Termonde was—— Let me recall what it was. It was a not unprosperous town of some eleven or twelve thousand people. Though not destitute of commerce and industries, it lived mainly on law (for it was an assize town), on education, and on the army. The two handsomest residences that I saw—one in puce-coloured brick at the approach to the bridge, the other more grandiose in stone and inexplicably saved in the principal street—belonged one to a judge, the other to an avocat. Termonde, like many other places in the Low Countries, had already been lifted into history by war. It repelled Louis XIV with its dykes, but Marlborough took it dry. Such was Termonde.
To-day it is a tumbled avalanche of brick, stone, twisted iron and shattered glass, over which the remaining public buildings rise like cliffs over a flood. I walked every foot of every street. Of the Rue de l’Eglise, the chief street, the Porte de Boom and Church of Notre Dame at one end, and the Hôtel de Ville, Palais de Justice, and Museum at the other are untouched. So is the avocat’s house, of which I have spoken, chalked over with that piteous legend to which one has become so accustomed. Friends here! Please spare! (in German and German characters). The rest of the street is as if the breath of Armageddon had withered it. The post office, the chapel and convent of the Poor Clares, the hospital, the orphanage have all disappeared.
There is no need to multiply descriptive details. It is always the same capricious devastation, the same arabesques of ruin, with which flame searches its mad way through architecture. About one-half of the Grand’ Place has been saved owing to the fact that the Germans were gathered there, drinking champagne, when fire was being sown through the town.
The Marché au Bétail, a pretty little boulevard, has also disappeared. The great College, at its corner, like the other schools, is gone. Each of its façades resembles nothing so much as an X-ray photograph. Through the charred ribs of what was a house the green-red-and-white of a flower-garden flashes the eternal tricolour of nature.
Culture and the Sick
In the Marché au Lin the Church of the Récolletes and the National Bank lie disembowelled. It was here that the Germans laid on the pavements the sick and wounded while they burned the beds from which they had dragged them and the roof that had sheltered them.
A few small factory buildings on the left bank of the river and the poorest section of the workmen’s quarter remain. The rest of Termonde is a mere heap of bricks. It was; it no longer is. Walking out towards the southern side of the town I came suddenly—everything here happens suddenly—upon a note of desolation, not the most desolate, but the most crying of all. Through a chasm in a shattered façade I saw the white walls of little houses, the white coifs of nuns, and the waving green of trees. It was the Béguinage. Anyone who knows Flanders knows these remote pools of silence, these quiet backwaters where no oar breaks the surface, where the old and spent await death as one courteously awaits an honoured visitor. I stepped in and found myself in an irregular triangle of almshouses. At first nothing seemed to have been touched. But in the centre there was a church, fringed with dwarf cypress. Walking over, I found that it was, like Termonde, a skeleton. The Germans, a nun told me, had on the entreaty of two Dutch ladies, members of the community, consented to spare the cottages. But they insisted on making a bonfire of the “cottage of the Bon Dieu!”
Nothing was lacking in this abomination of desolation. I determined to have some photographs made. Yes! our guide—a big country farmer, who had out of pure courtesy accompanied us from Zele—knew of a photographer who would doubtless be able to do our business. We went to look for him. His street had disappeared, his house with it. We walked back to the estaminet to ask where he might be found.
“But, monsieur! he was one of the first to be shot by the Germans!” Later, on one of the quays we saw a white wooden cross, with lime stamped down about its base. Bystanders told us that it marked the grave of two Belgian civilians. “Ah!” said our farmer, “it is perhaps there!”