My Year of the War. Frederick Palmer
arrest the whole population and lead them off to jail; and if you bayoneted a few—which really those phlegmatic, comfortable old Landsturms would not have the heart to do for such a little thing—why, it would get into the American Press, and the Berlin Foreign Office would say:
"There you are, you soldiers, breaking all the crockery again!"
In the smaller towns, where the Germans were billeted in Belgian houses, of course the hosts had to serve their unwelcome guests.
"Yet we managed to let them know what was in our hearts," said one woman. "Some tried to be friendly. They said they had wives and children at home; and we said: 'How glad your wives and children would be to see you! Why don't you go home?'"
When a report reached the commander in Ghent that an old man had concealed arms, a sergeant with a guard was sent to search the house.
"Yes, my son has a rifle."
"Where is it?"
"In his hands on the Yser, if he is not dead, monsieur. You are welcome to search, monsieur."
Belgium was developing a new humour, a humour at the expense of the Germans. In their homes they mimicked their rulers as freely as they pleased. To carry mimickry into the streets meant arrest for the elders, but not always for the children. You have heard the story, which is true, of how some gamins put carrots in old bowler hats to represent the spikes of German helmets, and at their leader's command of "On to Paris!" did a goose-step backwards. There is another which you may not have heard of a small boy who put on grandfather's spectacles, a pillow under his coat, and a card on his cap, 'Officer of the Landsturm.' The conquerors had enough sense not to interfere with the battalion which was taking Paris; but the pseudo-Landsturm officer was chased into a doorway and got a cuff after his placard was taken away from him.
When a united public opinion faces bayonets it is not altogether helpless to reply. By the atmospheric force of mass it enjoys a conquest of its own. If a German officer or soldier entered a street car, women drew aside in a way to indicate that they did not want their garments contaminated. People walked by the sentries in the streets giving them room as you would give a mangy dog room, yet as if they did not see the sentries; as if no sentries existed.
The Germans said that they wanted to be friendly. They even expressed surprise that the Belgians would not return their advances. They sent out invitations to social functions in Brussels, but no one came—not even to a ball given by the soldiers to the daughters of the poor. Belgium stared its inhospitality, its contempt, its cynical drolleries at the invader.
I kept thinking of a story I heard in Alaska of a man who had shown himself yellow by cheating his partner out of a mine. He appeared one day hungry at a cabin occupied by half a dozen men who knew him. They gave him food and a bunk that night; they gave him breakfast; they even carried his blanket-roll out to his sled and harnessed his dogs as a hint, and saw him go without one man having spoken to him. No matter if that man believed he had done no wrong, he would have needed a rhinoceros hide not to have felt this silence. Such treatment the Belgians have given to the Germans, except that they furnished the shelter and harnessed the team under duress, as they so specifically indicate by every act. No wonder, then, that the old Landsturm guards, used at home to saying "Wie gehts?" and getting a cheery answer from the people they passed in the streets, were lonely.
Not only stubborn, but shrewd, these Belgians. Both qualities were brought out in the officials who had to deal with the Germans, particularly in the small towns and where destruction had been worst. Take, for example, M. Nerincx, of Louvain, who has energy enough to carry him buoyantly through an American political campaign, speaking from morning to midnight. He had been in America. I insisted that he ought to give up his professorship, get naturalized, and run for office in America. I know that he would soon be mayor of a town, or in Congress.
When the war began he was professor of international law at the ancient university whose walls alone stand, surrounding the ashes of its priceless volumes, across from the ruined cathedral. With the burgomaster a refugee from the horrors of that orgy, he turned man of action on behalf of the demoralized people of the town with a thousand homes in ruins. Very lucky the client in its lawyer. He is the kind of man who makes the best of the situation; picks up the fragments of the pitcher, cements them together with the first material at hand, and goes for more milk. It was he who got a German commander to sign an agreement not to "kill, burn, or plunder" any more, and the signs were still up on some houses saying that "This house is not to be burned except by official order."
There in the Hôtel de Ville, which is quite unharmed, he had his office, within reach of the German commander. He yielded to Caesar and protected his own people day in and day out, diplomatic, watchful, Belgian. And he was cheerful. What other people could have retained any vestige of cheer! Sometimes one wondered if it were not partly due to an absence of keen nerve-sensibilities, or to some other of the traits which are a product of the Belgian hothouse and Belgian inheritance.
I might tell you about M. Nerincx's currency system; how he issued paper promises to pay when he gave employment to the idle in repairing those houses which permitted of being repaired, and cleaned the streets of debris, till ruined Louvain looked as shipshape as ruined Pompeii; and how he got a little real money from Brussels to stop depreciation when the storekeepers came to him and said that they had stacks of his notes which no mercantile concern would cash.
M. Nerincx was practising in the life about all that he ever learned and taught at the university, "which we shall rebuild!" he declared, with cheery confidence. "You will help us in America," he said. "I'm going to America to lecture one of these days about Louvain!"
"You have the most famous ruins, unless it is Rheims," I assured him. "You will get flocks of tourists"—particularly if he fenced in the ruins of the library and burned leaves of ancient books were on sale.
"Then you will not only have fed, but have helped to rebuild Belgium," he added.
A shadow of apprehension overhung his anticipation of the day of Belgium's delivery. Many a Belgian had arms hidden from the alert eye of German espionage, and his bitterness was solaced by the thought; "I'll have a shot at the Germans when they go!" The lot of the last German soldier to leave a town, unless the garrison slips away overnight, would hardly make him a good life-insurance risk.
My last look at a Belgian bread-line was at Liege, that town which had had a blaze of fame in August, 1914, and was now almost forgotten. An industrial town, its mines and works were idle. The Germans had removed the machinery for rifle-making, which has become the most valuable kind of machinery in the world next to that for making guns and shells. If skilled Belgians here or elsewhere were called upon to serve the Germans at their craft, they suddenly became butter-fingered. So that bread-line at Liege was long, its queue stretching the breadth of the cathedral square.
As most of the regular German officers in Belgium were cavalrymen—there was nothing for cavalry to do on the Aisne line of trenches—it was quite in keeping that the aide to the commandant of Liege, who looked after my pass to leave the country, should be a young officer of Hussars. He spoke English well; he was amiable and intelligent. While I waited for the commandant to sign the pass the aide chatted of his adventures on the pursuit of the British to the Marne. The British fought like devils, he said. It was a question if their new army would be so good. He showed me a photograph of himself in a British Tommy's overcoat.
"When we took some prisoners I was interested in their overcoats," he explained. "I asked one of the Tommies to let me try on his. It fitted me perfectly, so I kept it as a souvenir and had this photograph made to show my friends."
Perhaps a shade of surprise passed over my face.
"You don't understand," he said. "That Tommy had to give me his coat! He was a prisoner."
On my way out from Liege I was to see Visé—the town of the gateway—the first town of the war to suffer from frightfulness. I had thought of it as entirely destroyed. A part of it had survived.
A delightful old Bavarian Landsturmman searched me for contraband letters when our cart stopped on the Belgian side of a barricade at Maastricht, with Dutch soldiers on the other side. His examination was