It was my first glimpse of the reconstituted Belgian army. In the two years that it has been holding the line on the Yser it has been completely reuniformed, re-equipped, reorganized. The result is a small but complete and highly efficient organism. The Belgian army consists to-day of six infantry and two cavalry divisions—a total of about 120,000 men—with perhaps another 80,000 being drilled in the various training camps at the rear. It has, of course, no great reserves to fall back upon, for the greater part of the nation is imprisoned, but the King and his generals, by unremitting energy, have produced a force which is as well disciplined and as completely equipped as can be found anywhere on the front. When the day comes, as it surely will, when Berlin issues the orders for a general retirement, I shouldn't care to be the Germans who are assigned to the work of holding off the Belgians, for from the men who wear the red-yellow-and-black rosettes they need expect no pity.
Though the shortest of the lines held by the Allies, the Belgian front is, in proportion to the free Belgian population, much the longest. The northernmost sector of the Western Front, beginning at the sea and extending through Nieuport, a distance of only three or four miles, is held by the French; then come the twenty-three miles held by the Belgians, another two or three miles held by the French, and then the British. The Belgians occupy a difficult and extremely uncomfortable position, for these Flemish lowlands were inundated in order to check the German advance, and as a result they are in the midst of a vast swamp, which, in the rainy season, becomes a lake. They are, in fact, fighting under conditions not encountered on any other front save in the Mazurian marshes. During the rainy season the gunners of certain batteries frequently work in water up to their waists. So wet is the soil that dugouts are out of the question, for they instantly become cisterns, so the Belgian engineers have developed a type of above-ground shelter which has concrete walls and a roof of steel rails, on top of which are laid several layers of sand-bags. Though these shelters afford their occupants protection from the fire of small-caliber guns, they are not proof against the heavy projectiles which the Germans periodically rain upon the Belgian trenches. As the soil is so soft and slimy as to be useless for defensive purposes, the trench-walls are for the most part built of sand-bags, which are, however, usually filled with clay, for sand must be brought by incredible exertions from the seashore. I was shown a single short sector on the Yser, where six million bags were used. For the floors of these shelters, as well as for innumerable other purposes, millions of feet of lumber are required, which is taken up to the front over the network of light railways, some of which penetrate to the actual firing-line. If trench-building materials are scarce in Flanders, fuel is scarcer. Every stick of wood and every piece of coal burned on the front has to be brought from great distances and at great expense, so economy in fuel consumption is rigidly enforced. I remember walking through a trench with a Belgian officer one bitterly cold and rainy day last winter. In a corner of the trench a soldier in soaking clothes had piled together a tiny mound of twigs and roots and over the feeble flame was trying to warm his hands, which were blue with cold. To my surprise my companion stopped and spoke to the man quite sharply.
"We can't let one man have a fire all to himself," he explained as he rejoined me. "Wood is too scarce for that. The fire that fellow had would have warmed three or four men and I had to reprimand him for building it." A moment later he added: "The poor devil looked pretty cold, though, didn't he?"
I had been informed by telephone from the Belgian État-Major that a staff-officer would meet me at a certain little frontier town whose name I have forgotten how to spell. After many inquiries and wrong turnings, for in this corner of Belgium the Flemish peasantry understand but little French and no English, my driver succeeded in finding the town, but the officer who was to meet me had not arrived. It was too cold to sit in the car with comfort, so a lieutenant of gendarmerie, the chief of the local Sûrété, invited me to make myself comfortable in his little office. After a time the conversation languished, and, for want of something better to say, I inquired how far it was to Ostend. I was interested in knowing, because during the retreat of the Belgian army in October, 1914, I left two kit-bags filled with perfectly good clothes at the American Consulate in Ostend. They are there still, I suppose, provided the Consulate has not been shelled to pieces by the British monitors or the bags stolen by German soldiers.
"Ostend?" repeated the gendarme. "It isn't over thirty kilometres from here. From the roof of this building, if the weather was fine, you could almost see its church-spires."
He walked across to the window and, pressing his face against the pane, stared out across the fog-hung lowlands. He so stood for some minutes and when he turned I noticed that tears were glistening in his eyes.
"My wife and children are over there in Ostend," he explained, in a voice which he tried pathetically hard to control. "At least, they were there two years ago last August. They had gone there for the summer. I was in Brussels when the Germans crossed the frontier, and I at once joined the army. I have never heard from my family since. It is very hard, monsieur, to be so near them—they are only thirty kilometres away—and not be able to see them or to hear from them, or even be able to learn whether they are well or whether they have enough to eat."
It is a terrible thing, this prison wall within which the Germans have shut up the people of Belgium. How terrible it is one cannot realize until he has known those whose dear ones are confined incommunicado within that prison. I wish I might bring home to you, my friends, just what it means. How would you feel to stand on the banks of the Hudson and look across into New Jersey and know that, though over there, a few miles away, were your homes and those that you hold most dear, you could no more get word to them, or they to you, than if they were in Mars? And how would you feel if you knew that Englewood and Morristown and Plainfield and the Oranges, and a dozen other of the pretty Jersey towns, were but heaps of blackened ruins, that the larger cities were garrisoned by brutal German soldiery and ruled by heartless-German governors, and that thousands of women and girls—perhaps your wife, your daughters among them—had been dragged from their homes and taken God knows where? How would you feel then, Mr. American?