One kind of bombardment for which there is no excuse is that in which German aircraft engaged over towns and villages behind the enemy lines, out of the reach of German guns and sometimes even outside the theatre of war. It is certain that the intention to give oneself up to such acts absolutely precludes respect for open towns and for preliminary warnings. It is the proof of an absolute contempt for the laws of war, and of a fixed determination to act contrary to ordinary good sense.
The bombing of Paris, Antwerp (25th August to 2nd Sept.), Dunkirk, Warsaw—towns all of which were situated, when the attack took place, out of the range of German cannon, is an outrage of a special kind. No military object was in view, but merely a desire to terrorise the civil population. At Paris six people were killed and about thirty wounded: at Antwerp there were twelve people killed and twenty-five wounded; at Dunkirk about fifteen were killed and more than twenty wounded; at Warsaw 106 people were injured. All these victims—except at Warsaw, where among the people struck were nine soldiers—were civilians, for the most part women, children and old men. Hence we understand the indignation aroused among neutrals by these bombardments, and the care which several nations took to protest against them.
The American Committee, founded by the United States ambassador in Paris, and consisting of the most influential Americans resident in Paris, was entrusted with the duty of keeping an eye upon the conduct of Germans on the outskirts of the French capital and above it. They were indignant at the deadly acts of the German aeroplanes in Paris, and dispatched a report on the subject. As for the throwing of bombs on Antwerp, the American newspapers denounced it and emphatically assigned it to its category. The World described this kind of attack as “murder, pure and simple”; “dynamite for children,” said the New York Herald; the New York Times spoke of “crime against humanity”; and the Tribune energetically protested against the repetition of murder so blind, so purposeless and so unpardonable.
Bombardment of Malines and Lierre
When the Belgians took Malines again, on the 25th August, the Germans began to bombard it. This act can only be put down to a thirst for vengeance. They made violent efforts to demolish it quarter by quarter by bursting shells. One shell struck a bakehouse and killed two workmen in it. The cathedral, the museum, the town hall, St. Peter’s Church, the magistrates’ court, and all the buildings round about the “Grand Place” were badly damaged, and the ministers of State of the Triple Entente, who visited Malines on the 13th September, saw shells smashing in before their eyes the pro-cathedral of Saint-Rombaud, full of miracles of art, where Van Dyck’s “Christ upon the Cross” towered high above the tombs of the archbishops; they witnessed also the destruction of the famous old carillon of the pro-cathedral, and the belfries of churches, convents and seminaries buried beneath the ruins (vide the photograph of one of the chapels of “Our Lady of Malines” after the Germans had passed by, in L’Illustration for the 3rd October).
What is left of Malines? A German journalist, war-correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt, undertook to reply to this question, in a description, entitled Malines the Dead, of the town in the condition in which the German bombardment left it.
“Life has become extinct. The town is dead. The sixty thousand inhabitants have fled. The melancholy houses stand open. The streets are empty. German soldiers go up and down. In the Grand Place, the wool-market, the Place d’Egmont, at the railway station, soldiers are working in larger groups, but the ordinary residents are wanting.
“The emptiness and the havoc in these venerable-looking streets are so awful and so overwhelming that one’s breath is stopped and one recalls with terror the legend of towns that bore a curse upon them. What no one has ever seen, what Hoffmann and Edgar Poe have never dreamed of in their morbid visions, has here become a reality.
“In the midst of the town rises the cathedral, a Gothic building of gigantic size. The tower, 100 metres high, bounds the horizon on the west. At the top, at a height which makes the brain reel, four dials, fourteen metres in diameter, are twisted and riddled with bullets. Shells have hollowed out seven holes in the wall.”
Lierre, a town of 26,000 inhabitants, was, like Malines, pitilessly bombarded towards the end of September.