The trains this evening stopped running for the reason that a column of 150 German cavalry has been located across the line and along the road down which we ran this morning; and the Belgians have been preparing a surprise for to-night. In fact, there is an additional, more serious and most satisfactory cause, almost laughable in its performance to anyone in the secret, of which again I may not at present speak. (French troops were being run in concealed by various devices from the sight of the airmen. They detrained outside the town. A regiment of "Turcos" however marched in in the evening, and produced the first applause I had heard for a long time).
The aviators have stopped dropping bombs. The soldiers, at least, believe to-night that "the King has sent an envoy to say that a hundred prisoners will be shot for every bomb dropped in the unprotected streets." Only girls and old men have so far suffered from the inhuman practice.
I have spoken with two witnesses of the encounter about Dinant yesterday. The chief struggle raged round the ancient citadel which was taken and retaken. The French guns smashed the pontoon bridges as soon as the Germans had built them. The permanent bridges were swept as the columns advanced. They were mined, but left standing, acting each as a death trap. The impatience of the French African troops, the "Turcos," who are spoken of with bated breath, is said to have prevented the success of a crushing enveloping movement, a yielding in the centre to pour in on the flanks, which the French could only partially execute.
Pitiable stories are told of the corps-á-corps charges of the "Turcos." The stories are becoming so universal that there seems reason to suppose that the German "machine" has not been trained to meet the bayonet. The Belgians have already learned to count on the bayonet as their strongest weapon in meeting the Uhlans.
The battles at Haelen would suggest that the tubular Uhlan lance is less serviceable than the Belgian bamboo. It is certainly ineffective against the solid bayonet. At Haelen I found a large number of "buckled" and cracked lances along the line of the German cavalry charges.
The losses yesterday about Dinant seem to have been immense. Rumour speaks of anything between 20,000 and 40,000 put hors de combat from the two opposing forces. It is probable from accounts that the number must be reckoned in thousands. A peasant from a village below Dinant told me that when he was called back from the fields "by the noise" he "came over the hill to see the Meuse running red-streaked with blood."
Allowing for the Ardennois emotion, there seems no doubt that the fighting was savage and terribly costly, and that one of the many good reasons that stopped our passage just short of Dinant was the fact that the dead were not yet removed.
In this war both sides are very rightly concealing their losses. The relatives are separately informed, whenever it seems fit; and no lists are published.
To-night it is reported among the soldiers, and possibly therefore with truth, that the Belgians have just blown up and abandoned one of the smaller forts. "The reinforcements came just a day too late; the 4th Army Corps should have been up yesterday."