Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts--and Behind Them | Page 3

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 the Germans saw them in uniform, tore off their coats
and threw them in the canal. Others threw in cartridges, thousands of
gallons of gasolene were poured on the ground, and everybody watched
the church tower for the red flag which would signal that firing was
about to begin. Le Bien Public of Ghent, however, protested stoutly
because its mail edition had been refused at the station:
It is not alone on the field of battle that one must be brave. For us
civilians real courage consists in doing our ordinary duty up to the last.
In Limburg postmen made their rounds while Prussians inundated the
region, and peasants went right along with their sowing while down the
road troops were falling back from the firing-line.
Let us think of our sons sleeping forever down there in the trenches of
Haelen and Tirlemont and Aerschot; of those brave artillerymen who,
for twenty days, have been waiting in the forts at Liege the help so
many times promised from the allies; of our lancers charging into
mitrailleuse-fire as if they were in a tournament; let us remember that
our heroic little infantrymen, crouched behind a hedge or in a trench,
keeping up their fire for ten hours running until their ammunition was
exhausted, and forced at last to retire, wounded and worn out, without a
chief to take orders from, have had no other thought than that of finding
some burgomaster or commissioner of police, in order not to be taken
for deserters. Let us think a little of all these brave men and be worthy
of them.
There were no music-halls in Belgium and there were posters on the
blank walla, even of little villages, reminding bands and hurdy-gurdy
players and the proprietors of dance-halls that this was no time for
unnecessary noise. There were no soldiers going gayly off to war; the
Belgians were coming back from war. They had been asked to hold out

for three days, and they had held for three weeks. All their little country
was a battle-field, and Belgium open to the invader.
It was too late to get to Brussels, but there was still a train to Antwerp.
At Puers soldiers were digging trenches and stringing approaches with
barbed wire. The dikes had been opened and part of the country flooded.
Farther on we passed the Antwerp forts, then comely suburbs where
houses had been torn down and acres of trees and shrubs-- precious, as
may be imagined, to a people who line their country roads with elms
and lindens like avenues in parks, and build monuments to
benevolent-looking old horticulturists--chopped down and burned. And
go, presently, into the old city itself, dull-flaming with the scarlet, gold,
and black, of the Belgian flag, and with something that seemed to
radiate from the life itself of this hearty, happy people, after all their
centuries of trade and war, and good food, and good art--like their own
Rubenses and Van Dycks.
There was no business, not a ship moving in the Scheldt. All who
worked at all were helping prepare for the possible siege; those who
didn't crowded the sidewalk cafes, listening to tales from the front,
guessing by the aid of maps whither, across the silent, screened
southwest, the German avalanche was spreading.
"Treason," "betrayal," "savagery," were on everybody's lips. For
Antwerp, you might say, had been "half German"; many of its rich and
influential men were of German origin, although they had lived in
Belgium for years. And now the Belgians felt they had lived there as
spies, and the seizure of Belgium was an act long and carefully planned.
One was told of the finding of rifles in German cellars, marked
"Preserves," of German consuls authorized to give prizes for the most
complete inventories of their neighborhoods turned in by amateur spies.
Speaking to one man about the Rubens "Descent from the Cross" still
hanging in the cathedral, I suggested that such a place was safe from
bombardment. He looked up at the lace-like old tower, whose chimes,
jangling down through leaping shafts and jets of Gothic stone, have so
long been Antwerp's voice. "They wouldn't stop a minute," he said.
All eastern Belgium was cut off. Brussels, to which people run over for
dinner and the theatre, might have been in China. Meanwhile Antwerp
seemed safe for the time and I returned to Ghent, got a train next day as
far south as Deynze, where the owner of a two-wheeled Belgian cart

was induced to take me another thirty kilometres on down to