VIII
In Belgium Under The Germans
No week at the front, where war is made, left the mind so full as this week beyond the sound of the guns with war's results. It taught the meaning of the simple words life and death, hunger and food, love and hate. One was in a house with sealed doors where a family of seven millions sat in silence and idleness, thinking of nothing but war and feeling nothing but war. He had war cold as the fragments of an exploded shell beside a dead man on a frozen road; war analysed and docketed for exhibition, without its noise, its distraction, and its hot passion.
In Ostend I had seen the Belgian refugees in flight, and I had seen them pouring into London stations, bedraggled outcasts of every class, with the staring uncertainty of the helpless human flock flying from the storm. England, who considered that they had suffered for her sake, opened her purse and her heart to them; she opened her homes, both modest suburban homes and big country houses which are particular about their guests in time of peace. No British family without a Belgian was doing its duty. Bishop's wife and publican's wife took whatever Belgian was sent to her. The refugee packet arrived without the nature of contents on the address tag. All Belgians had become heroic and noble by grace of the defenders of Liege.
Perhaps the bishop's wife received a young woman who smoked cigarettes, and asked her hostess for rouge, and the publican's wife received a countess. Mrs. Smith, of Clapham, who had brought up her children in the strictest propriety, welcomed as play-mates for her dears, whom she had kept away from the contaminating associations of the alleys, Belgian children from the toughest quarters of Antwerp, who had a precocity that led to baffling confusion in Mrs. Smith's mind between parental responsibility and patriotic duty. Smart society gave the run of its houses sometimes to gentry who were used to getting the run of that kind of houses by lifting a window with a jemmy on a dark night. It was a refugee lottery. When two hosts met one said: "My Belgian is charming!" and the other said: "Mine isn't. Just listen—"
But the English are game; they are loyal; they bear their burden of hospitality bravely.
The strange things that happened were not the more agreeable because of the attitude of some refugees who, when they were getting better fare than they ever had at home, thought that, as they had given their "all" for England, they should be getting still better, not to mention wine on the table in temperance families; whilst there was a disinclination towards self-support by means of work on the part of certain heroes by proxy which promised a Belgian occupation of England that would last as long as the German occupation of Belgium. England was learning that there are Belgians and Belgians. She had received not a few of the "and Belgians."
It was only natural. When the German cruisers bombarded Scarborough and the Hartlepools, the first to the station were not the finest and sturdiest. Those with good bank accounts and a disinclination to take any bodily or gastronomic risks, the young idler who stands on the street corner ogling girls and the girls who are always in the street to be ogled, the flighty-minded, the irresponsible, the tramp, the selfish, and the cowardly, are bound to be in the van of flight from any sudden disaster and to make the most of the generous sympathy of those who succour them.
The courageous, the responsible, those with homes and property at stake, those with an inborn sense of real patriotism which means loyalty to locality and to their neighbours, are more inclined to remain with their homes and their property. Besides, a refugee hardly appears at his best. He is in a strange country, forlorn, homesick, a hostage of fate and personal misfortune. The Belgian nation had taken the Allies' side and now individual Belgians expected help from the Allies.
England did not get the worst of the refugees. They could travel no farther than Holland, where the Dutch Government appropriated money to care for them at the same time that it was under the expense of keeping its army mobilized. Looking at the refugees in the camp at Bergen-op-Zoom, an observer might share some of the contempt of the Germans for the Belgians. Crowded in temporary huts in the chill, misty weather of a Dutch winter, they seemed listless, marooned human wreckage. They would not dig ditches to drain their camp; they were given to pilfering from one another the clothes which the world's charity supplied. The heart was out of them. They were numbed by disaster.
"Are all these men and women who are living together married?" I asked the Dutch officer in charge.