It was really a Pittsburg chauffeur
who was primarily responsible for my being invited
to dine with the commander of the Ninth German Army.
The chauffeur’s name was William Van Calck and
his employer was a gentleman who had amassed several
millions manufacturing hats in the Smoky City.
When war was declared the hat-manufacturer and his
family were motoring in Austria, with Van Calck at
the wheel of the car. The car being a large and
powerful one, it was promptly commandeered by the
Austrian military authorities; the hat-manufacturer
and his family, thus dumped unceremoniously by the
roadside, made their way as best they could to England;
and Van Calck, who was a Belgian by birth, though
a naturalized American, enlisted in the Belgian army
and was detailed to drive one of the armoured motor-cars
which so effectively harassed the enemy during the
early part of the campaign in Flanders. Now if
Van Calck hadn’t come tearing into Ghent in
his wheeled fortress on a sunny September morning he
wouldn’t have come upon a motor-car containing
two German soldiers who had lost their way; if he
had not met them, the two Germans would not have been
wounded in the dramatic encounter which ensued; if
the Germans had not been wounded it would not have
been necessary for Mr. Julius Van Hee, the American
Vice-Consul, to pay a hurried visit to General von
Boehn, the German commander, to explain that the people
of Ghent were not responsible for the affair and to
beg that no retaliatory measures be taken against
the city; if Mr. Van Hee had not visited General von
Boehn the question of the attitude of the American
Press would not have come up for discussion; and if
it had not been discussed, General von Boehn would
not have sent me an invitation through Mr. Van Hee
to dine with him at his headquarters and hear the
German side of the question.
But perhaps I had better begin at
the beginning. On September 8, then, the great
German army which was moving from Brussels on France
was within a few miles of Ghent. In the hope of
inducing the Germans not to enter the city, whose
large and turbulent working population would, it was
feared, cause trouble in case of a military occupation,
the burgomaster went out to confer with the German
commander. An agreement was finally arrived at
whereby the Germans consented to march around Ghent
if certain requirements were complied with. These
were that no Belgian troops should occupy the city,
that the Garde Civique should be disarmed
and their weapons surrendered, and that the municipality
should supply the German forces with specified quantities
of provisions and other supplies the chief
item, by the way, being a hundred thousand cigars.
The burgomaster had not been back
an hour when a military motor-car containing two
armed German soldiers appeared in the city streets.
It transpired afterwards that they had been sent out
to purchase medical supplies and, losing their way,
had entered Ghent by mistake. At almost the same
moment that the German car entered the city from the
south a Belgian armoured motor-car, armed with a machine-gun
and with a crew of three men and driven by the former
Pittsburg chauffeur, entered from the east on a scouting
expedition. The two cars, both travelling at high
speed, encountered each other at the head of the Rue
de l’Agneau, directly in front of the American
Consulate. Vice-Consul Van Hee, standing in the
doorway, was an eyewitness of what followed.
The Germans, taken completely by surprise
at the sight of the grim war-car in its coat of elephant-grey
bearing down upon them, threw on their power and attempted
to escape, the man sitting beside the driver opening
an ineffectual fire with his carbine. Regardless
of the fact that the sidewalks were crowded with spectators,
the Belgians opened on the fleeing Germans with their
machine-gun, which spurted lead as a garden-hose spurts
water. Van Calck, fearing that the Germans might
escape, swerved his powerful car against the German
machine precisely as a polo-player “rides off”
his opponent, the machine-gun never ceasing its angry
snarl. An instant later the driver of the German
car dropped forward over his steering-wheel with blood
gushing from a bullet-wound in the head, while his
companion, also badly wounded, threw up both hands
in token of surrender.
Vice-Consul Van Hee instantly recognized
the extremely grave consequences which might result
to Ghent from this encounter, which had taken place
within an hour after the burgomaster had assured the
German commander that there were no Belgian soldiers
in the city. Now Mr. Julius Van Hee is what is
popularly known in the United States as “a live
wire.” He is a shirt-sleeve diplomatist
who, if he thought the occasion warranted it, would
not hesitate to conduct diplomatic negotiations in
his night-shirt. Appreciating that as a result
of this attack on German soldiers, which the Germans
would probably characterize as treachery, Ghent stood
in imminent danger of meeting the terrible fate of
its sister-cities of Aerschot and Louvain, which were
sacked and burned on no greater provocation, Mr. Van
Hee jumped into his car and sought the burgomaster,
whom he urged to accompany him without an instant’s
delay to German headquarters. The burgomaster,
who had visions of being sent to Germany as a hostage,
at first demurred; but Van Hee, disregarding his protestations,
handed him his hat, hustled him into the car, and
ordered the chauffeur to drive as though the Uhlans
were behind him.
They found General von Boehn and his
staff quartered in a chateau a few miles outside the
city. At first the German commander was furious
with anger and threatened Ghent with the same punishment
he had meted out to other cities where Germans had
been fired on. Van Hee took a very firm stand,
however. He reminded the general that Americans
have a great sentimental interest in Ghent because
of the treaty of peace between England and the United
States which was signed there a century ago, and he
warned him that the burning of the city would do more
than anything else to lose the Germans the sympathy
of the American people.
“If you will give me your personal
word,” said the general finally, “that
there will be no further attacks upon Germans who may
enter the city, and that the wounded soldiers will
be taken under American protection and sent to Brussels
by the American Consular authorities when they have
recovered, I will agree to spare Ghent and will not
even demand a money indemnity.”
In the course of the informal conversation
which followed, General von Boehn remarked that copies
of American papers containing articles by E. Alexander
Powell, criticizing the Germans’ treatment of
the Belgian civil population, had come to his attention,
and he regretted that he could not have an opportunity
to talk with their author and give him the German
version of the incidents in question. Mr. Van
Hee said that, by a curious coincidence, I had arrived
in Ghent that very morning, whereupon the general asked
him to bring me out to dinner on the following day
and issued a safe conduct through the German lines
for the purpose.
We started early the next morning.
As there was some doubt about the propriety of my
taking a Belgian military driver into the German lines
I drove the car myself. And, though nothing was
said about a photographer, I took with me Donald Thompson.
Before we passed the city limits of Ghent things began
to happen. Entering a street which leads through
a district inhabited by the working classes, we suddenly
found our way barred by a mob of several thousand
excited Flemings.
Above a sea of threatening arms and
brandished sticks and angry faces rose the figures
of two German soldiers, with carbines slung across
their backs, mounted on work-horses which they had
evidently hastily unharnessed from a wagon. Like
their unfortunate comrades of the motor-car episode,
they too had strayed into the city by mistake.
As we approached the crowd made a concerted rush for
them. A blast from my siren opened a lane for
us, however, and I drove the car alongside the terrified
Germans.
“Quick!” shouted Van Hee
in German. “Off your horses and into the
car! Hide your rifles! Take off your helmets!
Sit on the floor and keep out of sight!”
The mob, seeing its prey escaping,
surged about us with a roar. For a moment things
looked very ugly. Van Hee jumped on the seat.
“I am the American Consul!”
he shouted. “These men are under my protection!
You are civilians, attacking German soldiers in uniform.
If they are harmed your city will be burned about your
ears.”
At that moment a burly Belgian shouldered
his way through the crowd and, leaping on the running-board,
levelled a revolver at the Germans cowering in the
tonneau. Quick as thought Thompson knocked up
the man’s hand, and at the same instant I threw
on the power. The big car leaped forward and
the mob scattered before it. It was a close call
for every one concerned, but a much closer call for
Ghent; for had those German soldiers been murdered
by civilians in the city streets no power on earth
could have saved the city from German vengeance.
General von Boehn told me so himself.
A few minutes later, as playlets follow
each other in quick succession on a stage, the scene
changed from near tragedy to screaming farce.
As we came thundering into the little town of Sotteghem,
which is the Sleepy Hollow of Belgium, we saw, rising
from the middle of the town square, a pyramid, at least
ten feet high, of wardrobe-trunks, steamer-trunks,
bags, and suit-cases. From the summit of this
extraordinary monument floated a huge American flag.
As our car came to a halt there rose a chorus of exclamations
in all the dialects between Maine and California, and
from the door of a near-by cafe came pouring a flood
of Americans. They proved to be a lost detachment
of that great army of tourists which, at the beginning
of hostilities, started on its mad retreat for the
coast, leaving Europe strewn with their belongings.
This particular detachment had been cut off in Brussels
by the tide of German invasion, and, as food-supplies
were running short, they determined to make a dash perhaps
crawl would be a better word for Ostend,
making the journey in two lumbering farm wagons.
On reaching Sotteghem, however, the Belgian drivers,
hearing that the Germans were approaching, refused
to go further and unceremoniously dumped their passengers
in the town square. When we arrived they had
been there for a day and a night and had begun to think
that it was to be their future home. It was what
might be termed a mixed assemblage, including several
women of wealth and fashion who had been motoring
on the Continent and had had their cars taken from
them, two prim schoolteachers from Brooklyn, a mine-owner
from West Virginia, a Pennsylvania Quaker, and a quartet
of professional tango-dancers artists,
they called themselves who had been doing
a “turn” at a Brussels music-hall when
the war suddenly ended their engagement. Van
Hee and I skirmished about and, after much argument,
succeeded in hiring two farm-carts to transport the
fugitives to Ghent. For the thirty-mile journey
the thrifty peasants modestly demanded four hundred
francs and got it. When I last saw
my compatriots they were perched on top of their luggage
piled high on two creaking carts, rumbling down the
road to Ghent with their huge flag flying above them.
They were singing at the top of their voices, “We’ll
Never Go There Any More.”
Half a mile or so out of Sotteghem
our road debouched into the great highway which leads
through Lille to Paris, and we suddenly found ourselves
in the midst of the German army. It was a sight
never to be forgotten. Far as the eye could see
stretched solid columns of marching men, pressing
westward, ever westward. The army was advancing
in three mighty columns along three parallel roads,
the dense masses of moving men in their elusive grey-green
uniforms looking for all the world like three monstrous
serpents crawling across the country-side.
The American flags which fluttered
from our wind-shield proved a passport in themselves,
and as we approached the close-locked ranks parted
to let us pass, and then closed in behind us.
For five solid hours, travelling always at express-train
speed, we motored between walls of marching men.
In time the constant shuffle of boots and the rhythmic
swing of grey-clad arms and shoulders grew maddening,
and I became obsessed with the fear that I would send
the car ploughing into the human hedge on either side.
It seemed that the interminable ranks would never
end, and so far as we were concerned they never did
end, for we never saw the head of that mighty column.
We passed regiment after regiment, brigade after brigade
of infantry; then hussars, cuirassiers, Uhlans,
field batteries, more infantry, more field-guns, ambulances
with staring red crosses painted on their canvas tops,
then gigantic siege-guns, their grim muzzles pointing
skyward, each drawn by thirty straining horses; engineers,
sappers and miners with picks and spades, pontoon-wagons,
carts piled high with what looked like masses of yellow
silk but which proved to be balloons, bicyclists with
carbines slung upon their backs hunter-fashion, aeroplane
outfits, bearded and spectacled doctors of the medical
corps, armoured motor-cars with curved steel rails
above them as a protection against the wires which
the Belgians were in the habit of stringing across
the roads, battery after battery of pom-poms (as the
quick-firers are descriptively called), and after them
more batteries of spidery-looking, lean-barrelled
machine-guns, more Uhlans the sunlight
gleaming on their lance-tips and the breeze fluttering
their pennons into a black-and-white cloud above
them, and then infantry in spiked and linen-covered
helmets, more infantry and still more infantry all
sweeping by, irresistibly as a mighty river, with
their faces turned towards France.
This was the Ninth Field Army, composed
of the very flower of the German Empire, including
the magnificent troops of the Imperial Guard.
It was first and last a fighting army. The men
were all young, and they struck me as being as keen
as razors and as hard as nails. Their equipment
was the acme to all appearances ordinary two-wheeled
farm-carts, contained “nests” of nine machine-guns
which could instantly be brought into action.
The medical corps was magnificent; as businesslike,
as completely equipped, and as efficient as a great
city hospital as, indeed, it should be,
for no hospital ever built was called upon to treat
so many emergency cases. One section of the medical
corps consisted wholly of pedicurists, who examined
and treated the feet of the men. If a German
soldier has even a suspicion of a corn or a bunion
or a chafed heel and does not instantly report to
the regimental pedicurist for treatment he is subject
to severe punishment. He is not permitted to
neglect his feet or for that matter his
teeth, or any other portion of his body because
his feet do not belong to him but to the Kaiser, and
the Kaiser expects those feet kept in condition to
perform long and arduous marches and to fight his battles.
At one cross-roads I saw a soldier
with a horse-clipping machine. An officer stood
beside him and closely scanned the heads of the passing
men. Whenever he spied a soldier whose hair was
a fraction of an inch too long, that soldier was called
out of the ranks, the clipper was run over his head
as quickly and dexterously as an expert shearer fleeces
sheep, and then the man, his hair once more too short
to harbour dirt, ran to rejoin his company. They
must have cut the hair of a hundred men an hour.
It was a fascinating performance. Men on bicycles,
with coils of insulated wire slung on reels between
them, strung field-telephones from tree to tree, so
that the general commanding could converse with any
part of the fifty-mile-long column. The whole
army never slept. When half was resting the other
half was advancing. The German soldier is treated
as a valuable machine, which must be speeded up to
the highest possible efficiency. Therefore he
is well fed, well shod, well clothed and
worked as a negro teamster works a mule. Only
men who are well cared-for can march thirty-five miles
a day, week in and week out. Only once did I
see a man ill-treated. A sentry on duty in front
of the general headquarters failed to salute an officer
with sufficient promptness, whereupon the officer
lashed him again and again across the face with a
riding-whip. Though welts rose at every blow,
the soldier stood rigidly at attention and never quivered.
It was not a pleasant thing to witness. Had it
been a British or an American soldier who was thus
treated there would have been an officer’s funeral
the next day.
As we were passing a German outpost
a sentry ran into the road and signalled us to stop.
“Are you Americans?” he asked.
“We are,” said I.
“Then I have orders to take you to the commandant,”
said he.
“But I am on my way to dine
with General von Boehn. I have a pass signed
by the General himself and I am late already.”
“No matter,” the man insisted
stubbornly. “You must come with me.
The commander has so ordered it.”
So there was nothing for it but to
accompany the soldier. Though we tried to laugh
away our nervousness, I am quite willing to admit that
we had visions of court-martials and prison cells and
firing parties. You never know just where you
are at with the Germans. You see, they have no
sense of humour.
We found the commandant and his staff
quartered at a farmhouse a half-mile down the road.
He was a stout, florid-faced, boisterous captain of
pioneers.
“I’m sorry to detain you,”
he said apologetically, “but I ordered the sentries
to stop the first American car that passed, and yours
happened to be the unlucky one. I have a brother
in America and I wish to send a letter to him to let
him know that all is well with me. Would you
have the goodness to post it?”
“I’ll do better than that,
Captain,” said I. “If you will give
me your brother’s name and address, and if he
takes the New York World, he will read in to-morrow
morning’s paper that I have met you.”
And the next morning, just as I had
promised, Mr. F. zur Nedden of Rosebank, New
York, was astonished to read in the columns of his
morning paper that I had left his soldier-brother comfortably
quartered in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Renaix,
Belgium, in excellent health but drinking more red
wine than was likely to be good for him.
It was now considerably past midday,
and we were within a few miles of the French frontier,
when I saw the guidon which signified the presence
of the head of the army, planted at the entrance to
a splendid old chateau. As we passed between
the stately gateposts, whirled up the splendid, tree-lined
drive and came to a stop in front of the terrace,
a dozen officers came running out to meet us.
So cordial and informal were their greetings that
I felt as though I were being welcomed at a country-house
in America instead of the headquarters of a German
army in the field. So perfect was the field-telephone
service that the staff had been able to keep in touch
with our progress ever since, five hours before, we
had entered the German lines, and had waited dinner
for us. General von Boehn I found to be a red-faced,
grey-moustached, jovial old warrior, who seemed very
much worried for fear that we were not getting enough
to eat, and particularly enough to drink. He explained
that the Belgian owners of the chateau had had the
bad taste to run away and take their servants with
them, leaving only one bottle of champagne in the
cellar. That bottle was good, however, as far
as it went. Nearly all the officers spoke English,
and during the meal the conversation was chiefly of
the United States, for one of them had been attached
to the German Embassy at Washington and knew the golf-course
at Chevy Chase better than I do myself; another had
fished in California and shot elk in Wyoming; and a
third had attended the army school at Fort Riley.
After dinner we grouped ourselves on the terrace and
Thompson made photographs of us. They are probably
the only ones in this war, at least of
a German general and an American war correspondent
who is not under arrest. Then we gathered about
a table on which was spread a staff map of the war
area and got down to serious business.
The general began by asserting that
the accounts of atrocities perpetrated by German troops
on Belgian non-combatants were lies.
“Look at these officers about
you,” he said. “They are gentlemen,
like yourself. Look at the soldiers marching past
in the road out there. Most of them are the fathers
of families. Surely you do not believe that they
would do the unspeakable things they have been accused
of?”
“Three days ago, General,”
said I, “I was in Aerschot. The whole town
is now but a ghastly, blackened ruin.”
“When we entered Aerschot,”
was the reply, “the son of the burgomaster came
into the room where our officers were dining and assassinated
the Chief of Staff. What followed was retribution.
The townspeople got only what they deserved.”
“But why wreak your vengeance
on women and children?” I asked.
“None have been killed,” the general asserted
positively.
“I’m sorry to contradict
you, General,” I asserted with equal positiveness,
“but I have myself seen their bodies. So
has Mr. Gibson, the secretary of the American Legation
in Brussels, who was present during the destruction
of Louvain.”
“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 assaulting 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
God, 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 passing.
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 shell 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.