As most of the regular German officers in Belgium were cavalrymen—there was nothing for cavalry to do on the Aisne line of trenches—it was quite in keeping that the aide to the commandant of Liége, who looked after my pass to leave the country, should be a young officer of Hussars. He spoke English well; he was amiable and intelligent. While I waited for the commandant to sign the pass he chatted of his adventures on the pursuit of the British to the Marne. The British fought like devils, he said. It was a question if their new army would be so good. He showed me a photograph of himself in a British Tommy’s overcoat.
“When we took some prisoners I was interested in their overcoats,” he explained. “I asked one of the Tommies to let me try on his. It fitted me perfectly, so I kept it as a souvenir and had this photograph made to show my friends.”
Perhaps a shade of surprise passed over my face.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “That Tommy had to give me his coat! He was a prisoner.”
On my way out from Liége I was to see Visé—the town of the gateway—the first town of the war to suffer from frightfulness. I had thought of it as entirely destroyed. A part of it had survived.
A delightful old Bavarian Landsturm man searched me for contraband letters when our cart stopped on the Belgian side of a barricade at Maastricht, with Dutch soldiers on the other side. His examination was a little perfunctory, almost apologetic, and he did want to be friendly. You guessed that he was thinking he would like to go around the corner and have “ein Glas Bier” rather than search me. What a hearty “Auf wiedersehen!” he gave me when he saw that I was inclined to be friendly, too!
I was glad to be across that frontier, with a last stamp on my Passierschein; glad to be out of the land of those ghostly Belgian millions in their living death; glad not to have to answer again their ravenously whispered “When?” When would the Allies come?
The next time that I was in Belgium it was in the British lines of the Ypres salient, two months later. When should I be next in Brussels? With a victorious British army, I hoped. A long wait it was to be for a conquered people, listening each day and trying to think that the sound of gun-fire was nearer.
The stubborn, passive resistance and self-sacrifice that I have pictured was that of a moral leadership of a majority shaming the minority; or an ostracism of all who had relations with the enemy. Of course, it was not the spirit of the whole. The American Commission, as charity usually must, had to overcome obstacles set in its path by those whom it would aid. Belgian politicians, in keeping with the weakness of their craft, could no more forego playing politics in time of distress than some that we had in San Francisco and some we have heard of only across the British Channel from Belgium.
Zealous leaders exaggerated the famine of their districts in order to get larger supplies; communities in great need without spokesmen must be reached; powerful towns found excuses for not forwarding food to small villages which were without influence. Natural greed got the better of men used to turning a penny anyway they could. Rascally bakers who sifted the brown flour to get the white to sell to patisseries and the well-to-do, while the bread line got the bran, required shrewd handling when the only means of punishment was through German authority.