The Soul of the War Part 17

That night I went for a journey in a train of tragedy I was glad to get into the train. Here, travelling through the clean air of a quiet night, I might forget for a little while the senseless cruelties of this war, and turn my eyes away from the suffering of individuals smashed by its monstrous injustice.

But the long train was packed tight with refugees. There was only room for me in the corridor if I kept my elbows close, tightly wedged against the door. Others tried to clamber in, implored piteously for a little s.p.a.ce, when there was no s.p.a.ce. The train jerked forward on uneasy brakes, leaving a crowd behind.

Turning my head and half my body round, I could see into two of the lighted carriages behind me, as I stood in the corridor. They were overfilled with various types of these Belgian people whom I had been watching all day--the fugitives of a ravaged country. For a little while in this French train they were out of the hurly-burly of their flight. For the first time since the sh.e.l.ls burst over Antwerp they had a little quietude and rest.

I glanced at their faces, as they sat back with their eyes closed. There was a young Belgian priest there, with a fair, clean-shaven face. He wore top boots splashed with mud, and only a silver cross at his breast showed his office. He had fallen asleep with a smile about his lips. But presently he awakened with a start, and suddenly there came into his eyes a look of indescribable horror... He had remembered.

There was an old lady next to him. The light from the carriage lamp glinted upon her silver hair, and gave a Rembrandt touch to a fair old Flemish face. She was looking at the priest, and her lips moved as though in pity. Once or twice she glanced at her dirty hands, at her draggled dress, and then sighed, before bending her head, and dozing into forgetfulness.

A young Flemish mother cuddled close to a small boy with flaxen hair, whose blue eyes stared solemnly in front of him with an old man's gravity of vision. She touched the child's hair with her lips, pressed him closer, seemed eager to feel his living form, as though nothing mattered now that she had him safe.

On the opposite seat were two Belgian officers--an elderly man with a white moustache and grizzled eyebrows under his high kepi and a young man in a ta.s.selled forage cap, like a boy-student. They both sat in a limp, dejected way. There was defeat and despair in their att.i.tude It was only when the younger man s.h.i.+fted his right leg with a sudden grimace of pain that I saw he was wounded.

Here in these two carriages through which I could glimpse were a few souls holding in their memory all the sorrow and suffering of poor, stricken Belgium. Upon this long train were a thousand other men and women in the same plight and with the same grief.

Next to me in the corridor was a young man with a pale beard and moustache and fine delicate features. He had an air of distinction, and his clothes suggested a man of some wealth and standing. I spoke to him, a few commonplace sentences, and found, as I had guessed, that he was a Belgian refugee.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

He smiled at me and shrugged his shoulders slightly.

"Anywhere. What does it matter? I have lost everything. One place is as good as another for a ruined man."

He did not speak emotionally. There was no thrill of despair in his voice. It was as though he were telling me that he had lost his watch.

"That is my mother over there," he said presently, glancing towards the old lady with the silver hair. "Our house has been burnt by the Germans and all our property was destroyed. We have nothing left.

May I have a light for this cigarette?"

One young soldier explained the reasons for the Belgian debacle.

They seemed convincing:

"I fought all the way from Liege to Antwerp. But it was always the same. When we killed one German, five appeared in his place. When we killed a hundred, a thousand followed. It was all no use. We had to retreat and retreat. That is demoralizing."

"England is very kind to the refugees," said another man. "We shall never forget these things."

The train stopped at wayside stations. Sometimes we got down to stamp our feet. Always there were crowds of Belgian refugees on the platforms--shadow figures in the darkness or silhouetted in the light of the station lamps. They were encamped there with their bundles and their babies.

On the railway lines were many trains, shunted into sidings. They belonged to the Belgian State Railways, and had been brought over the frontier away from German hands--hundreds of them. In their carriages little families of refugees had made their homes. They are still living in them, hanging their was.h.i.+ng from the windows, cooking their meals in these narrow rooms. They have settled down as though the rest of their lives is to be spent in a siding. We heard their voices, speaking Flemish, as our train pa.s.sed on. One woman was singing her child to sleep with a sweet old lullaby. In my train there was singing also. A party of four young Frenchmen came in, forcing their way hilariously into a corridor which seemed packed to the last inch of s.p.a.ce. I learnt the words of the refrain which they sang at every station:

A bas Guillaume!

C'est un filou II faut le pendre Il faut le pendre La corde a son cou!

The young Fleming with a pale beard and moustache smiled as he glanced at the Frenchmen.

"They have had better luck," he said. "We bore the first brunt."

I left the train and the friends I had made. We parted with an "Au revoir" and a "Good luck!" When I went down to the station the next morning I learnt that a train of refugees had been in collision at La Marquise, near Boulogne. Forty people had been killed and sixty injured.

After their escape from the horrors of Antwerp the people on this train of tragedy had been struck again by a blow from the clenched fist of fate.

4

I went back to Dunkirk again and stayed there for some days in the hope of getting a pa.s.s which would allow me to cross the Belgian frontier and enter the zone of battle. Even to get out of the railway station into this fortified town required diplomacy bordering upon dishonesty, for since the retreat of the Belgian army of volunteers, Dunkirk had an expectation of a siege and bombardment and no civilian strangers were allowed to enter. Fortunately I was enabled to mention a great name, with the implied and utterly untruthful suggestion that its influence extended to my humble person, so that a French gentleman with a yard-long bayonet withdrew himself from the station doorway and allowed me to pa.s.s with my two friends.

It struck me then, as it has a thousand times since the war began, how all precautions must fail to keep out a spy who has a little tact and some audacity. My two friends and I were provided with worthless pa.s.ses which failed to comply with official regulations. We had no authorized business in Dunkirk, and if our real profession had been known we should have been arrested by the nearest French or British officer, sent down to British headquarters under armed guard and, after very unpleasant experiences as criminals of a dangerous and objectionable type, expelled from France with nasty words on our pa.s.sports. Yet in spite of spy-mania and a hundred methods of spy- catching, we who were cla.s.sed with spies--pa.s.sed all barriers and saw all the secrets of the town's defence. If instead of being a mild and inoffensive Englishman I had been a fierce and patriotic German, I might have brought away a ma.s.s of military information of the utmost value to General von Kluck; or, if out for blood, I might have killed some very distinguished officers before dying as a faithful son of the Fatherland. No sentries at the door of the Hotel des Arcades, in the Place Jean-Bart, challenged three strangers of shabby and hungry look when they pa.s.sed through in search of food. Waiters scurrying about with dishes and plates did not look askance at them when they strolled into a dining-room crowded with French and British staff officers. At the far end of the room was a great general--drinking croute-au-pot with the simple appet.i.te of a French poilu--who would have been a splendid mark for anyone careless of his own life and upholding the law of frightfulness as a divine sanction for a.s.sa.s.sination. It was "Soixante-dix Pau," and I was glad to see that brave old man who had fought through the terrible year of 1870, and had been en retraite in Paris when, after forty-four years, France was again menaced by German armies. Left "on the shelf" for a little while, and eating his heart out in this inactivity while his country was bleeding from the first wounds of war, he had been called back to repair the fatal blunders in Alsace. He had shown a cool judgment and a masterly touch. From Alsace, after a reorganization of the French plan of attack, he came to the left centre and took part in the councils of war, where General Joffre was glad of this shrewd old comrade and gallant heart. He was given an advisory position, un- hampered by the details of a divisional command, and now it seemed to me that his presence in Dunkirk hinted at grave possibilities in this fortified town. He had not come merely to enjoy a good luncheon at the Hotel des Arcades.

The civilian inhabitants of Dunkirk were beginning to feel alarmed.

They knew that only the last remnant of the active Belgian army stood between their great port and the enemy's lines. Now that Antwerp had fallen they were beginning to lose faith in their girdle of forts and in their garrison artillery. The German guns had a.s.sumed a mythical and monstrous significance in the popular imagination. It seemed that they could smash the strongest defences with their far-reaching thunderbolts. There was no outward panic in the town and the citizens hid their fears under a mask of contempt for the "sacres Boches." But on some faces--of people who had no fear of death except for those they loved--it was a thin mask, which crumbled and let through terroi when across the d.y.k.es and ramparts the rumours came that the German army was smas.h.i.+ng forward, and closer.

The old landlady of the small hotel in which I stayed had laughed very heartily with her hands upon her bulging stays when a young Belgian officer flirted in a comical way with her two pretty daughters--a blonde and a brunette, whose real beauty and freshness and simplicity redeemed the squalor of their kitchen.

But presently she grabbed me by the arm, closing the door with the other hand.

"Monsieur, I am an old fool of a woman, because I have those two beauties there. It is not of myself that I am afraid. If I could strangle a German and wring his neck, I would let the rest cut me into bits. But those girls of mine--those two roses! I can't let them take risks! You understand--those Germans are a dirty race. Tell me, is it time for us to go?"

I could not tell her if it were time to go. With two such girls I think I should have fled, panic-stricken. And yet I did not believe the Germans would find Dunkirk an easy place to take. I had been round its fortifications, and had seen the details of elaborate works which even against German guns might prove impregnable. Outside the outer forts the ground was bare and flat, so that not a rabbit could scuttle across without being seen and shot. Sandbag entrenchments and earthworks, not made recently, because gra.s.s had clothed them, afforded splendid cover for the French batteries. Bomb-proof shelters were dotted about the fields, and for miles away, as far as the Belgian frontier, were lines of trenches and barbed-wire entanglements. To the eye of a man not skilled in military science all these signs of a strong defence were comforting. And yet I think they were known to be valueless if the enemy broke through along the road to Dunkirk.

A cheerful priest whom I met across an iron bridge told me the secret of Dunkirk's real defences.

"We have just to turn on a tap or two," he said, laughing at the simplicity of the operation, "and all those fields for miles will be flooded within an hour or two. Look, that low-lying land is under water already. The enemy's guns would sink in it."

He pointed away to the south-west, and I saw that many of the fields were all moist and marshy, as though after torrential rain. Nearer to us, on the dry land, a body of soldiers marched up and down, drilling industriously.

The priest pointed to them.

"They fought untrained, those Belgian boys. Next time they will fight with greater discipline. But not with greater courage, Monsieur! I lift my hat to the heroic spirit of brave little Belgium, which as long as history tells a splendid tale, will be remembered. May G.o.d bless Belgium and heal its wounds!"

He took off his broad black hat and stood bareheaded, with a great wind blowing his soutane, gazing at those Belgian soldiers who, after the exhaustion of retreat, gathered themselves into rank again and drilled so that they might fight once more for the little kingdom they had lost.

A few days later I saw how Belgians were still fighting on their own soil, miserable but magnificent, sick at heart but dauntless in spirit.

5

It was in Calais, to which I had gone back for a day or two, that I found my chance to get into the firing lines in Belgium. I was sitting at an open window with my two friends when I saw a lady's face in the street. The last time I had seen it was in an old English mansion, filled with many gallant and gentle ghosts of history, and with laughing girls who went scampering out to a game of tennis on the lawn below the terrace from which a scent of roses and climbing plants was wafted up on the drowsy air of an English summer. It was strange to see one of those girls in Calais, where such a different game was being played. She had a gravity in her eyes which I had not seen before in England, and yet, afterwards, I heard her laughter ring out within a little distance of bursting sh.e.l.ls. She had a motor-car and a pa.s.s to the Belgian front, and a good, nature which gave me a free seat, provided I was "jolly quick." I was so quick that, with a few things scrambled into a handbag, I was ready in two shakes of a jiffy, whatever that may be, and had only time to give a hasty grip to the hands of the two friends who had gone along many roads with me in this adventure of war, watching its amazing dramas. The Philosopher and the Strategist are but shadows in this book, but though I left them on the kerbstone, I took with me the memory of a comrades.h.i.+p which had been good to have.

6

The town of Furnes, in Belgium, into which I came when dusk crept into its streets and squares, was the headquarters of King Albert and his staff, and its people could hear all day long the roll of guns a few kilometres away, where the remnant of their army held the line of the Yser ca.n.a.l and the trenches which barred the roads to Dixmude, Pervyse and other little towns and villages on the last free patch of Belgian soil. I drove into the Grande Place and saw the beauty of this old Flemish square, typical of a hundred others, not less quaint and with not less dignity, which had been smashed to pieces by German guns. Three great buildings dominated its architecture--the Town Hall, with a fine stately facade, and two ancient churches, with ma.s.sive brick towers, overshadowing the narrow old houses and timber-front shops with stepped gables and wrought-iron signs. For three centuries or more time had slept here, and no change of modern life had altered the character of this place, where merchant princes had dwelt around the market. If there had been peace here in that velvety twilight which filled the square when I first pa.s.sed through it, I should have expected to see grave burghers in furred hoods pacing across the cobble stones to the Hotel de Ville, and the florid-faced knights whom Franz Hals loved to paint, quaffing wine inside the Hotel de la Couronne, and perhaps a young king in exile known as the Merry Monarch smiling with a roguish eye at some fair-haired Flemish wench as he leaned on the arm of my lord of Rochester on his way to his lodging on the other side of the way. But here was no peace. It was a backyard of war, and there was the rumble of guns over the stones, and a litter of war's munitions under the church wall.

Armoured cars were parked in the centre of the square, a corps of military cyclists had propped their machines against gun wagons and forage carts, out of the black shadows under high walls poked the snouts of guns, wafts of scented hay came from carts with their shafts down in the gutters, sentries with bayonets which caught the light of old lanterns paced up and down below the Town Hall steps, Belgian soldiers caked in the mud of the trenches slouched wearily in the side streets, and staff officers in motor-cars with glaring headlights and shrieking horns threaded their way between the wagons and the guns. From beyond the town dull shocks of noise grumbled, like distant thunder-claps, and through the tremulous dusk of the sky there came an irregular repet.i.tion of faint flashes.