III.—Termonde
The fate of Termonde is already known. But I do not apologise for adding to the literature of its devastation an account of a visit which I paid to-day. Imagination lacks the stringency of the scandal actually seen, and we have got, by repeated strokes, to hammer into the imagination of the world the things that Prussia has done in Belgium.
I went from Ghent to Zele by train this morning, and from Zele to Termonde by carriage. They call Ghent the flower-town, and not without some reason. It lies in that part of Flanders in which cultivation is at its most intensive. That is to say, it is the centre of one of the greatest agricultural areas in the world. Near Ghent it was nursery-gardens all the way, a checker-board of colour. The geraniums, we thought, will never again look like fire; they will look like blood. Further into the country fewer flowers and more crops and cattle. Not a square millimetre wasted. All the familiar Flemish picture; the windmill that looks like two combs crossed, and revolving on a pepper-box; the old churches, the old castles, reminiscent of the Spanish persecution; the strong peasant-faces—like those of my own “Ulster,” but Catholic—lined with labour; the wayside statues; the villages, with little beauty save that of fruitful effort.
It is a flat country all the way to Termonde, and especially as one nears the Scheldt. It is well timbered. I noticed again a contrast I have often noticed before. In England the trees look like gentlemen of leisure. If they do any good it is by a sort of graceful accident. In Belgium they look like soldiers. They stand there in planned ranks, repelling the infantry of the winds, drawing the artillery of the rain, sheltering, protecting. Add to them the waving patches of hemp, the corn-stacks, the rich herbage, and you get a closely-tufted and almost impenetrable country. It is striped everywhere also with little canals and ditches, so that any sort of military movement, except over the cobbled roads, must be almost impossible. If one remembers that the environs of the towns are almost the only places open enough for a conflict between any substantial forces, a good many events become more intelligible.
What Termonde was
But, for the moment, I am concerned with the impression of remoteness and quiet labour which such a country gives. The peasants yield to it. At Zele, at Lokeren, they feel the war as some great demon that has mysteriously passed them by. And then, eight kilometres away, you turn the bend of a country road at the Bridge of Termonde and drive, let us say, from something that looks very like Kent into something that looks very like Hell.
Termonde was—— Let me recall what it was. It was a not unprosperous town of some eleven or twelve thousand people. Though not destitute of commerce and industries, it lived mainly on law (for it was an assize town), on education, and on the army. The two handsomest residences that I saw—one in puce-coloured brick at the approach to the bridge, the other more grandiose in stone and inexplicably saved in the principal street—belonged one to a judge, the other to an avocat. Termonde, like many other places in the Low Countries, had already been lifted into history by war. It repelled Louis XIV with its dykes, but Marlborough took it dry. Such was Termonde.
To-day it is a tumbled avalanche of brick, stone, twisted iron and shattered glass, over which the remaining public buildings rise like cliffs over a flood. I walked every foot of every street. Of the Rue de l’Eglise, the chief street, the Porte de Boom and Church of Notre Dame at one end, and the Hôtel de Ville, Palais de Justice, and Museum at the other are untouched. So is the avocat’s house, of which I have spoken, chalked over with that piteous legend to which one has become so accustomed. Friends here! Please spare! (in German and German characters). The rest of the street is as if the breath of Armageddon had withered it. The post office, the chapel and convent of the Poor Clares, the hospital, the orphanage have all disappeared.
There is no need to multiply descriptive details. It is always the same capricious devastation, the same arabesques of ruin, with which flame searches its mad way through architecture. About one-half of the Grand’ Place has been saved owing to the fact that the Germans were gathered there, drinking champagne, when fire was being sown through the town.
The Marché au Bétail, a pretty little boulevard, has also disappeared. The great College, at its corner, like the other schools, is gone. Each of its façades resembles nothing so much as an X-ray photograph. Through the charred ribs of what was a house the green-red-and-white of a flower-garden flashes the eternal tricolour of nature.
Culture and the Sick
In the Marché au Lin the Church of the Récolletes and the National Bank lie disembowelled. It was here that the Germans laid on the pavements the sick and wounded while they burned the beds from which they had dragged them and the roof that had sheltered them.
A few small factory buildings on the left bank of the river and the poorest section of the workmen’s quarter remain. The rest of Termonde is a mere heap of bricks. It was; it no longer is. Walking out towards the southern side of the town I came suddenly—everything here happens suddenly—upon a note of desolation, not the most desolate, but the most crying of all. Through a chasm in a shattered façade I saw the white walls of little houses, the white coifs of nuns, and the waving green of trees. It was the Béguinage. Anyone who knows Flanders knows these remote pools of silence, these quiet backwaters where no oar breaks the surface, where the old and spent await death as one courteously awaits an honoured visitor. I stepped in and found myself in an irregular triangle of almshouses. At first nothing seemed to have been touched. But in the centre there was a church, fringed with dwarf cypress. Walking over, I found that it was, like Termonde, a skeleton. The Germans, a nun told me, had on the entreaty of two Dutch ladies, members of the community, consented to spare the cottages. But they insisted on making a bonfire of the “cottage of the Bon Dieu!”
Nothing was lacking in this abomination of desolation. I determined to have some photographs made. Yes! our guide—a big country farmer, who had out of pure courtesy accompanied us from Zele—knew of a photographer who would doubtless be able to do our business. We went to look for him. His street had disappeared, his house with it. We walked back to the estaminet to ask where he might be found.
“But, monsieur! he was one of the first to be shot by the Germans!” Later, on one of the quays we saw a white wooden cross, with lime stamped down about its base. Bystanders told us that it marked the grave of two Belgian civilians. “Ah!” said our farmer, “it is perhaps there!”
Organised Infamy
Now as to the procedure of the Germans. The facts admit of no doubt. I set aside forthwith any damage caused to Termonde by the bombardment. The bridge was dynamited, a number of houses on the outskirts were shattered by shells. Nobody is childish enough to complain about that. War is war, and, technically, Termonde is a fortified town—though the old fortifications have been dismantled. But the burning was deliberate, scientific, selective, devoid of military purpose.
The German commander demanded a levy of two million francs. The money was not there in the public treasury, and the Burgomaster was not there to save his town as Braun saved Ghent. General Sommerfeld—that is the name that now wears such a nimbus of infamy—had a chair brought from an inn into the centre of the Grand Place. He sat down on it, crossed his legs, and said: “It is our duty to burn the town!”
The inhabitants were allowed two hours to clear out. Then the soldiers went to work. Their apparatus is in the best tradition of German science—patented, for all I know, from Charlottenburg. It consists of a small portable pressure-caisson filled with benzine and fitted with a spray. Other witnesses said that there was also a great caisson on wheels. With this they sprinkled the doors, the ground storeys of the houses—as doorposts were once fatally sprinkled with blood in Egypt—and set fire to the buildings.
Others used a sort of phosphorus-paste with which they smeared the object to be destroyed. They completed the work by flinging hand-grenades and prepared fuses into the infant flames.
The selective power of this apparatus was remarkable. Remembering Louvain, and how the burning of the University had destroyed German prestige for a century, General Sommerfeld had evidently given directions that public monumental buildings were to be spared. Thus the Museum and the Hôtel de Ville both stand; but right between them his petroleurs picked out and destroyed a hotel as neatly as you pick a winkle out of a shell. Similarly they cut the avocat’s house, of which I have spoken, out of their sea of destruction.
General Sommerfeld’s soldiery stole, pillaged, and drank everything on which they could lay hands. Witnesses on this point are many, and unshakable. Their moderation must impress anybody who talks to them. A citizen of Termonde who had himself been held as a hostage said to me, standing amid the ruins of his town—
“Monsieur! there is human nature also among the Germans. I saw many officers in tears. A lieutenant came and shook me by the hand, crying: ‘It is not our fault! It is a shame!’”
“He must be Hanged”
Do not think that the evil, written here in the debris of Belgium, will be cancelled and blotted out by subscriptions and indemnities. It calls also for that holy vengeance without which all public law is a nullity. Sommerfeld has got to be hanged. When are the Allies going to issue a proclamation placing definitely outside the privilege of military law Sommerfeld and his kind?
The more one sees of Belgium the more deeply her magnificent courage pierces into the soul. I saw women weeping amid the ruins of Termonde. But I also saw builders’ men stolidly smoking their pipes as they shovelled out the bricks and rubble to make room for new foundations.
I talked with the pioupious. They had torn up half the pavement on the southern road and stretched barbed wire and brambles over the loose stones... to encourage the Uhlans. As you approached from without you saw the wicked eyes of the street trenches, and the grass-grown mounds of the old fortifications, winking down at you. The town was held by an outpost of three or four companies.
“Sir! American Sir!” said one of the pioupious, in the sort of English which an Antwerp Fleming who has spent two years among Scotchmen in the United States may be expected to speak. “Fourth Infantry of the Line at your service! We have two things only which we greatly much desire: Cigarettes and Revenge!”
Irish Horses
On the other side of the town a battery of artillery, magnificently horsed, was waiting under the trees for any alarm. Most of the horses were Irish. I felt a little nostalgia as I rubbed the sensitive nose of a roan mare. I wished that I had with me a poet or two of the Celtic renaissance to make a poem telling her how she had begun at the fair of Ballina, or Moy, or perhaps Ballsbridge itself, and how she would wander the white roads of Europe—not white now, but red—and die at last over there on the banks of the Rhine near pleasant Coblenz, or many-pinnacled Cologne. There being no poet about, I could but scratch the butt of her ears and give her some chocolate.
Two hours in the tram, five on the carriage-trip, three and a half to accomplish the hour’s train journey from Lokeren to Antwerp. I am now writing this impression of Termonde in this besieged city (in which no light is permitted after eight) by the light of two most excellent candles.