CHAPTER XI ANTWERP—THE DEAD CITIES OF BRABANT
One must have known Belgium before the war, and have travelled through that rich and beautiful country in times of peace, to realise how great is the change. All that has been written up to now about what has happened there is in reality much less than the truth.
Every town, large and small, every country village, one might almost say every inch of Belgian soil, bears the heavy mark of the invaders. What nobody dared to touch they have destroyed; what was believed to be protected by religion and tradition they have profaned; what centuries had made sacred for any thinking being they have demolished.
We send to prison and often take the life of the man who kills another man. Here defenceless old folk, women, and children have been killed by thousands without a motive, even without a pretext. We rage impotently at the earthquake which destroys towns and takes the toll of life. Here human beings have surpassed the earthquake. We shiver at the idea that a fire could destroy the treasures of art which are often the only chain which links us to past generations. Here men who proclaimed themselves the greatest admirers of all the arts stood by and watched the treasures of the world burn by the flames they themselves had lighted.
I have been practically across the whole of Belgium, from east to west, from north to south. From Antwerp to Liége, from Namur to Tournai and to Ghent, by road and by rail, but mostly on foot, on horseback, or by prehistoric vehicles, as it is impossible to get a motor-car at any price. Always the same sight. A population that hardly dares to hope, aching for real news—a population that is feeling a grief too deep for tears, and is plunged into a tragic, dumb sorrow. There it lives and works under the mocking eye of the Conqueror. Sometimes this Conqueror is frankly rude and violent, as he loves to feel and to look like the real descendants of that Attila he has glorified. Sometimes he takes on a mask of scoffing politeness which is still more unbearable. During the first month or so the Germans tried to make friends with the population; the men tried to mix with the people; the officers with the best families. Their advances always received an icy though more or less polite reception, so now the enemy has assumed an air of disdain for the weak little nation it is keeping under its heel.
The little steamboat which took me from Flushing to Antwerp all across the Escaut was laden with a pathetic crowd. There were mothers going back to see their sons, who, being of age liable to military service, had not been allowed to leave Belgium; parents whose only desire was to discover the grave of their son; people who, having come to an end of their resources, were going back to their deserted ruined homes, to their little piece of land which is now covered by water two feet deep.
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When we sight Antwerp it is already dusk, and round us is the large harbour, which has completely lost its wonderful multiform life. Carcases of old boats, breasts and keels of sunken ships, emerge from the lead-like water, suggesting the terrific curves of prehistoric monsters. Some of these boats were sunk by the British before they left. Others were sunk by the Germans, who madly shelled their own mercantile ships together with those of the Allies. On the top of a mast a French flag is still being washed continuously by the waves.
The complicated landing formalities distract my attention from the contemplation of this cemetery of ships. We are searched three times. Every scrap of paper in our pockets, every single article in our luggage, is carefully examined. Then our passports. Very few of these seem complete enough to please the German authorities. A man who is travelling with somebody else's pass is discovered and taken away. Two ladies are not allowed to land, and they are taken back on board screaming and crying; in two days they will be sent back to Holland. Only German is spoken here, though nearly all the officials know French perfectly. If one does not understand German, one cannot possibly get on. After a couple of hours we are allowed to go into the town. No more taxi-cabs are running owing to the shortage of petrol, and also to the fact that all vehicles have been taken up by the German Government. The town is dark for fear of an aerial attack. Patrols of Landsturm men pass continuously across the principal street, and fill the town with the squeaky noise of their nailed boots. The password is loudly shouted when they meet another patrol.
At the hotel everybody is German, from the manager to the liftman and to the chambermaids. As for the guests, they are all German officers. Every good hotel in Belgium is at the present moment inhabited almost exclusively by German officers, and outside the main doors a white, black, and red striped sentry-box has taken the place of the majestic doorkeeper.
Most of the officers are not alone; they have sent for their wives, and very often even their children, nursemaids, servants, and dogs.
I am told the German Government is encouraging this kind of thing, and offers special travel facilities for wives and families. Lately non-commissioned officers and men have been allowed to send for their families. I don't know the real reason of all this, but it is certain that the Germans are trying hard to give the Belgians the impression that they have come to stay. In many places they have taken houses or flats for a year, and have paid for them in advance, and in some small towns in which it is not possible to get a comfortable residence they have started the construction of new villas and cottages.
I walk down the Avenue de Keyzer and enter a very large restaurant, which seems also completely in German hands. Even the menu is printed in German, and hardly a single Belgian enters the huge establishment. I ask for some newspapers, and I am told they can only get German ones; at ten o'clock every light must be out. People walking in the street without special permits after half-past ten are likely to be arrested.
Antwerp is probably the most Germanised town in all Belgium, owing to the fact, I believe, that even before the war any amount of German people lived here, and nearly all the hotels were already in German hands. The town itself does not appear much damaged by the bombardment. Now and again a large hole or a burnt ruin shows the spot were a bomb has burst, but to see real destruction one must go to the southern suburbs, outside the Porte de Berckem.
Here are the old forts, some half destroyed by shells, some still untouched, and most of the houses show wide open wounds, red with freshly smashed bricks. Most of the forts are now converted into barracks for the German troops, and near every one of them is a small cemetery, with many a glorious name written on the rough, white wooden crosses.
Though most of the actual fighting took place outside the old fortification near the new fortresses, at about three miles' distance from the town, some of the old seventeenth-century forts have received their share of shells, and do not seem to have done at all badly, considering the very modern artillery which has beaten them.
Antwerp has lost more than three-quarters of its usual population, a large part of which joined the army or escaped to Holland and England. That is why, perhaps, foodstuff is still comparatively cheap here, and everything except bread and vegetables seems fairly plentiful. Flour is very scarce, and all sort of ingredients are used in its place.
Curiously enough, while bread is scarce and very bad even in the best restaurants, and while in most villages people are forbidden to buy more than a small ration per head, confectioners' shops are full of cakes and sweets of all descriptions. I could not help thinking of the words attributed to a fine lady of France: "Il n'y a plus de pain? Pourquoi ne mangent-ils pas de la brioche?"
As for vegetables, the Belgian gardens have been completely swamped by the inundations, and the produce imported from Germany does not seem to go very far.
There has been apparently a quiet exodus of works of art from Antwerp's famous museums to Germany, though apparently most of the Rubens, Rembrandts, Van Dycks, and Teniers, which were the gems of the Antwerp collections, were taken away before the arrival of the Huns, and are said to be now in a very safe place. Some of the remainder have now found their way to Germany. By the way, some of the rarest specimens of the Zoo animals have shared the fate of the old masters, and now languish behind alien bars.
The town is infested with spies, who are relentlessly hunting down Frenchmen and Englishmen. As a matter of fact, everyone who comes into Belgium is provided straight away with a sort of guardian angel, who very often does not leave him for many days, and possibly not before he has given him some trouble with the German Kommandantur.
This has happened to me, as I will relate later on, and also to most American and Dutch subjects who get into Belgium at the present moment.
Some of them, for the simple fact that they are journalists, are taken to Germany and interned there, and when the Embassies of the different countries protest and claim their subjects, the Government of Berlin answers that the captured journalists are not considered as prisoners, but are only detained for a certain time—that is to say, for as long as the news they have gathered remains important if made public.
Another variety of the so-called German Secret Service is the agent-provocateur, who generally speaks perfect French and Flemish, and gets a fixed sum for every arrest effected by the police on his initiative.
In Antwerp I saw one of these spies approach an old gentleman who had a Belgian rosette in his buttonhole. He was on a tramcar platform, and the spy said to him, "Very bitter weather for our poor little soldiers at the front, isn't it, sir?" The old gentleman evidently knew the identity of his companion, for he simply stared at the rascal and turned his face the other way.
The favourite ground of action of this army of spies is the railway carriage. There acquaintances are easily and quickly made. I very often saw people taken away at the station by two soldiers, while the hero of this beautiful deed was following at a short distance with his face wreathed in the happiest of smiles.
To travel in Belgium now is a complicated task; railways are completely taken over by the German War Office, and only Germans are employed. Not even the old porters are allowed in the stations. No tickets are given without a special pass from the Kommandantur of the town, saying where the applicant wishes to go, for how long, and for what reason. Then you pay for your ticket, provided you make yourself understood by the German employees, and you have the exact amount in marks and not in Belgian money. There are only third-class carriages at first-class fares—für Zivilpersonen—all the other first and second class carriages are marked Nur für Heeresangehorige—those who don't pay evidently.
Before arriving on the platform you are searched by very rude soldiers wearing a large crescent-shaped brass plate with the word "polizei" suspended to their necks by a chain, like a metal label on a brandy bottle.
After this you carry your own luggage to the train, which is thoughtfully kept waiting a quarter of a mile outside the station, in rain or snow, and sit down in a freezing carriage without any light or heating, but possibly with one or more windows smashed. Half an hour or so after the fixed time the train begins to move; a little notice, in German naturally, tells you not to put your head outside the window while crossing a bridge because sentries will shoot at you, and another notice says that, owing to the crisis, you may be asked to step out of the carriage at any moment and without any right to protest, even if you happen to have the pluck to do so.
And ultimately, after hours waiting in intermediate railway stations, after changing trains two or three times on a ten miles' fare, you sometimes arrive; you and your luggage are searched once again, and then you are let out.
I feel sure most of those gentlemen got their iron crosses for much less than this Odyssey.
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It was five o'clock in the afternoon when I walked out of Louvain station on to a muddy piece of uneven ground surrounded by ruins which were once the station square. It was a grey day, and a few stray flakes of snow were blown by the icy whirlwind in all directions. The weather was perfectly consonant with the general aspect of the town.
Right and left I could discover nothing but ruins; it was hard to tell which was the road and which the site of former buildings. Enormous masses of calcinated bricks and stones are all that remain of the houses which have collapsed; as for the others which are still standing, their appearance is still more tragic. All the inside part, the ceilings, the staircases, the roofs, have been burned away, and the outer wall, all out of perpendicular, still shows the pots of flowers, the iron bars, and the metallic parts of the shutters which were burned away.
Entire rows of houses protrude on the street as if they are going to collapse at any minute; others lean backwards just as if they were frightened; others are all leaning on the right or the left side as if a terrible wind had forced them into that unnatural position.
Here at another spot the walls of two houses touch each other at the top, forming a sort of pointed arch. The steeple of a little church leans far more than the famous Pisa Tower.
From every window there hangs a curious sort of transparent stalactite, which at first sight looks like an icicle, and is formed by the window glass melted in the dreadful heat. A three-floor house has collapsed completely except for the wall facing the street, and at one of the second-floor windows a bird-cage, suspended by a chain, is still hanging, and the blizzard rattles it continuously to and fro. For the fire has got a sort of sinister humour of its own. Here it has destroyed completely the powerful masonry of a fifteenth-century house whose walls were four feet thick, and next door it has blackened without burning a fragile-looking cottage, and even left a white and red check curtain hanging from the window. Further down, a butcher's shop has completely disappeared, but a large metallic sign with an enormous bull painted on it is still at its place, sustained, a miracle of balance, by the frame of the burned awning.
I walk down the Rue de la Station to the Grand' Place. Here was the fine theatre in Italian renaissance; now only the four pillars of the front mark the place where it was standing. Farther down, near the gigantic ruins of the University and the Library, is the once-famous Cathedral of St. Peter.
Up to a few months ago this building was one of the most beautiful examples of the Flemish florid-Gothic. All lovers of old things remember its windows, made more elegant than those of any other Gothic cathedral by a sort of carved balcony, its steep roof, its solid-looking, severe front without the traditional portals. Now all this has disappeared. The roof has collapsed. The wonderfully painted stained windows are no more. The carvings have been reduced to shapeless calcinated stones, and the bricks underneath, re-baked by the flames, show themselves as red as a fresh wound. A notice stuck on what was a beautifully carved oak door tells me that the entrance to the cathedral is strictly "verboten." But a couple of marks make the soldier on guard close both eyes, and he lets me in after having warned me not to say a word or make any noise, as pieces of burned wood and of cornice are dropping down at the slightest movement.
Inside one walks on a bed of rubbish four to seven feet deep. The huge pillars stand without supporting any vault, like useless date trees. The famous tabernacle of Mathieu de Layens has been cracked by the heat, and tattered blackened pieces of canvas hang from the walls once covered with paint. As for the twenty-four little statues which used to decorate the choir, they have disappeared. I don't know if they were taken away by the priests before the destruction of the cathedral or stolen by the Germans after it.
Outside, the streets are nearly deserted. A few soldiers, a few ragged people begging for a copper or a piece of bread, these I see; a few of the old inhabitants searching the remains of their homes and contemplating, with the look of somebody who sees an old friend, every bit of metal, every fragment of pottery they happen to find. They have constructed temporary shelters and collected therein what the flames have spared. Some are looking under their house ruins for a member of the family who has disappeared. Every day a new corpse is found. In every square are fresh graves, and the very day of my visit five more victims of German violence had been buried right in the middle of the station square, all round the statue of Van der Weyer, which has been respected probably as an homage to its ugliness. The Kommandant of Louvain insisted that the victims should be buried there, and not in the cemetery, "to set a good example!"
In this phrase is the reason of the destruction of the harmless little town—a reason which has puzzled the whole world.
For the most dreadful part of the destruction of Louvain is that there has been no fighting, no shelling, nothing of what we generally understand by the word war. The town had been quietly occupied by the Germans, and they forced the population to leave their houses without carrying anything with them. People who tried to save anything were robbed of what they had taken with them, the earrings were pulled out of the women's ears (I have seen a body with both the ear-lobes torn in two), the pockets searched, and in more than one case anybody who was found to be carrying something was immediately shot.
Petrol and some other new liquid combustible quite recently discovered in a Berlin laboratory, and which the Louvain people have christened "Colofogne du Diable," were poured abundantly on the whole town, except, perhaps, on twenty houses inhabited by Germans. I saw, in one of the station rooms, the fire engines which have been used for this purpose, fire engines which bear the arms of the City of Louvain, and which, with cruel irony, were used to set fire to the town they had been created to save. Specially made bombs were thrown into every house, and the Germans retired outside the town on the great boulevard to enjoy a spectacle really worthy of Nero.
But at Louvain the Germans have surpassed Nero. While the town was still burning all the population, regardless of age or sex, was arranged in a single line near Mont César. And then the most dreadful thing happened.
The Romans, to subdue soldiers' rebellions, invented a punishment which always seemed to the world the limit of cruelty—decimation.
The Germans at Louvain did the same thing, but they beat the Romans. Every third man was the victim. I met a gentleman who had been twice through this ordeal. He was still young, but his hair was grey, and his eyes had in them a far-off expression of terror. Near the cathedral somebody pointed out to me a young woman gone mad through having lost her husband and brother in this way.
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From Louvain to Malines the country shows all the signs of dreadful desolation. Flooded land covered with ice, under which the dead lie by hundreds, pieces of wood crowned by Belgian képis or Prussian helmets marking the grave of officers—this is the sight. Flooded trenches and rusty wirework, burned or cut trees, telegraphic poles smashed by shells, and again burned houses and windmills, some of the large wings of which have been amputated, and little ruined châteaux on the top of which waves a German flag.
The train passes the Dyle on a temporary bridge constructed at the side of the old one destroyed by the retreating Belgians. Here were many large greenhouses in which the cultivation of the orchid had reached its highest degree of perfection. Now they look like enormous cages, every one of their windows having been smashed.
Malines station gives you an idea of what the whole town looks like. A large placard tells you that the town is now called Mecheln, and underneath it is a large picture of the general who ordered the shelling of the town, but met his death the same day. German soldiers keep the frame constantly decorated with laurel branches. The glass roof is torn by an enormous hole, through which the snow enters freely. The waiting-room has also an extra aperture, and a bomb has taken away every bit of the stucco work and left the walls completely bare. Malines was not set on fire; all the ruin brought on it was due to the blind violence of the high explosives. Evidently they are not as destructive as the people who have invented them, and the town does not look half as bad as Louvain.
Though very few of the houses are untouched, the general aspect of the quiet town has not changed much. Only one or two of the large domes and steeples which used to emerge from the roofs of the small houses have disappeared, and the unfinished tower of St. Rombaut has altered its massive silhouette a little.
Now and again I see deep holes, caused by shells, and houses which have lost a corner, and allow a glance of their domestic life through a large crevice. Here a quiet "béguinage" has received a projectile in full, and from the street I can see a whitewashed room with a decapitated painted crucifix, and hanging to a nail a black bonnet of the old Brabant country woman.
I think of the tragedy of the poor old lady who received that unexpected visit in the very room in which she had chosen to end her life. The "béguinages" of Malines are said to be the most strict of the whole of Belgium, and in some of them the old women live for years without seeing an outsider. Where are now the poor old things who thought every day's life full enough of private worries, and have now been reached in their seclusion by this dreadful catastrophe?
Curiously enough, Malines, which can be considered as the religious metropolis of Belgium, establishes a real record in the way of sieges, pillages, and plunders. French, English, Dutch have often taken and half destroyed the town, and ultimately Napoleon dismantled it in 1804. Some old twelfth and thirteenth century houses which have resisted all previous trials have been fatally hit now. The Grand' Place, which used to delight the lovers of old Flemish constructions, has greatly suffered, and the shells with subtle perversity have spared some ugly modern buildings and raged on what centuries had respected.
Alas! these descriptions of destroyed towns, of murder and pillage; the stories of unbelievable atrocities, even only those which I know are true, the pictures of misery and famine which nobody would have believed possible in our times, could be continued page after page.
But what happened in the towns is nothing compared with what happened in the country. There, far from the control of high officers, the blonde beast has given way to all the brutal follies of which the Hun is now known to be capable.
I have seen and heard things that disgust keeps me from writing; things compared with which the excesses of the French Revolution, the bloodthirsty pleasures of some barbarian kings, the exploits of some notorious brigands, are but the A B C of an art in which the German army has certainly reached the highest possible standard of perfection.