Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts--and Behind Them | Page 2

Mr. Roosevelt had been a hero so long. There were party papers mechanically printing their praise or blame--"and then, of course, the New York Evening Post and the Springfield Republican"--but no general intelligent criticism of ideas for a popular idol to meet and answer. "On the whole, he's a good influence--but in place of something better. It isn't good for a man to stand so long in the bright sunshine."
That it was impossible for the Mexicans to work out their own salvation he doubted. "I think of Bulgaria--surely our inheritance of Turkish rule was almost as bad, and of how the nation has responded, and of the intensive culture we had at a time when we were only a name to most western Europeans." He was but one of those new potentialities which every whisper from the now cloud-wrapped Continent seemed to be opening --this tall, scholar-fighter from the comic-opera land where Mr. Shaw placed his chocolate soldiers.
In a steamer chair a frail-looking young woman in a white polo coat looked nervously out on the sea. She was Irish and came of a fighting line--father, uncles, and brothers in army and navy, her husband in command of a British cruiser, scouting the very steamship lane through which we were steaming. Frail-looking, but not frail in spirit--a fighter born, with Irish keenness and wit, she was ready to prick any balloon in sight. She had chased about the world too long after a fighting family to care much about settling down now. They couldn't afford to keep a place in England and live somewhere else half the time --"and, after all, what is there in being a cabbage?" She talked little. "You can learn more about people merely watching them," and she lay in her steamer chair and watched.
She could tell, merely by looking at them in their civilian's clothes, which were army and which navy men, which "R.N.s" and which merchant- service men. We spoke of a young lieutenant from an India artillery regiment. "Yes--'garrison-gunner,'" she said. She was sorry for the German people, but the Kaiser was "quite off his rocker and had to be licked."
War suddenly reached out for us as we came up to Mersey Bar, and an officer in khaki bellowed from the pilot-boat: "Take down your wireless!" Down it came, and there the ship stayed for the night, while the passengers crowded about a volunteer town-crier who read from the papers that had come aboard, and, in the strange quiet that descends on an anchored steamship, asked each other how true it was that the German military bubble--a magazine article with that title had been much read on the way over--had burst.
Slowly next morning we crept up the Mersey, past a rusty tramp outward bound, crowded with khaki-clad men. All the shipping was tooting as she swept by, and the men cheering and waving their hats at the land they might never come back to. The regular landing-stages were taken by transports, tracks were held for troop-trains, and it was night before we got down to London, where crowds and buses stormed along as usual and barytone soloists in every music-hall were roaring defiance to the Kaiser and reiterating that Britannia ruled the waves.
Into the fog of war that covered the Continent an army of Englishmen had vanished, none knew where. Out of it came rumors of victories, but as I crossed the Strand that morning on the way to Charing Cross, a newsboy pushed an extra into the cab window--the Germans were entering Brussels! Yet we fought into the boat train just as if thousands of people weren't fighting to get away from the very places we hoped to reach.
There were two business men in our coupe going to France, an elderly Irish lady, an intransigent Unionist, with black goggles and umbrella, hoping to get through to her invalid brother in Diest, and a bright, sweet-faced little Englishwoman, in nurse's dark-blue uniform and bonnet, bound for Antwerp, where her sister's convent had been turned into a hospital. She told about her little east-coast town as we crossed the sunny Channel; we trailed together into the great empty station at Ostend and, after an hour or two, found a few cars getting away, so to speak, of their own accord.
The low checker-board Belgian fields drifted quickly past; then Bruges, with a wounded soldier leaning on the shoulders of two companions; then Ghent. There was a great crowd about the station--men thrown out of work, men in flat cloth caps smoking pipes--the town just recovering from the panic of that afternoon. Flags had been hauled down--the American consul was even asked if he didn't think it would be safer to take down his flag--some of the civic guards, fearing they would be shot on sight if