In order to grasp the true significance
of the events which preceded and led up to the fall
of Antwerp, it is necessary to understand the extraordinary
conditions which existed in and around that city when
I reached there in the middle of August. At that
time all that was left to the Belgians of Belgium
were the provinces of Limbourg, Antwerp, and East
and West Flanders. Everything else was in the
possession of the Germans. Suppose, for the sake
of, having things quite clear, that you unfold the
map of Belgium. Now, with your pencil, draw a
line across the country from east to west, starting
at the Dutch city of Maastricht and passing through
Hasselt, Diest, Aerschot, Malines, Alost, and Courtrai
to the French frontier. This line was, roughly
speaking, “the front,” and for upwards
of two months fighting of a more or less serious character
took place along its entire length. During August
and the early part of September this fighting consisted,
for the most part, of attempts by the Belgian field
army to harass the enemy and to threaten his lines
of communication and of counter-attacks by the Germans,
during which Aerschot, Malines, Sempst, and Termonde
repeatedly changed hands. Some twenty miles or
so behind this line was the great fortified position
of Antwerp, its outer chain of forts enclosing an
area with a radius of nearly fifteen miles.
Antwerp, with its population of four
hundred thousand souls, its labyrinth of dim and winding
streets lined by mediaeval houses, and its splendid
modern boulevards, lies on the east bank of the Scheldt,
about fifteen miles from Dutch territorial waters,
at a hairpin-turn in the river. The defences
of the city were modern, extensive, and generally
believed, even by military experts, to be little short
of impregnable. In fact, Antwerp was almost universally
considered one of the three or four strongest fortified
positions in Europe. In order to capture the
city it would be necessary for an enemy to break through
four distinct lines of defence, any one of which,
it was believed, was strong enough to oppose successfully
any force which could be brought against it. The
outermost line of forts began at Lierre, a dozen
miles to the south-east of the city, and swept in
a great quarter-circle, through Wavre-St. Catherine,
Waelhem, Heyndonck and Willebroeck, to the Scheldt
at Ruppelmonde.
Two or three miles behind this outer
line of forts a second line of defence was formed
by the Ruppel and the Nethe, which, together with
the Scheldt, make a great natural waterway around
three sides of the city. Back of these rivers,
again, was a second chain of forts completely encircling
the city on a five-mile radius. The moment that
the first German soldier set his foot on Belgian soil
the military authorities began the herculean task of
clearing of trees and buildings a great zone lying
between this inner circle of forts and the city ramparts
in order that an investing force might have no cover.
It is estimated that within a fortnight the Belgian
sappers and engineers destroyed property to the value
of L16,000,000. Not San Francisco after the earthquake,
nor Dayton after the flood, nor Salem after the fire
presented scenes of more complete desolation than
did the suburbs of Antwerp after the soldiers had
finished with them.
On August 1, 1914, no city in all
Europe could boast of more beautiful suburbs than
Antwerp. Hidden amid the foliage of great wooded
parks were stately chateaux; splendid country-houses
rose from amid acres of green plush lawns and blazing
gardens; the network of roads and avenues and bridle-paths
were lined with venerable trees, whose branches, meeting
overhead, formed leafy tunnels; scattered here and
there were quaint old-world villages, with plaster
walls and pottery roofs and lichen-covered church
spires. By the last day of August all this had
disappeared. The loveliest suburbs in Europe
had been wiped from the earth as a sponge wipes figures
from a slate. Every house and church and windmill,
every tree and hedge and wall, in a zone some two or
three miles wide by twenty long, was literally levelled
to the ground. For mile after mile the splendid
trees which lined the highroads were ruthlessly cut
down; mansions which could fittingly have housed a
king were dynamited; churches whose walls had echoed
to the tramp of the Duke of Alba’s mail-clad
men-at-arms were levelled; villages whose picturesqueness
was the joy of artists and travellers were given over
to the flames. Certainly not since the burning
of Moscow has there been witnessed such a scene of
self-inflicted desolation. When the work of the
engineers was finished a jack-rabbit could not have
approached the forts without being seen. When
the work of levelling had been completed, acres upon
acres of barbed-wire entanglements were constructed,
the wires being grounded and connected with the city
lighting system so that a voltage could instantly
be turned on which would prove as deadly as the electric
chair at Sing Sing. Thousands of men were set
to work sharpening stakes and driving these stakes,
point upward, in the ground, so as to impale any soldiers
who fell upon them. In front of the stakes were
“man-traps,” thousands of barrels with
their heads knocked out being set in the ground and
then covered with a thin layer of laths and earth,
which would suddenly give way if a man walked upon
it and drop him into the hole below. And beyond
the zones of entanglements and chevaux de frise
and man-traps the beet and potato-fields were sown
with mines which were to be exploded by electricity
when the enemy was fairly over them, and blow that
enemy, whole regiments at a time, into eternity.
Stretching across the fields and meadows were what
looked at first glance like enormous red-brown serpents
but which proved, upon closer inspection, to be trenches
for infantry. The region to the south of Antwerp
is a network of canals, and on the bank of every canal
rose, as though by magic, parapets of sandbags.
Charges of dynamite were placed under every bridge
and viaduct and tunnel. Barricades of paving-stones
and mattresses and sometimes farm carts were built
across the highways. At certain points wires were
stretched across the roads at the height of a man’s
head for the purpose of preventing sudden dashes by
armoured motor-cars. The walls of such buildings
as were left standing were loopholed for musketry.
Machine-guns and quick-firers were mounted everywhere.
At night the white beams of the searchlights swept
this zone of desolation and turned it into day.
Now the pitiable thing about it was that all this
enormous destruction proved to have been wrought for
nothing, for the Germans, instead of throwing huge
masses of infantry against the forts, as it was anticipated
that they would do, and thus giving the entanglements
and the mine-fields and the machine-guns a chance
to get in their work, methodically pounded the forts
to pieces with siege-guns stationed a dozen miles
away. In fact, when the Germans entered Antwerp
not a strand of barbed wire had been cut, not a barricade
defended, not a mine exploded. This, mind you,
was not due to any lack of bravery on the part of
the Belgians Heaven knows, they did not
lack for that! but to the fact that the
Germans never gave them a chance to make use of these
elaborate and ingenious devices. It was like a
man letting a child painstakingly construct an edifice
of building-blocks and then, when it was completed,
suddenly sweeping it aside with his hand.
As a result of these elaborate precautions,
it was as difficult to go in or out of Antwerp as
it is popularly supposed to be for a millionaire to
enter the kingdom of Heaven. Sentries were as
thick as policemen in Piccadilly. You could not
proceed a quarter of a mile along any road, in any
direction, without being halted by a harsh “Qui
vive?” and having the business end of a
rifle turned in your direction. If your papers
were not in order you were promptly turned back or
arrested as a suspicious character and taken before
an officer for examination though if you
were sufficiently in the confidence of the military
authorities to be given the password, you were usually
permitted to pass without further question. It
was some time before I lost the thrill of novelty
and excitement produced by this halt-who-goes-there-advance-friend-and-give-the-countersign
business. It was so exactly the sort of thing
that, as a boy, I used to read about in books by George
A. Henty that it seemed improbable and unreal.
When we were motoring at night and a peremptory challenge
would come from out the darkness and the lamps of
the car would pick out the cloaked figure of the sentry
as the spotlight picks out the figure of an actor
on the stage, and I would lean forward and whisper
the magic mot d’ordre, I always had the feeling
that I was taking part in a play-which was not so
very far from the truth, for, though I did not appreciate
it at the time, we were all actors, more or less important,
in the greatest drama ever staged.
In the immediate vicinity of Antwerp
the sentries were soldiers of the regular army and
understood a sentry’s duties, but in the outlying
districts, particularly between Ostend and Ghent, the
roads were patrolled by members of the Garde
civique, all of whom seemed imbued with the idea
that the safety of the nation depended upon their
vigilance, which was a very commendable and proper
attitude indeed. When I was challenged by a Garde
civique I was always a little nervous, and wasted
no time whatever in jamming on the brakes, because
the poor fellows were nearly always excited and handled
their rifles in a fashion which was far from being
reassuring. More than once, while travelling
in the outlying districts, we were challenged by civil
guards who evidently had not been entrusted with the
password, but who, when it was whispered to them, would
nod their heads importantly and tell us to pass on.
“The next sentry that we meet,”
I said to Roos on one of these occasions, “probably
has no idea of the password. I’ll bet you
a box of cigars that I can give him any word that
comes into my head and that he won’t know the
difference.”
As we rolled over the ancient drawbridge
which gives admittance to sleepy Bruges, a bespectacled
sentry, who looked as though he had suddenly been
called from an accountant’s desk to perform the
duties of a soldier, held up his hand, palm outward,
which is the signal to stop the world over.
“Halt!” he commanded quaveringly.
“Advance slowly and give the word.”
I leaned out as the car came opposite
him. “Kalamazoo,” I whispered.
The next instant I was looking into the muzzle of his
rifle.
“Hands up!” he shouted,
and there was no longer any quaver in his voice.
“That is not the word. I shouldn’t
be surprised if you were German spies. Get out
of the car!”
It took half an hour of explanations
to convince him that we were not German spies, that
we really did know the password, and that we were
merely having a joke though not, as we had
planned, at his expense.
The force of citizen soldiery known
as the Garde civique has, so far as I am
aware, no exact counterpart in any other country.
It is composed of business and professional men whose
chief duties, prior to the war, had been to show themselves
on occasions of ceremony arrayed in gorgeous uniforms,
which varied according to the province. The mounted
division of the Antwerp Garde civique wore
a green and scarlet uniform which resembled as closely
as possible that of the Guides, the crack cavalry
corps of the Belgian army. In the Flemish towns
the civil guards wore a blue coat, so long in the
skirts that it had to be buttoned back to permit of
their walking, and a hat of stiff black felt, resembling
a bowler, with a feather stuck rakishly in the band.
Early in the war the Germans announced that they would
not recognize the Gardes civique as combatants,
and that any of them who were captured while fighting
would meet with the same fate as armed civilians.
This drastic ruling resulted in many amusing episodes.
When it was learned that the Germans were approaching
Ghent, sixteen hundred civil guardsmen threw their
rifles into the canal and, stripping off their uniforms,
ran about in the pink and light-blue under-garments
which the Belgians affect, frantically begging the
townspeople to lend them civilian clothing. As
a whole, however, these citizen-soldiers did admirable
service, guarding the roads, tunnels and bridges,
assisting the refugees, preserving order in the towns,
and, in Antwerp, taking entire charge of provisioning
the army.
No account of Antwerp in war time
would be complete without at least passing mention
of the boy scouts, who were one of the city’s
most picturesque and interesting features. I don’t
quite know how the city could have got along without
them. They were always on the job; they were
to be seen everywhere and they did everything.
They acted as messengers, as doorkeepers, as guides,
as orderlies for staff officers, and as couriers for
the various ministries; they ran the elevators in
the hotels, they worked in the hospitals, they assisted
the refugees to find food and lodgings. The boy
scouts stationed at the various ministries were on
duty twenty-four hours at a stretch. They slept
rolled up in blankets on the floors; they obtained
their meals where and when they could and paid for
them themselves, and made themselves extremely useful.
If you possessed sufficient influence to obtain a
motor-car, a boy scout was generally detailed to sit
beside the driver and open the door and act as a sort
of orderly. I had one. His name was Joseph.
He was most picturesque. He wore a sombrero with
a cherry-coloured puggaree and a bottle-green cape,
and his green stockings turned over at the top so
as to show knees as white and shapely as those of
a woman. To tell the truth, however, I had nothing
for him to do. So when I was not out in the car
he occupied himself in running the lift at the Hotel
St. Antoine. Joseph was with me during the German
attack on Waelhem. We were caught in a much hotter
place than we intended and for half an hour were under
heavy shrapnel fire. I was curious to see how
the youngster for he was only fourteen
would act. Finally he turned to me, his black
eyes snapping with excitement. “Have I
your permission to go a little nearer, monsieur?”
he asked eagerly. “I won’t be gone
long. I only want to get a German helmet.”
It may have been the valour of ignorance which these
broad-hatted, bare-kneed boys displayed, but it was
the sort of valour which characterized every Belgian
soldier. There was one youngster of thirteen
who was attached to an officer of the staff and who
was present at every battle of importance from the
evacuation of Brussels to the fall of Antwerp.
I remember seeing him during the retreat of the Belgians
from Wesemael, curled up in the tonneau of a car and
sleeping through all the turmoil and confusion.
I felt like waking him up and saying sternly, “Look
here, sonny, you’d better trot on home.
Your mother will be worried to death about you.”
I believe that four Belgian boy scouts gave up their
lives in the service of their country. Two were
run down and killed by automobiles while on duty in
Antwerp. Two others were, I understand, shot
by German troops near Brussels while attempting to
carry dispatches through the lines. One boy scout
became so adept at this sort of work that he was regularly
employed by the Government to carry messages through
to its agents in Brussels. His exploits would
provide material for a boy’s book of adventure
and, as a fitting conclusion, he was decorated by the
King.
Anyone who went to Belgium with hard-and-fast
ideas as to social distinctions quickly had them shattered.
The fact that a man wore a private’s uniform
and sat behind the steering-wheel of your car and
respectfully touched his cap when you gave him an order
did not imply that he had always been a chauffeur.
Roos, who drove my car throughout my stay in Belgium,
was the son of a Brussels millionaire, and at the
beginning of hostilities had, as I think I have mentioned
elsewhere, promptly presented his own powerful car
to the Government. The aristocracy of Belgium
did not hang around the Ministry of War trying to
obtain commissions. They simply donned privates’
uniforms, and went into the firing-line. As a
result of this wholehearted patriotism the ranks of
the Belgian army were filled with men who were members
of the most exclusive clubs and were welcome guests
in the highest social circles in Europe. Almost
any evening during the earlier part of the war a smooth-faced
youth in the uniform of a private soldier could have
been seen sitting amid a group of friends at dinner
in the Hotel St. Antoine. When an officer entered
the room he stood up and clicked his heels together
and saluted. He was Prince Henri de Ligne,
a member of one of the oldest and most distinguished
families in Belgium and related to half the aristocracy
of Europe. He, poor boy, was destined never again
to follow the hounds or to lead a cotillion; he was
killed near Herenthals with young Count de Villemont
and Philippe de Zualart while engaged in a daring
raid in an armoured motorcar into the German lines
for the purpose of blowing up a bridge.
When, upon the occupation of Brussels
by the Germans, the capital of Belgium was hastily
transferred to Antwerp, considerable difficulty was
experienced in finding suitable accommodation for the
staffs of the various ministries, which were housed
in any buildings which happened to be available at
the time. Thus, the foreign relations of the
nation were directed from a school-building in the
Avenue du Commerce the Foreign Minister,
Monsieur Davignon, using as his Cabinet the room formerly
used for lectures on physiology, the walls of which
were still covered with blackboards and anatomical
charts. The Grand Hotel was taken over by the
Government for the accommodation of the Cabinet Ministers
and their staffs, while the ministers of State and
the members of the diplomatic corps were quartered
at the St. Antoine. In fact, it used to be said
in fun that if you got into difficulties with the
police all you had to do was to get within the doors
of the hotel, where you would be safe, for half of
the ground floor was technically British soil, being
occupied by the British Legation; a portion of the
second floor was used by the Russian Legation; if
you dashed into a certain bedroom you could claim
Roumanian protection, and in another you were, theoretically,
in Greece; while on the upper floor extra-territoriality
was exercised by the Republic of China. Every
evening all the ministers and diplomats met in the
big rose-and-ivory dining-room the white
shirt-fronts of the men and the white shoulders of
the women, with the uniforms of the Belgian officers
and of the British, French and Russian military attaches,
combining to form a wonderfully brilliant picture.
Looking on that scene, it was hard to believe that
by ascending to the roof of the hotel you could see
the glare of burning villages and hear the boom of
German cannon.
As the siege progressed and the German
lines were drawn tighter, the military regulations
governing life in Antwerp increased in severity.
The local papers were not permitted to print any accounts
of Belgian checks or reverses, and at one time the
importation of English newspapers was suspended.
Sealed letters were not accepted by the post office
for any foreign countries save England, Russia and
France, and even these were held four days before
being forwarded. Telegrams were, of course, rigidly
censored. The telephone service was suspended
save for governmental purposes. At eight o’clock
the trams stopped running. Save for a few ramshackle
vehicles, drawn by decrepit horses, the cabs had disappeared
from the streets. The city went spy-mad.
If a man ordered Sauerkraut and sausage for lunch
he instantly fell under suspicion. Scarcely a
day passed without houses being raided and their occupants
arrested on the charge of espionage. It was reported
and generally believed that those whose guilt was proved
were promptly executed outside the ramparts, but of
this I have my doubts. The Belgians are too good-natured,
too easy-going. It is probable, of course, that
some spies were executed, but certainly not many.
One never stirred out of doors in
Antwerp without one’s papers, which had to be
shown before one could gain admission to the post
office, the telegraph bureau, the banks, the railway
stations, or any other public buildings. There
were several varieties of “papers.”
There was the plain passport which, beyond establishing
your nationality, was not worth the paper it was written
on. There was the permis de séjour,
which was issued by the police to those who were able
to prove that they had business which necessitated
their remaining in the city. And finally, there
was the much-prized laisser-passer which
was issued by the military government and usually
bore the photograph of the person to whom it was given,
which proved an open sesame wherever shown, and which,
I might add, was exceedingly difficult to obtain.
Only once did my laisser-passer
fail me. During the final days of the siege,
when the temper and endurance of the Belgian defenders
were strained almost to the breaking-point, I motored
out to witness the German assault on the forts near
Willebroeck. With me were Captain Raymond Briggs
of the United States army and Thompson. Before
continuing to the front we took the precaution of stopping
at division headquarters in Boom and asking if there
was any objection to our proceeding; we were informed
that there was none. We had not been on the firing-line
half an hour, however, before two gendarmes came
tearing up in a motor-car and informed us that we
were under arrest and must return with them to Boom.
At division headquarters we were interrogated by a
staff major whose temper was as fiery as his hair.
Thompson, as was his invariable custom, was smoking
a very large and very black cigar.
“Take that cigar out of your
mouth!” snapped the major in French. “How
dare you smoke in my presence?”
“Sorry, major,” said Thompson,
grinning broadly, “but you’ll have to
talk American. I don’t understand French.”
“Stop smiling!” roared
the now infuriated officer. “How dare you
smile when I address you? This is no time for
smiling, sir! This is a time of war!”
Though the major was reluctantly forced
to admit that our papers were in order, we were nevertheless
sent to staff headquarters in Antwerp guarded by two
gendarmes, one of whom was the bearer of a dossier
in which it was gravely recited that Captain Briggs
and I had been arrested while in the company of a
person calling himself Donald Thompson, who was charged
by the chief of staff with having smiled and smoked
a cigar in his presence. Needless to say, the
whole opera-bouffe affair was promptly disavowed by
the higher authorities. I have mentioned the
incident because it was the sole occasion on which
I met with so much as a shadow of discourtesy from
any Belgian, either soldier or civilian. I doubt
if in any other country in the world in time of war,
a foreigner would have been permitted to go where
and when he pleased, as I was, and would have met
with hospitality and kindness from every one.
The citizens of Antwerp hated the
Germans with a deeper and more bitter hatred, if such
a thing were possible, than the people of any other
part of Belgium. This was due to the fact that
in no foreign city where Germans dwelt and did business
were they treated with such marked hospitality and
consideration as in Antwerp. They had been given
franchises and concessions and privileges of every
description; they had been showered with honours and
decorations; they were welcome guests on every occasion;
city streets had been named after leading German residents;
time and time again, both at private dinners and public
banquets, they had asserted, wineglass in hand, their
loyalty and devotion to the city which was their home.
Yet, the moment opportunity offered, they did not scruple
to betray it. In the cellar of the house belonging
to one of the most prominent German residents the
police found large stores of ammunition and hundreds
of rifles and German uniforms. A German company
had, as a result of criminal stupidity, been awarded
the contract for wiring the forts defending the city and
when the need arose it was found that the wiring was
all but worthless. A wealthy German had a magnificent
country estate the gardens of which ran down to the
moat of one of the outlying forts. One day he
suggested to the military authorities that if they
would permit him to obtain the necessary water from
the moat, he would build a swimming-pool in his garden
for the use of the soldiers. What appeared to
be a generous offer was gladly accepted but
when the day of action came it was found that the moat
had been drained dry. In the grounds of another
country place were discovered concrete emplacements
for the use of the German siege-guns. Thus the
German residents repaid the hospitality of their adopted
city.
When the war-cloud burst every German
was promptly expelled from Antwerp. In a few
cases the mob got out of hand and smashed the windows
of some German saloons along the water-front, but no
Germans were injured or mistreated. They were
merely shipped, bag and baggage, across the frontier.
That, in my opinion at least, is what should have
been done with the entire civil population of Antwerp provided,
of course, that the Government intended to hold the
city at all costs. The civilians seriously hampered
the movements of the troops and thereby interfered
with the defence; the presence of large numbers of
women and children in the city during the bombardment
unquestionably caused grave anxiety to the defenders
and was probably one of the chief reasons for the
evacuation taking place when it did; the masses of
civilian fugitives who choked the roads in their mad
flight from Antwerp were in large measure responsible
for the capture of a considerable portion of the retreating
Belgian army and for the fact that other bodies of
troops were driven across the frontier and interned
in Holland. So strongly was the belief that Antwerp
was impregnable implanted in every Belgian’s
mind, however, that up to the very last not one citizen
in a thousand would admit that there was a possibility
that it could be taken. The army did not believe
that it could be taken. The General Staff did
not believe that it could be taken. They were
destined to have a rude and sad awakening.