Through the Great Hall in Ghent there poured 100,000 refugees. Here we pleaded how absolutely imperative it was that we should obtain an atrocity picture. The daughter of the burgomaster, who was in charge, understood our plight and promised to do her best. But out of the vast concourse she was able to uncover but one case that could possibly do service as an atrocity.
It was that of a blind peasant woman with her six children. The photographers told her to smile, but she didn't, nor did the older children; they had suffered too horribly to make smiling easy. When the Germans entered the village the mother was in bed with her day-old baby. Her husband was seized and, with the other men, marched away, as the practice was at that period of the invasion, for some unaccountable reason. With the roof blazing over her head, she was compelled to arise from her bed and drag herself for miles before she found a refuge. I related this to a German later and he said: "Oh, well, there are plenty of peasant women in the Fatherland who are hard at work in the fields three days after the birth of their child."
The Hall filled with women wailing for children, furnished heartrending sights, but no victim bore such physical marks as the most vivid imagination could construe into an atrocity.
"I can't explain why we don't get a picture," said the free lance. "Enough deviltry has been done. I can't see why some of the stuff doesn't come through to us."
"Simply because the Germans are not fools," replied the movie- man; "when they mutilate a victim, they go through with it to the finish. They take care not to let telltales go straggling out to damn them."
Some one proposed that the only way to get a first-class atrocity picture was to fake it. It was a big temptation, and a fine field for the exercise of their inventive genius. But on this issue the chorus of dissent was most emphatic.
The nearest that I came to an atrocity was when in a car with Van Hee, the American vice-consul at Ghent. Van Hee was a man of laconic speech and direct action. I told him what Lethbridge, the British consul, had told me; viz., that the citizens of Ghent must forthwith erect a statue of Van Hee in gold to commemorate his priceless services. "The gold idea appeals to me, all right," said Van Hee, "but why put it in a statue!" He routed me out at five one morning to tell me that I could go through the German lines with Mr. Fletcher into Brussels. We left the Belgian Army cheering the Stars and Stripes, and came to the outpost of sharpshooters. Crouching behind a barricade, they were looking down the road. They didn't know whether the Germans were half a mile, two miles, or five miles down that road.
Into that uncertain No-Man's-Land we drove with only our honking to disturb the silence, while our minds kept growing specters of Uhlans the size of Goliath. Fletcher and I kept up a hectic conversation upon the flora and fauna of the country. But Van Hee, being of strong nerves, always gleefully brought the talk back to Uhlans.
"How can you tell an Uhlan?" I faltered.
"If you see a big gray man on horseback, with a long lance, spearing children," said Van Hee, "why, that's an Uhlan."