The advance of the Allied Armies towards the Rhine was by definite, slow stages, enabling the German Army to withdraw in advance of us with as much material of war as was left to them by the conditions of the Armistice. On that retreat of theirs they abandoned so much that it was clearly impossible for them to resist our demands by fighting again, however hard might be the Peace Terms. Their acceptance of the Armistice drawn up by Marshal Foch with a relentless severity in every clause, so that the whole document was a sentence of death to the German military system, proved that they had no more “fight” in them. It was the most abject and humiliating surrender ever made by a great nation in the hour of defeat, and an acknowledgment before the whole world that their armies had broken to bits, in organisation and in spirit.
On the roads for hundreds of kilometres out from Mons and Le Cateau, past Brussels and Liège and Namur, was the visible proof of the disintegration and downfall of what had been the greatest military machine in the world. Mile after mile and score after score of miles, on each side of the long straight roads, down which, four years before, the first German Armies had marched in endless columns after the first brief check at Liège, with absolute faith in victory, there lay now abandoned guns, trench mortars, aeroplanes, motor-lorries, motor-cars and transport-wagons. Those monstrous guns which had pounded so much of our young flesh to pulp, year after year, were now tossed into the ditches, or upturned in the wayside fields, with broken breach-blocks or without their sights. It was good to see them there. Field-guns captured thrust their muzzles into the mud, and Belgian peasant-boys made cock-shies of them. I liked to see them at that game. Here also was the spectacle of a war machine which had worn out until, like the “One Hoss Shay,” it had fallen to pieces. Those motor-lorries, motor-cars, and transport-wagons were in the last stage of decrepitude, their axles and spokes all rusty, their woodwork cracked, their wheels tied round with bits of iron in the place of tyres. Everywhere were dead horses worn to skin and bones before they had fallen. For lack of food and fats and rubber and labour the German material of war was in a sorry state before the failure of their man-power in the fighting fields after those years of massacre brought home to them the awful fact that they had no more strength to resist our onslaughts.
One of those who pointed the moral of all this was the little American doctor, Edward Small, and he found an immense satisfaction in the sight of those derelict wrecks of the German war-devils. He and I travelled together for some time, meeting Brand, Harding, and other friends, in towns like Liège and Namur. I remember him now, standing by a German howitzer—a colossus—sprawling out of a ditch. He chuckled in a goblin way, with his little grey beard thrust up by a muffler which he had tied over his field-cap and under his chin. (It was cold, with a white mist which clung damply to our faces.) He went so far in his pleasure as to pick up a big stone (like those Belgian boys) and heave it at the monster.
“Fine!” he said. “That devil will never again vomit out death upon men crouching low in ditches—fifteen miles away. Never again will it smash through the roofs of farmhouses where people desired to live in peace, or bash big holes in little old churches where folk worshipped through the centuries—a loving God!... Sonny, this damned thing is symbolical. Its overthrow means the downfall of all the machinery of slaughter which has been accumulated by civilised peoples afraid of each other. In a little while, if there’s any sense in humanity after this fearful lesson, we shall put all our guns on to the scrap-heap, and start a new era of reasonable intercourse between the peoples of the world.”
“Doctor,” I answered, “there’s a mighty big If in that long sentence of yours.”
He blinked at me with beads of mist on his lashes.
“Don’t you go wet-blanketing my faith in a step-up for the human race! During the next few months we’re going to rearrange life. We are going to give Fear the knock-out blow.... It was Fear that was the cause of all this horrible insanity and all this need of sacrifice. Germany was afraid of being ‘hemmed in’ by England, France and Russia. Fear, more than the lust of power, was at the back of her big armies. France was afraid of Germany trampling over her frontiers again. Russian Czardom was afraid of Revolution within her own borders and looked to war as a safety-valve. England was afraid of the German Navy, and afraid of Germans at Calais and Dunkirk. All the little Powers were afraid of the Big Powers, and made their beastly little alliances as a life insurance against the time when they would be dragged into the dog-fight. Now, with the German bogey killed—the most formidable and frightful bogey—Austria disintegrated, Russia groping her way with bloodshot eyes to a new democracy, a complete set of Fears has been removed. The spirits of the peoples will be uplifted, the darkness of fear having passed from them. We are coming out into the broad sunlight of sanity, and mankind will march to better conquests than those of conscript armies. Thank God, the United States of America (and don’t you forget it!) will play a part in this advance to another New World.”
It was absurd to argue with the little man in a sodden field on the road to Liège. Besides, though I saw weak links in his chain of reasoning, I did not want to argue. I wanted to believe also that our victory would not be a mere vulgar triumph of the old kind, one military power rising upon the ruins of its rival, one great yell (or many) of “Yah!—we told you so!” but that it would be a victory for all humanity, shamed by the degradation of its orgy of blood, in spite of all pride in long-enduring manhood, and that the peoples of the world, with one common, enormous, generous instinct, would cry out, “The horror has passed! Never again shall it come upon us.... Let us pay back to the dead by contriving a better way of life for them who follow!” The chance of that lay with living youth, if they would not allow themselves to be betrayed by their Old Men. That also was a mighty “If,” but I clung to the hope with as passionate a faith as that of the little American doctor....
The way to the Rhine lay through many cities liberated from hostile rule, through many wonderful scenes in which emotion surged like a white flame above great crowds. There was a pageantry of life, which I had never before seen in war or in peace, and those of us who went that way became dazed by the endless riot of colour, and our ears were tired by a tumult of joyous sound. In Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, Liège, Namur, Verviers, banners waved above every house. Flags—flags—flags, of many nations and designs, decorated the house-fronts, were draped on the balconies, were entwined in the windows, came like flames above the heads of marching crowds. Everywhere there was the sound of singing by multitudes, and through those weeks one song was always in the air, triumphant, exultant, intoxicating, almost maddening in its effect upon crowds and individuals—the old song of liberty and revolt: “La Marseillaise.” With it, not so universal, but haunting in constant refrain between the outbursts of that other tune, they sang “La Brabançonne” of Belgium, and quaint old folk-songs that came to life again with the spirit of the people. Bells pealed from churches in which the Germans had left them by special favour. The belfry of Bruges had not lost its carillon. In Ghent when the King of the Belgians rode in along flower-strewn ways under banners that made one great canopy, while cheers swept up and around him, to his grave, tanned, melancholy face, unchanged by victory—so I had seen him in his ruined towns among his dead—I heard the great boom of the Cathedral bell. In Brussels, when he rode in later, there were many bells ringing and clashing, and wild cheering which to me, lying in an upper room, after a smash on the Field of Waterloo, seemed uncanny and inhuman, like the murmur of innumerable ghost-voices. Into these towns, and along the roads through Belgium to the Meuse, bands were playing and soldiers singing, and on each man’s rifle was a flag or a flower. In every city there was carnival. It was the carnival of human joy after long fasting from the pleasure of life. Soldiers and civilians, men and women, sang together, linked arms, danced together, through many streets, in many towns. In the darkness of those nights of Armistice one saw the eyes of people, sparkling, laughing, burning; the eyes of girls lit up by inner fires, eager, roving, alluring, untamed; and the eyes of soldiers surprised, amused, adventurous, drunken, ready for any kind of fun; and sometimes in those crowds, dead eyes, or tortured eyes, staring inwards and not outwards because of some remembrance which came like a ghost between them and carnival.
In Ghent there were other sounds besides music and laughter, and illuminations too fierce and ruddy in their glow to give me pleasure. At night I heard the screams of women. I had no need to ask the meaning of them. I had heard such screams before, when Pierre Nesle’s sister Marthe was in the hands of the mob. But one man told me, as though I did not know.