At eleven minutes past one o’clock
on the morning of August 25 death came to Antwerp
out of the air. Some one had sent a bundle of
English and American newspapers to my room in the Hotel
St. Antoine and I had spent the evening reading them,
so that the bells of the cathedral had already chimed
one o’clock when I switched off my light and
opened the window. As I did so my attention was
attracted by a curious humming overhead, like a million
bumblebees. I leaned far out of the window, and
as I did so an indistinct mass, which gradually resolved
itself into something resembling a gigantic black
cigar, became plainly apparent against the purple-velvet
sky. I am not good at estimating altitudes, but
I should say that when I first caught sight of it
it was not more than a thousand feet above my head and
my room was on the top floor of the hotel, remember.
As it drew nearer the noise, which had at first reminded
me of a swarm of angry bees, grew louder, until it
sounded like an automobile with the muffler open.
Despite the darkness there was no doubting what it
was. It was a German Zeppelin.
Even as I looked something resembling
a falling star curved across the sky. An instant
later came a rending, shattering crash that shook
the hotel to its foundations, the walls of my room
rocked and reeled, about me, and for a breathless
moment I thought that the building was going to collapse.
Perhaps thirty seconds later came another splitting
explosion, and another, and then another ten
in all each, thank Heaven, a little farther
removed. It was all so sudden, so utterly unexpected,
that it must have been quite a minute before I realized
that the monstrous thing hovering in the darkness overhead
was one of the dirigibles of which we had read and
talked so much, and that it was actually raining death
upon the sleeping city from the sky. I suppose
it was blind instinct that caused me to run to the
door and down the corridor with the idea of getting
into the street, never stopping to reason, of course,
that there was no protection in the street from Zeppelins.
But before I had gone a dozen paces I had my nerves
once more in hand. “Perhaps it isn’t
a Zeppelin, after all,” I argued to myself.
“I may have been dreaming. And how perfectly
ridiculous I should look if I were to dash downstairs
in my pyjamas and find that nothing had happened.
At least I’ll go back and put some clothes on.”
And I did. No fireman, responding to a night
alarm, ever dressed quicker. As I ran through
the corridors the doors of bedrooms opened and sleepy-eyed,
tousle-headed diplomatists and Government officials
called after me to ask if the Germans were bombarding
the city.
“They are,” I answered,
without stopping. There was no time to explain
that for the first time in history a city was being
bombarded from the air.
I found the lobby rapidly filling
with scantily clad guests, whose teeth were visibly
chattering. Guided by the hotel manager and accompanied
by half a dozen members of the diplomatic corps in
pyjamas, I raced upstairs to a sort of observatory
on the hotel roof. I remember that one attache
of the British Legation, ordinarily a most dignified
person, had on some sort of a night-robe of purple
silk and that when he started to climb the iron ladder
of the fire-escape he looked for all the world like
a burglarious suffragette.
By the time we reached the roof of
the hotel Belgian high-angle and machine-guns were
stabbing the darkness with spurts of flame, the troops
of the garrison were blazing away with rifles, and
the gendarmes in the streets were shooting wildly
with their revolvers: the noise was deafening.
Oblivious of the consternation and confusion it had
caused, the Zeppelin, after letting fall a final bomb,
slowly rose and disappeared in the upper darkness.
The destruction wrought by the German
projectiles was almost incredible. The first
shell, which I had seen fall, struck a building in
the Rue de la Bourse, barely two hundred yards in a
straight line from my window. A hole was not
merely blown through the roof, as would have been
the case with a shell from a field-gun, but the three
upper stories simply crumbled, disintegrated, came
crashing down in an avalanche of brick and stone and
plaster, as though a Titan had hit it with a sledge-hammer.
Another shell struck in the middle of the Poids
Public, or public weighing-place, which is about
the size of Russell Square in London. It blew
a hole in the cobblestone-pavement large enough to
bury a horse in; one policeman on duty at the far
end of the square was instantly killed and another
had both legs blown off. But this was not all
nor nearly all. Six people sleeping in houses
fronting on the square were killed in their beds and
a dozen others were more or less seriously wounded.
Every building facing on the square was either wholly
or partially demolished, the steel splinters of the
projectile tearing their way through the thick brick-walls
as easily as a lead-pencil is jabbed through a sheet
of paper. And, as a result of the terrific concussion,
every house within a hundred yards of the square in
every direction had its windows broken. On no
battlefield have I ever seen so horrible a sight as
that which turned me weak and nauseated when I entered
one of the shattered houses and made my way, over heaps
of fallen debris, to a room where a young woman had
been sleeping. She had literally been blown to
fragments. The floor, the walls, the ceiling,
were splotched with well, it’s enough
to say that that woman’s remains could only
have been collected with a shovel. In saying
this, I am not speaking flippantly either. I have
dwelt upon these details, revolting as they are, because
I wish to drive home the fact that the only victims
of this air-raid on Antwerp were innocent non-combatants.
Another shell struck the roof of a
physician’s house in the fashionable Rue
des Escrimeurs, killing two maids who were sleeping
in a room on the upper floor. A shell fell in
a garden in the Rue von Bary, terribly wounding a
man and his wife. A little child was mangled
by a shell which struck a house in the Rue de la Justice.
Another shell fell in the barracks in the Rue Falcon,
killing one inmate and wounding two others. By
a fortunate coincidence the regiment which had been
quartered in the barracks had left for the front on
the previous day. A woman who was awakened by
the first explosion and leaned from her window to
see what was happening had her head blown off.
In all ten people were killed, six of whom were women,
and upwards of forty wounded, two of them so terribly
that they afterwards died. There is very little
doubt that a deliberate attempt was made to kill the
royal family, the General Staff and the members of
the Government, one shell bursting within a hundred
yards of the royal palace, where the King and Queen
were sleeping, and another within two hundred yards
of staff headquarters and the Hotel St. Antoine.
As a result of this night of horror,
Antwerp, to use an inelegant but descriptive expression,
developed a violent case of the jim-jams. The
next night and every night thereafter until the Germans
came in and took the city, she thought she saw things;
not green rats and pink snakes, but large, sausage-shaped
balloons with bombs dropping from them. The military
authorities for the city was under martial
law screwed down the lid so tight that even
the most rabid prohibitionists and social reformers
murmured. As a result of the precautionary measures
which were taken, Antwerp, with its four hundred thousand
inhabitants, became about as cheerful a place of residence
as a country cemetery on a rainy evening. At eight
o’clock every street light was turned off, every
shop and restaurant and cafe closed, every window
darkened. If a light was seen in a window after
eight o’clock the person who occupied that room
was in grave danger of being arrested for signalling
to the enemy. My room, which was on the third
floor of the hotel, was so situated that its windows
could not be seen from the street, and hence I was
not as particular about lowering the shades as I should
have been. The second night after the Zeppelin
raid the manager came bursting into my room.
“Quick, Mr. Powell,” he called, excitedly,
“pull down your shade. The observers in
the cathedral tower have just sent word that your
windows are lighted and the police are downstairs to
find out what it means.”
The darkness of London and Paris was
a joke beside the darkness of Antwerp. It was
so dark in the narrow, winding streets, bordered by
ancient houses, that when, as was my custom, I went
to the telegraph office with my dispatches after dinner,
I had to feel my way with a cane, like a blind man.
To make conditions more intolerable, if such a thing
were possible, cordons of sentries were
thrown around those buildings under whose roofs the
members of the Government slept, so that if one returned
after nightfall he was greeted by a harsh command
to halt, and a sentry held a rifle-muzzle against
his breast while another sentry, by means of a dark
lantern, scrutinized his papers. Save for the
sentries, the streets were deserted, for, as the places
of amusement and the eating-places and drinking-places
were closed, there was no place for the people to
go except to bed. I was reminded of the man who
told his wife that he came home because all the other
places were closed.
I have heard it said that Antwerp
was indifferent to its fate, but it made no such impression
on me. Never have I lived in such an atmosphere
of gloom and depression. Except around the St.
Antoine at the lunch and dinner-hours and in the cafes
just before nightfall did one see anything which was
even a second cousin to jollity. The people did
not smile. They went about with grave and anxious
faces. In fact, outside of the places I have mentioned,
one rarely heard a laugh. The people who sat
at the round iron tables on the sidewalks in front
of the cafes drinking their light wines and beer no
spirits were permitted to be sold sat in
silence and with solemn faces. God knows, there
was little enough for them to smile about. Their
nation was being slowly strangled. Three-quarters
of its soil was under the heel of the invader.
An alien flag, a hated flag, flew over their capital.
Their King and their Government were fugitives, moving
from place to place as a vagrant moves on at the approach
of a policeman. Men who, a month before, were
prosperous shopkeepers and tradesmen were virtual
bankrupts, not knowing where the next hundred-franc
note was coming from. Other men had seen their
little flower-surrounded homes in the suburbs razed
to the ground that an approaching enemy might find
no cover. Though the shops were open, they had
no customers for the people had no money, or, if they
had money they were hoarding it against the days when
they might be homeless fugitives. No, there was
not very much to smile about in Antwerp.
There were amusing incidents, of course.
If one recognizes humour when he sees it he can find
it in almost any situation. After the first Zeppelin
attack the management of the St. Antoine fitted up
bedrooms in the cellars.
A century or more ago the St. Antoine
was not a hotel but a monastery, and its cellars are
all that the cellars of a monastery ought to be thick-walled
and damp and musty. Yet these subterranean suites
were in as great demand among the diplomatists as
are tables in the palm-room of the Savoy during the
season. From my bedroom window, which overlooked
the court, I could see apprehensive guests cautiously
emerging from their cellar chambers in the early morning.
It reminded me of woodchucks coming out of their holes.
As the siege progressed and the German
guns were pushed nearer to the city, those who lived
in what might be termed “conspicuous”
localities began to seek other quarters.
“I’m going to change hotels
to-day,” I heard a man remark to a friend.
“Why?” inquired the other.
“Because I am within thirty
yards of the cathedral,” was the answer.
The towering spire of the famous cathedral is, you
must understand, the most conspicuous thing in Antwerp on
clear days you can see it from twenty miles away and
to live in its immediate vicinity during a bombardment
of the city was equivalent to taking shelter under
the only tree in a field during a heavy thunderstorm.
Two days before the bombardment began
there was a meeting of the American residents such
of them as still remained in the city at
the leading club. About a dozen of us in all sat
down to dinner. The purpose of the gathering
was to discuss the attitude which the Americans should
adopt towards the German officers, for it was known
that the fall of the city was imminent. I remember
that the sense of the meeting was that we should treat
the helmeted intruders with frigid politeness I
think that was the term which, translated,
meant that we were not to offer them cigars and buy
them drinks. Of the twelve of us who sat around
the table that night, there are only two Mr.
Manly Whedbee and myself who remained to
witness the German occupation.
That the precautions taken against
Zeppelins were by no means overdone was proved by
the total failure of the second aerial raid on Antwerp,
in the latter part of September, when a dirigible again
sailed over the city under cover of darkness.
Owing to the total absence of street-lights, however,
the dirigible’s crew were evidently unable to
get their bearings, for the half-dozen bombs that they
discharged fell in the outskirts of the city without
causing any loss of life or doing any serious damage.
This time, moreover, the Belgians were quite prepared the
fire of their “sky artillery,” guided by
searchlights, making things exceedingly uncomfortable
for the Germans.
I have heard it stated by Belgian
officers and others that the bombs were dropped from
the dirigibles by an ingenious arrangement which made
the airship itself comparatively safe from harm and
at the same time rendered the aim of its bombmen much
more accurate. According to them, the dirigible
comes to a stop or as near a stop as possible above
the city or fortification which it wishes to attack,
at a height out of range of either artillery or rifle-fire.
Then, by means of a steel cable a thousand feet or
more in length, it lowers a small wire cage just large
enough to contain a man and a supply of bombs, this
cage being sufficiently armoured so that it is proof
against rifle-bullets. At the same time it affords
so tiny a mark that the chances of its being hit by
artillery-fire are insignificant. If it should
be struck, moreover, the airship itself would still
be unharmed and only one man would be lost, and when
he fell his supply of bombs would fall with him.
The Zeppelin, presumably equipped with at least two
cages and cables, might at once lower another bomb-thrower.
I do not pretend to say whether this ingenious contrivance
is used by the Germans. Certainly the Zeppelin
which I saw in action had nothing of the kind, nor
did it drop its projectiles promiscuously, as one
would drop a stone, but apparently discharged them
from a bomb-tube.
Though the Zeppelin raids proved wholly
ineffective, so far as their effect on troops and
fortifications were concerned, the German aviators
introduced some novel tricks in aerial warfare which
were as practical as they were ingenious. During
the battle of Vilvorde, for example, and throughout
the attacks on the Antwerp forts, German dirigibles
hovered at a safe height over the Belgian positions
and directed the fire of the German gunners with remarkable
success. The aerial observers watched, through
powerful glasses, the effect of the German shells
and then, by means of a large disc which was swung
at the end of a line and could be raised or lowered
at will, signalled as need be in code “higher lower right left”
and thus guided the gunners who were, of
course, unable to see their mark or the effect of
their fire until almost every shot was a
hit. At Vilvorde, as a result of this aerial
fire-control system, I saw the German artillery, posted
out of sight behind a railway embankment, get the
range of a retreating column of Belgian infantry and
with a dozen well-placed shots practically wipe it
out of existence. So perfect was the German system
of observation and fire control during the final attack
on the Antwerp defences that whenever the Belgians
or British moved a regiment or a battery the aerial
observers instantly detected it and a perfect storm
of shells was directed against the new position.
Throughout the operations around Antwerp,
the Taubes, as the German aeroplanes are called because
of their fancied resemblance to a dove, repeatedly
performed daring feats of reconnaissance. On
one occasion, while I was with the General Staff at
Lierre, one of these German Taubes sailed directly
over the Hotel de Ville, which was being used as staff
headquarters. It so happened that King Albert
was standing in the street, smoking one of the seven-for-a-franc
Belgian cigars to which he was partial.
“The Germans call it a dove,
eh?” remarked the King, as he looked up at the
passing aircraft. “Well, it looks to me
more like a hawk.”
A few days before the fall of Antwerp
a Taube flew over the city in the early afternoon,
dropping thousands of proclamations printed in both
French and Flemish and signed by the commander of the
investing forces, pointing out to the inhabitants the
futility of resistance, asserting that in fighting
Germany they were playing Russia’s game, and
urging them to lay down their arms. The aeroplane
was greeted by a storm of shrapnel from the high-angle
guns mounted on the fortifications, the only effect
of which, however, was to kill two unoffending citizens
who were standing in the streets and were struck by
the fragments of the falling shells.
Most people seem to have the impression
that it is as easy for an aviator to see what is happening
on the ground beneath him as though he were looking
down from the roof of a high building. Under
ordinary conditions, when one can skim above the surface
of the earth at a height of a few hundred feet, this
is quite true, but it is quite a different matter
when one is flying above hostile troops who are blazing
away at him with rifles and machine-guns. During
reconnaissance work the airmen generally are compelled
to ascend to an altitude of a mile or a mile and a
quarter, which makes observation extremely difficult,
as small objects, even with the aid of the strongest
glasses, assume unfamiliar shapes and become fore-shortened.
If, in order to obtain a better view, they venture
to fly at a lower height, they are likely to be greeted
by a hail of rifle fire from soldiers in the trenches.
The Belgian aviators with whom I talked assured me
that they feared rifle fire more than bursting shrapnel,
as the fire of a regiment, when concentrated even on
so elusive an object as an aeroplane, proves far more
deadly than shells.
The Belgians made more use than any
other nation of motor-cars. When war was declared
one of the first steps taken by the military authorities
was to commandeer every motor-car, every motor-cycle
and every litre of petrol in the kingdom. As a
result they depended almost entirely upon motor-driven
vehicles for their military transport, which was,
I might add, extremely efficient. In fact, we
could always tell when we were approaching the front
by the amazing number of motor-cars which lined the
roads for miles in the rear of each division.
Anything that had four wheels and
a motor to drive them diminutive American
run-abouts, slim, low-hung racing cars, luxurious
limousines with coronets painted on the panels, delivery-cars
bearing the names of shops in Antwerp and Ghent and
Brussels, lumbering motor-trucks, hotel omnibuses all
met the same fate, which consisted in being daubed
with elephant-grey paint, labelled “S.M.”
(Service Militaire) in staring white letters,
and started for the front, usually in charge of a
wholly inexperienced driver. It made an automobile
lover groan to see the way some of those cars were
treated. But they did the business. They
averaged something like twelve miles an hour which
is remarkable time for army transport
and, strangely enough, very few of them broke down.
If they did there was always an automobile des
reparations promptly on hand to repair the damage.
Before the war began the Belgian army had no army
transport worthy of the name; before the forts at Liege
had been silenced it had as efficient a one as any
nation in Europe.
The headquarters of the motor-car
branch of the army was at the Pare des Automobiles
Militaires, on the Red Star quays in Antwerp.
Here several hundred cars were always kept in reserve,
and here was collected an enormous store of automobile
supplies and sundries. The scene under the long,
low sheds, with their corrugated-iron roofs, always
reminded me of the Automobile Show at Olympia.
After a car had once been placed at your disposal by
the Government, getting supplies for it was merely
a question of signing bons. Obtaining extra equipment
for my car was Roos’ chief amusement. Tyres,
tools, spare parts, horns, lamps, trunks all
you had to do was to scrawl your name at the foot
of a printed form and they were promptly handed over.
When I first went to Belgium I was given a sixty horse-power
touring car, and when the weather turned unpleasant
I asked for and was given a limousine that was big
enough to sleep in, and when I found this too clumsy,
the commandant of the Parc des Automobiles
obligingly exchanged it for a ninety horse-power berline.
They were most accommodating, those Belgians.
I am sorry to say that my berline, which was the
envy of every one in Antwerp, was eventually captured
by the Germans.
Though both the French and the Germans
had for a number of years been experimenting with
armoured cars of various patterns, the Belgians, who
had never before given the subject serious consideration,
were the first to evolve and to send into action a
really practical vehicle of this description.
The earlier armoured cars used by the Belgians were
built at the great Minerva factory in Antwerp and
consisted of a circular turret, high enough so that
only the head and shoulders of the man operating the
machine-gun were exposed, covered with half-inch steel
plates and mounted on an ordinary chassis. After
the disastrous affair near Herenthals, in which Prince
Henri de Ligne was mortally wounded while
engaged in a raid into the German lines for the purpose
of blowing up bridges, it was seen that the crew of
the auto-mitrailleuses, as the armoured cars were
called, was insufficiently protected, and, to remedy
this, a movable steel dome, with an opening for the
muzzle of the machine-gun, was superimposed on the
turret. These grim vehicles, which jeered at
bullets, and were proof even against shrapnel, quickly
became a nightmare to the Germans. Driven by
the most reckless racing drivers in Belgium, manned
by crews of dare-devil youngsters, and armed with
machine-guns which poured out lead at the rate of
a thousand shots a minute, these wheeled fortresses
would tear at will into the German lines, cut up an
outpost or wipe out a cavalry patrol, dynamite a bridge
or a tunnel or a culvert, and be back in the Belgian
lines again almost before the enemy realized what
had happened.
I witnessed an example of the cool
daring of these mitrailleuse drivers during the fighting
around Malines. Standing on a railway embankment,
I was watching the withdrawal under heavy fire of the
last Belgian troops, when an armoured car, the lean
muzzle of its machine-gun peering from its turret,
tore past me at fifty miles an hour, spitting a murderous
spray of lead as it bore down on the advancing Germans.
But when within a few hundred yards of the German
line the car slackened speed and stopped. Its
petrol was exhausted. Instantly one of the crew
was out in the road and, under cover of the fire from
the machine-gun, began to refill the tank. Though
bullets were kicking up spurts of dust in the road
or ping-pinging against the steel turret he would
not be hurried. I, who was watching the scene
through my field-glasses, was much more excited than
he was. Then, when the tank was filled, the car
refused to back! It was a big machine and the
narrow road was bordered on either side by deep ditches,
but by a miracle the driver was able and
just able to turn the car round. Though
by this time the German gunners had the range and
shrapnel was bursting all about him, he was as cool
as though he were turning a limousine in the width
of Piccadilly. As the car straightened out for
its retreat, the Belgians gave the Germans a jeering
screech from their horn, and a parting blast of lead
from their machine-gun and went racing Antwerpwards.
It is, by the way, a curious and interesting
fact that the machine-gun used in both the Belgian
and Russian armoured cars, and which is one of the
most effective weapons produced by the war, was repeatedly
offered to the American War Department by its inventor,
Major Isaac Newton Lewis, of the United States army,
and was as repeatedly rejected by the officials at
Washington. At last, in despair of receiving
recognition in his own country, he sold it to Russia
and Belgium. The Lewis gun, which is air-cooled
and weighs only twenty-nine pounds less
than half the weight of a soldier’s equipment fires
a thousand shots a minute. In the fighting around
Sempst I saw trees as large round as a man’s
thigh literally cut down by the stream of lead from
these weapons.
The inventor of the Lewis gun was
not the only American who played an inconspicuous
but none the less important part in the War of Nations.
A certain American corporation doing business in Belgium
placed its huge Antwerp plant and the services of its
corps of skilled engineers at the service of the Government,
though I might add that this fact was kept carefully
concealed, being known to only a handful of the higher
Belgian officials. This concern made shells and
other ammunition for the Belgian army; it furnished
aeroplanes and machine-guns; it constructed miles of
barbed-wire entanglements and connected those entanglements
with the city lighting system; one of its officers
went on a secret mission to England and brought back
with him a supply of cordite, not to mention six large-calibre
guns which he smuggled through Dutch territorial waters
hidden in the steamer’s coal bunkers. And,
as though all this were not enough, the Belgian Government
confided to this foreign corporation the minting of
the national currency. For obvious reasons I
am not at liberty to mention the name of this concern,
though it is known to practically every person in the
United States, each month cheques being sent to the
parent concern by eight hundred thousand people in
New York alone.
Incidentally it publishes the most
widely read volume in the world. I wish that
I might tell you the name of this concern. Upon
second thought, I think I will. It is the American
Bell Telephone Company.