Part 3 (2/2)
It was such a progress as one might make in some fantastic nightmare--as the hero of some eerie piece of fiction about the Last Man in the World.
Street after street, with doors locked, shutters closed, sandbags, mattresses, or little heaps of earth piled over cellar windows; streets in which the only sound was that of one's own feet, where the loneliness was made more lonely by some forgotten dog cringing against the closed door and barking nervously as one hurried past.
Here, where most of the sh.e.l.ls had fallen the preceding night, nearly all the houses were empty. Yet occasionally one caught sight of faces peering up from bas.e.m.e.nt windows or of some stubborn householder standing in his southern doorway staring into s.p.a.ce. Once I pa.s.sed a woman bound away from, instead of toward, the river with her big bundle; and once an open carriage with a family in it driving, with peculiarly Flemish composure, toward the quay, and as I hurried past the park, along the Avenue Van Dyck--where fresh craters made by exploding sh.e.l.ls had been dug in the turf--the swans, still floating on the little lake, placidly dipped their white necks under water as if it were a quiet morning in May.
Now and then, as the sh.e.l.l's wail swung over its long parabola, there came with the detonation, across the roofs, the rumble of falling masonry. Once I pa.s.sed a house quietly burning, and on the pavement were lopped-off trees. The impartiality with which those far-off gunners distributed their attentions was disconcerting. Peering down one of the up-and-down streets before crossing it, as if a sh.e.l.l were an automobile which you might see and dodge, you would shoot across and, turning into a cosey little side street, think to yourself that here at least they had not come, and then promptly see, squarely in front, another of those craters blown down through the Belgian blocks.
Presently I found myself under the trees of the Boulevard Leopold, not far from the British hospital, and recalled that it was about time that promise was made good. It was time indeed, and help with lifting they needed very literally. The order had just come to leave the building, bringing the wounded and such equipment as they could pack into half a dozen motor-buses and retire--just where, I did not hear--in the direction of Ghent. As I entered the porte-cochere two poor wrecks of war were being led out by their nurses--more men burned in the powder explosion at Waelhem, their seared faces and hands covered with oil and cotton just as they had been lifted from bed.
The phrase ”whistle of sh.e.l.ls” had taken on a new reality since midnight. Now one was to learn something of the meaning of those equally familiar words, ”they succeeded in saving their wounded, although under heavy fire.”
None of the wounded could walk, none dress himself; most of them in ordinary times would have lain where they were for weeks. There were fractured legs not yet set, men with faces half shot away, men half out of their heads, and all these had to be dressed somehow, covered up, crowded into or on top of the buses, and started off through a city under bombardment toward open country which might already be occupied by the enemy.
Bundles of uniforms, mud-stained, blood-stained, just as they had come from the trenches, were dumped out of the storeroom and distributed, hit or miss.
British ”Tommies” went out as Belgians, Belgians in British khaki; the man whose broken leg I had lifted the day before we simply bundled in his bed blankets and set up in the corner of a bus. One healthy-looking Belgian boy, on whom I was trying to pull a pair of British trousers, seemed to have nothing at all the matter with him, until it presently appeared that he was speechless and paralyzed in both left arm and left leg. And while we were working, an English soldier, shot through the jaw and throat, sat on the edge of his bed, shaking with a hideous, rattling cough.
The hospital was in a handsome stone building, in ordinary times a club, perhaps, or a school; a wide, stone stairway led up the centre, and above it was a gla.s.s skylight. This central well would have been a charming place for a sh.e.l.l to drop into, and one did drop not more than fifty feet or so away, in or close to the rear court. A few yards down the avenue another sh.e.l.l hit a cornice and sent a ton or so of masonry cras.h.i.+ng down on the sidewalk. Under conditions like these the nurses kept running up and down that staircase during the endless hour or two in which the wounded were being dressed and carried on stretchers to the street. They stood by the buses making their men comfortable, and when the first buses were filled they sat in the open street on top of them, patiently waiting, as calm and smiling as circus queens on their gilt chariots. The behavior of the men in the trenches was cool enough, but they at least were fighting men and but taking the chance of war. These were civilian volunteers, they had not even trenches to shelter them, and it took a rather unforeseen and difficult sort of courage to leave that fairly safe masonry building and sit smiling and helpful on top of a motor-bus during a wait of half an hour or so, any second of which might be one's last. There was an American nurse there, a tall, radiant girl, whom they called, and rightly, ”Morning Glory,” who had been introduced to me the day before because we both belonged to that curious foreign race of Americans. What her name was I haven't the least idea, and if we were to meet to-morrow, doubtless we should have to be carefully presented over again, but I remember calling out to her, ”Good-by, American girl!” as we pa.s.sed in the hall during the last minute or two, and she said good-by, and suddenly reached out and put her hand on my shoulder and added, ”Good luck!” or ”G.o.d bless you!” or something like that. And these seemed at the moment quite the usual things to do and say. The doctor in charge and the general's wife apologized for running away, as they called it, and the last I saw of the latter was as she waved back to me from the top of a bus, with just that look of concern over the desperate ride they were beginning which a slightly preoccupied hostess casts over a dinner-table about which are seated a number of oddly a.s.sorted guests.
The strange procession got away safely at last, and safely, too, so I was told later, across the river; but where they finally spent the night I never heard. I hurried down the street and into the Rue Nerviens. It must have been about four o'clock by that time. The bright October morning had changed to a chill and dismal afternoon, and up the western sky in the direction of the river a vast curtain of greasy, black smoke was rolling. The petrol-tanks along the Scheldt had been set afire. It looked at the moment as if the whole city might be going, but there was no time then to think of possibilities, and I slipped down the lee side of the street to the door with the Red Cross flag. The front of the hospital was shut tight. It took several pulls at the bell to bring any one, and inside I found a Belgian family who had left their own house for the thicker ceilings of the hospital, and the nuns back in the wards with their nervous men. Their servants had left that morning, the three or four sisters in charge had had to do all the cooking and housework as well as look after their patients, and now they were keeping calm and smiling, to subdue as best they could the fears of the Belgian wounded, who were ready to jump out of bed, whatever their condition, rather than fall into the hands of the enemy. Each had no doubt that if he were not murdered outright he would be taken to Germany and forced to fight in the east against the Russians. Several, who knew very well what was going on outside, had been found by the nurses that morning out of bed and all ready to take to the street.
Lest they should hear that their comrades in the Boulevard Leopold had been moved, the lay sister--the English lady--and I withdrew to the operating-room, closed the door, and in that curious retreat talked over the situation. No orders had come to leave; in fact, they had been told to stay. They did have a man now in the shape of the Belgian gentleman, and from the same source an able-bodied servant, but how long these would stay, where food was to be found in that desolate city, when the bombardment would cease, and what the Germans would do with them--well, it was not a pleasant situation for a handful of women. But it was not of themselves she was thinking, but of their wounded and of Belgium, and of what both had suffered already and of what might yet be in store. It was of that this frail little sister talked that hopeless afternoon, while the smoke in the west spread farther up the sky, and she would now and then pause in the middle of a syllable while a sh.e.l.l sang overhead, then take it up again.
Meanwhile the light was going, and before it became quite dark and my hotel deserted, perhaps, as the rest of Antwerp, it seemed best to be getting across town. I could not believe that the Germans could treat such a place and people with anything but consideration and told the little nurse so. She came to the edge of the gla.s.s-covered court, laughingly saying I had best run across it, and wondering where we, who had met twice now under such curious circ.u.mstances, would meet again.
Then she turned back to the ward--to wait with that roomful of more or less panicky men for the tramp of German soldiers and the knock on the door which meant that they were prisoners.
Hurrying across town, I pa.s.sed, not far from the Hotel St. Antoine, a blazing four-story building. The cathedral was not touched, and indeed, in spite of the noise and terror, the material damage was comparatively slight. Soldiers were clearing the quay and setting a guard directly in front of our hotel--one of the few places in Antwerp that night where one could get so much as a crust of bread--and behind drawn curtains we made what cheer we could. There were two American photographers and a correspondent who had spent the night before in the cellar of a house, the upper story of which had been wrecked by a sh.e.l.l; a British intelligence officer, with the most bewildering way of hopping back and forth between a brown civilian suit and a spick-and-span new uniform; and several Belgian families hoping to get a boat down-stream in the morning.
We sat round the great fire in the hall, above which the architect, building for happier times, had had the bad grace to place a skylight, and discussed the time and means of getting away. The intelligence officer, not wis.h.i.+ng to be made a prisoner, was for getting a boat of some sort at the first crack of dawn, and the photographers, who had had the roof blown off over their heads, heartily agreed with him. I did not like to leave without at least a glimpse of those spiked helmets nor to desert my friends in the Rue Nerviens, and yet there was the likelihood, if one remained, of being marooned indefinitely in the midst of the conquering army.
Meanwhile the flight of sh.e.l.ls continued, a dozen or more fires could be seen from the upper windows of the hotel, and billows of red flame from the burning petrol-tanks rolled up the southern sky. It had been what might be called a rather full day, and the wail of approaching projectiles began to get on one's nerves. One started at the slamming of a door, took every dull thump for a distant explosion; and when we finally turned in I carried the mattress from my room, which faced the south, over to the other side of the building, and laid it on the floor beside another man's bed. Before a sh.e.l.l could reach me it would have to traverse at least three part.i.tions and possibly him as well.
After midnight the bombardment quieted, but sh.e.l.ls continued to visit us from time to time all night. All night the Belgians were retreating across the pontoon bridge, and once--it must have been about two or three o'clock--I heard a sound which meant that all was over. It was the crisp tramp--different from the Belgian shuffle--of British soldiers, and up from the street came an English voice, ”Best foot forward, boys!” and a little farther on: ”Look alive, men; they've just picked up our range!”
I went to the window and watched them tramp by--the same men we had seen that morning. The petrol fire was still flaming across the south, a steamer of some sort was burning at her wharf beside the bridge-- Napoleon's veterans retreating from Moscow could scarcely have left behind a more complete picture of war than did those young recruits.
Morning came dragging up out of that dreadful night, smoky, damp, and chill. It was almost a London fog that lay over the abandoned town. I had just packed up and was walking through one of the upper halls when there was a crash that shook the whole building, the sound of falling gla.s.s, and out in the river a geyser of water shot up, timbers and boards flew from the bridge, and there were dozens of smaller splashes as if from a shower of shot. I thought that the hotel was. .h.i.t at last and that the Germans, having let civilians escape over the bridge, were turning everything loose, determined to make an end of the business. It was, as a matter of fact, the Belgians blowing up the bridge to cover their retreat. In any case it seemed useless to stay longer, and within an hour, on a tug jammed with the last refugees, we were starting down-stream.
Behind us, up the river, a vast curtain of lead-colored smoke from the petrol-tanks had climbed up the sky and spread out mushroomwise, as smoke and ashes sometimes spread out from a volcano. This smoke, merging with the fog and the smoke from the Antwerp fires, seemed to cover the whole sky. And under that sullen mantle the dark flames of the petrol still glowed; to the right, as we looked back, was the blazing skeleton of the s.h.i.+p, and on the left Antwerp itself, the rich, old, beautiful, comfortable city, all but hidden, and now and then sending forth the boom of an exploding sh.e.l.l like a groan.
A large empty German steamer, the Gneisenau, marooned here since the war, came swinging slowly out into the river, pushed by two or three nervous little tugs--to be sunk there, apparently, in midstream. From the pontoon bridge, which stubbornly refused to yield, came explosion after explosion, and up and down the river fires sprang up, and there were other explosions, as the crushed Belgians, in a sort of rage of devastation, became their own destroyers.
By following the adventures of one individual I have endeavored to suggest what the bombardment of a modern city was like--what you might expect if an invading army came to-morrow to New York or Chicago or San Francisco. I have only coasted along the edges of Belgium's tragedy, and the rest of the story, of which we were a part for the next two days--the flight of those hundreds of thousands of homeless people--is something that can scarcely be told--you must follow it out in imagination into its countless uprooted, disorganized lives. You must imagine old people struggling along over miles and miles of country roads; young girls, under burdens a man might not care to bear, tramping until they had to carry their shoes in their hands and go barefoot to rest their unaccustomed feet. You must imagine the pathetic efforts of hundreds of people to keep clean by was.h.i.+ng in wayside streams or ditches; imagine babies going without milk because there was no milk to be had; families s.h.i.+vering in damp hedgerows or against haystacks where darkness overtook them; and you must imagine this not on one road, but on every road, for mile after mile over a whole countryside. What was to become of these people when their little supply of food was exhausted?
Where could they go? Even if back to their homes, it would be but to lift their hats to their conquerors, never knowing but that the next week or month would sweep the tide of war back over them again.
Never in modern times, not in our generation at least, had Europe seen anything like that flight--nothing so strange, so overwhelming, so pitiful. And when I say pitiful, you must not think of hysterical women, desperate, trampling men, tears and screams. In all those miles one saw neither complaining nor protestation--at times one might almost have thought it some vast, eccentric picnic. No, it was their orderliness, their thrift and kindness, their unmistakable usefulness, which made the waste and irony of it all so colossal and hideous. Each family had its big, round loaves of bread and its pile of hay for the horses, the bags of pears and potatoes; the children had their little dolls, and you would see some tired mother with her big bundle under one arm and some fluffy little puppy in the other. You could not a.s.sociate them with forty-centimetre sh.e.l.ls or burned churches and libraries or anything but quiet homes and peaceable, helpful lives. You could not be swept along by that endless stream of exiles and retain at the end of the day any particular enthusiasm for the red glory of war. And when we crossed the Dutch border that afternoon and came on a village street full of Belgian soldiers cut off and forced to cross the line, to be interned here, presumably until the war was over, one could not mourn very deeply their lost chances of martial glory as they unslung their rifles and turned them over to the good-natured Dutch guard. They had held back that avalanche long enough, these Belgians, and one felt as one would to see lost children get home again or some one dragged from under the wheels.
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