World's War Events, Vol. I

by Unknown

A little later in La Panne I was shown a concrete tennis court belonging to a German which had been punched full of holes. It was in no place thick enough, however, to give cause for suspicion that its real purpose was in any way sinister.

By the time we regained La Panne I was hardly able to walk as I had been going hard all day, a good deal of the way through soft sand. But even if I had been much more tired I would have sensed the atmosphere of that town. To me the little seaside village, built for summer gayety, had more of the romance of war in it than any place I have seen.

The half dozen summer hotels and all the villas were filled with the mothers, wives, and children of the Belgian soldiers whose firing line I had just left. Their homes had been in Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent. Now they were in the last little town in Belgium. To some their soldiers had already returned, and they were dining as merrily as if to-morrow did not hold out a reasonable likelihood of being killed. At the doors of the hotels and on the street were many others waiting, and, as the street had filled up with another French artillery division bivouacked for a few hours, they could not see their men folk until they were close at hand.

Refugees at La Panne.

Now and then as we passed we could hear little gasps of happiness. For some, of course, there were disappointment and bad news. But they must have carried their sorrow to their chambers, as La Panne was all gayety.

A comment on the Belgian soldiers made at the beginning of the war occurred to me: "They shoot the enemy all day; at night they come home and kiss mother. In the morning they kiss mother again and go back to shoot some more."

They certainly showed themselves capable of shaking off the horrors of war before their women folk. To see them there in La Panne that night you might have thought it was all a sham battle if it had not been for a conviction of reality that would not shake off.

It was nearly ten o'clock, now but Belgian soldiers relieved from the firing line and off duty for the night were still coming into La Panne. In the Hotel Des Arcades, which incidentally, has no arcades, the bar and the dining room were full of soldiers. Officers and their men were eating and drinking together in the pleasant democratic way they have in the Belgian army. Room was made for us at the long central table in the dining room, and all at the table were solicitous to see that we were at once given plenty to eat and drink. Several of the fifteen men at the table had hands or heads bandaged, but that did not seem to detract from their gayety.

Spirit of the Belgian soldiers.

A joke was being told as we sat down, and every one was taking a lively interest in it, the narrator was a bearded man of fifty, and he was telling to the delight of the others how his son had once got the better of him in Brussels before the war. There were other stories of matters equally foreign to war. The private on one side of me told me he was the manager for Belgium of an American typewriter. The lieutenant on the other side was in ordinary times an insurance agent. All the men there were in business and talked and acted like a company of young American business men.