Sometimes I felt as if I were dreaming and wanted to call myself back from this nightmare to another, better, and real world. And I thought constantly of the man who, by one word, had given the order for these murders, this arson; the man who severed husbands and fathers, wives and mothers, and children, who caused so many innocent people to be shot, who destroyed the results of many, many years of strict economy and strenuous industry.
The first acquaintance whom I met on Netherland territory was a Netherland lady married to a Walloon, who kept a large café at Visé. Before the destruction she had asked me, full of anxiety, whether the Germans would indeed carry out their threat and wreck everything. I had comforted her, and answered that I did not think them capable of doing such a thing. Weeping, she came to me, and reminded me of my words. The whole business, in which these young people had invested their slender capital, had been wrecked.
CHAPTER V
FRANCS-TIREURS?
I THINK that there is no better occasion to deal with the question whether there was a franc-tireur-guerilla in Belgium than after the chapter on the destruction of Visé.
My opinion on the matter is still the same as when I first wrote about it to De Tijd, and in Vrij België; and from my own personal knowledge and after mixing with the people I consider the allegation that the Belgians acted as francs-tireurs an absolute lie.
Some uphold the accusation on the ground of expressions in Belgian newspapers, collected in a German pamphlet. In my opinion these quotations have not the slightest value. Everyone will understand this who thinks of the excitement of journalists, whose country was suddenly and quite unexpectedly involved in a terrible war, and who felt now that as journalists they had to perform a great, patriotic duty. In their nervous, over-excited condition they sat at their desk and listened to the gossip of refugees about civilians taking part in the struggle. In their imagination they saw hordes of barbarians overrun their native soil, saw man and man, woman and woman, shoulder to shoulder, resisting the invader without regard for their own life. The thoughts of such journalists, whose very own country had been at war now for a few days, were not on severe logical lines; they found a certain beauty in that picture, and I can quite understand how some came to believe in it as a reality, and gloried in it.
That is not evidence however, for how did they get the information? From my own experience I make bold to say with the greatest confidence that these reports came from German sources only, whereas there was not any ground for them.
I have witnessed all the people during the very earliest days of the war. I came to Liège, passing between the forts, as described already. I was in Lixhe when the pontoon bridge was wrecked repeatedly by Fort Pontisse; I stayed at Visé three times before the destruction began, and I was there when the charming townlet was wrecked by fire; and in Louvain I have been dragged from my bed by six soldiers and arrested, when the whole town was still ablaze.