Part 7 (1/2)
”Sorry that you weren't here yesterday,” the lieutenant remarked. ”We had a little entertainment of our own. Do you see that square?” and he swung the barrel of the telescope so that it commanded a cobble-paved _place_, with a small fountain in the centre, flanked on three sides by rows of red-brick dwellings.
”I see it plainly,” I told him.
”The Boches are evidently billeting their men in those houses,” he continued. ”Yesterday morning an army baker's cart drove into the square and the soldiers came piling out of the houses to get their bread ration. There was quite a crowd of them around the cart, so I phoned back to the gunners and they dropped a sh.e.l.l bang into the square. The soldiers scattered, of course, and the horse hitched to the cart took fright and ran away. The cart tipped over and the bread spilled out. After a few minutes the men came out of their cellars and began to gather up the bread, so we sh.e.l.led 'em again. The next time they sent out the women to pick up the loaves. We let them alone--French women, you understand--until I saw the Huns beating the women and taking the bread away from them. That made me mad and for ten minutes we strafed that section of the town good and plenty. It was very amusing while it lasted. And,” he added wistfully, ”we don't get much amus.e.m.e.nt here.”
Darkness had fallen, when cold and tired, we climbed stiffly into the waiting car. As we tore down the long, straight road which led to General Headquarters the purple velvet of the eastern sky was stabbed by fiery flashes, many of them, and, borne on the night wind, came the sullen growling of the guns. As I stared out into the flame-p.r.i.c.ked darkness there pa.s.sed before me in imaginary review that endless stream of dauntless and determined men--mud-caked infantrymen, gunners, despatch riders, sappers, pioneers, motor-drivers, road-menders, mechanics, railway-builders--who form that wall of steel which Britain has thrown between Western Europe and the Hunnish hordes. Unyielding and undiscouraged they have stood, for close on three years, in winter and in summer, in heat and in cold, in snow and in rain, holding the frontier of civilization. And I knew that it was safe in their care.
VIII
WITH THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER
I had left the Belgian army late in the autumn of 1914, just at the close of that series of heroic actions which began at Liege and ended on the Yser, so that my return, two years later, was in the nature of a home-coming. But it was a home-coming deeply tinged with sadness, for many, oh, so many of the gallant fellows with whom I had campaigned in those stirring days before the trench robbed war of its picturesqueness, were in German prisons or lay in unmarked and forgotten graves before Namur and Antwerp and Termonde. The Belgians that I had left were dirty, dog-tired, and disheartened. They were short of food, short of ammunition, short of everything save valor.
The picturesque but impractical uniforms they wore--the green tunics and cherry-colored breeches of the Guides, the towering bearskins of the gendarmes, the s.h.i.+ny leather hats of the Carabinieri--were foul with blood and dirt.
As my car rolled across a ca.n.a.l bridge into that tiny triangle which is all that remains of free Belgium, a trim-looking trooper in khaki stepped from a sentry-box and, holding up an imperative hand, demanded to see my papers. Had it not been for the rosette of red-yellow-and-black enamel on his cap, and the colored regimental facings on his collar, I should have taken him for a British soldier.
”To what regiment do you belong?” I asked him.
”The First Guides, monsieur,” he replied, returning my papers and saluting.
The First Guides! What memories the name brought back. How well I remembered the last time that I had seen those gallant riders, the pick and flower of the Belgian army, their comic-opera uniforms yellow with dust, crouching behind the hedgerows on the road to Alost, a pitifully thin screen of them, holding off the Germans while their weary comrades tramped northward into Flanders on the great retreat.
It was not easy to make myself believe that this smart, khaki-clad trooper before me belonged to that homeless band of rear-guard fighters who had marked with their dead the line of retreat from the Meuse to the Yser.
It was my first glimpse of the reconst.i.tuted Belgian army. In the two years that it has been holding the line on the Yser it has been completely reuniformed, re-equipped, reorganized. The result is a small but complete and highly efficient organism. The Belgian army consists to-day of six infantry and two cavalry divisions--a total of about 120,000 men--with perhaps another 80,000 being drilled in the various training camps at the rear. It has, of course, no great reserves to fall back upon, for the greater part of the nation is imprisoned, but the King and his generals, by unremitting energy, have produced a force which is as well disciplined and as completely equipped as can be found anywhere on the front. When the day comes, as it surely will, when Berlin issues the orders for a general retirement, I shouldn't care to be the Germans who are a.s.signed to the work of holding off the Belgians, for from the men who wear the red-yellow-and-black rosettes they need expect no pity.
Though the shortest of the lines held by the Allies, the Belgian front is, in proportion to the free Belgian population, much the longest.
The northernmost sector of the Western Front, beginning at the sea and extending through Nieuport, a distance of only three or four miles, is held by the French; then come the twenty-three miles held by the Belgians, another two or three miles held by the French, and then the British. The Belgians occupy a difficult and extremely uncomfortable position, for these Flemish lowlands were inundated in order to check the German advance, and as a result they are in the midst of a vast swamp, which, in the rainy season, becomes a lake. They are, in fact, fighting under conditions not encountered on any other front save in the Mazurian marshes. During the rainy season the gunners of certain batteries frequently work in water up to their waists. So wet is the soil that dugouts are out of the question, for they instantly become cisterns, so the Belgian engineers have developed a type of above-ground shelter which has concrete walls and a roof of steel rails, on top of which are laid several layers of sand-bags. Though these shelters afford their occupants protection from the fire of small-caliber guns, they are not proof against the heavy projectiles which the Germans periodically rain upon the Belgian trenches. As the soil is so soft and slimy as to be useless for defensive purposes, the trench-walls are for the most part built of sand-bags, which are, however, usually filled with clay, for sand must be brought by incredible exertions from the seash.o.r.e. I was shown a single short sector on the Yser, where six million bags were used. For the floors of these shelters, as well as for innumerable other purposes, millions of feet of lumber are required, which is taken up to the front over the network of light railways, some of which penetrate to the actual firing-line. If trench-building materials are scarce in Flanders, fuel is scarcer. Every stick of wood and every piece of coal burned on the front has to be brought from great distances and at great expense, so economy in fuel consumption is rigidly enforced. I remember walking through a trench with a Belgian officer one bitterly cold and rainy day last winter. In a corner of the trench a soldier in soaking clothes had piled together a tiny mound of twigs and roots and over the feeble flame was trying to warm his hands, which were blue with cold. To my surprise my companion stopped and spoke to the man quite sharply.
”We can't let one man have a fire all to himself,” he explained as he rejoined me. ”Wood is too scarce for that. The fire that fellow had would have warmed three or four men and I had to reprimand him for building it.” A moment later he added: ”The poor devil looked pretty cold, though, didn't he?”
I had been informed by telephone from the Belgian _etat-Major_ that a staff-officer would meet me at a certain little frontier town whose name I have forgotten how to spell. After many inquiries and wrong turnings, for in this corner of Belgium the Flemish peasantry understand but little French and no English, my driver succeeded in finding the town, but the officer who was to meet me had not arrived.
It was too cold to sit in the car with comfort, so a lieutenant of gendarmerie, the chief of the local _Surete_, invited me to make myself comfortable in his little office. After a time the conversation languished, and, for want of something better to say, I inquired how far it was to Ostend. I was interested in knowing, because during the retreat of the Belgian army in October, 1914, I left two kit-bags filled with perfectly good clothes at the American Consulate in Ostend. They are there still, I suppose, provided the Consulate has not been sh.e.l.led to pieces by the British monitors or the bags stolen by German soldiers.
”Ostend?” repeated the gendarme. ”It isn't over thirty kilometres from here. From the roof of this building, if the weather was fine, you could almost see its church-spires.”
He walked across to the window and, pressing his face against the pane, stared out across the fog-hung lowlands. He so stood for some minutes and when he turned I noticed that tears were glistening in his eyes.
”My wife and children are over there in Ostend,” he explained, in a voice which he tried pathetically hard to control. ”At least, they were there two years ago last August. They had gone there for the summer. I was in Brussels when the Germans crossed the frontier, and I at once joined the army. I have never heard from my family since. It is very hard, monsieur, to be so near them--they are only thirty kilometres away--and not be able to see them or to hear from them, or even be able to learn whether they are well or whether they have enough to eat.”
It is a terrible thing, this prison wall within which the Germans have shut up the people of Belgium. How terrible it is one cannot realize until he has known those whose dear ones are confined _incommunicado_ within that prison. I wish I might bring home to you, my friends, just what it means. How would _you_ feel to stand on the banks of the Hudson and look across into New Jersey and know that, though over there, a few miles away, were your homes and those that you hold most dear, you could no more get word to them, or they to you, than if they were in Mars? And how would you feel if you knew that Englewood and Morristown and Plainfield and the Oranges, and a dozen other of the pretty Jersey towns, were but heaps of blackened ruins, that the larger cities were garrisoned by brutal German soldiery and ruled by heartless-German governors, and that thousands of women and girls--perhaps _your_ wife, _your_ daughters among them--had been dragged from their homes and taken G.o.d knows where? How would you feel then, Mr. American?
After an hour's wait my officer, profuse in his apologies, arrived in a beautifully appointed limousine, beside which the British staff-car in which I had come looked cheap and very shabby. At the very beginning of the war the Belgian military authorities commandeered every car they could lay their hands on, and though many have been worn out and hundreds were lost during the retreat, they are still rather better supplied with luxurious cars than any of the other armies.
”There will be a moon to-night,” said my cicerone, ”so before going to La Panne, where quarters have been reserved for you, I shall take you to Furnes. The Grande Place is pure Spanish--it was built in the Duke of Alva's time, you know--and it is very beautiful by moonlight.”
The road to Furnes took us through what had been, a few years before, quaint Flemish villages, but German _Kultur_, aided by the products of Frau Bertha Krupp, had transformed the beautiful sixteenth-century architecture into heaps of brick and stone. And nowhere did I see a church left standing. Whether the Germans sh.e.l.led the churches because they honestly believed that their towers were used for observation purposes, or from sheer l.u.s.t for destruction, I do not know. In any event, the churches are gone. In one little sh.e.l.l-torn village my companion pointed out to me the ruins of a church, amid which a company of infantry, going up to the trenches, had camped for the night. Just as the men were falling in at daybreak a German sh.e.l.l of large caliber exploded among them. Sixty-four--I think that was the number--were killed outright or died of their wounds. But not even the dead are permitted to sleep in peace. I saw several churchyards on which German sh.e.l.ls had rained so heavily that the corpses had been disinterred, and whitened bones and grinning skulls littered the ploughed-up ground.