J. P. WHITAKER
The German iron heel on Roubaix.
Toward the end of March, 1915, a distinct change became noticeable in the policy of the German military authorities, and for the first time the people of Roubaix began to feel the iron heel. The allied Governments had formally declared their intention of blockading Germany and the German Army had been given a sharp lesson at Neuve Chapelle. Whether these two events had anything to do with the change, or whether it was merely a coincidence, I do not know; the fact remains that our German governors who had hitherto treated us with tolerable leniency chose about this time to initiate a régime of stringent regulation and repression.
Identification papers.
The first sign of the new policy was the issue of posters calling on all men, women, and children over the age of 14 to go to the Town Hall and take out identification papers, while all men between 17 and 50 were required also to obtain a control card.
Up to this time I had escaped any interference from the Germans, perhaps because I scarcely ventured into the streets for the first two months of the German occupation, and possibly also because, from a previous long residence in Roubaix, I spoke French fluently. Strangely enough, though I went to the Town Hall with the rest and supplied true particulars of my age and nationality, papers were issued to me as a matter of course, and never during the whole two years and more of my presence in their midst did the enemy molest me in any way.
Control cards for men of military age.
The only incident which throws any light on this curious immunity occurred about the middle of 1915. Like all other men of military age, I was required to present myself once a month at a public hall, in order to have my control card, which was divided into squares for the months of the year, marked in the proper space with an official stamp "Kontrol, July," or "August," or whatever the month might be. We were summoned for this process by groups, first those from 17 to 25, then those from 25 to 35, and so on. Hundreds of young fellows would gather in a room, and one by one, as their names were called, would take their cards to be stamped by a noncommissioned officer sitting at a table on the far side of the room. On the occasion I have in mind, the noncommissioned officer said to me, "You are French, aren't you?" I answered, "No." "Are you Belgian?" "No," again. "You are Dutch, then?" A third time I replied "No."
At this stage an officer who had been sauntering up and down the room smoking a cigarette came to the table, took up my card, and turning to the man behind the table, remarked, "It's all right. He's an American." I did not trouble to enlighten him. That is probably why I enjoyed comparative liberty.
The German policy of enslavement.
Enslavement is part of the deliberate policy of the Germans in France. It began by the taking of hostages at the very outset of their possession of Roubaix. A number of the leading men in the civic and business life of the town were marked out and compelled to attend by turns at the Town Hall, to be shot on the spot at the least sign of revolt among the townspeople.
Treatment of girl mill operatives who refuse to work.
Not a few of the mill owners were ordered to weave cloth for the invaders, and on their refusal were sent to Germany and held to ransom. Many of the mill operatives, quite young girls, were directed to sew sandbags for the German trenches. They, too, refused, but the Germans had their own ways of dealing with what they regarded as juvenile obstinacy. They dragged the girls to a disused cinema hall, and kept them there without food or water until their will was broken.
Barbarity reached its climax in the so-called "deportations." They were just slave raids, brutal and undisguised.
The deportations or slave raids.
Taken to an unknown fate.
The procedure was this: The town was divided into districts. At 3 o'clock in the morning a cordon of troops would be drawn round a district—the Prussian Guard and especially, I believe, the Sixty-ninth Regiment, played a great part in this diabolical crime—and officers and noncommissioned officers would knock at every door until the household was roused. A handbill, about octavo size, was handed in, and the officer passed on to the next house. The handbill contained printed orders that every member of the household must rise and dress immediately, pack up a couple of blankets, a change of linen, a pair of stout boots, a spoon and fork, and a few other small articles, and be ready for the second visit in half an hour. When the officer returned, the family were marshaled before him, and he picked out those whom he wanted with a curt "You will come," "And you," "And you." Without even time for leave-taking, the selected victims were paraded in the street and marched to a mill on the outskirts of the town. There they were imprisoned for three days, without any means of communication with friends or relatives, all herded together indiscriminately and given but the barest modicum of food. Then, like so many cattle, they were sent away to an unknown fate.
Girls put to farm labor.
Months afterward some of them came back, emaciated and utterly worn out, ragged and verminous, broken in all but spirit. I spoke with numbers of the men. They had been told by the Germans, they said, that they were going to work on the land. They found that only the women and girls were put to farm labor.
Men do construction work in Ardennes.
Very little food.
No complaints permitted.
The men were taken to the French Ardennes and compelled to mend roads, man sawmills and forges, build masonry, and toil at other manual tasks. Rough hutments formed their barracks. They were under constant guard both there and at their work, and they were marched under escort from the huts to work and from work to the huts. For food each man was given a two-pound loaf of German bread every five days, a little boiled rice, and a pint of coffee a day. At 8 o'clock in the morning, after a breakfast consisting of a slice of bread and a cup of coffee, they went to work. At 4 o'clock in the afternoon they returned for the night and took their second meal—dinner, tea, and supper all in one. Often they were buffeted and generally ill-used by their taskmasters. If they fell ill, cold water, internally or externally, was the invariable remedy. Once a commission came to see them at work, but they had been warned beforehand that any man who complained of his treatment would suffer for it. One of them was bold enough to protest to the visitors against a particularly flagrant case of ill-usage. That man disappeared a few days later.
The Belgian frontier is closed.
Long before this the food problem had become acute in Roubaix. Simultaneously with the establishment of the system of personal control over the inhabitants the Germans closed the frontier between France and Belgium and forbade us to approach within half a mile of the border line. The immediate effect of this isolation was to reduce to an insignificant trickle the copious stream of foodstuffs which until then poured in from Belgium—not the starving Belgium of fiction, but the well supplied Belgium of fact.
Fabulous prices for meat.
Butchers and bakers and provision dealers had to shut their shops, and the town became almost wholly dependent on supplies brought in by the American Relief Commission. Fresh meat was soon unobtainable, except by those few people who could afford to pay fabulous prices for joints smuggled across the frontier. Months ago meat cost 32 francs a kilogram (about 13 shillings a pound) and an egg cost 1 franc 25 (a shilling). Obviously such things were beyond the reach of the bulk of the people, and had it not been for the efforts of the Relief Commission we should all have starved.
Foodstuffs supplied by the Relief Commission.
The commission opened a food depot, a local committee issued tickets for the various articles, and rich and poor alike had to wait their turn at the depot to procure the allotted rations. The chief foodstuffs supplied were: Rice, flaked maize, bacon, lard, coffee, bread, condensed milk (occasionally), haricot beans, lentils, and a very small allowance of sugar. Potatoes could not be bought at any price.
The Germans intercept mine food.
Unfortunately, though I regret that I should have to record it, there is evidence that by some means or other the German Army contrived to intercept for itself a part of the food sent by the American Commission. One who had good reason to know told me that more than once trainloads which, according to a notification sent to him, had left Brussels for Roubaix failed to arrive. I know also that analysis of the bread showed that in some cases German rye flour, including 30 per cent of sawdust, had been substituted for the white American flour, producing an indigestible putty-like substance which brought illness and death to many. Indeed, the mortality from this cause was so heavy at one period that all the grave diggers in the town could not keep pace with it.
Germans eager to buy food.
One could easily understand how great must have been the temptation to the Germans to tap for themselves the food which friends abroad had sent for their victims. It is a significant fact that soldiers in Roubaix were eager to buy rice from those who had obtained it at the depot at four francs (3s 4d) the pound in order, as they said, "to send it home." I shall describe later how utterly different were the conditions in Belgium as I saw them.
Meagre as were the food supplies for the civilians in Roubaix, those issued to the German soldiers toward the end of my stay were little better.
At first the householders, on whom the soldiers were billeted, were required to feed them and to recover the cost from the municipal authorities.
Change of demeanor of soldiery.
Of all the things I saw and heard in Roubaix and Lille none impressed me more than the wonderful change which came over the outlook and demeanor of the German soldiery between October, 1914, and October, 1915.
I had many opportunities of mingling with them, more, in fact, than I cared to have, for now and again during this period two or three of them were actually billeted on the good folk with whom I lodged.
Already tired of war.
I knew just sufficient of the German language to be able to chat with them, and they made no attempt to conceal from me their real feelings. I am merely repeating the statement made to me over and over again by many German soldiers when I say that the men in the ranks are thoroughly tired of the war, that they have abandoned all thought of conquest, and that they fight on only because they believe that their homes and families are at stake.
On that Autumn morning when the first German troops came into Roubaix they came flushed with victory, full of confidence in their strength, marching with their eyes fixed on Paris and London. They sang aloud as they swung through our streets. They sing no more. Instead, as I saw with my own eyes, many of them show in their faces the abject misery which is in their hearts.
Expect end of war in November, 1916.
Last year scores of them told me, quite independently, that the war would come to an end on November 17, 1916. How that date came to be fixed by the prophets nobody knew, but the belief in the prophecy was universal among the soldiers.
Soldiers more courteous than officers.
As a rule, the soldiers did not maltreat the civilians in Roubaix, except when they were acting under the orders of their officers; when, for example, they were tearing people from their homes to work as slaves. They had, however, the right of traveling without payment on the tramcars, and they frequently exercised this right to such an extent as to preclude the townsfolk from the use of the cars.
Officers requisition supplies.
Apart from that annoyance, there was little ground for complaint of the general behavior of the soldiers. The conduct of the officers was very different. For a long time they made a habit of requisitioning from shopkeepers and others supplies of food for which they had no intention of paying. One day an officer drove up in a trap to a shop kept by an acquaintance of mine and "bought" sardines, chocolate, bread, and fancy cakes to the value of about 200 francs (about $40). He produced a piece of paper and borrowed a pair of scissors with which to cut off a slip. On this slip he wrote a few words in German, and then, handing it to the shopkeeper, he went off with his purchases. The shopkeeper, on presenting the paper at the Kommandantur, was informed that the inscription ran, "For the loan of scissors, 200 francs," and that the signature was unknown. Payment was therefore refused. This case, I believe, was by no means an isolated one.
When an officer was billeted on a house, he would insist on turning the family out of the dining room and drawing room and sleeping in the best bedroom; sometimes he would eject people entirely from their home.
A docile private soldier.
By contrast the docile private soldier was almost a welcome guest. I remember well one quite friendly fellow who was lodged for some time in the same house as myself and some English over military age in the suburb of Croix. He came to me in great glee one day with a letter from his wife in which she warned him to beware of "the English cutthroats." She went on to give him a long series of instructions for his safety. He was to barricade his bedroom door every night, to sleep always with his knife under his pillow, and never to take anything we offered him to eat or drink.
Few civilian offenses.
Despite the temptations to crime and insubordination which naturally attend an idle manufacturing population of some 125,000 people, there were very few civilian offenses against the law, German or French, among the inhabitants of Roubaix.
Time hangs heavily.
Time hung heavily on our hands. Cut off from the outer world except by the occasional arrival of smuggled French and English newspapers, we spent our time reading and playing cards, and at the last I hoped I might never be reduced to this form of amusement again. In the two and a half years cut out of my life and completely wasted I played as many games of cards as will satisfy me for the rest of my existence.
The gendarmerie called "Green devils."
But even if the inhabitants, in their enforced idleness, had any temptation to be insubordinate, they had a far greater inducement to keep the law in the bridled savagery of the German gendarmerie. These creatures, who from the color of their uniform and the brutality of their conduct were known as the "green devils," seemed to revel in sheer cruelty. They scour the towns on bicycles and the outlying districts on horseback, always accompanied by a dog as savage as his master, and at the slightest provocation or without even the slenderest pretext they fall upon civilians with brutish violence.
Women badly treated.
It was not uncommon for one of these men to chase a woman on his bicycle, and when he had caught her, batter her head and body with the machine. Many times they would strike women with the flat of their sabres. One of them was seen to unleash his dog against an old woman, and laugh when the savage beast tore open the woman's flesh from thigh to knee.
Crossing Belgium.
In January Mr. Whitaker crossed the line into Belgium with the aid of smuggler friends, traversed that country, chiefly on foot, and two months later escaped into Holland and so to England. In Belgium he was astonished to find what looked like prosperity when compared with conditions in the occupied provinces of France. After expressing gratitude to Belgian friends and a desire to tell only what is truth, he proceeds:
No sign of privations.
The first fact I have to declare is that nowhere in my wanderings did I see any sign of starvation. Nowhere did I notice such privation of food as I had known in Northern France. Near the French frontier, it is true, the meals I took in inns and private cottages were far from sumptuous, but as I drew nearer to the Dutch frontier the amount and variety of the food to be obtained changed in an ascending scale, until at Antwerp one could almost forget, so far as the table was concerned, that the world was at war.
The diet at Roubaix, France.
Let me give a few comparisons. At Roubaix, in France, at the time when I left in the first week of this year, my daily diet was as follows: Breakfast—coffee, bread and butter (butter was a luxury beyond the reach of the working people, who had to be content with lard); midday meal—vegetable soup, bread, boiled rice, and at rare intervals an egg or a tiny piece of fresh meat; supper—boiled rice and bread. Just over the border, in Belgium, the food conditions were a little better. The ticket system prevailed, and the villagers were dependent on the depots of the American Relief Commission, supplemented by local produce.
A little further, and one passed the line of demarkation between the étape—the part of Belgium which is governed by General von Denk, formerly commanding the troops at Valenciennes—and the governement général, under the command of General von Bissing.
The first fresh meat in weeks.
Here a distinct change was noticeable. My first meal in this area included fillet of beef, the first fresh meat I had tasted for weeks. Tickets were still needed to buy bread and other things supplied by the Relief Commission, but other foodstuffs could be bought without restriction.
A dinner at Brussels.
At Brussels the food supply seems to be nearly normal. My Sunday dinner there consisted of excellent soup, a generous helping of roast leg of mutton, potatoes, haricot beans, white bread, cheese, and jam, and wine or beer, as preferred; while for supper I had cold meat, fried potatoes, and bread.
Food conditions at Antwerp.
At Antwerp, with two French friends who accompanied me on my journey through Belgium, I walked into a middle-class café at midday. I ordered a steak with fried potatoes and my friends ordered pork chops. Without any question about tickets we were served. We added bread, cheese, and butter to complete the meal and washed it down with draft light beer. Later in the day we took supper in the same café—an egg omelette, fried potatoes, bread, cheese, and butter. And the cost of both meals together was less than the cost of the steak alone in Roubaix.
Appearance of Brussels.
The policy of the Germans appears to be to interfere as little as possible with the everyday life of the country. The fruits of this policy are seen in a remarkable degree in Brussels. All day long the main streets of the city are full of bustle and all the outward manifestations of prosperity.
Business going on.
Women in short, fashionable skirts, with high-topped fancy boots, stroll completely at their ease along the pavement, studying the smart things with which the drapers' shop windows are dressed. Jewelers' shops, provision stores, tobacconists, and the rest show every sign of "business as usual." I bought at quite a reasonable price a packet of Egyptian cigarettes, bearing the name of a well-known brand of English manufacture, and I recalled how, not many miles away in harassed France, I had seen rhubarb leaves hanging from upper windows to dry, so that the French smoker might use them instead of the tobacco which he could not buy. Even the sweetstuff shops had well-stocked windows.
Theaters and cinema palaces open.
The theaters, music halls, cinema palaces, and cafés of Brussels were open and crowded. On the second night of my visit I went with my two French companions to the Théâtre Molière and heard a Belgian company in Paul Hervieu's play, "La Course du Flambeau." The whole building was packed with Belgians, thoroughly enjoying the performance. So far as I could tell, the only reminder that we were in the fallen capital of an occupied country was the presence in the front row of the stalls of two German soldiers, whose business, so I learned, was to see that nothing disrespectful to Germany and her armies was allowed to creep into the play.
An ordinary cinema performance.
At another theater, according to the posters, "Véronique" was produced, and a third bill announced "The Merry Widow." At the Théâtre de la Monnaie, which has been taken over by the Germans, operas and plays are given for the benefit of the soldiers and German civilians. One afternoon I spent a couple of hours in a cinema hall. A continuous performance was provided, and people came and went as they chose, but throughout the program the place was well filled. The films shown had no relation to the war. They were of the ordinary dramatic or comic types, and I fancy they were of pre-war manufacture. Nothing of topical interest was exhibited.
Scenes in Antwerp like those in Brussels.
All the scenes which I have described in Brussels were reproduced in Antwerp. There was a slightly closer supervision over the comings and goings of the inhabitants, but there was the same unreal atmosphere of contentment and real appearance of plenty. Though a good number of officers were in evidence, the military arm of Germany was not sufficiently displayed to produce any intimidation. Perhaps the most obvious mark, here and in the capital, that all was not normal was the complete absence of private motor cars and cabs from the streets.
Belgium still has cattle.
In the country districts two things struck me as unfamiliar after my long months in France. About Roubaix not a single head of cattle was to be seen; in Belgium every farm had its cows. In Belgium the mounted gendarmerie—the "green devils" whose infamous conduct in the Roubaix district I have described—were unknown. Their place was filled by military police, who, by comparison with the gendarmes, were gentleness itself.
I do not profess to know the state of affairs in parts of Belgium which I did not visit, but I do know that my narrative of the conditions of life that came under my personal inspection has come as a great surprise to many people who imagine the whole of Belgium is starving.
Belgium better fed than occupied France.
We in hungry Roubaix looked out on Belgium as the land of promise. The Flemish workers who came into the town from time to time from Belgium were well fed and prosperous looking, a great contrast to the French of Roubaix and Lille. The Belgian children that I saw were healthy and of good appearance, quite unlike the wasted little ones of France, with hollow blue rings round their eyes.
Germany desires a state in Belgium.
The people of Roubaix, knowing these facts, are convinced that the Germans are endeavoring to lay the foundations of a vassal State in Belgium. Foiled in their attempts to capture Calais, the Germans believe that Zeebrugge and Ostend are capable of development as harbors for aggressive action against England. The French do not doubt that the enemy will make a desperate struggle before giving up Antwerp.
The picture I have presented of Belgium as I saw it is, of course, vastly different from the outraged Belgium of the first stage of the war.
The people not to be seduced.
Lest there should arise any misunderstanding, I complete the picture by stating my conviction, based on intimate talks with Belgian men and women, that the population as a whole are keeping a firm upper lip, and that attempts by the Germans to seduce them from their allegiance by blandishment and bribery will fail as surely as the efforts of frightfulness.
Mr. Whitaker's account of his escape into Holland closes thus:
Nearing Holland.
When we drew near to the wires, just before midnight, we lay on the ground and wriggled along until we were within fifty yards of Holland. There we lay for what seemed to be an interminable time. We saw patrols passing. An officer came along and inspected the sentries. Everything was oppressively quiet.
Through the electrified barbed wire.
Each sentry moved to and fro over a distance of a couple of hundred yards. Opposite the place where we lay two of them met. Choosing his opportunity, one of my comrades, who had provided himself with rubber gloves some weeks before for this critical moment, rushed forward to the spot where the two sentries had just met. Scrambling through barbed wire and over an unelectrified wire, he grasped the electrified wires and wriggled between them. We came close on his heels. He held the deadly electrified wires apart with lengths of thick plate glass with which he had come provided while first my other companions and then I crawled through. Before the sentries returned we had run some hundreds of yards into No Man's Land between the electrified wires and the real Dutch frontier.
Arrival at Rotterdam.
Only one danger remained. We had no certainty that the Dutch frontier guards would not hand us back to the Germans. We took no risks, though it meant wading through a stream waist deep. Our troubles were now practically over. By rapid stages we proceeded to Rotterdam.
I was without money. My watch I had given to the Belgian villager in whose cottage I had found refuge. My clothes were shabby from frequent soakings and hard wear. I had shaved only once in Belgium, and a stubby growth of beard did not improve my general appearance.
Sent on to London.
At Rotterdam I reported myself to the British Consul. I was treated with the utmost kindness. My expenses during the next four or five days, while I waited for a boat, were paid and I was given my fare to Hull. There I was searched by two military police and questioned closely by an examining board. My papers were taken and I was told to go to London and apply for them at the Home Office. As I was again practically without means I was given permission to go to my home in Bradford before proceeding to London.
In cooperation with the British forces, a Russian army took part in movements against Bagdad and Turkish cities in Armenia and Persia. These military movements were marked by varying success on the part of the Russian and Turkish forces. Certain phases of this campaign are described in the following chapter.