Fighting in Flanders

by E. Alexander Powell

VI. On The Belgian Battle-Line

In writing of the battles in Belgium I find myself at a loss as to what names to give them. After the treaty-makers have affixed their signatures to a piece of parchment and the arm-chair historians have settled down to the task of writing a connected account of the campaign, the various engagements will doubtless be properly classified and labelled--and under the names which they will receive in the histories we, who were present at them, will probably not recognize them at all. Until such time, then, as history has granted them the justice of perspective, I can only refer to them as "the fight at Sempst" or "the first engagement at Alost" or "the battle of Vilvorde" or "the taking of Termonde." Not only this, but the engagements that seemed to us to be battles, or remarkably lifelike imitations of battles, may be dismissed by the historians as unimportant skirmishes and contacts, while those engagements that we carelessly referred to at the time as "scraps" may well prove, in the light of future events, to have been of far greater significance than we realized. I don't even know how many engagements I witnessed, for I did not take the trouble to keep count. Thompson, who was with me from the beginning of the campaign to the end, told a reporter who interviewed him upon his return to London that we had been present at thirty-two engagements, large and small. Though I do not vouch, mind you, for the accuracy of this assertion, it is not as improbable as it sounds, for, from the middle of August to the fall of Antwerp in the early part of October, it was a poor day that didn't produce a fight of some sort. The fighting in Belgium at this stage of the war may be said to have been confined to an area within a triangle whose corners were Antwerp, Aerschot and Termonde. The southern side of this triangle, which ran somewhat to the south of Malines, was nearly forty miles in length, and it was this forty-mile front, extending from Aerschot on the east to Termonde on the west, which, during the earlier stages of the campaign, formed the Belgian battle-line. As the campaign progressed and the Germans developed their offensive, the Belgians were slowly forced back within the converging sides of the triangle until they were squeezed into the angle formed by Antwerp, where they made their last stand.

The theatre of operations was, from the standpoint of a professional onlooker like myself, very inconsiderately arranged. Nature had provided neither orchestra-stalls nor boxes. All the seats were bad. In fact it was quite impossible to obtain a good view of the stage and of the uniformed actors who were presenting the most stupendous spectacle in all history upon it. The whole region, you see, was absolutely flat--as flat as the top of a table--and there wasn't anything even remotely resembling a hill anywhere. To make matters worse, the country was criss-crossed by a perfect network of rivers and brooks and canals and ditches; the highways and the railways, which had to be raised to keep them from being washed out by the periodic inundations, were so thickly screened by trees as to be quite useless for purposes of observation; and in the rare places where a rise in the ground might have enabled one to get a comprehensive view of the surrounding country, dense groves of trees or red-and-white villages almost invariably intervened. One could be within a few hundred yards of the firing-line and literally not see a thing save the fleecy puffs of bursting shrapnel. Indeed, I don't know what we should have done had it not been for the church towers. These were conveniently sprinkled over the landscape-- every cluster of houses seemed to have one--and did their best to make up for the region's topographical shortcomings. The only disadvantage attaching to the use of the church-spires as places to view the fighting from was that the military observers and the officers controlling the fire of the batteries used them for the same purpose. The enemy knew this, of course, and almost the first thing he did, therefore, was to open fire on them with his artillery and drive those observers out. This accounts for the fact that in many sections of Belgium there is not a church-spire left standing. When we ascended a church tower, therefore, for the purpose of obtaining a general view of an engagement, we took our chances and we knew it. More than once, when the enemy got the range and their shells began to shriek and yowl past the belfry in which I was stationed, I have raced down the rickety ladders at a speed which, under normal conditions, would probably have resulted in my breaking my neck. In view of the restrictions imposed upon correspondents in the French and Russian theatres of war, I suppose that instead of finding fault with the seating arrangements I should thank my lucky stars that I did not have to write my dispatches with the aid of an ordnance-map and a guide-book in a hotel bedroom a score or more of miles from the firing-line.

The Belgian field army consisted of six divisions and a brigade of cavalry and numbered, on paper at least, about 180,000 men. I very much doubt, however, if King Albert had in the field at anyone time more than 120,000 men--a very large proportion of whom were, of course, raw recruits. Now the Belgian army, when all is said and done, was not an army according to the Continental definition; it was not much more than a glorified police force, a militia. No one had ever dreamed that it would be called upon to fight, and hence, when war came, it was wholly unprepared. That it was able to offer the stubborn and heroic resistance which it did to the advance of the German legions speaks volumes for Belgian stamina and courage. Many of the troops were armed with rifles of an obsolete pattern, the supply of ammunition was insufficient, and though the artillery was on the whole of excellent quality, it was placed at a tremendous disadvantage by the superior range and calibre of the German field- guns. The men did not even have the protection afforded by neutral- coloured uniforms, but fought from first to last in clothes of blue and green and blazing scarlet. As I stood one day in the Place de Meir in Antwerp and watched a regiment of mud-bespattered guides clatter past, it was hard to believe that I was living in the twentieth century and not in the beginning of the nineteenth, for instead of serviceable uniforms of grey or drab or khaki, these men wore the befrogged green jackets, the cherry-coloured breeches, and the huge fur busbies which characterized the soldiers of Napoleon.

The carabineers, for example, wore uniforms of bottle-green and queer sugar-loaf hats of patent leather which resembled the headgear of the Directoire period. Both the grenadiers and the infantry of the line marched and fought and slept in uniforms of heavy blue cloth piped with scarlet and small, round, visorless fatigue-caps which afforded no protection from either sun or rain. Some of the men remedied this by fitting their caps with green reading-shades, such as undergraduates wear when they are cramming for examinations, so that at first glance a regiment looked as though its ranks were filled with either jockeys or students. The gendarmes--who, by the way, were always to be found where the fighting was hottest--were the most unsuitably uniformed of all, for the blue coats and silver aiguillettes and towering bearskins which served to impress the simple country-folk made splendid targets for the German marksmen. This medley of picturesque and brilliant uniforms was wonderfully effective, of course, and whenever I came upon a group of lancers in sky-blue and yellow lounging about the door of a wayside tavern or met a patrol of guides in their green jackets and scarlet breeches trotting along a country-road, I always had the feeling that I was looking at a painting by Meissonier or Detaille.