Antwerp to Gallipoli Part 2

Crepy-en-Valois, more fortunate than some of the towns, whose mayors were dismissed for revealing "a lamentable absence of sang-froid," had a mayor who stuck to his post. He was there when three-fourths of the village had fled and, getting up from a sick-bed to receive the German commander, he saw that the latter's orders were carried out, and signed the order for the town's ransom while his daughter held smelling-salts under his nose.

Whether the mayor of the old town of Senlis, a few miles west of Crepy, was in any way tactless is scarcely of importance now, in so far as it concerns him for he and the other hostages were shot, and, however little good it may have done anybody, he at least gave France his life.

It is said that his order to the townspeople to turn in their arms was not completely obeyed. It was also said--and this several people of Senlis told us--that a few Senegalese, lagging behind as the French left, fired on the Germans as they approached, and that it was possible that one or two excited civilians had joined in.

Granting that civilians did fire after hostages had been given, there remains the question of reprisal. It was the German commander's idea that Senlis should be taught a lesson, and this consisted of shooting the mayor and the hostages, and sacking and burning the main street--a half mile, perhaps--from end to end. The idea was carried out with thoroughness, and men ran along from house to house feeding the flames with petroleum and even burning a handsome new country house which stood apart at one end.

A nice-looking, elderly gentleman whom we met in front of the ruined Hotel du Nord said that the Germans came there and, finding champagne in the cellar after the maitre d'hotel had told them there wasn't any, set fire to the hotel, and, as I recall it, shot him. How true such stories are I cannot say, but there was no doubt that Senlis had been punished.

At least half of the old city on the banks of the wistful Nonette--it is a much larger place than Crepy, with a cathedral of some consequence-- was smashed as utterly as it might have been by a cyclone or an earthquake. The systematic manner in which this was done was suggested by the fact that, in the long street running parallel to the one picked for destruction, nearly every door still carried its chalked order to "Schoenen." One house spared was that of a town fireman. "I've got five little children," he told the German soldiers. "They're one, two, three, four, five years old, and I'm expecting another." And they went on.

These were common sights and sounds of that gracious country north of Paris--deserted, perhaps demolished, villages; the silent countryside, with dead horses, bits of broken sh.e.l.l, smashed bicycles or artillery wagons along the road; and the tainted autumn wind. Along the level French roads, under their arches of elms or poplars, covered carts on tall wheels, drawn by two big farm horses harnessed one behind another, and loaded with women, children, and household goods, were beginning to move northward as they had moved south three weeks before. Trains, similarly packed, were creeping up to within ear-shot of the constant cannonading, and it was on one of these trains that we had come.

In Paris, recovered now from the dismay of three weeks before, keen French imaginations were daily turning the war into terms of heroism and sacrifice and military glory. Even editors and play-writers fighting at the front were able to send back impressions now and then, and these, stripped by the censorship of names and dates, became almost as impersonal as pages torn from fiction. Sitting comfortably at some cafe table, reading the papers with morning coffee, one saw the dawn coming up over the Oise and Aisne, heard the French "seventy-fives" and the heavy German siege-guns resume their roar; saw again, for the hundredth time, some hitherto unheard-of little man flinging away his life in one brief burst of glory. And these thrills, repeated over and over again, without sight or sound of the concrete facts, in that strange, still city whose usual life had stopped, produced at last a curious sense of unreality. Meaux became as far away as Waterloo, and one read words that had been spoken yesterday exactly as one reads that the old guard dies but never surrenders.

A man could leave the Cafe de la Paix and in two hours be under fire, where killing was as matter of fact as driving tacks. And in between these two zones--the zone where war was at once a highly organized business and a splendid, terrible game, and that in which its disjointed, horrible surfaces were being turned into abstractions, into ideas, poetry, rhetoric--was this middle ground through which we were now tramping, where one saw only its silence and ruin and desolation.

We returned to Crepy. All that night the trains went clanking through the station, pouring more men--Frenchmen, Englishmen--into the sodden trenches along the Aisne. For a week it had rained, cold shower following cold shower. In Paris shivering concierges closed their doors in the middle of the day in mournful attempts to keep warm--autumn's quick sequel to the almost torrid heat in which the armies had fought across this same country a fortnight before. It was into trenches half filled with water that the new men were going--Frenchmen trundling over to the bar in big overcoats, with their air of good little boy, to go galloping back with a bottle of red wine and a long loaf of bread; Englishmen, noisy, laughing, trying to talk French with their fingers and wanting a nip of brandy or hot water for their tea.

There were Highlanders among them, men with necks like towers and straight, flat backs and a swing of the shoulders--like band music going past. One watched them stride back to their cars with a sort of pang.

What grotesque irony that men like these, who in times when war was man's normal business might have fought their way through, must now, with all the diseased and hopeless bodies enc.u.mbering the earth, be cut off by a mere wad of unthinking lead!

All that night it rained, and, through the rain and dark, trains kept pouring on up into the terrible north. Once I heard cattle lowing as their cars clanked past, and again, in the gloomy clairvoyance of night, saw the faces on the field at Betz, beaten on by the rain that had beaten them for days. And just before a feeble daylight returned again, the steady rumble of artillery.

After noon there was a break in the clouds, and we started on foot for Villers-Cotterets, some fifteen kilometres away. The hard macadam road was no more than dampened, and ambulances and motor-trucks went scooting by as on a city street. Occasionally there was an abandoned trench, once a broken caisson, and the wreck of an aeroplane, but the wheat was harvested and stacked. Beyond Vaumoise the country grew more hilly, and the caves and quarries, which the Germans were making such effective use of along the Aisne, began to appear.

And all this time the cannon were thundering--so close that it seemed each hilltop would bring them into view, and as the detonation puffed across the landscape, one even fancied one could feel the concussion in one's ear. Up from a field ahead of us an aeroplane rose and, in a wide spiral, went climbing up the sky, now almost cleared, and presently disappeared in the north. Then, after satisfying a sentry that our papers were correct--such things could be done in those first days--we got into Villers-Cotterets. Instead of deserted houses we found that nearly every house was quartering soldiers. There were infantrymen, dragoons, flyers, Senegalese, Algerians in white turbans and burnooses on their desert horses, and everywhere officers. We had stumbled into a headquarters!

With somewhat the sensation of walking a tight rope, we sought the mayor to ask for permission to stay in town--finally to ask for safe-conducts to Soissons. The charming old gentleman, undisturbed by war's alarms, politely made them out.

Presently in a hotel full of officers we came on three civilians calmly eating dinner. They had arrived by train, although there were no trains for civilians; they were now dining at a long table set for officers from which we had a moment before been turned away; and we were rescued by a mysterious being at the head of the table--a dark, bald, bright-eyed, smiling, sanguine gentleman, who might have been an impresario or a press agent, and continually had the air of saying, as from time to time he actually said: "Ssst! Leave it all to me!"

He was an American, he said, but spoke vernacular French. The other two civilians were a London chartered accountant and a Canadian volunteer--a young Oxford man--waiting for his regiment. Across the table, a big French dragoon, just in from the firing-line, his horsetail helmet on the chair beside him, was also dining. This man was as different from the little infantrymen we had so often seen as the air of that town was different from deserted Paris. Just as he was, he might have stepped-- or ridden, rather--from some cavalry charge by Meissonier or Detaille; a splendid fellow--head to spurs, all soldier.

After weeks of newspaper rhetoric and windy civilian partisanship, it was like water in the desert to listen to him--straight talk from a professional fighting man, modest, level-headed, and, like most fighting men, as contrasted with those who stay at home and write about fighting, ready to give a brave enemy his due. The German retirement was not at all a rout. When an army is in flight it leaves baggage and equipment behind, guns in the mud. The Germans had left very little; they were falling back in good order. Their soldiers were good fighters, especially when well led. They might lack the individual initiative of Frenchmen, the nervous energy with which Frenchmen would keep on fighting after mere bone and muscle had had enough, but they had plenty of courage. Their officers--the dragoon paused. Yesterday, he said, they had run into a troop of cavalry. The German officer ordered his men to charge, and instead they wavered and started to fall back. He turned on them. "Schweinhunde!" he shouted after them, and, flinging his horse about, charged alone, straight at the French lances.

"Kill him?" asked the man at the head of the table.

The dragoon nodded. "It was a pity. Joli garcon he was"--he ran a hand round a weather-beaten cheek as if to suggest the other's well-made face--"monocle in his eye--and he never let go of it until it fell off-- a lance through his heart."

As we talked two secret-service-men entered, demanded our papers, examined them, and directed us to call at the Maine for them next morning at eight o'clock. Now, indeed, we were walking a tight rope.

Following the genius who had got us our suppers, we emerged into the dark street, walked down it a few doors, entered a courtyard full of cavalry horses, where men in spurred boots were clanking up and down stairs. He thrust a heavy key into a lock, opened a door and ushered us into an empty and elegantly furnished house.

Here was a sombre dining-room with decanters and gla.s.ses, bedrooms with satin down quilts spread over the foot of the bed, and adjoining one of them a dressing-room with pomades and perfumes and rows of boots just as its owner had left it. Who he might be, why we should be here, how our mysterious, conductor--who knew no one in Villers-Cotteret and had but landed there himself that night--had arranged this occupation, was beyond finding out. At the moment, with military motor-trucks rumbling past outside, soldiers coming and going in the court and tramping about in the room overhead--an extension of the adjoining house--one scarcely thought of trying to find out. One merely accepted it, enchained by that uplifted finger and "Leave it to me!" For a time we talked under the dining-room light, with doors bolted and wooden shutters on street and courtyard closed, as if we were conspirators in Russian melodrama, and then we slept.

The Germans were evidently much nearer than Paris had supposed, and we should not have been greatly surprised to find them in the streets next morning. It was an Algerian horseman, however, m.u.f.fled up in his dingy white and looking rather chilly, who was riding past the window as I first looked out.

We went to the Mairie--not the grandfatherly old mayor this time, but a sharp-eyed special commissioner of police.

"After all," said he, when we had put our case, "you want to get as near the front as possible."

True, I answered, we did.

"Well," he said, with a gesture at once final and wholly French, "you are already farther than that. You are inside the lines." He crossed out the safe-conduct and on the laissez-pa.s.ser wrote: "Good for immediate return to Paris," and carefully set down the date. Half an hour later we were well on the road to Crepy, with the thunder which had drawn us. .h.i.ther rolling fainter and fainter in the north.

Chapter IV

The Fall Of Antwerp

The storm which was to burst over Antwerp the following night was gathering fast when we arrived on Tuesday morning. Army motor-trucks loaded with dismantled aeroplanes, and the less essential impedimenta screamed through the streets bound away from, not toward, the front. The Queen, that afternoon, was seen in the Hotel St. Antoine receiving the good-bys of various friends. Consuls suddenly locked their doors and fled. And the cannon rumbling along the eastern horizon as they had rumbled, nearer and nearer, for a fortnight, were now beyond the outer line of forts and within striking distance of the town. That night, an hour or two after midnight, in my hotel by the water-front, I awoke to the steady clatter of hoofs on cobblestones and the rumble of wheels. I went to the window, on the narrow side street, black as all streets had been in Antwerp since the night that the Zeppelin threw its first bombs, and looked out. It was a moonlight night, clear and cold, and there along the Quai St. Michael, at the end of the street, was an army in retreat. They were Belgians, battered and worn out with their unbroken weeks of hopeless fighting; cavalrymen on their tired horses, artillerymen, heads sunk on their chests, drowsing on their lurching caissons; the patient little foot-soldiers, rifles slung across their shoulders, scuffling along in their heavy overcoats.

In the dark shadow of the tall old houses a few people came out and stood there watching silently, and, as one felt, in a sort of despair.

All night long men were marching by--and in London they were still reading that it was but a "demonstration" the Germans were engaged in-- down the quay and across the pontoon bridge--the only way over the Scheldt--over to the Tete-de-Flandres and the road to Ghent. They were strung along the street next morning, boots mud-covered, mud-stained, intrenching shovels hanging to their belts, faces unshaven for weeks, just as they had come from the trenches; yet still patient and cheerful, with that unshakable Flemish good cheer. Perhaps, after all, it was not a retreat; they might be swinging round to the south and St. Nicholas to attack the German flank...

But before they had crossed, another army, a civilian army, flowed down on and over the quay. For a week people had been leaving Antwerp, now the general flight began. From villages to the east and southeast, from the city itself, people came pouring down. In wagons drawn by huge Belgian draft-horses, in carts pulled by the captivating Belgian work dogs, panting mightily and digging their paws into the slippery cobbles; on foot, leading little children and carrying babies and dolls and canaries and great bundles of clothes and household things wrapped in sheets, they surged toward that one narrow bridge and the crowded ferry-boats. I saw one old woman, gray-haired and tanned like an Indian squaw with work in the fields, yet with a fine, well-made face, pushing a groaning wheelbarrow. A strap went from the handles over her shoulders, and, stopping now and then to ask the news, she would slip off this harness, gossip for a time, then push on again. That afternoon under my window there was a tall wagon, a sort of hay wagon, in which there were twenty-two little tow-headed children, none more than eight or ten and several almost babies in arms. By the side of the wagon a man, evidently father of some of them, stood b.u.t.tering the end of a huge round loaf of bread and cutting off slice after slice, which the older children broke and distributed to the little ones. Two cows were tied to the back of the wagon and the man's wife squatted there milking them.

All along the quay and in the streets leading into it were people like this--harmless, helpless, hard-working people, going they knew not where. The entrance to the bridge was soon choked. One went away and returned an hour later and found the same people waiting almost in the same spot, and, with that wonderful calm and patience of theirs, feeding their children or giving a little of their precious hay to the horses, quietly waiting their turn while the cannon which had driven them from their homes kept on thundering behind them.

That afternoon I walked up-town through the shuttered, silent streets-- silent but for that incessant rumbling in the southeast and the occasional honking flight of some military automobile--to two of the hospitals. In one, a British hospital on the Boulevard Leopold, the doctor in charge was absent for the moment, and there was no one to answer my offer of occasional help if an outsider could be of use. As I sat waiting a tall, brisk Englishwoman, in nurse's uniform, came up and asked what I wanted. I told her.

"Oh," she said, and in her crisp, English voice, without further ado, "will you help me with a leg?"

She led the way into her ward, and there we contrived between us to bandage and slip a board and pillow under a fractured thigh. Between whispers of "Courage! Courage!" to the Belgian soldier, she said that she was the wife of a British general and had two sons in the army, and a third--"Poor boy!" she murmured, more to him than to me--on one of the ships in the North Sea. I arranged to come back next morning to help with the lifting, and went on to another hospital in the Rue Nerviens, to find that little English lady who crossed with me in the Ostend boat in August on the way to her sister's hospital in Antwerp.

Here in the quiet wards she had been working while the Germans swept down on Paris and were rolled back again, and while the little nation which she and her sister loved so well was being clubbed to its knees.

Louvain, Liege, Malines, Namur--chapters in all the long, pitiless story were lying there in the narrow iron beds. There were men with faces chewed by shrapnel, men burned in the explosion of the powder magazine at Fort Waelhem, when the attack on Antwerp began--dragged out from the underground pa.s.sage in which the garrison had sought momentary refuge and where most of them were killed, burned, and blackened. One strong, good-looking young fellow, able to eat and live apparently, was shot through the temples and blind in both eyes. It was the hour for carrying those well enough to stand it out into the court and giving them their afternoon's airing and smoke. One had lost an arm, another, a whimsical young Belgian, had only the stump of a left leg. When we started to lift him back into his bed, he said he had a better way than that. So he put his arms round my neck and showed me how to take him by the back and the well leg.

"Bon!" he said, and again "Bon!" when I let him down, and then, reaching out and patting me on the back, "Bon!" he smiled again.

That night, behind drawn curtains which admitted no light to the street, we dined peacefully and well, and, except for this unwonted seclusion, just outside which were the black streets and still the endless procession of carts and wagons and shivering people, one might have forgotten, in that cheerfully lighted room, that we were not in times of peace. We even loitered over a grate fire before going to bed, and talked in drowsy and almost indifferent fashion of whether it was absolutely sure that the Germans were trying to take the town.

It was almost exactly midnight that I found myself listening, half awake, to the familiar sound of distant cannon. One had come to think of it, almost, as nothing but a sound; and to listen with a detached and not unpleasant interest as a man tucked comfortably in bed follows a roll of thunder to its end or listens to the fall of rain.

It struck me suddenly that there was something new about this sound; I sat up in bed to listen, and at that instant a far-off, sullen "Boom !"

was followed by a crash as if lightning had struck a house a little way down the street. As I hurried to the window there came another far-off detonation, a curious wailing whistle swept across the sky, and over behind the roofs to the left there was another crash.

One after another they came, at intervals of half a minute, or screaming on each other's heels as if racing to their goal. And then the crash or, if farther away, m.u.f.fled explosion as another roof toppled in or cornice dropped off, as a house made of canvas drops to pieces in a play.

The effect of those unearthly wails, suddenly singing in across country in the dead of night from six--eight--ten miles away--Heaven knows where--was, as the Germans intended it to be, tremendous. It is not easy to describe nor to be imagined by those who had not lived in that threatened city--the last Belgian stronghold--and felt that vast, unseen power rolling nearer and nearer. And now, all at once, it was here, materialized, demoniacal, a flying death, swooping across the dark into your very room.

It was like one of those dreams in which you cannot stir from your tracks, and meanwhile "Boom... Tzee-ee-ee-ee !"--is this one meant for you?

Already there was a patter of feet in the dark, and people with white bundles on their backs went stumbling by toward the river and the bridge. Motors came honking down from the inner streets, and the quay, which had begun to clear by this time, was again jammed. I threw on some clothes, hurried to the street. A rank smell of kerosene hung in the air; presently a petrol sh.e.l.l burst to the southward, lighting up the sky for an instant like the flare from a blast-furnace, and a few moments later there showed over the roofs the flames of the first fire.

Although we could hear the wail of sh.e.l.ls flying across their wide parabola both into the town and out from the first ring of forts, few burst in our part of the city that night, and we walked up as far as the cathedral without seeing anything but black and silent streets. Every one in the hotel was up and dressed by this time. Some were for leaving at once; one family, piloted by the comfortable Belgian servants--far cooler than any one else--went to the cellar, some gathered about the grate in the writing-room to watch the night out; the rest of us went back to bed.