trench to trench across the zone of fire, with the London bus trailing behind, and pick up wounded. It wasn't a particularly pleasant job, he said, jerking his head toward the distant firing, and frankly he wasn't keen about it. We talked for some time, every one talked to every one else in Antwerp that morning, and when he started out again I asked him to give me a lift to the edge of town.
Quickly we raced through the Place de Meir and the deserted streets of the politer part of Antwerp, where, the night before, most of the sh.e.l.ls had fallen. We went crackling over broken gla.s.s, past gaping cornices and holes in the pavement, five feet across and three feet deep, and once pa.s.sed a house quietly burning away with none to so much as watch the fire. The city wall, along which are the first line of forts, drew near, then the tunnel pa.s.sing under it, and we went through without pausing and on down the road to Malines. We were beyond the town now, bowling rapidly out into the flat Belgian country, and, clinging there to the running-board with the October wind blowing quite through a thin flannel suit, it suddenly came over me that things had moved very fast in the last five minutes, and that all at once, in some unexpected fas.h.i.+on, all that elaborate barrier of laissez-pa.s.sers, sauf-conduits, and so on, had been swept aside, and, quite as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, I was spinning out to that almost mythical ”front.”
Front, indeed! It was two fronts. There was an explosion just behind us, a hideous noise overhead, as if the whole zenith had somehow been ripped across like a tightly stretched piece of silk, and a sh.e.l.l from the Belgian fort under which we had just pa.s.sed went hurtling down long aisles of air--farther--farther--to end in a faint detonation miles away.
Out of sight in front of us, there was an answering thud, and-- ”Tzee-ee-ee-er-r-r-ong!”--a German sh.e.l.l had gone over us and burst behind the Belgian fort. Under this gigantic antiphony the motor-car raced along, curiously small and irrelevant on that empty country road.
We pa.s.sed great holes freshly made, neatly blown out of the macadam, then a dead horse. There were plenty of dead horses along the roads in France, but they had been so for days. This one's blood was not yet dry, and the sh.e.l.l that had torn the great rip in its chest must have struck here this morning.
We turned into the avenue of trees leading up to an empty chateau, a field-hospital until a few hours before. Mattresses and bandages littered the deserted room, and an electric chandelier was still burning. The young officer pointed to some trenches in the garden. ”I had those dug to put the wounded in in case we had to hold the place,”
he said. ”It was getting pretty hot.”
There was nothing here now, however, and, followed by the London bus with its obedient enlisted men doing duty as ambulance orderlies, we motored a mile or so farther on to the nearest trench. It was in an orchard beside a brick farmhouse with a vista in front of barbed-wire entanglement and a carefully cleaned firing field stretching out to a village and trees about half a mile away. They had looked very interesting and difficult, those barbed-wire mazes and suburbs, ruthlessly swept of trees and houses, when I had seen the Belgians preparing for the siege six weeks before, and they were to be of about as much practical use now as pictures on a wall.
There are, it will be recalled, three lines of forts about Antwerp--the inner one, corresponding to the city's wall; a middle one a few miles farther out, where the British now were; and the outer line, which the enemy had already pa.s.sed. Their artillery was hidden far over behind the horizon trees, and the British marines and naval-reserve men who manned these trenches could only wait there, rifle in hand, for an enemy that would not come, while a captive balloon a mile or two away to the eastward and an aeroplane sailing far overhead gave the ranges, and they waited for the shrapnel to burst. The trenches were hasty affairs, narrow and shoulder-deep, very like trenches for gas or water pipes, and reasonably safe except when a sh.e.l.l burst directly overhead. One had struck that morning just on the inner rim of the trench, blown out one of those crater-like holes, and discharged all its shrapnel backward across the trench and into one of the heavy timbers supporting a bombproof roof. A raincoat hanging to a nail in this timber was literally shot to shreds. ”That's where I was standing,” said the young lieutenant in command, pointing with a dry smile to a spot not more than a yard from where the sh.e.l.l had burst.
Half a dozen young fellows, crouched there in the bomb-proof, looked out at us and grinned. They were brand-new soldiers, some of them, boys from the London streets who had answered the thrilling posters and signs, ”Your King and Country Need You,” and been sent on this ill-fated expedition for their first sight of war. The London papers are talking about it as I am writing this--how this handful of nine thousand men, part of them recruits who scarcely knew one end of a rifle from another, were flung across the Channel on Sunday night and rushed up to the front to be shot at and rushed back again. I did not know this then, but wondered if this was what they had dreamed of--squatting helplessly in a ditch until another order came to retire--when they swung through the London streets singing ”It's a long, long way to Tipperary” two months before.
Yet not one of the youngest and the greenest showed the least nervousness as they waited there in that melancholy little orchard under the incessant scream of sh.e.l.ls. That unshakable British coolness, part sheer pluck, part a sort of lack of imagination, perhaps, or at least of ”nerves,” left them as calm and casual as if they were but drilling on the turf of Hyde Park. And with it persisted that almost equally unshakable sense of cla.s.s, that touching confidence in one's superiors-- the young clerk's or mechanic's inborn conviction that whatever that smart, clean-cut, imperturbable young officer does and says must inevitably be right--at least, that if he is cool and serene you must, if the skies fall, be cool and serene too.
We met one young fellow as we walked through an empty lateral leading to a bomb-proof prepared for wounded, and the ambulance officer asked him sharply how things had been going that morning.
”Oh, very well, sir,” he said with the most respectful good humor, though a sh.e.l.l bursting just then a stone's throw beyond the orchard made both of us duck our heads. ”A bit hot, sir, about nine o'clock, but only one man hurt. They do seem to know just where we are, sir; but wait till their infantry comes up--we'll clean them out right enough, sir.”
And, if he had been ordered to stay there and hold the trench alone, one could imagine him saying, in that same tone of deference and chipper good humor, ”Yes, sir; thank you, sir,” and staying, too, till the cows came home.
We motored down the line to another trench--this one along a road with fields in front and, about a couple of hundred yards behind, a clump of trees which masked a Belgian battery. The officer here, a tall, upstanding, gravely handsome young man, with a deep, strong, slightly humorous voice, and the air of one both born to and used to command--the best type of navy man--came over to meet us, rather glad, it seemed, to see some one. The ambulance officer had just started to speak when there was a roar from the clump of trees, at the same instant an explosion directly overhead, and an ugly chunk of iron--a bit of broken casing from a shrapnel sh.e.l.l--plunged at our very feet. The sh.e.l.l had been wrongly timed and exploded prematurely.
”I say!” the lieutenant called out to a Belgian officer standing not far away, ”can't you telephone over to your people to stop that? That's the third time we've been nearly hit by their shrapnel this morning. After all”--he turned to us with the air of apologizing somewhat for his display of irritation--”it's quite annoying enough here without that, you know.”
It was, indeed, annoying--very. The trenches were not under fire in the sense that the enemy were making a persistent effort to clear them out, but they were in the zone of fire, their range was known, and there was no telling, when that distant boom thudded across the fields, whether that particular sh.e.l.l might be intended for them or for somebody's house in town.
We could see in the distance their captive balloon, and there were a couple of scouts, the officer said, in a tower in the village, not much more than half a mile away. He pointed to the spot across the barbed wire. ”We've been trying to get them for the last half-hour.”
We left them engaged in this interesting distraction, the little rifle-snaps in all that mighty thundering seeming only to accent the loneliness and helplessness of their position, and spun on down the transverse road, toward another trench. The progress of the motor seemed slow and disappointing. Not that the spot a quarter of a mile off was at all less likely to be hit, yet one felt conscious of a growing desire to be somewhere else. And, though I took off my hat to keep it from blowing off, I found that every time a sh.e.l.l went over I promptly put it on again, indicating, one suspected, a decline in what the military experts call morale.
As we bowled down the road toward a group of brick houses on the left, a sh.e.l.l pa.s.sed not more than fifty yards in front of us and through the side of one of these houses as easily as a circus rider pops through a tissue-paper hoop. Almost at the same instant another exploded--where, I haven't the least idea, except that the dust from it hit us in the face. The motor rolled smoothly along meanwhile, and the Belgian soldier driving it stared as imperturbably ahead of him as if he were back at Antwerp on the seat of his taxicab.
You get used to sh.e.l.ls in time, it seems, and, deciding that you either are or are not going to be hit, dismiss responsibility and leave it all to fate. I must admit that in my brief experience I was not able to arrive at this restful state. We reached at last the city gate through which we had left Antwerp, and the motor came to a stop just at the inner edge of the pa.s.sage under the fort, and I said good-by to the young Englishman ere he started back for the trenches again.
”Well,” he called after me as I started across the open s.p.a.ce between the gate and the houses, a stone's throw away, ”you've had an experience anyway.”
I was just about to answer that undoubtedly I had when-- ”Tzee-ee-ee-er-r”--a sh.e.l.l just cleared the ramparts over our heads and disappeared in the side of a house directly in front of us with a roar and a geyser of dust. Neither the motor nor a guest's duty now detained me, and, waving him good-by, I turned at right angles and made with true civilian speed for the shelter of a side street.
The sh.e.l.ls all appeared to be coming from a southeast direction, and in the lee of houses on the south side of the street one was reasonably protected. Keeping close to the house-fronts and dodging--rather absurdly, no doubt--into doorways when that wailing whistle came up from behind, I went zigzagging through the deserted city toward the hotel on the other side of town.