Antwerp to Gallipoli. Arthur Ruhl
the pilot-boat: "Take down your wireless!" Down it came, and there the ship stayed for the night, while the passengers crowded about a volunteer town-crier who read from the papers that had come aboard, and, in the strange quiet that descends on an anchored steamship, asked each other how true it was that the German military bubble—a magazine article with that title had been much read on the way over—had burst.
Slowly next morning we crept up the Mersey, past a rusty tramp outward bound, crowded with khaki-clad men. All the shipping was tooting as she swept by, and the men cheering and waving their hats at the land they might never come back to. The regular landing-stages were taken by transports, tracks were held for troop-trains, and it was night before we got down to London, where crowds and buses stormed along as usual and barytone soloists in every music-hall were roaring defiance to the Kaiser and reiterating that Britannia ruled the waves.
Into the fog of war that covered the Continent an army of Englishmen had vanished, none knew where. Out of it came rumors of victories, but as I crossed the Strand that morning on the way to Charing Cross, a newsboy pushed an extra into the cab window—the Germans were entering Brussels! Yet we fought into the boat train just as if thousands of people weren't fighting to get away from the very places we hoped to reach.
There were two business men in our coupe going to France, an elderly Irish lady, an intransigent Unionist, with black goggles and umbrella, hoping to get through to her invalid brother in Diest, and a bright, sweet-faced little Englishwoman, in nurse's dark-blue uniform and bonnet, bound for Antwerp, where her sister's convent had been turned into a hospital. She told about her little east-coast town as we crossed the sunny Channel; we trailed together into the great empty station at Ostend and, after an hour or two, found a few cars getting away, so to speak, of their own accord.
The low checker-board Belgian fields drifted quickly past; then Bruges, with a wounded soldier leaning on the shoulders of two companions; then Ghent. There was a great crowd about the station—men thrown out of work, men in flat cloth caps smoking pipes—the town just recovering from the panic of that afternoon. Flags had been hauled down—the American consul was even asked if he didn't think it would be safer to take down his flag—some of the civic guards, fearing they would be shot on sight if the Germans saw them in uniform, tore off their coats and threw them in the canal. Others threw in cartridges, thousands of gallons of gasolene were poured on the ground, and everybody watched the church tower for the red flag which would signal that firing was about to begin. Le Bien Public of Ghent, however, protested stoutly because its mail edition had been refused at the station:
It is not alone on the field of battle that one must be brave. For us civilians real courage consists in doing our ordinary duty up to the last. In Limburg postmen made their rounds while Prussians inundated the region, and peasants went right along with their sowing while down the road troops were falling back from the firing-line.
Let us think of our sons sleeping forever down there in the trenches of Haelen and Tirlemont and Aerschot; of those brave artillerymen who, for twenty days, have been waiting in the forts at Liege the help so many times promised from the allies; of our lancers charging into mitrailleuse-fire as if they were in a tournament; let us remember that our heroic little infantrymen, crouched behind a hedge or in a trench, keeping up their fire for ten hours running until their ammunition was exhausted, and forced at last to retire, wounded and worn out, without a chief to take orders from, have had no other thought than that of finding some burgomaster or commissioner of police, in order not to be taken for deserters. Let us think a little of all these brave men and be worthy of them.
There were no music-halls in Belgium and there were posters on the blank walla, even of little villages, reminding bands and hurdy-gurdy players and the proprietors of dance-halls that this was no time for unnecessary noise. There were no soldiers going gayly off to war; the Belgians were coming back from war. They had been asked to hold out for three days, and they had held for three weeks. All their little country was a battle-field, and Belgium open to the invader.
It was too late to get to Brussels, but there was still a train to Antwerp. At Puers soldiers were digging trenches and stringing approaches with barbed wire. The dikes had been opened and part of the country flooded. Farther on we passed the Antwerp forts, then comely suburbs where houses had been torn down and acres of trees and shrubs—precious, as may be imagined, to a people who line their country roads with elms and lindens like avenues in parks, and build monuments to benevolent-looking old horticulturists—chopped down and burned. And go, presently, into the old city itself, dull-flaming with the scarlet, gold, and black, of the Belgian flag, and with something that seemed to radiate from the life itself of this hearty, happy people, after all their centuries of trade and war, and good food, and good art—like their own Rubenses and Van Dycks.
There was no business, not a ship moving in the Scheldt. All who worked at all were helping prepare for the possible siege; those who didn't crowded the sidewalk cafes, listening to tales from the front, guessing by the aid of maps whither, across the silent, screened southwest, the German avalanche was spreading.
"Treason," "betrayal," "savagery," were on everybody's lips. For Antwerp, you might say, had been "half German"; many of its rich and influential men were of German origin, although they had lived in Belgium for years. And now the Belgians felt they had lived there as spies, and the seizure of Belgium was an act long and carefully planned. One was told of the finding of rifles in German cellars, marked "Preserves," of German consuls authorized to give prizes for the most complete inventories of their neighborhoods turned in by amateur spies.
Speaking to one man about the Rubens "Descent from the Cross" still hanging in the cathedral, I suggested that such a place was safe from bombardment. He looked up at the lace-like old tower, whose chimes, jangling down through leaping shafts and jets of Gothic stone, have so long been Antwerp's voice. "They wouldn't stop a minute," he said.
All eastern Belgium was cut off. Brussels, to which people run over for dinner and the theatre, might have been in China. Meanwhile Antwerp seemed safe for the time and I returned to Ghent, got a train next day as far south as Deynze, where the owner of a two-wheeled Belgian cart was induced to take me another thirty kilometres on down to Courtrai. It was rumored that there had been a battle at Courtrai—it was, at any rate, close to the border and the German right wing and in the general line of their advance.
We rattled along the hard highroad, paved with Belgian blocks, with a well-pounded dirt path at the side for bicycles, between almost uninterrupted rows of low houses and tiny fields in which men and women both were working. Other carts like ours passed by, occasional heavy wagons drawn by one of the handsome Belgian draft-horses, and now and then a small loaded cart, owner perched on top, zipping along behind a jolly Belgian work dog—pulling as if his soul depended on it and apparently having the time of his life. Every one was busy, not a foot of ground wasted; a more incongruous place into which to force the waste and lawlessness of war it would be hard to imagine.
Past an old chateau, with its lake and pheasant-preserve; along the
River Lys, with its miles of flax, soaked in this peculiarly potent
water, now drying in countless little cones, like the tents of some vast
Lilliputian army, and so at last into Courtrai.
It was like hundreds of other quaint old towns along the French and Flemish border, not yet raked by war, but motionless, with workmen idle, young men gone to the front, and nothing for people to do but exchange rumors and wait for the clash to come. I strolled round the old square and through some of the winding streets. One window was filled with tricolor sashes carrying the phrase: "Long live our dear Belgium! May God preserve her!"
On blank walls was this proclamation in parallel columns of French and
Flemish:
Ville De Courtrai Avis Important a la Population Courtraisienne Stad
Kortrijk Belangrijk Bericht aan de Kortrijksche Bevolking
I am about to make an appeal to your reason and your sentiments of humanity.
If, in the course of the unjust war which we are now enduring, it happens that French or Belgian troops