‘Attack is being harshly pressed at this moment, and half measures would be useless, but Prime Minister informs me that they are confident they can hold out for three days, pretty sure they can hold out for six, and will try ten.
‘This arrangement, if adopted, will give time necessary for problem to be solved calmly.
‘Two thousand marines are arriving this evening.
‘I am remaining here till to-morrow.
‘I have read this telegram to Belgian Prime Minister, who says that we are in full agreement, subject to ratification by Council of Ministers which is now being held.
‘If you clinch these propositions, pray give the following order to the Admiralty: Send at once both naval brigades, minus recruits, via Dunkirk, into Antwerp, with five days’ rations and 2,000,000 rounds of ammunition, but without tents or much impedimenta.
‘When can they arrive?’
I had been met on arrival by Admiral Oliver, the Director of the Naval Intelligence Division. This officer had been sent by the Admiralty on September 29 to see what could be done to disable the large quantity of merchant shipping which lay in the Scheldt, so that if the city fell it could not be used by the Germans for embarking troops to invade England. He was a great stand-by in this time of stress. Night and day he laboured on the ships. With the assistance only of a Belgian sapper officer, four privates and a Belgian boy scout, he inserted explosive charges between the cylinders of thirty-eight large vessels, and by this means ruptured the propelling machinery so that not one of them was fit to go down the Scheldt during the whole of the German occupation.
While waiting for the reply from London that afternoon and also the next morning, I went out and examined the front: a leafy enclosed country, absolutely flat; a crescent of peering German kite balloons; a continuous bombardment; scarcely anything in the nature of an infantry attack; wearied and disheartened defenders. It was extremely difficult to get a clear view and so understand what kind of fighting was actually going on. We were, however, at length able to reach the actual inundations beyond which the enemy was posted. Entrenching here was impossible for either side, owing to the water met with at a foot’s depth. The Belgian pickets crouched behind bushes. There was at that moment no rifle fire, but many shells traversed the air overhead on their way to the Belgian lines.
Although the artillery fire of the Germans at Antwerp was at no time comparable to the great bombardments afterwards witnessed on the Western Front, it was certainly severe. The Belgian trenches were broad and shallow, and gave hardly any protection to their worn-out and in many cases inexperienced troops. As we walked back from the edge of these inundations along a stone-paved high road, it was a formidable sight to see on either hand the heavy shells bursting in salvoes of threes and fours with dense black smoke near or actually inside these scanty shelters in which the supporting troops were kneeling in fairly close order. Every prominent building—château, tower or windmill—was constantly under fire; shrapnel burst along the roadway, and half a mile to the left a wooded enclosure was speckled with white puffs. Two or three days at least would be required to make sound breastworks or properly constructed and drained trenches or rifle pits. Till then it must be mainly an affair of hedges and of houses; and the ineffective trenches were merely shell traps.