She had been besieged and fallen before. To-day she fell with scarcely a siege.
Who was responsible for this fiasco—for the defense which was no defense, the relief which was no relief? Why was the Naval Brigade sent there? Perhaps we shall know some day, when Raemaekers’ country is free to set them also free again.
What we can know is graphically and terribly told by Mr. John Buchan and the witnesses he cites.
The highways were black with the panting crowds: ladies of fashion, white-haired men and women, wounded soldiers, priests old and young, nuns, mothers, daughters, children. So it was described by one who saw it.
More than a quarter of a million of inhabitants left Antwerp in one day. The world has never before seen such an emptying of a great city. “Some day,” Mr. Buchan ends, “when its imagination has grown quicker, it will find the essence of war not in gallant charges and heroic stands, but in the pale women dragging their pitiful belongings through the Belgian fields in the raw October night.”
If anything could further quicken the world’s imagination it would be this picture. Rubens devised the famous “pomps” for the entry of Ferdinand of Austria. The German entry had no Rubens. But this miserable pomp, this “pitiful exodus,” has found its realistic Rubens in Raemaekers.
