Paths of Glory: Impressions of War Written at and Near the Front Part 22

He is a s...o...b..ring idiot."

In the Grand Place, near the sh.e.l.l-riddled Church of Notre Dame--built by the Bishops in the thirteenth century, restored by the Belgian Government in the nineteenth, and destroyed by the German guns in the twentieth--a long queue of women wound past the doorway of a building where German noncommissioned officers handed out to each applicant a big loaf of black soldier bread.

"Oh, yes; we feed the poor devils," the German commandant, an elderly, scholarly looking man of the rank of major, said to us when he had come up to be introduced. "When our troops entered this town the men of the lower cla.s.ses took up arms and fired at our soldiers; so the soldiers burned all their houses and shot all the men who came out of those houses.

"All this occurred before I was sent here. Had I been the commander of the troops, I should have shot them without mercy. It is our law for war times, and these Belgian civilians must be taught that they cannot fire on German soldiers and not pay for it with their lives and their homes. With the women and children, however, the case is different. On my own responsibility I am feeding the dest.i.tute. Every day I give away to these people between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred loaves of bread; and I give to some who are particularly needy rations of tea and sugar and coffee and rice. Also, I sell to the butcher shops fresh and salt meat from our military stores at cost, requiring only that they, in turn, shall sell it at no more than a fair profit. So long as I am stationed here I shall do this, for I cannot let them starve before my eyes. I myself have children."

It was like escaping from a pesthouse to cross the one bridge of Dinant that remained standing on its piers, and go winding down the lovely valley, overtaking and pa.s.sing many German wagon trains, the stout, middle-aged soldier drivers of which drowsed on their seats; pa.s.sing also one marching battalion of foot-reserves, who, their officers concurring, broke from the ranks to beg newspapers and cigars from us.

On the mountain ash the bright red berries dangled in clumps like Christmas bells, and some of the leaves of the elm still clung to their boughs; so that the wide yellow road was dappled like a wild-cat's back with black splotches of shadow. Only when we curved through some village that had been the scene of a skirmish or a reprisal did the roofless sh.e.l.ls and the toppled walls of the houses, standing gaunt and ugly in the sharp sunlight, make us realize that we were still in the war tracks.

As nearly as we could tell from our brief scrutiny a great change had come over the dwellers in southern Belgium. In August they had been buoyant and confident of the ultimate outcome and very proud of the behavior of their little army. Even when the Germans burst through the frontier defenses and descended on them in innumerable swarms they were, for the most part, not daunted by those evidences of the invaders'

numerical superiority and of their magnificent equipment. The more there were of the Germans the fewer of them there would be to come back when the Allies, over the French border, fell on them. This we conceived to be the mental att.i.tude of the villagers and the peasants; but now they were different. The difference showed in all their outward aspects--in their gaits; in their drooped shoulders and half-averted faces; and, most of all, in their eyes. They had felt the weight of the armed hand, and they must have heard the boast, filtering down from the officers to the men, and from the men to the native populace, that, having taken their country, the Germans meant to keep it; that Belgium, ceasing to be Belgium, would henceforth be set down on the map as a part of Greater Prussia.

Seeing them now, I began to understand how an enforced docility may reduce a whole people to the level of dazed, unresisting automatons.

Yet a national spirit is harder to kill than a national boundary--so the students of these things say. A little flash of flaming hate from the dead ashes of things; a quick, darting glance of defiance; a hissed word from a seemingly subdued man or woman; a shrill, hostile whoop from a ragged youngster behind a hedge--things such as these showed us that the courage of the Belgians was not dead. It had been crushed to the ground, but it had not been torn up by the roots. The roots went down too far. The under dog had secret dreams of the day to come, when he should not be underneath, but on top.

Even had there been no abandoned custom-houses to convince us of it, we should have known when we crossed from southern Belgium into northern France; for in France the proportion of houses that had suffered in punitive attacks was, compared with Belgium, as one to ten. Understand, I am speaking of houses that had been deliberately burned in punishment, and not of houses that stood in the way of the cannon and the rapid-fire guns, and so underwent partial or complete destruction as the result of an accidental yet inevitable and unavoidable process. Of these last France, to the square mile, could offer as lamentably large a showing as Belgium; but buildings that presented indubitable signs of having been fired with torches rather than with sh.e.l.ls were few.

Explaining this and applauding it, Germans of high rank said it presented direct and confirmatory proof of their claim that sheer wanton reprisals were practically unknown in their system of warfare. Perhaps I can best set forth the German att.i.tude in this regard by quoting a general whom we interviewed on the subject:

"We do not destroy for the pleasure it gives us. We destroy only when it is necessary. The French rural populace are more rational, more tractable and much less turbulent than the Belgians. To a much greater degree than the Belgians they have refrained from acts against our men that would call for severe retaliatory measures on our part.

Consequently we have spared the houses and respected the property of the French noncombatants."

Personally I had a theory of my own. So far as our observations went, the people living immediately on both sides of the line were an interrelated people, using the same speech and being much alike in temperament, manners and mode of conduct. I reached the private conclusion that, because of the chorus of protest that arose from all the neutral countries, and particularly from the United States, against the severities visited on Belgium in August and September, the word went forth to the German forces in the field that the scheme of punishment for offenders who violated the field code should be somewhat softened and relaxed. However, that is merely a personal theory. I may be absolutely wrong about it. The German general who interpreted the meaning of the situation may have been absolutely right about it.

Certainly the physical testimony was on his side.

Also, it seemed to me, the psychology of the people--particularly of the womenfolk--in northern France was not that of their neighboors over the frontier. In a trade way the small shopkeepers here faced ruin; the Belgians already had been ruined. The Frenchwomen, whose sons and brothers and husbands and fathers were at the front, walked in the shadow of a great fear, as you might tell by a look into the face of any one of them. They were as peppercorns between the upper millstone and the nether, and the sound of the crunching was always in their ears, even though their turn to be ground up had not yet come.

For the Belgian women, however, the worst that might befall had already happened to them; their souls could be wrung no more; they had no terror of the future, since the past had been so terrible and the present was a living desolation of all they counted worth while. You might say the Frenchwomen dreaded what the Belgians endured. The refilled cup was at the lips of France; Belgium had drained it dry.

Yet in both countries the women generally manifested the same steadfast and silent patience. They said little; but their eyes asked questions.

In the French towns we saw how bravely they strove to carry on their common affairs of life, which were so sadly shaken and distorted out of all normality by the earthquake of war.

For currency they had small French coins and strange German coins, and in some places futile-looking, little green-and-white slips, issued by the munic.i.p.ality in denominations of one franc and two francs and five francs, and redeemable in hard specie "three months after the declaration of peace." For wares to sell they had what remained of their depleted stocks; and for customers, their friends and neighbors, who looked forward to commercial ruin, which each day brought nearer to them all. Outwardly they were placid enough, but it was not the placidity of content. It bespoke rather a dumb, disciplined acceptance by those who have had fatalism literally thrust on them as a doctrine to be practiced.

Looking back on it I can recall just one woman I saw in France who maintained an unquenchable blitheness of spirit. She was the little woman who managed the small cafe in Maubeuge where we ate our meals.

Perhaps her frugal French mind rejoiced that business remained so good, for many officers dined at her table and, by Continental standards, paid her well and abundantly for what she fed them; but I think a better reason lay in the fact that she had within her an innate buoyancy which nothing--not even war--could daunt.

She was one of those women who remain trig and chic though they be slovens by instinct. Her blouse was never clean, but she wore it with an air. Her skirt testified that skillets spit grease; but in it she somehow looked as trim as a trout fly. Even the hole in her stocking gave her piquancy; and she had wonderful black hair, which probably had not been combed properly for a month, and big, crackling black eyes.

They told us that one day, a week or two before we came, she had been particularly cheerful--so cheerful that one of her patrons was moved to inquire the cause of it.

"Oh," she said, "I am quite content with life to-day. I have word that my husband is a prisoner. Now he is out of danger and you Germans will have to feed him--and he is a great eater! If you starve him then I shall starve you."

At breakfast Captain Mannesmann, who was with us, asked her in his best French for more b.u.t.ter. She paused in her quick, bird-like movements-- for she was waitress, cook, cas.h.i.+er, manager and owner, all rolled into one--and c.o.c.king a saucy, unkempt head at him asked that the question be repeated. This time, in his efforts to be understood, he stretched his words out so that unwittingly his voice took on rather a whining tone.

"Well, don't cry about it!" she snapped. "I'll see what I can do."

Returning from the battle front our itinerary included a long stretch of the great road that runs between Paris and Brussels, a road much favored formerly by auto tourists, but now used almost altogether for military purposes. Considering that we traversed a corner of the stage of one of the greatest battles thus far waged--Mons--and that this battle had taken place but a few weeks before, there were remarkably few evidences remaining of it.

With added force we remarked a condition that had given us material for wonderment in our earlier journeyings. Though a retreating army and an advancing army, both enormous in size, had lately poured through the country, the houses, the farms and the towns were almost undamaged.

Certain contrasts which took on a heightened emphasis by reason of their brutal abruptness, abounded all over Belgium. You pa.s.sed at a step, as it were, from a district of complete and irreparable destruction to one wherein all things were orderly and ordered, and much as they should be in peaceful times. Were it not for the stagnated towns and the depression that berode the people, one would hardly know these areas had lately been overrun by hostile soldiers and now groaned under enormous t.i.thes. In isolated instances the depression had begun to lift.

Certain breeds of the polyglot Flemish race have, it appears, an almost unkillable resilience of temper; but in a town a mile away all those whom we met would be like dead people who walked.

Also, there were many graves. If we pa.s.sed a long ridged mound of clay in a field, unmarked except by the piled-up clods, we knew that at this spot many had fought and many had fallen; but if, as occurred constantly, one separate mound or a little row of separate mounds was at the roadside, that probably meant a small skirmish. Such a grave almost always was marked by a little wooden cross, with a name penciled on it; and often the comrades of the dead man had hung his cap on the upright of the cross. If it were a French cap or a Belgian the weather would have worn it to a faded blue-and-red wisp of worsted. The German helmets stood the exposure better. They retained their shape.

On a cross I saw one helmet with a bullet hole right through the center of it in front. Sometimes there would be flowers on the mound, faded garlands of field poppies and wreaths of withered wild vines; and by the presence of these we could tell that the dead man's mates had time and opportunity to accord him greater honor than usually is be-stowed on a soldier killed in an advance or during a retreat.

Mons was reached soon, looking much as I imagine Mons must always have looked; and then, after a few stretching and weary leagues, Brussels--to my mind the prettiest and smartest of the capital cities of Europe, not excluding Paris. I first saw Brussels when it was as gay as carnival-- that was in mid-August; and, though Liege had fallen and Namur was falling, and the German legions were eating up the miles as they hurried forward through the dust and smoke of their own making, Brussels still floated her flags, built her toy barricades, and wore a gay face to mask the panic clutching at her nerves.

Getting back four days later I found her beginning to rally from the shock of the invasion. Her people, relieved to find that the enemy did not mean to mistreat noncombatants who obeyed his code of laws, were going about their affairs in such odd hours as they could spare from watching the unending gray freshet that roared and pounded through their streets. The flags were down and the counterfeit light-heartedness was gone; but essentially she was the same Brussels.

Coming now, however, six weeks later, I found a city that had been transformed out of her own customary image by captivity and hunger and hard-curbed resentment. The pulse of her life seemed hardly to beat at all. She lay in a coma, flas.h.i.+ng up feverishly sometimes at false rumors of German repulses to the southward.

Only the day before we arrived a wild story got abroad among the starvelings in the poorer quarters that the Russians had taken Berlin and had swept across Prussia and were now pus.h.i.+ng forward, with an irresistible army, to relieve Brussels. So thousands of the deluded populace went to a bridge on the eastern outskirts of the town to catch the first glimpse of the victorious oncoming Russians; and there they stayed until nightfall, watching and hoping and--what was more pitiable --believing.

From what I saw of him I judged that the military governor of Brussels, Major Bayer, was not only a diplomat but a kindly and an engaging gentleman. Certainly he was wrestling most manfully, and I thought tactfully, with a difficult and a dangerous situation. For one thing, he was keeping his soldiers out of sight as much as possible without relaxing his grip on the community. He did this, he said, to reduce the chances of friction between his men and the people; for friction might mean a spark and a spark might mean a conflagration, and that would mean another and greater Louvain. We could easily understand that small things might readily grow into great and serious troubles. Even the most docile-minded man would be apt to resent in the wearer of a hated uniform what he might excuse as over-officiousness or love of petty authority were the offender a policeman of his own nationality.

Brooding over their own misfortunes had worn the nerves of these captives to the very quick.

In any event, be the outcome of this war what it may, I do not believe the Belgians can ever be molded, either by kindness or by sternness, into a tractable va.s.sal race. German civilization I concede to be a magnificent thing--for a German; but it seems to press on an alien neck as a galling yoke. Belgium under Berlin rule would be, I am sure, Alsace and Lorraine all over again on a larger scale, and an unhappier one. She would never, in my humble opinion, be a star in the Prussian constellation, but always a raw sore in the Prussian side.

In Major Bayer's office I saw the major stamp an order that turned over to the acting burgomaster ten thousand bags of flour for distribution among the more needy citizens. We were encouraged to believe that this was by way of a free gift from the German Government. It may have been made without payment or promise of payment. In regard to that I cannot say positively; but this was the inference we drew from the statements of the German officers who took part in the proceeding. As for the acting burgomaster, he stood through the scene silent and inscrutable, saying nothing at all. Possibly he did not understand; the conversation--or that part of it which concerned us--was carried on exclusively in English. His face, as he bowed to accept the certified warrant for the flour, gave us no hint of his mental processes.

Major Bayer claimed a professional kins.h.i.+p with those of us who were newspaper men, as he was the head of the Boy Scout movement in Germany and edited the official organ of the Boy Scouts. He had a squad of his scouts on messenger duty at his headquarters--smart, alert-looking youngsters. They seemed to me to be much more competent in their department than were the important-appearing German Secret Service agents who infested the building. The Germans may make first-rate spies--a.s.suredly their system of espionage was well organized before the war broke out--but I do not think they are conspicuous successes as detectives: their methods are so delightfully translucent.

Major Bayer had been one of the foremost German officers to set foot on Belgian soil after the severance of friendly relations between the two countries. "I believe," he said, "that I heard the first shot fired in this war. It came from a clump of trees within half an hour after our advance guard crossed the boundary south of Aachen, and it wounded the leg of a captain who commanded a company of scouts at the head of the column. Our skirmishers surrounded the woods and beat the thickets, and presently they brought forth the man who had fired the shot. He was sixty years old, and he was a civilian. Under the laws of war we shot him on the spot. So you see probably the first shot fired in this war was fired at us by a franc-tireur. By his act he had forfeited his life, but personally I felt sorry for him; for I believe, like many of his fellow countrymen who afterward committed such offenses, he was ignorant of the military indefensibility of his attack on us and did not realize what the consequences would be.

"I am sure, though, that the severity with which we punished these offenses at the outset was really merciful, for only by killing the civilians who fired on us, and by burning their houses, could we bring home to thousands of others the lesson that if they wished to fight us they must enlist in their own army and come against us in uniforms, as soldiers."

Within the same hour we were introduced to Privy Councilor Otto von Falke, an Austrian by birth, but now, after long service in Cologne and Berlin, promoted to be Director of Industrial Arts for Prussia. He had been sent, he explained, by order of his Kaiser, to superintend the removal of historic works of art from endangered churches and other buildings, and turn them over to the curator of the Royal Belgian Gallery, at Brussels, for storage in the vaults of the museum until such time as peace had been restored and they might be returned with safety to their original positions.

"So you see, gentlemen," said Professor von Falke, "the Germans are not despoiling Belgium of its wealth of pictures and statues. We are taking pains to preserve and perpetuate them. They belong to Belgium--not to us; and we have no desire to take them away. Certainly we are not vandals who would wantonly destroy the splendid things of art, as our enemies have claimed."

He was plainly a sincere man and he was much in love with his work; that, too, was easy to see. Afterward, though, the thought came to us that, if Belgium was to become a German state by right of seizure and conquest, he was saving these masterpieces of Vand.y.k.e and Rubens, not for Belgium, but for the greater glory of the Greater Empire.

However, that was beside the mark. What at the moment seemed to us of more consequence even than rescuing holy pictures was that all about us were sundry hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who did not need pictures, but food. You had only to look at them in the streets to know that their bellies felt the grind of hunger. Famine knocked at half the doors in that city of Brussels, and we sat in the glittering cafe of the Palace Hotel and talked of pictures!

We called on Minister Brand Whitlock, whom we had not seen--McCutcheon and I--since the Sunday afternoon a month and a half before when we two left his official residence in a hired livery rig for a ride to Waterloo, which ride extended over a thousand miles, one way and another, and carried us into three of the warring countries. Mention of this call gives me opportunity to say in parenthesis, so to speak, that if ever a man in acutely critical circ.u.mstances kept his head, and did a big job in a big way, and reflected credit at a thousand angles on himself and the country that had the honor to be served by him, that man was Brand Whitlock. To him, a citizen of another nation, the people of forlorn Brussels probably owe more than to any man of their own race.

Gra.s.s was sprouting from between the cobbles of the streets in the populous residential districts through which we pa.s.sed on the way from the American Ministry to our next stopping place. Viewed at a short distance each vista of empty street had a wavy green beard on its face; and by this one might judge to what a low ebb the commerce and the pleasure of the city had fallen since its occupation. There was one small square where goats and geese might have been pastured. It looked as though weeks might have pa.s.sed since wagon wheels had rolled over those stones; and the town folks whose houses fronted on the little square lounged in their doorways, with idle hands thrust into their pockets, regarding us with lackl.u.s.ter, indifferent eyes. It may have been fancy, but I thought nearly all of them looked griped of frame and that their faces seemed drawn. Seeing them so, you would have said that, with them, nothing mattered any more.

We saw a good many people, though, who were taking for the moment an acute and uneasy interest in their own affairs, at the big city prison, where we spent half an hour or so. Here, in a high-walled courtyard, we found upward of two hundred offenders against small civic regulations, serving sentences ranging in length from seven days to thirty. Perhaps one in three was a German soldier, and probably one in ten was a woman or a girl; the rest were male citizens of all ages, sizes and social grading, a few Congo negroes being mixed in. Most of the time they stayed in their cells, in solitary confinement; but on certain afternoons they might take the air and see visitors in the bleak and barren inclosure where they were now herded together.

By common rumor in Brussels the Germans were shooting all persons caught secretly peddling copies of French or English papers or unauthorized and clandestine Belgian papers; since only orthodox German papers were permitted to be sold. The Germans themselves took no steps to deny these stories, but in the prison we found a large collection of forlorn newsdealers. Having been captured with the forbidden wares in their possession, they had mysteriously vanished from the ken of their friends; but they had not been "put against the wall," as they say in Europe. They had been given fourteen days apiece, with a promise of six months if they transgressed a second time.

One little man, with the longest and sleekest and silkiest black whiskers I have seen in many a day, recognized us as Americans and drew near to tell us his troubles in a confidential whisper. By his bleached indoor complexion and his manners anyone would have known him for a pastry cook or a hairdresser. A hairdresser he was; and in a better day than this, not far remote, had conducted a fas.h.i.+onable establishment on a fas.h.i.+onable boulevard.

"Ah, I am in one very sad state," he said in his twisted English. "I start for Ostend to take winter garments for my two small daughters, which are there at school, and they arrest me--these Germans--and keep me two days in a cowshed, and then bring me back here and put me here in this so-terrible-a-place for two weeks; and all for nothing at all."