Four days after my first visit the Germans burned again the already wrecked town, turning their attention to the neglected three hundred houses. I went in as soon as I could safely enter the town, and that was on the Wednesday after.
As companions in Termonde I had Tennyson Jesse, Radclyffe Dugmore, and William R. Renton. Mr. Dugmore took photographs of the chalked houses.
"Build a fence around Termonde," suggested a Ghent manufacturer, "leave the ruins untouched. Let the place stand there, with its burned houses, churches, orphanage, hospital, factories, to show the world what German culture is. It will be a monument to their methods of conducting war. There will be no need of saying anything. That is all the proof we need. Then throw open the place to visitors from all the world, as soon as this war is over. Let them draw their own conclusions."
BALLAD OF THE GERMANS
In Wetteren Hospital, Flanders, the writer saw a little peasant girl dying from the bayonet wounds in her back which the German soldiers had given her.
Cain slew only a brother,
A lad who was fair and strong,
His murder was careless and honest,
A heated and sudden wrong.
And Judas was kindly and pleasant,
For he snared an invincible man.
But you—you have spitted the children,
As they toddled and stumbled and ran.
She heard you sing on the high-road,
She thought you were gallant and gay;
Such men as the peasants of Flanders:
The friends of a child at play.
She saw the sun on your helmets,
The sparkle of glancing light.
She saw your bayonets flashing,
And she laughed at your Prussian might.
Then you gave her death for her laughter,
As you looked on her mischievous face.
You hated the tiny peasant,
With the hate of your famous race.
You were not frenzied and angry;
You were cold and efficient and keen.
Your thrust was as thorough and deadly
As the stroke of a faithful machine.
You stabbed her deep with your rifle:
You had good reason to sing,
As you footed it on through Flanders
Past the broken and quivering thing.
Something impedes your advancing,
A dragging has come on your hosts.
And Paris grows dim now, and dimmer,
Through the blur of your raucous boasts.
Your singing is sometimes broken
By guttural German groans.
Your ankles are wet with her bleeding,
Your pike is blunt from her bones.
The little peasant has tripped you.
She hangs to your bloody stride.
And the dimpled hands are fastened
Where they fumbled before she died.
THE STEAM ROLLER
The Steam Roller, the final method, now operating in Belgium to flatten her for all time, is the most deadly and universal of the three. It is a calculated process to break the human spirit. People speak as if the injury done Belgium was a thing of the past. It is at its height now. The spy system with its clerks, waiters, tourists, business managers, reached directly only some thousands of persons. The atrocities wounded and killed many thousands of old men, women, and children. But the German occupation and sovereignty at the present moment are denationalizing more than six million people. The German conquerors operate their Steam Roller by clever lies, thus separating Belgium from her real friends; by taxation, thus breaking Belgium economically; by enforced work on food supplies, railways, and ammunition, thus forcing Belgian peasants to feed their enemy's army and destroy their own army, and so making unwilling traitors out of patriots; by fines and imprisonment that harass the individual Belgian who retains any sense of nationality; by official slander from Berlin that the Belgians are the guilty causes of their own destruction; and finally by the fact of sovereignty itself, that at one stroke breaks the inmost spirit of a free nation.