The Log of a Noncombatant | Page 5

some acrobatic exercises
which we interpreted as a signal to halt. Van Hee swapped cigarettes
with them and gossiped in their native tongue, in return for which they
gave us some good advice. They warned us to pay no attention to
sign-posts, which, in order to fool the enemy, were either marked with
false names or else were pointed in the wrong direction. While we were
talking, a tall gray alderman came along the road with a greasy package
under his arm and at his side a priest--one of those ubiquitous
black-robed figures with a hat like an inverted oatmeal bowl.
"Where to?" asked the Vice-Consul of Ghent.
"A Dendermonde," (to Termonde), answered Verhagen, sizing us up as
strangers, and using French instead of the local Flemish dialect.
"You know the road?"
"Yes, well," said Verhagen; and so, partly because of charity and partly
because we could have him as a useful guide, we took him into the car.

As we sped through the level lanes of poplars, challenged as usual by
every Belgian regular or Garde Civique who could boast a uniform, the
smooth green meadows of Flanders with their trim hamlets of stucco
and tile seemed to deny the reports of savagery we had heard the night
before. We had been told, and we had read, of German atrocities, and
we had talked with survivors of Louvain. There was pillage, burning,
and looting in Louvain, we had agreed, but the cruelty to women and
children was the better part myth. And at all events, there was a
semblance of cause for that. Perhaps there had been more resistance,
more sniping by citizens than generally known, and perhaps the
German side had not been fully explained.
Then suddenly Termonde lay before us. The center of the bridge was
gone. Splintered timber sticking on end lay in the mud at the river's side,
along with iron beams torn by the charges of dynamite. The current was
choked with masses of steel and wood. We crawled across some
temporary beams reconstructed by Belgian engineers, and entered the
ruins with a handful of Termonde's citizens who had come back for the
first time to see what was left of their homes.
"I will take you to the center," said Verhagen. "That is where my house
was."
A quarter of a mile behind us, as the alderman sat upon a rock beside
the gravestone, lay the thin neck of the Upper Scheldt, less than one
hundred yards wide at this point, where it curved between the lines of
charred and flattened buildings. We could still see the rush of water
tumbling and splashing through the wreckage of the bridge we had just
crossed. Twice it had been dynamited and twice rebuilt in part, so that
at present a single line of slippery beams, suspended a few feet above
the water and supported by some heavy wire, was all that remained
between ourselves and the retreating road to Ghent. From the direction
of Alost came the desultory boom of German guns; across the stream
behind us the Belgian outposts whiled away the time with cigarettes
and cards. Shaggy horses dozed against the gun trucks, and the men of
artillery, some stretched at full length in the sun, others sitting bolt
upright with arms folded, slept soundly on the gun carriages. We could
hear the stream gurgling. We could hear the creak of a lazy windmill,
and, coming somewhere from the smoking piles, the hideous howl of
starving hounds. Of other human sounds there were none except the

voice of Verhagen.
Ten days before Termonde had been a thriving town; that day it was a
heap of smouldering ashes. America had heard a good deal about
Tirlemont and Louvain, but not much of Termonde. Because this was a
war of millions, it did not count in the news--for it was only a
community of twelve thousand inhabitants, as pretty and quaint as the
province of Flanders boasts, the prosperous center of its rope and
cordage manufacture, with fifteen hundred houses, barracks, two
statues, a town-hall, five churches, an orphan asylum, and a convent.
Now only one of the churches stood, as well as the building where the
officers were quartered, the Museum of Antiquity, and perhaps a dozen
others. Across the moat, which led to the gateway of what were
formerly the inner fortifications, were piles of rotting horseflesh. The
bronze statue of De Smet, the Jesuit missionary, looked calmly on the
scene. All the rest was blotted out. There was no sign of hot-tempered
impetuous work of a handful of drunken Uhlans, a fire started in anger
and driven by the wind throughout the entire town. There was not a
breath of wind. That the night was calm was shown by the fact that here
and