As Obels left me to continue his journey to Dunkirk and on to London to deliver his own "copy," he advised me to go directly to Furnes, the most considerable town in what was left of Belgium, and have my passport viséd again. So I continued down the long, flat highway, bordered on both sides by sunken fields, toward the cannonading I could now hear ahead. The road had been fairly full of automobiles, motor-trucks, motorcycles, and bicycles over its whole length, but it became crowded now with the addition of a long string of Parisian motor-buses taking several infantry regiments forward. A whole artillery division of yellow French "Schneiders" also took up its share of the wide road, and at the barricades there were traffic blockades lasting at times for ten minutes.
The road to Furnes.
All the way from Dunkirk I had been struck by the character of the land. As I approached Furnes, the dykes were being opened and half the fields were already inundated. It seemed a poor country for military operations. There were at most three highways, all defended. They could only be taken at a price no army could afford, and any departure from them meant being mired in the heavy fields, now being hastily harvested of a bumper crop of sugar-beets: at one place a whole French regiment in uniform was gathering the beets preparatory to inundation. With the dykes open these fields would be covered with four feet of water half the time. The only possible course for an army was over the sand-dunes, which lay a mile to the north, looking like the imitation mountains you see in the scenic-railways at every amusement resort in the United States.
Tommies' battles on the sand-dunes.
A reservist with whom I walked a mile or so told me Dunkirk had never been successfully attacked except over those sand-dunes, and the English and French had fought some of the bloodiest battles of history there against the Spanish, when they held Dunkirk. I doubt, though, that they were as bloody as the battle I was to see within a few hours.
Belgian soldiers.
The old Flemish town of Furnes had much less military precision about it than Dunkirk. It was on the very edge of the battle, and an occasional shell was dropping in the town. One exploded as I crossed the bridge and entered a narrow street, but it was on the far side of town, too far away for the soldiers halted in the street to notice. These were tired and dirty men, but not too tired to be courteous. They were also passing jokes among themselves, and laughing. By that, even if I had not known their uniforms, I could have told they were Belgians.
The enemy held at the Yser.
Every street and every courtyard in Furnes was full of Belgian soldiers. They were resting for the day, waiting to go forward at night-fall to relieve the men on the firing line only five miles away. Even above the noises of the street I could hear the answer of their small field artillery to the heavy assault of the German guns. Nothing I heard the soldiers say, however, would have given the idea that the Belgians considered themselves outclassed by their enemy. They seemed superbly unconscious of the absurdity of their position. This was the tenth day they had held the Germans at the Yser, and they had done it with rifles and machine guns, taking punishment every minute from the big fieldpieces the Germans had brought against them. So far they had lost twelve thousand men at that ditch, but the thought of giving it up had evidently not even occurred to them. They could not give it up, one of them explained to me later, it was all they had left. There was a little irritation in his tone, too, as he said it, such as one might feel toward a child who was slow at grasping a simple fact.
Military automobiles and wagons.