I talked with the pioupious. They had torn up half the pavement on the southern road and stretched barbed wire and brambles over the loose stones... to encourage the Uhlans. As you approached from without you saw the wicked eyes of the street trenches, and the grass-grown mounds of the old fortifications, winking down at you. The town was held by an outpost of three or four companies.
“Sir! American Sir!” said one of the pioupious, in the sort of English which an Antwerp Fleming who has spent two years among Scotchmen in the United States may be expected to speak. “Fourth Infantry of the Line at your service! We have two things only which we greatly much desire: Cigarettes and Revenge!”
Irish Horses
On the other side of the town a battery of artillery, magnificently horsed, was waiting under the trees for any alarm. Most of the horses were Irish. I felt a little nostalgia as I rubbed the sensitive nose of a roan mare. I wished that I had with me a poet or two of the Celtic renaissance to make a poem telling her how she had begun at the fair of Ballina, or Moy, or perhaps Ballsbridge itself, and how she would wander the white roads of Europe—not white now, but red—and die at last over there on the banks of the Rhine near pleasant Coblenz, or many-pinnacled Cologne. There being no poet about, I could but scratch the butt of her ears and give her some chocolate.
Two hours in the tram, five on the carriage-trip, three and a half to accomplish the hour’s train journey from Lokeren to Antwerp. I am now writing this impression of Termonde in this besieged city (in which no light is permitted after eight) by the light of two most excellent candles.
IV.—Malines
The prompt, creative courage of these Belgians is admirable. No sooner have the soldiers “cleaned” an invaded district than the engineers hurry along to rebuild bridges, repair railways, to open again the encumbered channels of intercourse. It was therefore without surprise that I found trains running again from Antwerp to Malines, crowded but comfortable, and sharp almost to the minute. Their resuscitating effect on the town, however, was not very great. It looked too much like pumping blood into a corpse.
The journey is right across one of the most important sectors of the Antwerp defences. The countryside shows the aspect of a sort of terrible security. It has been stripped not only to the skin, but to the skeleton. Woods, houses, where necessary, crops, have been sacrificed to the impregnability of the war capital. The typical prepared position shows a criss-cross entanglement of barbed wire, a long stretch of level ground, now entirely naked, more wire or chevaux-de-frise of pointed stakes, raised trenches, defended in front by artificial ditches, and glaring grimly down on the whole scene of the forts of Brialmont, with death lying couched in its guns.
Of Malines little of the material fabric of the town has suffered, with the exception of the cathedral. Through about twenty other houses shells had torn gashes as erratic as those which apparently a bullet tears through living tissue. But most of the streets remain unchanged. This statement is not, perhaps, as reassuring as it sounds. It is as if you were to say, in speaking of an attack on Oxford, that only the colleges had suffered. Malines is not only a cathedral city; the cathedral, situated geographically at its heart, dominates its whole economy. It is the spiritual centre of Belgium. The Cardinal Archbishop’s palace, unpretentious between its thick trees and its quiet canal, is in some sense the moral capital of this valorous people.
Like Louvain, Malines got its bread largely by education. Its manufacturing industries, so to say, radiated from the cathedral. It printed missals and breviaries. It made lace for ecclesiastical vestments, and then other lace. It cut and carved heavy oak into furniture for churches, and then it made other furniture. Every shell launched against the cathedral was therefore launched against the very being and essence of Malines city.