Imagine, if you please, a professional
heavy-weight prize-fighter, with an abnormally long
reach, holding an amateur bantam-weight boxer at arm’s
length with one hand and hitting him when and where
he pleased with the other. The fact that the little
man was not in the least afraid of his burly antagonist
and that he got in a vicious kick or jab whenever
he saw an opening would not, of course, have any effect
on the outcome of the unequal contest. Now that
is almost precisely what happened when the Germans
besieged Antwerp, the enormously superior range and
calibre of their siege-guns enabling them to pound
the city’s defences to pieces at their leisure
without the defenders being able to offer any effective
resistance.
Though Antwerp was to all intents
and purposes a besieged city for many weeks prior
to its capture, it was not until the beginning of the
last week in September that the Germans seriously set
to work of destroying its fortifications. When
they did begin, however, their great siege pieces
pounded the forts as steadily and remorselessly as
a trip-hammer pounds a bar of iron. At the time
the Belgian General Staff believed that the Germans
were using the same giant howitzers which demolished
the forts at Liege, but in this they were mistaken,
for, as it transpired later, the Antwerp fortifications
owed their destruction to Austrian guns served by
Austrian artillerymen. Now guns of this size
can only be fired from specially prepared concrete
beds, and these beds, as we afterwards learned, had
been built during the preceding month behind the embankment
of the railway which runs from Malines to Louvain,
thus accounting for the tenacity with which the Germans
had held this railway despite repeated attempts to
dislodge them. At this stage of the investment
the Germans were firing at a range of upwards of eight
miles, while the Belgians had no artillery that was
effective at more than six. Add to this the fact
that the German fire was remarkably accurate, being
controlled and constantly corrected by observers stationed
in balloons, and that the German shells were loaded
with an explosive having greater destructive properties
than either cordite or shimose powder, and it will
be seen how hopeless was the Belgian position.
The scenes along the Lierre-St.
Catherine-Waelhem sector, against which the Germans
at first focussed their attack, were impressive and
awesome beyond description. Against a livid sky
rose pillars of smoke from burning villages.
The air was filled with shrieking shell and bursting
shrapnel. The deep-mouthed roar of the guns in
the forts and the angry bark of the Belgian field-batteries
were answered at intervals by the shattering crash
of the German high-explosive shells. When one
of these big shells the soldiers dubbed
them “Antwerp expresses” struck
in a field it sent up a geyser of earth two hundred
feet in height. When they dropped in a river or
canal, as sometimes happened, there was a waterspout.
And when they dropped in a village, that village disappeared
from the map.
While we were watching the bombardment
from a rise in the Waelhem road a shell burst in the
hamlet of Waerloos, whose red-brick houses were clustered
almost at our feet. A few minutes later a procession
of fugitive villagers came plodding up the cobble-paved
highway. It was headed by an ashen-faced peasant
pushing a wheelbarrow with a weeping woman clinging
to his arm. In the wheelbarrow, atop a pile of
hastily collected household goods, was sprawled the
body of a little boy. He could not have been more
than seven. His little knickerbockered legs and
play-worn shoes protruded grotesquely from beneath
a heap of bedding. When they lifted it we could
see where the shell had hit him. Beside the dead
boy sat his sister, a tot of three, with blood trickling
from a flesh-wound in her face. She was still
clinging convulsively to a toy lamb which had once
been white but whose fleece was now splotched with
red. Some one passed round a hat and we awkwardly
tried to express our sympathy through the medium of
silver. After a little pause they started on
again, the father stolidly pushing the wheelbarrow,
with its pathetic load, before him. It was the
only home that family had.
One of the bravest acts that I have
ever seen was performed by an American woman during
the bombardment of Waelhem. Her name was Mrs.
Winterbottom; she was originally from Boston, and had
married an English army officer. When he went
to the front in France she went to the front in Belgium,
bringing over her car, which she drove herself, and
placing it at the disposal of the British Field Hospital.
After the fort of Waelhem had been silenced and such
of the garrison as were able to move had been withdrawn,
word was received at ambulance headquarters that a
number of dangerously wounded had been left behind
and that they would die unless they received immediate
attention. To reach the fort it was necessary
to traverse nearly two miles of road swept by shell-fire.
Before anyone realized what was happening a big grey
car shot down the road with the slender figure of
Mrs. Winterbottom at the wheel. Clinging to the
running-board was her English chauffeur and beside
her sat my little Kansas photographer, Donald Thompson.
Though the air was filled with the fleecy white patches
which look like cotton-wool but are really bursting
shrapnel, Thompson told me afterwards that Mrs. Winterbottom
was as cool as though she were driving down her native
Commonwealth Avenue on a Sunday morning. When
they reached the fort shells were falling all about
them, but they filled the car with wounded men and
Mrs. Winterbottom started back with her blood-soaked
freight for the Belgian lines.
Thompson remained in the fort to take
pictures. When darkness fell he made his way
back to the village of Waelhem, where he found a regiment
of Belgian infantry. In one of the soldiers Thompson
recognized a man who, before the war, had been a waiter
in the St. Regis Hotel in New York and who had been
detailed to act as his guide and interpreter during
the fighting before Termonde. This man took Thompson
into a wine-shop where a detachment of soldiers was
quartered, gave him food, and spread straw upon the
floor for him to sleep on. Shortly after midnight
a forty-two centimetre shell struck the building.
Of the soldiers who were sleeping in the same room
as Thompson nine were killed and fifteen more who were
sleeping upstairs, the ex-waiter among them. Thompson
told me that when the ceiling gave way and the mangled
corpses came tumbling down upon him, he ran up the
street with his hands above his head, screaming like
a madman. He met an officer whom he knew and
they ran down the street together, hoping to get out
of the doomed town. Just then a projectile from
one of the German siege-guns tore down the long,
straight street, a few yards above their heads.
The blast of air which it created was so terrific that
it threw them down. Thompson said that it was
like standing close to the edge of the platform at
a wayside station when the Empire State Express goes
by. When his nerve came back to him he pulled
a couple of cigars out of his pocket and offered one
to the officer. Their hands trembled so, he said
afterwards, that they used up half a box of matches
before they could get their cigars lighted.
I am inclined to think that the most
bizarre incident I saw during the bombardment of the
outer forts was the flight of the women inmates of
a madhouse at Duffel. There were three hundred
women in the institution, many of them violently insane,
and the nuns in charge, assisted by soldiers, had
to take them across a mile of open country, under
a rain of shells, to a waiting train. I shall
not soon forget the picture of that straggling procession
winding its slow way across the stubble-covered fields.
Every few seconds a shell would burst above it or
in front of it or behind it with a deafening explosion.
Yet, despite the frantic efforts of the nuns and soldiers,
the women would not be hurried. When a shell
burst some of them would scream and cower or start
to run, but more of them would stop in their tracks
and gibber and laugh and clap their hands like excited
children. Then the soldiers would curse under
their breath and push them roughly forward and the
nuns would plead with them in their soft, low voices,
to hurry, hurry, hurry. We, who were watching
the scene, thought that few of them would reach the
train alive, yet not one was killed or wounded.
The Arabs are right: the mad are under God’s
protection.
One of the most inspiring features
of the campaign in Belgium was the heroism displayed
by the priests and the members of the religious orders.
Village cures in their black cassocks and shovel hats,
and monks in sandals and brown woollen robes, were
everywhere. I saw them in the trenches exhorting
the soldiers to fight to the last for God and the
King; I saw them going out on to the battlefield with
stretchers to gather the wounded under a fire which
made veterans seek shelter; I saw them in the villages
where the big shells were falling, helping to carry
away the ill and the aged; I saw them in the hospitals
taking farewell messages and administering the last
sacrament to the dying; I even saw them, rifle in hand,
on the firing-line, fighting for the existence of
the nation. To these soldiers of the Lord I raise
my hat in respect and admiration. The people of
Belgium owe them a debt that they can never repay.
In the days before the war it was
commonly said that the Church was losing ground in
Belgium; that religion was gradually being ousted
by socialism. If this were so, I saw no sign of
it in the nation’s days of trial. Time
and time again I saw soldiers before going into battle
drop on their knees and cross themselves and murmur
a hasty prayer. Even the throngs of terrified
fugitives, flying from their burning villages, would
pause in their flight to kneel before the little shrines
along the wayside. I am convinced, indeed, that
the ruthless destruction of religious edifices by
the Germans and the brutality which they displayed
toward priests and members of the religious orders
was more responsible than any one thing for the desperate
resistance which they met with from the Belgian peasantry.
By the afternoon of October 3 things
were looking very black for Antwerp. The forts
composing the Lierre-Waelhem sector of the outer
line of defences had been pounded into silence by the
German siege-guns; a strong German force, pushing through
the breach thus made, had succeeded in crossing the
Nethe in the face of desperate opposition; the Belgian
troops, after a fortnight of continuous fighting,
were at the point of exhaustion; the hospitals were
swamped by the streams of wounded which for days past
had been pouring in; over the city hung a cloud of
despondency and gloom, for the people, though kept
in complete ignorance of the true state of affairs,
seemed oppressed with a sense of impending disaster.
When I returned that evening to the
Hotel St. Antoine from the battle-front, which was
then barely half a dozen miles outside the city, the
manager stopped me as I was entering the lift.
“Are you leaving with the others,
Mr. Powell?” he whispered.
“Leaving for where? With what others?”
I asked sharply.
“Hadn’t you heard?”
he answered in some confusion. “The members
of the Government and the Diplomatic Corps are leaving
for Ostend by special steamer at seven in the morning.
It has just been decided at a Cabinet meeting.
But don’t mention it to a soul. No one
is to know it until they are safely gone.”
I remember that as I continued to
my room the corridors smelled of smoke, and upon inquiring
its cause I learned that the British Minister, Sir
Francis Villiers, and his secretaries were burning
papers in the rooms occupied by the British Legation.
The Russian Minister, who was superintending the packing
of his trunks in the hall, stopped me to say good-bye.
Imagine my surprise, then, upon going down to breakfast
the following morning, to meet Count Goblet d’Alviella,
the Vice-President of the Senate and a minister of
State, leaving the dining-room.
“Why, Count!” I exclaimed,
“I had supposed that you were well on your way
to Ostend by this time.”
“We had expected to be,”
explained the venerable statesman, “but at four
o’clock this morning the British Minister sent
us word that Mr. Winston Churchill had started for
Antwerp and asking us to wait and hear what he has
to say.”
At one o’clock that afternoon
a big drab-coloured touring-car filled with British
naval officers tore up the Place de Meir, its horn
sounding a hoarse warning, took the turn into the narrow
Marche aux Souliers on two wheels, and drew up
in front of the hotel. Before the car had fairly
come to a stop the door of the tonneau was thrown
violently open and out jumped a smooth-faced, sandy-haired,
stoop-shouldered, youthful-looking man in the undress
Trinity House uniform. There was no mistaking
who it was. It was the Right Hon. Winston Churchill.
As he darted into the crowded lobby, which, as usual
at the luncheon-hour, was filled with Belgian, French,
and British staff officers, diplomatists, Cabinet
Ministers and correspondents, he flung his arms out
in a nervous, characteristic gesture, as though pushing
his way through a crowd. It was a most spectacular
entrance and reminded me for all the world of a scene
in a melodrama where the hero dashes up, bare-headed,
on a foam-flecked horse, and saves the heroine or
the old homestead or the family fortune, as the case
may be.
While lunching with Sir Francis Villiers
and the staff of the British Legation, two English
correspondents approached and asked Mr. Churchill
for an interview.
“I will not talk to you,”
he almost shouted, bringing his fist down upon the
table. “You have no business to be in Belgium
at this time. Get out of the country at once.”
It happened that my table was so close
that I could not help but overhear the request and
the response, and I remember remarking to the friends
who were dining with me: “Had Mr. Churchill
said that to me, I should have answered him, ’I
have as much business in Belgium at this time, sir,
as you had in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.’”
An hour later I was standing in the
lobby talking to M. de Vos, the Burgomaster of Antwerp,
M. Louis Franck, the Antwerp member of the Chamber
of Deputies, American Consul-General Diederich and
Vice-Consul General Sherman, when Mr. Churchill rushed
past us on his way to his room. He impressed
one as being always in a tearing hurry. The Burgomaster
stopped him, introduced himself, and expressed his
anxiety regarding the fate of the city. Before
he had finished Churchill was part-way up the stairs.
“I think everything will be
all right now, Mr. Burgomaster,” he called down
in a voice which could be distinctly heard throughout
the lobby. “You needn’t worry.
We’re going to save the city.”
Whereupon most of the civilians present
heaved sighs of relief. They felt that a real
sailor had taken the wheel. Those of us who were
conversant with the situation were also relieved because
we took it for granted that Mr. Churchill would not
have made so confident and public an assertion unless
ample reinforcements in men and guns were on the way.
Even then the words of this energetic, impetuous young
man did not entirely reassure me, for from the windows
of my room I could hear the German guns quite plainly.
They had come appreciably nearer.
That afternoon and the three days
following Mr. Churchill spent in inspecting the Belgian
position. He repeatedly exposed himself upon
the firing-line and on one occasion, near Waelhem,
had a rather narrow escape from a burst of shrapnel.
For some unexplainable reason the British censorship
cast a veil of profound secrecy over Mr. Churchill’s
visit to Antwerp. The story of his arrival, just
as I have related it above, I telegraphed that same
night to the New York World, yet it never got through,
nor did any of the other dispatches which I sent during
his four days’ visit. In fact, it was not
until after Antwerp had fallen that the British public
was permitted to learn that the Sea Lord had been
in Belgium.
Had it not been for the promises of
reinforcements given to the King and the Cabinet by
Mr. Churchill, there is no doubt that the Government
would have departed for Ostend when originally planned
and that the inhabitants of Antwerp, thus warned of
the extreme gravity of the situation, would have had
ample time to leave the city with a semblance of comfort
and order, for the railways leading to Ghent and to
the Dutch frontier were still in operation and the
highways were then not blocked by a retreating army.
The first of the promised reinforcements
arrived on Sunday evening by special train from Ostend.
They consisted of a brigade of the Royal Marines,
perhaps two thousand men in all, well drilled and
well armed, and several heavy guns. They were
rushed to the southern front and immediately sent
into the trenches to relieve the worn-out Belgians.
On Monday and Tuesday the balance of the British expeditionary
force, consisting of between five and six thousand
men of the Volunteer Naval Reserve, arrived from the
coast, their ammunition and supplies being brought
by road, via Bruges and Ghent, in London motor-buses.
When this procession of lumbering vehicles, placarded
with advertisements of teas, tobaccos, whiskies, and
current theatrical attractions and bearing the signs
“Bank,” “Holborn,” “Piccadilly,”
“Shepherd’s Bush,” “Strand,”
rumbled through the streets of Antwerp, the populace
went mad. “The British had come at last!
The city was saved! Vive les Anglais! Vive
Tommy Atkins!”
I witnessed the detrainment of the
naval brigades at Vieux Dieu and accompanied them
to the trenches north of Lierre. As they
tramped down the tree-bordered, cobble-paved high
road, we heard, for the first time in Belgium, the
lilting refrain of that music-hall ballad which had
become the English soldiers’ marching song:
It’s a long way to Tipperary,
It’s a long way to go; It’s a long way
to Tipperary
To the sweetest girl I know! Good-bye, Piccadilly!
Farewell, Leicester Square! It’s a long,
long way to Tipperary;
But my heart’s right there!
Many and many a one of the light-hearted
lads with whom I marched down the Lierre road
on that October afternoon were destined never again
to feel beneath their feet the flags of Piccadilly,
never again to lounge in Leicester Square.
They were as clean-limbed, pleasant-faced,
wholesome-looking a lot of young Englishmen as you
would find anywhere, but to anyone who had had military
experience it was evident that, despite the fact that
they were vigorous and courageous and determined to
do their best, they were not “first-class fighting
men.” To win in war, as in the prize-ring,
something more than vigour and courage and determination
are required; to those qualities must be added experience
and training, and experience and training were precisely
what those naval reservists lacked. Moreover,
their equipment left much to be desired. For
example, only a very small proportion had pouches
to carry the regulation one hundred and fifty rounds.
They were, in fact, equipped very much as many of
the American militia organizations were equipped when
suddenly called out for strike duty in the days before
the reorganization of the National Guard. Even
the officers those, at least, with whom
I talked seemed to be as deficient in field
experience as the men. Yet these raw troops were
rushed into trenches which were in most cases unprotected
by head-covers, and, though unsupported by effective
artillery, they held those trenches for three days
under as murderous a shell-fire as I have ever seen
and then fell back in perfect order. What the
losses of the Naval Division were I do not know.
In Antwerp it was generally understood that very close
to a fifth of the entire force was killed or wounded upwards
of three hundred cases were, I was told, treated in
one hospital alone and the British Government
officially announced that sixteen hundred were forced
across the frontier and interned in Holland.
No small part in the defence of the
city was played by the much-talked-about armoured
train, which was built under the supervision of Lieutenant-Commander
Littlejohn in the yards of the Antwerp Engineering
Company at Hoboken. The train consisted of four
large coal-trucks with sides of armour-plate sufficiently
high to afford protection to the crews of the 4.7
naval guns six of which were brought from
England for the purpose, though there was only time
to mount four of them and between each gun-truck
was a heavily-armoured goods-van for ammunition,
the whole being drawn by a small locomotive, also
steel-protected. The guns were served by Belgian
artillerymen commanded by British gunners and each
gun-truck carried, in addition, a detachment of infantry
in the event of the enemy getting to close quarters.
Personally, I am inclined to believe that the chief
value of this novel contrivance lay in the moral encouragement
it lent to the defence, for its guns, though more
powerful, certainly, than anything that the Belgians
possessed, were wholly outclassed, both in range and
calibre, by the German artillery. The German
officers whom I questioned on the subject after the
occupation told me that the fire of the armoured train
caused them no serious concern and did comparatively
little damage.
By Tuesday night a boy scout could
have seen that the position of Antwerp was hopeless.
The Austrian siege guns had smashed and silenced the
chain of supposedly impregnable forts to the south
of the city with the same businesslike dispatch with
which the same type of guns had smashed and silenced
those other supposedly impregnable forts at Liege
and Namur. Through the opening thus made a German
army corps had poured to fling itself against the
second line of defence, formed by the Ruppel and the
Nethe. Across the Nethe, under cover of a terrific
artillery fire, the Germans threw their pontoon-bridges,
and when the first bridges were destroyed by the Belgian
guns they built others, and when these were destroyed
in turn they tried again, and at the third attempt
they succeeded. With the helmeted legions once
across the river, it was all over but the shouting,
and no one knew it better than the Belgians, yet,
heartened by the presence of the little handful of
English, they fought desperately, doggedly on.
Their forts pounded to pieces by guns which they could
not answer, their ranks thinned by a murderous rain
of shot and shell, the men heavy-footed and heavy-eyed
from lack of sleep, the horses staggering from exhaustion,
the ambulance service broken down, the hospitals helpless
before the flood of wounded, the trenches littered
with the dead and dying, they still held back the
German legions.
By this time the region to the south
of Antwerp had been transformed from a peaceful, smiling
country-side into a land of death and desolation.
It looked as though it had been swept by a great hurricane,
filled with lightning which had missed nothing.
The blackened walls of what had once been prosperous
farm-houses, haystacks turned into heaps of smoking
carbon, fields slashed across with trenches, roads
rutted and broken by the great wheels of guns and
transport wagons these scenes were on every
hand. In the towns and villages along the Nethe,
where the fighting was heaviest, the walls of houses
had fallen into the streets and piles of furniture,
mattresses, agricultural machinery, and farm carts
showed where the barricades and machine-guns had been.
The windows of many of the houses were stuffed with
mattresses and pillows, behind which the riflemen
had made a stand. Lierre and Waelhem and
Duffel were like sieves dripping blood. Corpses
were strewn everywhere. Some of the dead were
spread-eagled on their backs as though exhausted after
a long march, some were twisted and crumpled in attitudes
grotesque and horrible, some were propped up against
the walls of houses to which they had tried to crawl
in their agony.
All of them stared at nothing with
awful, unseeing eyes. It was one of the scenes
that I should like to forget. But I never can.
On Tuesday evening General de Guise,
the military governor of Antwerp, informed the Government
that the Belgian position was fast becoming untenable
and, acting on this information, the capital of Belgium
was transferred from Antwerp to Ostend, the members
of the Government and the Diplomatic Corps leaving
at daybreak on Wednesday by special steamer, while
at the same time Mr. Winston Churchill departed for
the coast by automobile under convoy of an armoured
motorcar. His last act was to order the destruction
of the condensers of the German vessels in the harbour,
for which the Germans, upon occupying the city, demanded
an indemnity of twenty million francs.
As late as Wednesday morning the great
majority of the inhabitants of Antwerp remained in
total ignorance of the real state of affairs.
Morning after morning the Matin and the Metropole
had published official communiques categorically denying
that any of the forts had been silenced and asserting
in the most positive terms that the enemy was being
held in check all along the line. As a result
of this policy of denial and deception, the people
of Antwerp went to sleep on Tuesday night calmly confident
that in a few days more the Germans would raise the
siege from sheer discouragement and depart. Imagine
what happened, then, when they awoke on Wednesday
morning, October 7, to learn that the Government had
stolen away between two days without issuing so much
as a word of warning, and to find staring at them
from every wall and hoarding proclamations signed
by the military governor announcing that the bombardment
of the city was imminent, urging all who were able
to leave instantly, and advising those who remained
to shelter themselves behind sand-bags in their cellars.
It was like waiting until the entire first floor of
a house was in flames and the occupants’ means
of escape almost cut off, before shouting “Fire!”
No one who witnessed the exodus of
the population from Antwerp will ever forget it.
No words can adequately describe it. It was not
a flight; it was a stampede. The sober, slow-moving,
slow-thinking Flemish townspeople were suddenly transformed
into a herd of terror-stricken cattle. So complete
was the German enveloping movement that only three
avenues of escape remained open: westward, through
St. Nicolas and Lokeren, to Ghent; north-eastward
across the frontier into Holland; down the Scheldt
toward Flushing. Of the half million fugitives for
the exodus was not confined to the citizens of Antwerp
but included the entire population of the country-side
for twenty miles around probably fully a
quarter of a million escaped by river. Anything
that could float was pressed into service: merchant
steamers, dredgers, ferry-boats, scows, barges, canal-boats,
tugs, fishing craft, yachts, rowing-boats, launches,
even extemporized rafts. There was no attempt
to enforce order. The fear-frantic people piled
aboard until there was not even standing room on the
vessels’ decks. Of all these thousands
who fled by river, but an insignificant proportion
were provided with food or warm clothing or had space
in which to lie down. Yet through two nights
they huddled together on the open decks in the cold
and the darkness while the great guns tore to pieces
the city they had left behind them. As I passed
up the crowded river in my launch on the morning after
the first night’s bombardment we seemed to be
followed by a wave of sound a great murmur
of mingled anguish and misery and fatigue and hunger
from the homeless thousands adrift upon the waters.
The scenes along the highways were
even more appalling, for here the retreating soldiery
and the fugitive civilians were mixed in inextricable
confusion. By mid-afternoon on Wednesday the road
from Antwerp to Ghent, a distance of forty miles, was
a solid mass of refugees, and the same was true of
every road, every lane, every footpath leading in
a westerly or a northerly direction. The people
fled in motor-cars and in carriages, in delivery-wagons,
in moving-vans, in farm-carts, in omnibuses, in vehicles
drawn by oxen, by donkeys, even by cows, on horseback,
on bicycles, and there were thousands upon thousands
afoot. I saw men trundling wheelbarrows piled
high with bedding and with their children perched
upon the bedding. I saw sturdy young peasants
carrying their aged parents in their arms. I
saw women of fashion in fur coats and high-heeled
shoes staggering along clinging to the rails of the
caissons or to the ends of wagons. I saw
white-haired men and women grasping the harness of
the gun-teams or the stirrup-leathers of the troopers,
who, themselves exhausted from many days of fighting,
slept in their saddles as they rode. I saw springless
farm-wagons literally heaped with wounded soldiers
with piteous white faces; the bottoms of the wagons
leaked and left a trail of blood behind them.
A very old priest, too feeble to walk, was trundled
by two young priests in a handcart. A young woman,
an expectant mother, was tenderly and anxiously helped
on by her husband. One of the saddest features
of all this dreadful procession was the soldiers,
many of them wounded, and so bent with fatigue from
many days of marching and fighting that they could
hardly raise their feet. One infantryman who
could bear his boots no longer had tied them to the
cleaning-rod of his rifle. Another had strapped
his boots to his cowhide knapsack and limped forward
with his swollen feet in felt slippers. Here
were a group of Capuchin monks abandoning their monastery;
there a little party of white-faced nuns shepherding
the flock of children many of them fatherless who
had been entrusted to their care. The confusion
was beyond all imagination, the clamour deafening:
the rattle of wheels, the throbbing of motors, the
clatter of hoofs, the cracking of whips, the curses
of the drivers, the groans of the wounded, the cries
of women, the whimpering of children, threats, pleadings,
oaths, screams, imprecations, and always the monotonous
shuffle, shuffle, shuffle of countless weary feet.
The fields and the ditches between
which these processions of disaster passed were strewn
with the prostrate forms of those who, from sheer
exhaustion, could go no further. And there was
no food for them, no shelter. Within a few hours
after the exodus began the country-side was as bare
of food as the Sahara is of grass. Time after
time I saw famished fugitives pause at farmhouses and
offer all of their pitifully few belongings for a
loaf of bread; but the kind-hearted country-people,
with tears streaming down their cheeks, could only
shake their heads and tell them that they had long
since given all their food away. Old men and
fashionably gowned women and wounded soldiers went
out into the fields and pulled up turnips and devoured
them raw for there was nothing else to eat.
During a single night, near a small town on the Dutch
frontier, twenty women gave birth to children in the
open fields. No one will ever know how many people
perished during that awful flight from hunger and
exposure and exhaustion; many more, certainly, than
lost their lives in the bombardment.