Fighting in Flanders Part 4

"Of course," replied General von Boehn, "there is always danger of women and children being killed during street fighting if they insist on coming into the streets. It is unfortunate, but it is war."

"But how about a woman's body I saw with the hands and feet cut off? How about the white-haired man and his son whom I helped to bury outside of Sempst, who had been killed merely because a retreating Belgian soldier had shot a German soldier outside their house? There were twenty-two bayonet wounds in the old man's face. I counted them. How about the little girl, two years old, who was shot while in her mother's arms by a Uhlan and whose funeral I attended at Heyst-op-den-Berg? How about the old man near Vilvorde who was hung by his hands from the rafters of his house and roasted to death by a bonfire being built under him?"

The general seemed taken aback by the exactness of my information.

"Such things are horrible if true," he said. "Of course, our soldiers, like soldiers in all armies, sometimes get out of hand and do things which we would never tolerate if we knew it. At Louvain, for example, I sentenced two soldiers to twelve years' penal servitude each for a.s.saulting a woman."

"Apropos of Louvain," I remarked, "why did you destroy the library?"

"We regretted that as much as anyone else," was the answer. "It caught fire from burning houses and we could not save it."

"But why did you burn Louvain at all?" I asked.

"Because the townspeople fired on our troops. We actually found machine-guns in some of the houses. And," smashing his fist down upon the table, "whenever civilians fire upon our troops we will teach them a lasting lesson. If women and children insist on getting in the way of bullets, so much the worse for the women and children."

"How do you explain the bombardment of Antwerp by Zeppelins?" I inquired.

"Zeppelins have orders to drop their bombs only on fortifications and soldiers," he answered.

"As a matter of fact," I remarked, "they destroyed only private houses and innocent civilians, several of whom were women. If one of those bombs had dropped two hundred yards nearer my hotel I wouldn't be here to-day smoking one of your excellent cigars."

"That is a calamity which, thank G.o.d, didn't happen," he replied.

"If you feel for my safety as deeply as that, General," I said, earnestly, "you can make quite sure of my coming to no harm by sending no more Zeppelins."

"Well, Herr Powell," he said, laughing, "we will think about it. And," he continued gravely, "I trust that you will tell the American people, through your great paper, what I have told you to-day. Let them hear our side of this atrocity business. It is only justice that they should be made familiar with both sides of the question."

I have quoted my conversation with General von Boehn as nearly verbatim as I can remember it. I have no comments to make. I will leave it to my readers to decide for themselves just how convincing were the answers of the German General Staff--for General von Boehn was but its mouthpiece--to the Belgian accusations. Before we began our conversation I asked the general if my photographer, Thompson, might be permitted to take photographs of the great army which was pa.s.sing. Five minutes later Thompson whirled away in a military motor-car, ciceroned by the officer who had attended the army school at Fort Riley. It seems that they stopped the car beside the road, in a place where the light was good, and when Thompson saw approaching a regiment or a battery or a squadron of which he wished a picture he would tell the officer, whereupon the officer would blow a whistle and the whole column would halt.

"Just wait a few minutes until the dust settles," Thompson would remark, lighting a cigar, and the Ninth Imperial Army, whose columns stretched over the country-side as far as the eye could see, would stand in its tracks until the air was sufficiently clear to get a good picture.

A field battery of the Imperial Guard rumbled past and Thompson made some remark about the accuracy of the American gunners at Vera Cruz.

"Let us show you what our gunners can do," said the officer, and he gave an order. There were more orders--a perfect volley of them. A bugle shrilled, eight horses strained against their collars, the drivers cracked their whips, the cannoneers put their shoulders to the wheels, and a gun left the road and swung into position in an adjacent field. On a knoll three miles away an ancient windmill was beating the air with its huge wings. A sh.e.l.l hit the windmill and tore it into splinters.

"Good work," Thompson observed critically. "If those fellows of yours keep on they'll be able to get a job in the American navy when the war is over."

In all the annals of modern war I do not believe that there is a parallel to this little Kansas photographer halting, with peremptory hand, an advancing army and leisurely photographing it, regiment by regiment, and then having a field-gun of the Imperial Guard go into action solely to gratify his curiosity.

They were very courteous and hospitable to me, those German officers, and I was immensely interested with all that I saw. But, when all is said and done, they impressed me not as human beings, who have weaknesses and virtues, likes and dislikes of their own, but rather as parts, more or less important, of a mighty and highly efficient machine which is directed and controlled by a cold and calculating intelligence in far-away Berlin. That machine has about as much of the human element as a meat-chopper, as a steam- roller, as the death-chair at Sing Sing. Its mission is to crush, obliterate, destroy, and no considerations of civilization or chivalry or humanity will affect it. I think that the Germans, with their grim, set faces, their monotonous uniforms, and the ceaseless shuffle, shuffle, shuffle of their boots must have gotten on my nerves, for it was with a distinct feeling of relief that I turned the bonnet of my car once more towards Antwerp and my friends the Belgians.

VI. On The Belgian Battle-Line

In writing of the battles in Belgium I find myself at a loss as to what names to give them. After the treaty-makers have affixed their signatures to a piece of parchment and the arm-chair historians have settled down to the task of writing a connected account of the campaign, the various engagements will doubtless be properly cla.s.sified and labelled--and under the names which they will receive in the histories we, who were present at them, will probably not recognize them at all. Until such time, then, as history has granted them the justice of perspective, I can only refer to them as "the fight at Sempst" or "the first engagement at Alost" or "the battle of Vilvorde" or "the taking of Termonde." Not only this, but the engagements that seemed to us to be battles, or remarkably lifelike imitations of battles, may be dismissed by the historians as unimportant skirmishes and contacts, while those engagements that we carelessly referred to at the time as "sc.r.a.ps" may well prove, in the light of future events, to have been of far greater significance than we realized. I don't even know how many engagements I witnessed, for I did not take the trouble to keep count. Thompson, who was with me from the beginning of the campaign to the end, told a reporter who interviewed him upon his return to London that we had been present at thirty-two engagements, large and small. Though I do not vouch, mind you, for the accuracy of this a.s.sertion, it is not as improbable as it sounds, for, from the middle of August to the fall of Antwerp in the early part of October, it was a poor day that didn't produce a fight of some sort. The fighting in Belgium at this stage of the war may be said to have been confined to an area within a triangle whose corners were Antwerp, Aerschot and Termonde. The southern side of this triangle, which ran somewhat to the south of Malines, was nearly forty miles in length, and it was this forty-mile front, extending from Aerschot on the east to Termonde on the west, which, during the earlier stages of the campaign, formed the Belgian battle-line. As the campaign progressed and the Germans developed their offensive, the Belgians were slowly forced back within the converging sides of the triangle until they were squeezed into the angle formed by Antwerp, where they made their last stand.

The theatre of operations was, from the standpoint of a professional onlooker like myself, very inconsiderately arranged. Nature had provided neither orchestra-stalls nor boxes. All the seats were bad. In fact it was quite impossible to obtain a good view of the stage and of the uniformed actors who were presenting the most stupendous spectacle in all history upon it. The whole region, you see, was absolutely flat--as flat as the top of a table--and there wasn't anything even remotely resembling a hill anywhere. To make matters worse, the country was criss-crossed by a perfect network of rivers and brooks and ca.n.a.ls and ditches; the highways and the railways, which had to be raised to keep them from being washed out by the periodic inundations, were so thickly screened by trees as to be quite useless for purposes of observation; and in the rare places where a rise in the ground might have enabled one to get a comprehensive view of the surrounding country, dense groves of trees or red-and-white villages almost invariably intervened. One could be within a few hundred yards of the firing-line and literally not see a thing save the fleecy puffs of bursting shrapnel. Indeed, I don't know what we should have done had it not been for the church towers. These were conveniently sprinkled over the landscape-- every cl.u.s.ter of houses seemed to have one--and did their best to make up for the region's topographical shortcomings. The only disadvantage attaching to the use of the church-spires as places to view the fighting from was that the military observers and the officers controlling the fire of the batteries used them for the same purpose. The enemy knew this, of course, and almost the first thing he did, therefore, was to open fire on them with his artillery and drive those observers out. This accounts for the fact that in many sections of Belgium there is not a church-spire left standing. When we ascended a church tower, therefore, for the purpose of obtaining a general view of an engagement, we took our chances and we knew it. More than once, when the enemy got the range and their sh.e.l.ls began to shriek and yowl past the belfry in which I was stationed, I have raced down the rickety ladders at a speed which, under normal conditions, would probably have resulted in my breaking my neck. In view of the restrictions imposed upon correspondents in the French and Russian theatres of war, I suppose that instead of finding fault with the seating arrangements I should thank my lucky stars that I did not have to write my dispatches with the aid of an ordnance-map and a guide-book in a hotel bedroom a score or more of miles from the firing-line.

The Belgian field army consisted of six divisions and a brigade of cavalry and numbered, on paper at least, about 180,000 men. I very much doubt, however, if King Albert had in the field at anyone time more than 120,000 men--a very large proportion of whom were, of course, raw recruits. Now the Belgian army, when all is said and done, was not an army according to the Continental definition; it was not much more than a glorified police force, a militia. No one had ever dreamed that it would be called upon to fight, and hence, when war came, it was wholly unprepared. That it was able to offer the stubborn and heroic resistance which it did to the advance of the German legions speaks volumes for Belgian stamina and courage. Many of the troops were armed with rifles of an obsolete pattern, the supply of ammunition was insufficient, and though the artillery was on the whole of excellent quality, it was placed at a tremendous disadvantage by the superior range and calibre of the German field- guns. The men did not even have the protection afforded by neutral- coloured uniforms, but fought from first to last in clothes of blue and green and blazing scarlet. As I stood one day in the Place de Meir in Antwerp and watched a regiment of mud-bespattered guides clatter past, it was hard to believe that I was living in the twentieth century and not in the beginning of the nineteenth, for instead of serviceable uniforms of grey or drab or khaki, these men wore the befrogged green jackets, the cherry-coloured breeches, and the huge fur busbies which characterized the soldiers of Napoleon.

The carabineers, for example, wore uniforms of bottle-green and queer sugar-loaf hats of patent leather which resembled the headgear of the Directoire period. Both the grenadiers and the infantry of the line marched and fought and slept in uniforms of heavy blue cloth piped with scarlet and small, round, visorless fatigue-caps which afforded no protection from either sun or rain. Some of the men remedied this by fitting their caps with green reading-shades, such as undergraduates wear when they are cramming for examinations, so that at first glance a regiment looked as though its ranks were filled with either jockeys or students. The gendarmes--who, by the way, were always to be found where the fighting was hottest--were the most unsuitably uniformed of all, for the blue coats and silver aiguillettes and towering bearskins which served to impress the simple country-folk made splendid targets for the German marksmen. This medley of picturesque and brilliant uniforms was wonderfully effective, of course, and whenever I came upon a group of lancers in sky-blue and yellow lounging about the door of a wayside tavern or met a patrol of guides in their green jackets and scarlet breeches trotting along a country-road, I always had the feeling that I was looking at a painting by Meissonier or Detaille.

At the beginning of the war the Belgian cavalry was as well mounted as that of any European army, many of the officers having Irish hunters, while the men were mounted on Hungarian-bred stock. The almost incessant campaigning, combined with lack of proper food and care, had its effect upon the horses, however, and before the campaign in Flanders was half over the cavalry mounts were a raw- boned and sorry-looking lot. The Belgian field artillery was horsed magnificently: the st.u.r.dy, hardy animals native to Luxembourg and the Ardennes making admirable material for gun-teams, while the great Belgian draught-horses could scarcely have been improved upon for the army's heavier work.

Speaking of cavalry, the thing that I most wanted to see when I went to the war was a cavalry charge. I had seen mounted troops in action, of course, both in Africa and in Asia, but they had brown skins and wore fantastic uniforms. What I wanted to see was one of those charges such as Meissonier used to paint--scarlet breeches and steel helmets and a sea of brandished sword-blades and all that sort of thing. But when I confided my wish to an American army officer whom I met on the boat going over he promptly discouraged me. "Cavalry charges are a thing of the past," he a.s.serted. "There will never be one again. The modern high-power rifle has made them impossible. Henceforward cavalry will only be used for scouting purposes or as mounted infantry." He spoke with great positiveness, I remember, having been, you see, in both the Cuban and Philippine campaigns. According to the textbooks and the military experts and the armchair tacticians he was perfectly right; I believe that all of the writers on military subjects agree in saying that cavalry charges are obsolete as a form of attack. But the trouble with the Belgians was that they didn't play the war-game according to the rules in the book. They were very primitive in their conceptions of warfare. Their idea was that whenever they got within sight of a German regiment to go after that regiment and exterminate it, and they didn't care whether in doing it they used horse, foot, or guns. It was owing, therefore, to this total disregard for the rules laid down in the textbooks that I saw my cavalry charge. Let me tell you about it while I have the chance, for there is no doubt that cavalry charges are getting scarce and I may never see another.

It was in the region between Termonde and Alost. This is a better country for cavalry to manoeuvre in than most parts of Flanders, for sometimes one can go almost a mile without being stopped by a ca.n.a.l. A considerable force of Germans had pushed north from Alost and the Belgian commander ordered a brigade of cavalry, composed of the two regiments of guides and, if I remember rightly, two regiments of lancers, to go out and drive them back. After a morning spent in skirmishing and manoeuvring for position, the Belgian cavalry commander got his Germans where he wanted them. The Germans were in front of a wood, and between them and the Belgians lay as pretty a stretch of open country as a cavalryman could ask for. Now the Germans occupied a strong position, mind you, and the proper thing to have done according to the books would have been to have demoralized them with sh.e.l.l-fire and then to have followed it up with an infantry attack. But the grizzled old Belgian commander did nothing of the sort. He had fifteen hundred troopers who were simply praying for a chance to go at the Germans with cold steel, and he gave them the chance they wanted. Tossing away his cigarette and tightening the chin-strap of his busby, he trotted out in front of his men. "Right into line!" he bellowed. Two long lines--one the guides, in green and scarlet, the other the lancers, in blue and yellow--spread themselves across the fields. "Trot!" The bugles squealed the order. "Gallop!" The forest of lances dropped from vertical to horizontal and the cloud of gaily fluttering pennons changed into a bristling hedge of steel. "Charge!" came the order, and the spurs went home. "Vive la Belgique! Vive la Belgique!" roared the troopers--and the Germans, not liking the look of those long and cruel lances, fell back precipitately into the wood where the troopers could not follow them. Then, their work having been accomplished, the cavalry came trotting back again. Of course, from a military standpoint it was an affair of small importance, but so far as colour and action and excitement were concerned it was worth having gone to Belgium to see.

After the German occupation of Brussels, the first engagement of sufficient magnitude to be termed a battle took place on August 25 and 26 in the Sempst-Elewyt-Eppeghem-Vilvorde region, midway between Brussels and Malines. The Belgians had in action four divisions, totalling about sixty thousand men, opposed to which was a considerably heavier force of Germans. To get a clear conception of the battle one must picture a fifty-foot-high railway embankment, its steeply sloping sides heavily wooded, stretching its length across a fertile, smiling country-side like a monstrous green snake. On this line, in time of peace, the bloc trains made the journey from Antwerp to Brussels in less than an hour. Malines, with its historic buildings and its famous cathedral, lies on one side of this line and the village of Vilvorde on the other, five miles separating them. On the 25th the Belgians, believing the Brussels garrison to have been seriously weakened and the German communications poorly guarded, moved out in force from the shelter of the Antwerp forts and a.s.sumed a vigorous offensive. It was like a terrier attacking a bulldog.

They drove the Germans from Malines by the very impetus of their attack, but the Germans brought up heavy reinforcements, and by the morning of the 26th the Belgians were in a most perilous position. The battle hinged on the possession of the railway embankment had gradually extended, each army trying to outflank the other, until it was being fought along a front of twenty miles. At dawn on the second day an artillery duel began across the embankment, the German fire being corrected by observers in captive balloons. By noon the Germans had gotten the range and a rain of shrapnel was bursting about the Belgian batteries, which limbered up and retired at a trot in perfect order. After the guns were out of range I could see the dark blue ma.s.ses of the supporting Belgian infantry slowly falling back, cool as a winter's morning. Through an oversight, however, two battalions of carabineers did not receive the order to retire and were in imminent danger of being cut off and destroyed.

Then occurred one of the bravest acts that I have ever seen. To reach them a messenger would have to traverse a mile of open road, swept by-shrieking shrapnel and raked by rifle-fire. There was about one chance in a thousand of a man getting to the end of that road alive. A colonel standing beside me under a railway-culvert summoned a gendarme, gave him the necessary orders, and added, "Bonne chance, mon brave." The man, a fierce-moustached fellow who would have gladdened the heart of Napoleon, knew that he was being sent into the jaws of death, but he merely saluted, set spurs to his horse, and tore down the road, an archaic figure in his towering bearskin. He reached the troops uninjured and gave the order for them to retreat, but as they fell back the German gunners got the range and with marvellous accuracy dropped sh.e.l.l after sh.e.l.l into the running column. Soon road and fields were dotted with corpses in Belgian blue.

Time after time the Germans attempted to carry the railway embankment with the bayonet, but the Belgians met them with blasts of lead which shrivelled the grey columns as leaves are shrivelled by an autumn wind. By mid-afternoon the Belgians and Germans were in places barely a hundred yards apart, and the rattle of musketry sounded like a boy drawing a stick along the palings of a picket-fence. During the height of the battle a Zeppelin slowly circled over the field like a great vulture awaiting a feast. So heavy was the fighting that the embankment of a branch railway from which I viewed the afternoon's battle was literally carpeted with the corpses of Germans who had been killed during the morning. One of them had died clasping a woman's picture. He was buried with it still clenched in his hand. I saw peasants throw twelve bodies into one grave. One peasant would grasp a corpse by the shoulders and another would take its feet and they would give it a swing as though it were a sack of meal. As I watched these inanimate forms being carelessly tossed into the trench it was hard to make myself believe that only a few hours before they had been sons or husbands or fathers and that somewhere across the Rhine women and children were waiting and watching and praying for them. At a hamlet near Sempst I helped to bury an aged farmer and his son, inoffensive peasants, who had been executed by the Germans because a retreating Belgian soldier had shot a Uhlan in front of their farmhouse. Not content with shooting them, they had disfigured them almost beyond recognition. There were twenty-two bayonet wounds in the old man's face. I know, for I counted them.

By four o'clock all the Belgian troops were withdrawn except a thin screen to cover the retreat. As I wished to see the German advance I remained on the railway embankment on the outskirts of Sempst after all the Belgians, save a picket of ten men, had been withdrawn from the village. I had my car waiting in the road below with the motor running. As the German infantry would have to advance across a mile of open fields it was obvious that I would have ample time in which to get away. The Germans prefaced their advance by a terrific cannonade. The air was filled with whining shrapnel. Farmhouses collapsed amid puffs of brown smoke. The sky was smeared in a dozen places with the smoke of burning hamlets. Suddenly a soldier crouching beside me cried, "Les Allemands! Les Allemands!" and from the woods which screened the railway- embankment burst a long line of grey figures, hoa.r.s.ely cheering. At almost the same moment I heard a sudden splutter of shots in the village street behind me and my driver screamed, "Hurry for your life, monsieur! The Uhlans are upon us!" In my desire to see the main German advance it had never occurred to me that a force of the enemy's cavalry might slip around and take us in the flank, which was exactly what had happened. It was three hundred yards to the car and a freshly ploughed field lay between, but I am confident that I broke the world's record for the distance. As I leaped into the car and we shot down the road at fifty miles an hour, the Uhlans cantered into the village, the sunlight striking on their lance- tips. It was a close call.

The retreat from Malines provided a spectacle which I shall never forget. For twenty miles every road was jammed with clattering cavalry, plodding infantry, and rumbling batteries, the guns, limbers, and caissons still covered with the green boughs which had been used to mask their position from German aeroplanes. Gendarmes in giant bearskins, cha.s.seurs in uniforms of green and yellow, carabineers with their shiny leather hats, grenadiers, infantry of the line, guides, lancers, sappers and miners with picks and spades, engineers with pontoon-wagons, machine-guns drawn by dogs, ambulances with huge Red Cross flags fluttering above them, and cars, cars, cars, all the dear old familiar American makes among them, contributed to form a mighty river flowing towards Antwerp. Malines formerly had a population of fifty thousand people, and forty-five thousand of these fled when they heard that the Germans were returning. The scenes along the road were heart-rending in their pathos. The very young and the very old, the rich and the well- to-do and the poverty-stricken, the lame and the sick and the blind, with the few belongings they had been able to save in sheet- wrapped bundles on their backs or piled in push-carts, clogged the roads and impeded the soldiery. These people were abandoning all that they held most dear to pillage and destruction. They were completely terrorized by the Germans. But the Belgian army was not terrorized. It was a retreating army but it was victorious in retreat. The soldiers were cool, confident, courageous, and gave me the feeling that if the German giant left himself unguarded a single instant little Belgium would drive home a solar-plexus blow.

For many days after its evacuation by the Belgians, Malines occupied an unhappy position midway between the contending armies, being alternately bombarded by the Belgians and the Germans. The latter, instead of endeavouring to avoid damaging the splendid cathedral, whose tower, three hundred and twenty-five feet high, is the most conspicuous landmark in the region, seemed to take a grim pleasure in directing their fire upon the ancient building. The great clock, the largest in Belgium, was destroyed; the famous stained-gla.s.s windows were broken; the exquisite carvings were shattered; and sh.e.l.ls, crashing through the walls and roof, converted the beautiful interior into a heap of debris. As there were no Belgian troops in Malines at this time, and as this fact was perfectly well known to the Germans, this bombardment of an undefended city and the destruction of its historic monuments struck me as being peculiarly wanton and not induced by any military necessity. It was, of course, part and parcel of the German policy of terrorism and intimidation. The bombardment of cities, the destruction of historic monuments, the burning of villages, and, in many cases, the ma.s.sacre of civilians was the price which the Belgians were forced to pay for resisting the invader.

In order to ascertain just what damage had been done to the city, and particularly to the cathedral, I ran into Malines in my car during a pause in the bombardment. As the streets were too narrow to permit of turning the car around, and as it was more than probable that we should have to get out in a hurry, Roos suggested that we run in backward, which we did, I standing up in the tonneau, field-gla.s.ses glued to my eyes, on the look-out for lurking Germans. I don't recall ever having had a more eerie experience than that surrept.i.tious visit to Malines. The city was as silent and deserted as a cemetery; there was not a human being to be seen; and as we cautiously advanced through the narrow, winding streets, the vacant houses echoed the throbbing of the motor with a racket which was positively startling. Just as we reached the square in front of the cathedral a German sh.e.l.l came shrieking over the house-tops and burst with a shattering crash in the upper story of a building a few yards away. The whole front of that building came crashing down about us in a cascade of brick and plaster. We did not stay on the order of our going. No. We went out of that town faster than any automobile every went out of it before. We went so fast, in fact, that we struck and killed the only remaining inhabitant. He was a large yellow dog.

Owing to strategic reasons the magnitude and significance of the great four days' battle which was fought in mid-September between the Belgian field army and the combined German forces in Northern Belgium was carefully masked in all official communications at the time, and, in the rush of later events, its importance was lost sight of. Yet the great flanking movement of the Allies in France largely owed its success to this determined offensive movement on the part of the Belgians, who, as it afterwards proved, were acting in close co-operation with the French General Staff. This unexpected sally, which took the Germans completely by surprise, not only compelled them to concentrate all their available forces in Belgium, but, what was far more important, it necessitated the hasty recall of their Third and Ninth armies, which were close to the French frontier and whose addition to the German battle-line in France might well have turned the scales in Germany's favour. In addition the Germans had to bring up their Landwehr and Landsturm regiments from the south of Brussels, and a naval division composed of fifteen thousand sailors and marines was also engaged. It is no exaggeration, then, to say that the success of the Allies on the Aisne was in great measure due to the sacrifices made on this occasion by the Belgian army. Every available man which the Germans could put into the field was used to hold a line running through Sempst, Weerde, Campenhout, Wespelaer, Rotselaer, and Holsbeek. The Belgians lay to the north-east of this line, their left resting on Aerschot and their centre at Meerbeek. Between the opposing armies stretched the Malines-Louvain ca.n.a.l, along almost the entire length of which fighting as b.l.o.o.d.y as any in the war took place.

To describe this battle--I do not even know by what name it will be known to future generations--would be to usurp the duties of the historian, and I shall only attempt, therefore, to tell you of that portion of it which I saw with my own eyes. On the morning of September 13 four Belgian divisions moved southward from Malines, their objective being the town of Weerde, on the Antwerp- Brussels railway. It was known that the Germans occupied Weerde in force, so throughout the day the Belgian artillery, masked by heavy woods, pounded away incessantly. By noon the enemy's guns ceased to reply, which was a.s.sumed by the jubilant Belgians to be a sign that the German artillery had been silenced. At noon the Belgian First Division moved forward and Thompson and I, leaving the car in front of a convent over which the Red Cross flag was flying, moved forward with it. Standing quite by itself in the middle of a field, perhaps a mile beyond the convent, was a two-story brick farmhouse. A hundred yards in front of the farmhouse stretched the raised, stone-paved, tree-lined highway which runs from Brussels to Antwerp, and on the other side of the highway was Weerde. Sheltering ourselves as much as possible in the trenches which zigzagged across the field, and dashing at full speed across the open places which were swept by rifle-fire, we succeeded in reaching the farmhouse. Ascending to the garret, we broke a hole through the tiled roof and found ourselves looking down upon the battle precisely as one looks down on a cricket match from the upper tier of seats at Lord's. Lying in the deep ditch which bordered our side of the highway was a Belgian infantry brigade, composed of two regiments of carabineers and two regiments of cha.s.seurs a pied, the men all crouching in the ditch or lying p.r.o.ne upon the ground. Five hundred yards away, on the other side of the highway, we could see through the trees the whitewashed walls and red pottery roofs of Weerde, while a short distance to the right, in a heavily wooded park, was a large stone chateau. The only sign that the town was occupied was a pall of blue-grey vapour which hung over it and a continuous crackle of musketry coming from it, though occasionally, through my gla.s.ses, I could catch glimpses of the lean muzzles of machine-guns protruding from the upper windows of the chateau.

Now you must bear in mind the fact that in this war soldiers fired from the trenches for days on end without once getting a glimpse of the enemy. They knew that somewhere opposite them, in that bit of wood, perhaps, or behind that group of buildings, or on the other side of that railway-embankment, the enemy was trying to kill them just as earnestly as they were trying to kill him. But they rarely got a clear view of him save in street fighting and, of course, when he was advancing across open country. Soldiers no longer select their man and pick him off as one would pick off a stag, because the great range of modern rifles has put the firing-lines too far apart for that sort of thing. Instead, therefore, of aiming at individuals, soldiers aim at the places where they believe those individuals to be. Each company commander shows his men their target, tells them at what distance to set their sights, and controls their expenditure of ammunition, the fire of infantry generally being more effective when delivered in bursts by sections.

What I have said in general about infantry being unable to see the target at which they are firing was particularly true at Weerde owing to the dense foliage which served to screen the enemy's position. Occasionally, after the explosion of a particularly well-placed Belgian sh.e.l.l, Thompson and I, from our hole in the roof and with the aid of our high-power gla.s.ses, could catch fleeting glimpses of scurrying grey-clad figures, but that was all. The men below us in the trenches could see nothing except the hedges, gardens, and red-roofed houses of a country town. They knew the enemy was there, however, from the incessant rattle of musketry and machine-guns and from the screams and exclamations of those of their fellows who happened to get in the bullets' way.

Late in the afternoon word was pa.s.sed down the line that the German guns had been put out of action, that the enemy was retiring and that at 5.30 sharp the whole Belgian line would advance and take the town with the bayonet. Under cover of artillery fire so continuous that it sounded like thunder in the mountains, the Belgian infantry climbed out of the trenches and, throwing aside their knapsacks, formed up behind the road preparatory to the grand a.s.sault. A moment later a dozen dog batteries came trotting up and took position on the left of the infantry. At 5.30 to the minute the whistles of the officers sounded shrilly and the mile-long line of men swept forward cheering. They crossed the roadway, they scrambled over ditches, they climbed fences, they pushed through hedges, until they were within a hundred yards of the line of buildings which formed the outskirts of the town. Then h.e.l.l itself broke loose. The whole German front, which for several hours past had replied but feebly to the Belgian fire, spat a continuous stream of lead and flame. The rolling crash of musketry and the ripping snarl of machine-guns were stabbed by the vicious pom-pom-pom- pom-pom of the quick-firers. From every window of the three-storied chateau opposite us the lean muzzles of mitrailleuses poured out their hail of death. I have seen fighting on four continents, but I have never witnessed so deadly a fire as that which wiped out the head of the Belgian column as a sponge wipes out figures on a slate.

The Germans had prepared a trap and the Belgians had walked--or rather charged--directly into it. Three minutes later the dog batteries came tearing back on a dead run. That should have been a signal that it was high time for us to go, but, in spite of the fact that a storm was brewing, we waited to see the last inning. Then things began to happen with a rapidity that was bewildering. Back through the hedges, across the ditches, over the roadway came the Belgian infantry, crouching, stooping, running for their lives, Every now and then a soldier would stumble, as though he had stubbed his toe, and throw out his arms and fall headlong. A bullet had hit him. The road was sprinkled with silent forms in blue and green. The fields were sprinkled with them too. One man was. .h.i.t as he was struggling to get through a hedge and died standing, held upright by the th.o.r.n.y branches. Men with blood streaming down their faces, men with horrid crimson patches on their tunics, limped, crawled, staggered past, leaving scarlet trails behind them. A young officer of cha.s.seurs, who had been recklessly exposing himself while trying to check the retreat of his men, suddenly spun around on his heels, like one of those wooden toys which the curb vendors sell, and then crumpled up, as though all the bone and muscle had gone out of him. A man plunged into a half-filled ditch and lay there, with his head under water. I could see the water slowly redden.