Ghent also is an undamaged city. Our airmen spared her; our cannon could not reach her. She was not taken by assault, but fell into the enemy's hands. It is prosperous, all its factory chimneys are a-smoke. Cheap plenitude fills its shop windows. Its people are at work—or, rather, they are at work when there is not a groodefeest.
It is calm on the Lokeren road. You cannot hear the battle-thunder of that October now, the ominous and insistent and encroaching roaring of the monster who was just spitting and flashing fire at Ghent in those days. You can see with the mind's eye the new army with its new boots and its sore feet and its loads of equipment. It did not carry bombs and it did not carry gas-masks, but it carried everything else. One can see the perplexed and anxious Staff looking at the intelligence brought in—the Germans held nowhere, the Germans in vast numbers, truly ready and capable of sweeping the contemptibly little army into the sea, the Germans advancing everywhere. The order comes to retire. Retire—retreat—might not the retreat from Antwerp resemble the retreat from Mons? It is retreat in any case. Back into Ghent; back, perhaps, to Bruges and to Ostende. No one talks of Ypres. The army does not yet know where Ypres is. However, they filed through Ghent, and it was once more boots, boots, boots, boots over the cobbled roads. It was midnight, and they traversed the whole broad metropolis—singing a song which has not been forgotten in all the intervening years.
But now it is midnight again, the night of the 1920 National Fête, and the whole population has got singing drunk and then screaming drunk on beer. Tens of thousands of men and women flock the streets. There are fireworks, there is music, there is dancing. The fronts of the estaminets have been taken out, and seats go from the bar to the middle of the street; long tables on trestles, and plank seats, have been put out; piles of shrimps litter the tables from end to end, and the yellow beer gleams as it streams. Tired children are massed on the cathedral steps waiting for the fireworks to begin, and past those who sit surges a tireless crowd.
In the Groensel Maarkt a truly Dostoieffskian scene. A soldier with one arm, a diminutive woman with dislocated hips, and two children are singing Flemish songs to a ring of people of varying ages. The old soldier has a sheaf of leaflets with the words of the songs and sells them a penny a time, a small boy plays the concertina, "mother" sings all the while a murmuring sing-song which never rises or falls, and keeps time with her wasp-like waist, which seems to hang from the black hump of her hips and sways uncannily back and forth. Father with the one arm also sings all the while he sells, the little girl sings, and the boy playing the concertina sings also. To the tune of "Way Down in Tennessee" they sing:
Ik noem haar mijn everzwijn
Mijn voddenmagazijn
They sing too, over and over again, a Flemish song about the war:
Nog niet genoeg dat hij
Binst d'oorlog was in 't lij
Tot overmaat huns laffe daad
Der duitschers vol van haat ...
and a haunting chorus which begins:
Hoe ... kan het bestaan
Dat men een man, die gansch zijn plicht
toch heeft gekweten
and glasses of beer pass over the heads of the audience to the singing family. All in a dark, empty market-place, with somebody's statue looking down on the scene and many a tear softening human eyes.