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

and America, studied at
Harvard, and he talked about our politics, theatres, universities, society
generally. It was a pity, he said, and the result of the comparative lack
of critical spirit in America that 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