It's a long way to Tipperary, It's a long way to go; It's a long way to Tipperary To the sweetest girl I know! Good-bye, Piccadilly! Farewell, Leicester Square! It's a long, long way to Tipperary; But my heart's right there!
Many and many a one of the light-hearted lads with whom I marched down the Lierre road on that October afternoon were destined never again to feel beneath their feet the flags of Piccadilly, never again to lounge in Leicester Square.
They were as clean-limbed, pleasant-faced, wholesome-looking a lot of young Englishmen as you would find anywhere, but to anyone who had had military experience it was evident that, despite the fact that they were vigorous and courageous and determined to do their best, they were not "first-class fighting men." To win in war, as in the prize-ring, something more than vigour and courage and determination are required; to those qualities must be added experience and training, and experience and training were precisely what those naval reservists lacked. Moreover, their equipment left much to be desired. For example, only a very small proportion had pouches to carry the regulation one hundred and fifty rounds. They were, in fact, equipped very much as many of the American militia organizations were equipped when suddenly called out for strike duty in the days before the reorganization of the National Guard. Even the officers--those, at least, with whom I talked--seemed to be as deficient in field experience as the men. Yet these raw troops were rushed into trenches which were in most cases unprotected by head-covers, and, though unsupported by effective artillery, they held those trenches for three days under as murderous a shell-fire as I have ever seen and then fell back in perfect order. What the losses of the Naval Division were I do not know. In Antwerp it was generally understood that very close to a fifth of the entire force was killed or wounded--upwards of three hundred cases were, I was told, treated in one hospital alone--and the British Government officially announced that sixteen hundred were forced across the frontier and interned in Holland.
No small part in the defence of the city was played by the much- talked-about armoured train, which was built under the supervision of Lieutenant-Commander Littlejohn in the yards of the Antwerp Engineering Company at Hoboken. The train consisted of four large coal-trucks with sides of armour-plate sufficiently high to afford protection to the crews of the 4.7 naval guns--six of which were brought from England for the purpose, though there was only time to mount four of them--and between each gun-truck was a heavily- armoured goods-van for ammunition, the whole being drawn by a small locomotive, also steel-protected. The guns were served by Belgian artillerymen commanded by British gunners and each gun- truck carried, in addition, a detachment of infantry in the event of the enemy getting to close quarters. Personally, I am inclined to believe that the chief value of this novel contrivance lay in the moral encouragement it lent to the defence, for its guns, though more powerful, certainly, than anything that the Belgians possessed, were wholly outclassed, both in range and calibre, by the German artillery. The German officers whom I questioned on the subject after the occupation told me that the fire of the armoured train caused them no serious concern and did comparatively little damage.
By Tuesday night a boy scout could have seen that the position of Antwerp was hopeless. The Austrian siege guns had smashed and silenced the chain of supposedly impregnable forts to the south of the city with the same businesslike dispatch with which the same type of guns had smashed and silenced those other supposedly impregnable forts at Liege and Namur. Through the opening thus made a German army corps had poured to fling itself against the second line of defence, formed by the Ruppel and the Nethe. Across the Nethe, under cover of a terrific artillery fire, the Germans threw their pontoon-bridges, and when the first bridges were destroyed by the Belgian guns they built others, and when these were destroyed in turn they tried again, and at the third attempt they succeeded. With the helmeted legions once across the river, it was all over but the shouting, and no one knew it better than the Belgians, yet, heartened by the presence of the little handful of English, they fought desperately, doggedly on. Their forts pounded to pieces by guns which they could not answer, their ranks thinned by a murderous rain of shot and shell, the men heavy-footed and heavy-eyed from lack of sleep, the horses staggering from exhaustion, the ambulance service broken down, the hospitals helpless before the flood of wounded, the trenches littered with the dead and dying, they still held back the German legions.
By this time the region to the south of Antwerp had been transformed from a peaceful, smiling country-side into a land of death and desolation. It looked as though it had been swept by a great hurricane, filled with lightning which had missed nothing. The blackened walls of what had once been prosperous farm-houses, haystacks turned into heaps of smoking carbon, fields slashed across with trenches, roads rutted and broken by the great wheels of guns and transport wagons--these scenes were on every hand. In the towns and villages along the Nethe, where the fighting was heaviest, the walls of houses had fallen into the streets and piles of furniture, mattresses, agricultural machinery, and farm carts showed where the barricades and machine-guns had been. The windows of many of the houses were stuffed with mattresses and pillows, behind which the riflemen had made a stand. Lierre and Waelhem and Duffel were like sieves dripping blood. Corpses were strewn everywhere. Some of the dead were spread-eagled on their backs as though exhausted after a long march, some were twisted and crumpled in attitudes grotesque and horrible, some were propped up against the walls of houses to which they had tried to crawl in their agony.
All of them stared at nothing with awful, unseeing eyes. It was one of the scenes that I should like to forget. But I never can.
On Tuesday evening General de Guise, the military governor of Antwerp, informed the Government that the Belgian position was fast becoming untenable and, acting on this information, the capital of Belgium was transferred from Antwerp to Ostend, the members of the Government and the Diplomatic Corps leaving at daybreak on Wednesday by special steamer, while at the same time Mr. Winston Churchill departed for the coast by automobile under convoy of an armoured motorcar. His last act was to order the destruction of the condensers of the German vessels in the harbour, for which the Germans, upon occupying the city, demanded an indemnity of twenty million francs.
As late as Wednesday morning the great majority of the inhabitants of Antwerp remained in total ignorance of the real state of affairs. Morning after morning the Matin and the Metropole had published official communiqués categorically denying that any of the forts had been silenced and asserting in the most positive terms that the enemy was being held in check all along the line. As a result of this policy of denial and deception, the people of Antwerp went to sleep on Tuesday night calmly confident that in a few days more the Germans would raise the siege from sheer discouragement and depart. Imagine what happened, then, when they awoke on Wednesday morning, October 7, to learn that the Government had stolen away between two days without issuing so much as a word of warning, and to find staring at them from every wall and hoarding proclamations signed by the military governor announcing that the bombardment of the city was imminent, urging all who were able to leave instantly, and advising those who remained to shelter themselves behind sand-bags in their cellars. It was like waiting until the entire first floor of a house was in flames and the occupants' means of escape almost cut off, before shouting "Fire!"
