My Year of the War | Page 4

boy scout. It was a unique, a most accommodating pass; the only one I have received from the Allies' side which would have taken me into the German lines.
The front which we saw was in the square of the little town of Haelen, where some dogs of a dog machine-gun battery lay panting in their traces. A Belgian officer in command there I recollect for his passionate repetition of, "Assassins! The barbarians!" which seemed to choke out any other words whenever he spoke of the Germans. His was a fresh, livid hate, born of recent fighting. We could go where we pleased, he said; and the Germans were "out there," not far away. Very tired he was, except for the flash of hate in his eyes; as tired as the dogs of the machine-gun battery.
We went outside to see the scene of "the battle," as it was called in the dispatches; a field in the first flush of the war, where the headless lances of Belgian and German cavalrymen were still scattered about. The peasants had broken off the lance-heads for the steel, which was something to pay for the grain smouldering in the barn which had been shelled and burned.
A battle! It was a battle because the reporters could get some account of it, and the fighting in Alsace was hidden under the cloud of secrecy. A superficial survey was enough to show that it had been only a reconnaissance by the Germans with some infantry and guns as well as cavalry. Their defeat had been an incident to the thrust of a tiny feeling finger of the German octopus for information. The scouting of the German cavalry patrols here and there had the same object. Waiting behind hedges or sweeping around in the rear of a patrol with their own cavalry when the word came by telephone, the Belgians bagged many a German, man and horse, dead and alive. Brussels and London and New York, too, thrilled over these exploits supplied to eager readers. It was the Uhlan week of the war; for every German cavalryman was a Uhlan, according to popular conception. These Uhlans seemed to have more temerity than sense from the accounts that you read. But if one out of a dozen of these mounted youths, with horses fresh and a trooper's zest in the first flush of war, returned to say that he had ridden to such and such points without finding any signs of British or French forces, he had paid for the loss of the others. The Germans had plenty of cavalry. They used it as the eyes of the army, in co-operation with the aerial eyes of the planes.
A peasant woman came out of the house beside the battlefield with her children around her; a flat-chested, thin woman, prematurely old with toil. "Les Anglais!" she cried at sight of us. Seeing that we had some lances in the car, she rushed into her house and brought out half a dozen more. If the English wanted lances they should have them. She knew only a few words of French, not enough to express the question which she made understood by gestures. Her eyes were burning with appeal to us and flashing with hate as she shook her fist toward the Germans.
When were the English coming? All her trust was in the English, the invincible English, to save her country. Probably the average European would have passed her by as an excited peasant woman. But pitiful she was to me, more pitiful than the raging officer and his dog battery, or the infantry awkwardly intrenching back of Louvain, or flag-bedecked Brussels believing in victory: one of the Belgians with the true schipperke spirit. She was shaking her fist at a dam which was about to burst in a flood.
It was strange to an American, who comes from a land where everyone learns a single language, English, that she and her ancestors, through centuries of living neighbour in a thickly-populated country to people who speak French and to French civilization, should never have learned to express themselves in any but their own tongue--singular, almost incredible, tenacity in the age of popular education! She would save the lance-heads and garner every grain of wheat; she economized in all but racial animosity. This racial stubbornness of Europe--perhaps it keeps Europe powerful in jealous competition of race with race.
The thought that went home was that she did not want the Germans to come; no Belgian wanted them; and this was the fact decisive in the scales of justice. She said, as the officer had said, that the Germans were "out there." Across the fields one saw nothing on that still August day; no sign of war unless a Taube overhead, the first enemy aeroplane I had seen