Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts--and Behind Them | Page 5

We drove
into the courtyard of the solid old Flemish house--a house in which he

and his father before him had lived, with tiny rooms full of old
paintings, garden, stable, and hothouse packed close in the saving
Belgian fashion, and all as spick and span and shining as if built
yesterday--and then into the street again. It was interesting to watch this
square little man roll sturdily along, throwing out his stout arms
impatiently and flinging at the nervous villagers--who treated him
almost as a sort of feudal lord--guttural Flemish commands to keep
cool and not make fools of themselves.
All at once, coming out of nowhere, a wave of panic swept down the
street like a squall across a still pond.
"Bing--Bang!" went wooden shutters over windows, the stout
housewives flinging the bars home and gathering up their children.
Doors slammed, windows closed--it was like something in a play--and
almost as soon as it takes to tell it there was not a head, not a sound; the
low houses were one blank wall, and we stood in the street alone.
Just such scenes as this people must have known in the days when
Europe was a general battle-ground--when the French or the Spanish
came into Flanders; just such villages, just such housewives slamming
shutters close--you can see them now in old Flemish pictures.
Slowly doors and windows opened, heads poked out. The little street
filled, the knots of people gathered again. We walked up and down, the
linen merchant flinging out his arms and his reassurances more and
more vigorously. Half an hour passed, and then, all at once, it came
again. And this time it was real. The Germans were coming!
Down the straight, paved highway, a mile or so away, at the farther end
of an avenue of elms which framed them like a tunnel, was a band of
horsemen. They were coming at an easy trot, half a dozen in single file
on either side of the road. We could see their lances, held rakishly
upstanding across the saddle, then the tail of the near horse whisking to
and fro. One, crossing over, was outlined against the sky, and those
who could see whispered: "One is standing sidewise!" as if this were
somehow important. Tears rolled down the cheeks of the women
huddled inside the door before which we stood.
Coming nearer and nearer up that long tunnel of trees, like one of those
unescapable things seen in dreams, the little gray spot of moving
figures grew to strange proportions--"the Germans!"--front of that
frightful avalanche. A few hundred yards away they pulled down to a

walk, and slowly, peering sharply out from under their helmets, entered
the silent street. Another moment and the leader was alongside, and we
found ourselves looking up at a boy, not more than twenty he seemed,
with blue eyes and a clean-cut, gentle face. He passed without a look or
word, but behind him a young officer, soldier-like and smart in the
Prussian fashion, with a half-opened map in his hand, asked the way to
a near-by village. He took the linen merchant's direction without
pausing and the horses swung down the side street. "Do you speak
English?" he called back, as if, in happier times, we might have been
friends, and, without waiting for an answer, trotted on into the growing
dusk.
They were but one of hundreds of such squads of light cavalry--uhlans
for the most part--ranging all over western Belgium as far as Ostend, a
dozen or so men in hostile country, prepared to be cut to pieces if they
found the enemy they were looking for, or to be caught from ambush at
any time by some squad of civic guards. But as one watched them
disappear down their long road to France they grew into something
more than that. And in the twilight of the quiet countryside these stern
shapes that rode on without turning, lances upstanding from tired
shoulders, became strange, grotesque, pathetic--again the Germans,
legions of the War Lord, come too late into a world which must crush
them at last, Knights of the Frightful Adventure, riding to their death.




Chapter II
Paris At Bay

The Calais and Boulogne routes were already closed. Dieppe and Havre
might at any moment follow. You must go now, people said in London,
if you want to get there at all.

And yet the boat was crowded as it left Folkstone. In bright afternoon
sunshine we hurried over the Channel, empty of any sign of war, unless
war showed in its very emptiness. Next to me sat a young Frenchman,
different from those we had met before hurrying home to fight.
Good-looking, tall, and rather languid in manner, he spoke English
with an English accent,