CHAPTER X HOLLAND
During my war wanderings I crossed Holland several times, and each time I spent a few days there. I did this because of the difficulty of getting the signatures of the different foreign Consuls, because of the irregular service run by the Channel boats, and because I wanted to witness the change which, little by little, came over Dutch public opinion and altered the Germanophile tendencies of the early days of the war to the sympathy for the Entente of the last months.
This does not mean to say that Holland was wildly pro-German in August and is enthusiastically pro-British now.
Holland is essentially pro-Holland, for can we blame her for this attitude, which has been christened by an eminent writer of a neutral country "sacred egoism"?
We who belong to nations numbered, since a more or less long time, among the great Powers, love our country and our independence in a different way from that of the subject of a small nation. We love it, as a matter of fact, without thinking and without speaking very much about it; we know she is in a position to defend herself if attacked, and that she is able to make other nations respect her.
But a Dutchman, like a native of all little States, loves his country and cherishes her independence with the tender and anxious feeling we feel for a person we might easily lose. He knows how difficult is the position of his country, and the example of what happened to Belgium has made him even more thoughtful about it.
The bygone sympathy for Germany was not of a very demonstrative sort, and was inspired in the Dutch population by the undeniable affinity of race, as well as by the never-completely-extinguished jealousy of Belgium and the ill-feeling against England due to the Transvaal War.
But a distinction has to be made; if the Dutch people were rather inclined towards Germany on account of her activity, her commercial prosperity, and her wonderful development (which, indirectly, has done a lot of good to Holland—intermediary and natural channel between Germany and the sea), they felt the opposite sentiments towards Prussia. "Prussia" means, in Holland, the military caste, the Hohenzollern system, the competition in armaments, the general predominance of the soldier over the civilian.
This Holland could never like. She belongs to the hen type, and not to the eagle type. She will fight if she is forced to do so, and fight well too, but she leads a useful existence, and does not understand nor appreciate the system of life of the other bird and his mania for space, for dominion, for prey.
Then came the war, and Holland had to arm, and the refugees began to pour in from the Belgian frontier, and with them their tales of horror; then the action of England protecting the weak against the strong captured the sympathies of the Dutch public; the rudeness and clumsiness of the German Government, its system of war, its campaign of paid articles in the Dutch papers and spies all over the Dutch country, its unfortunate diplomatic conduct, did the rest.
Each time I visited Holland during this war I received the impression that England had acquired, and Germany lost, some more friends.
In the meantime, the Government proceeded to look after the defensive works, and the mobilisation, which was thought at the beginning of the war to be a temporary measure, became a permanent thing. In Holland, before the war, a soldier or an officer was a curiosity. I remember that during my first visit, years ago, I wanted to see the different uniforms of the Dutch Army, but could never manage to do so, so scarce were the soldiers. Even at the Hague one used to see very few officers, and I remember asking a Dutch friend, "Where do you keep your army, please?" To which he answered, "I am not quite certain if we have one!"
Now soldiers are everywhere, and good, solid, sturdy soldiers they look too. I saw them drilling in the grounds near Haarlem, on the long straight avenue that leads to Scheveningen, in the narrow lanes which run by the side of the canals, and I received the most favourable impression.
But the element Man is necessarily of secondary importance in the defence of a country like Holland. The only effective system of protecting her well-developed frontiers is by fortifications, and to this Holland has turned her attention long since. During the last forty years the Dutch Government has carried out, at great expense, the construction of a line of forts, complete with channels, blockhouses, and redoubts, all along the German and Belgian frontiers.
Recently these forts were all armed with modern guns, and the capital, Amsterdam, was also fortified in a modern and efficient manner.
But this does not mean that the defence of the country would be carried out without much trouble; on the contrary, if Holland went to war, the forts would offer a temporary resistance against the gigantic modern artillery, and then the sluices would be opened and the whole of the country, with the exception of a few eastern provinces, would be covered by the water of the Zuyder Zee, the level of which, as everybody knows, is higher than the level of Holland. The towns and villages would be kept out of water by means of a system of strategic dykes, and the country would probably resist for a long period.
But what an enormous price Holland would have to pay! The century-long work which has transformed a sea-bed into the productive, modern Holland would be completely wasted. For years and years to come the industrial life of Holland would be spoiled, and it is almost certain that the little kingdom, instead of being one of the richest, would become one of the poorest countries on earth.
This is certainly one of the many reasons why Holland does all she possibly can to remain neutral.
Up to the present she has succeeded in the difficult task, thanks not only to the action of her Government, but also to the behaviour of her subjects.
When you speak to a Dutchman who happens to have been near the frontier and to have spoken to Belgian refugees, he may let himself go and use a bitter phrase against Germany, but he will suddenly stop with the sentence: "Of course, I am a neutral, and this does not really concern me."
It is wonderful to see how the single individual understands the fragility of his country, which reminds one of the earthenware pitcher travelling with the bronze vase. Even when he had to suffer personally from German manners (and many inhabitants of Holland trading with Belgium were treated in the most disgusting way), the Dutchman will generally add, as a sort of excuse, after relating his adventures: "But, of course, they are at war, and probably one cannot help doing such things even to neutrals when one's country is at war."
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If Holland is "the most neutral of neutral States," it does not mean that the war is not felt financially in the country. In Amsterdam a member of the Chamber of Commerce told me that Holland's trade since the war began has been reduced gradually by more than 65 per cent., and that this figure is continually mounting higher.
Moreover, the refugees from Belgium who have found asylum in the western provinces cost the nation a fair amount of money, not to consider the expense of the fully-mobilised army's upkeep and the high prices paid for the hurried fortification works carried out since the beginning of the war.
"Dutch people are said to have made a good deal of money out of Germany, up to December or even later, by selling her foodstuffs and other articles at very high prices," I remarked, remembering what I had heard both in England and Germany.
"Somebody certainly has," admitted the Dutchman. "Since August, 1914, our Government has stopped the exportation of wheat, etc., but some German private agents used to buy it and send it to private addresses in Germany; we really don't know what happened to that stuff, and as the prices offered by the Germans were very good, I know that a lot of merchants here were only too glad to make business with them. Now the new customs regulations have completely stopped this, and I can tell you that lately Germany has not managed to get anything through the frontiers. The German agents are still here, as well as in Rotterdam and other towns, but they have realised that it is impossible to send to Germany the foodstuffs, etc., which they have already stored for the purpose, and now they have stopped buying."
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During my last visit to Holland I was struck by a curious phenomenon. Dutch people are very fond of humming a tune. They hum it when they walk, when they read, when on business, while smoking huge cigars. True enough, it is very difficult to detect the tune, as they generally distort it in the most unexpected way, but as everybody seems to be fond of the very same tune at the very same time, after hearing three or four performances you usually get to know what they mean by the series of mewings and mutterings they send out, together with abundant puffs of white smoke. My different visits to Holland have been marked by different favourites in the way of tunes: "Merry Widow" three years ago, then "Dollar Princess," then "El Choclo," then "Dixie," and the last time "Tipperary."
Men, women, and children have really gone Tipperary-mad; they make the most gallant efforts to master the tune, hum it all the time, ask for it in the café or theatre, and put the Tipperary record on the gramophone every night before going to bed.
When at the Hague I saw at a music-hall a revue in which the Tipperary tune returned over and over again like a nightmare, and a Dutchman at my side observed to his wife, who was marking time to the music by alternating movements of her head, causing her corkscrew earrings to rattle to and fro: "Isn't it a charming melody?"
At any rate, the "charming melody" has been officially acknowledged in Holland, and I heard the military band at the Bosch playing it in front of the Royal villa.
"That's a real breach of neutrality," I remarked to a Dutch officer who was with me. "If you are not careful you will have serious trouble with Berlin!"
"Oh, no; we are very neutral. I, personally, am absolutely impartial, and don't care a scrap, for instance, whether Berlin is blown up or burnt down," he answered, repeating, for the hundredth time, a joke which has lately captured Dutch sympathies at least as much as "Tipperary."
Walking through the wonderful wood which probably has no equal in Europe, calm and imposing as it is with its green ponds and its gigantic lime-trees, we came to the large avenue on which is the Palace of Peace, the greatest irony in brick and stone human mind has ever conceived.
"You should be ashamed to talk like that, you official guardian of the temple of European peace," I said.
"We are jolly glad to have this big palace here," he answered, smiling. "We are short of large barracks at the Hague!"
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The names of Nispen, Rosendaal, Bergen-op-Zoom, and of many other little towns and villages of North Brabant, will always in future call to my mind the most touching scenes I have ever witnessed. The multitude of refugees who have found asylum in the frontier towns of Holland called to my memory the crowds of starving folk in the best of Goya's sanguines, or the intricate groups of absent-minded humanity in some of Previati's wonderful drawings. Every face, every movement, not only of men and women who have seen and understood, but even of children, is full of pathos and tragedy.
Even now, months and months after their flight from that hell of sacked, burned, and destroyed towns which was Belgium before Antwerp's capitulation, they look frightened, worried, and restless as on the day of their arrival.
Dutch hospitality, which has been celebrated for centuries and centuries, has in this case surpassed itself. The crowd of starving, penniless, terrorised people found a kindly reception, and within a few days' time all churches, public buildings, theatres, and chapels were transformed into lodgings for the new guests.
But soon this was not enough, and temporary constructions had to be erected at public expense, most of the able-bodied refugees helping in the task.
About 350,000 refugees are now in Holland, some in the frontier towns, some in the large towns of South and North Holland. Rotterdam and Amsterdam, the Hague, and Leiden and Haarlem received with outstretched arms, dressed, sheltered, and fed their share of Belgians without making any fuss about it, just as if it was the most natural thing to help this wave of humanity which had come into their country.
It may be said here that not a single charity show, fund, or special committee has been arranged. The different corporations give what they can or take as many refugees as they can afford to keep. The same with private families. I have seen a humble workman offer a corner of his bedroom and his dining-table to a Belgian boy who had lost his parents, and consider him as one of the family.
At Ossendrecht, quite close to the barrier of wood, barbed wire, and stones thrown across the country road to mark the frontier of Holland and Belgium, of peace and war, there is a little café where most of the refugees from Antwerp made their first halt in Dutch territory, and which really would have done a roaring trade since the beginning of the war but for the fact that most of the customers were not even rich enough to pay for their bun or for their glass of beer, and but for the kind-hearted proprietress who could not refuse such comforts even if she had no hope of getting paid for it.
She was a tall, solid, and healthy-looking woman, who seemed to have stepped from a Rubens canvas, with a glory of fair, curly hair and a complexion to render jealous the brightest Haarlem tulip. When she asked me in her curious dialect—which, as a compliment to me, was mixed with a few English words—if I wanted "Pilsener" or "Dunkel," she was carrying two babies of apparently the same age in her arms, one each side. I was wondering how she would manage to bring me my drink, when she put one of the babies on the counter and kept the other in her arms. The baby on the counter fell asleep, but the other one started crying desperately.
She told me that only one of the babies, the one on the counter, was her own, and that he was born in August; then her husband was called away by the mobilisation order, and the refugees began to pour into Holland like flocks of sheep chased by wolves. One day a tired, ill-looking woman came with a baby in her arms. She crossed the frontier and was almost carried into the little café, as she was too faint to walk any further. She said her husband had been killed at Liège, and asked to remain just one night. Though there was not a single bedroom to let in the little café, the kind-hearted giantess agreed. The next morning the Belgian woman was very ill, and in two days she was dead.
"The little girl was just about as old as my boy. I was strong enough to keep the two," she concluded, with a proud smile. "Why shouldn't I have kept the two?"
"And what about your husband?" I asked, admiring her great simplicity.
"I wrote him a postcard, telling everything; and he answered that for him it would just be as if we had got twins."
From Ossendrecht to Bergen-op-Zoom a curious steam tramcar, in the middle of which a group of natives and refugees dry their feet at a red-hot stove, affords me a curious place of observation. Old women, in the celebrated lace bonnets and gilded helmets of the Dutch peasants, seem great friends with Belgian girls, who try their best to convert their Flemish into a language as nearly as possible Dutch. I learn that a lot of refugees go on daily pilgrimages to the frontier, where in one way or another they manage to get some news, or at least a talk with their country-people who continuously come out of Belgium.
The refugees' most difficult task is apparently to find each other. I know of sisters from Malines with their families who have been living for two months within a few hundred yards one of the other, and each believing the other killed or gone to England. One finds everywhere, carved into trees, scribbled on walls, or written on pieces of paper nailed here and there, addresses of refugees wishing and trying to meet old friends or relations.
Sometimes the address is a sensible one, but often one cannot help laughing on learning that the present address of a refugee's family, or part of it, is a church, or a theatre, or a motor garage, or even, as I have seen, a stable or cellar.
At Bergen-op-Zoom the refugees are certainly twice as numerous as the ordinary residents, and the little town, the present look of which belies its bellicose traditions, has been given up completely to them.
Here the refugees can get their meals for nothing, or, if they can afford to pay for them, for a few coppers, and the depôts of foodstuffs specially reserved for them are so gigantic that they seem sufficient to keep the whole country going for a long time.
I have assisted at a dinner of refugees in a large schoolroom close to the Hof van Holland Hotel; hot steaming soup, vegetables, roast meat, cheese, and ham were freely given away by young girls in the picturesque costume of the country.
The food seems excellent. The convivial scene reminded me more of the dinner of country people than of a charity meal. A faint smile comes back to most of the refugees' faces as they eat.
This war, the simple and noble manner in which the Dutch have given all they could to the refugee Belgians, will certainly kill for ever the century-long jealousies which were still alive a few months ago.