Antwerp to Gallipoli - Arthur Ruhl
A Year of the War on Many Fronts--and Behind Them
by Arthur Ruhl
with Illustrations from Photographs
Contents
Chapters
I. "The Germans Are Coming!"
II. Paris at Bay
III. After the Marne
IV. The Fall of Antwerp I
V. Paris Again-and Bordeaux: Journal of a Flight from a London Fog
VI. "The Great Days"
VII. Two German Prison Camps
VIII. In the German Trenches at La Bassee
IX. The Road to Constantinople: Rumania and Bulgaria
X. The Adventure of the Fifty Hostages
XI. With the Turks at the Dardanelles
XII. Soghan-Dere and the Flier of Ak-Bash
XIII. A War Correspondents' Village
XIV. Cannon Fodder
XV. East of Lemberg: Through Austria-Hungary to the Galician Front
XVI. In the Dust of the Russian Retreat
Chapter I
The Germans Are Coming!
The Germans had already entered Brussels, their scouts were reported on
the outskirts of Ghent; a little farther now, over behind the horizon
wind-mills, and we might at any moment come on them.
For more than a fortnight we had been hurrying eastward, hearing,
through cable despatches and wireless, the far-off thunder of that vast
gray tide rumbling down to France. The first news had come drifting in,
four thousand miles away, to the little Wisconsin lake where I was
fishing. A strange herd of us, all drawn in one way or another by the
war, had caught the first American ship, the old St. Paul, and, with
decks crowded with trunks and mail-bags from half a dozen ships, steamed
eastward on the all but empty ocean. There were reservists hurrying to
the colors, correspondents, men going to rescue wives and sisters. Some
were hit through their pocketbooks, some through their imaginations--
like the young women hoping to be Red Cross nurses, or to help in some
way, they weren't sure how.
One had a steamer chair next mine--a pale, Broadway tomboy sort of girl
in a boyish sailor suit, who looked as if she needed sleep. Without
exactly being on the stage, she yet appeared to live on the fringe of
it, and combined the slangy freedoms of a chorus girl with a certain
quick wisdom and hard sense. It was she who discovered a steerage
passenger, on the Liverpool dock, who had lost his wife and was bringing
his four little children back to Ireland from Chicago, and, while the
other cabin passengers fumed over their luggage, took up a collection
for him then and there.
"Listen here!" she would say, grabbing my arm. "I want to tell you
something. I'm going to see this thing--d'you know what I mean?--for
what it'll do to me--you know--for its effect on my mind! I didn't say
anything about it to anybody--they'd only laugh at me--d'you know what I
mean? They don't think I've got any serious side to me. Now, I don't
mind things--I mean blood--you know--they don't affect me, and I've read
about nursing--I've prepared for this! Now, I don't know how to go about
it, but it seems to me that a woman who can--you know--go right with
'em--jolly 'em along--might be just what they'd want--d'you know what I
mean?"
One Russian had said good-by to a friend at the dock, he to try to get
through this way, the other by the Pacific and Trans-Siberian. The
Englishman who shared my stateroom was an advertising man. "I've got
contracts worth fifty thousand pounds," he said, "and I don't suppose
they're worth the paper they're written on." There were several Belgians
and a quartet of young Frenchmen who played cards every night and
gravely drank bottle after bottle of champagne to the glory of France.
Even the Balkans were with us, in the shape of a tall, soldier-like
Bulgarian with a heavy mustache and the eyes of a kindly and highly
intelligent hawk. He was going back home--"to fight?" "Yes, to fight."
"With Servia?" asked some one politely, with the usual vague American
notion of the Balkan states. The Bulgarian's eyes shone curiously.
"You have a sense of humor!" he said.
This man had done newspaper work in Russia 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 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 Courtrai.
It was rumored that there had been a battle at Courtrai--it was, at any
rate, close to the border and the German right wing and in the general
line of their advance.
We rattled along the hard highroad, paved with Belgian blocks, with a
well-pounded dirt path at the side for bicycles, between almost
uninterrupted rows of low houses and tiny fields in which men and women
both were working. Other carts like ours passed by, occasional heavy
wagons drawn by one of the handsome Belgian draft-horses, and now and
then a small loaded cart, owner perched on top, zipping along behind a
jolly Belgian work dog--pulling as if his soul depended on it and
apparently having the time of his life. Every one was busy, not a foot
of ground wasted; a more incongruous place into which to force the waste
and lawlessness of war it would be hard to imagine.
Past an old chateau, with its lake and pheasant-preserve; along the
River Lys, with its miles of flax, soaked in this peculiarly potent
water, now drying in countless little cones, like the tents of some vast
Lilliputian army, and so at last into Courtrai.
It was like hundreds of other quaint old towns along the French and
Flemish border, not yet raked by war, but motionless, with workmen idle,
young men gone to the front, and nothing for people to do but exchange
rumors and wait for the clash to come. I strolled round the old square
and through some of the winding streets. One window was filled with
tricolor sashes carrying the phrase: "Long live our dear Belgium! May
God preserve her!"
On blank walls was this proclamation in parallel columns of French and
Flemish:
Ville De Courtrai Avis Important a la Population Courtraisienne Stad
Kortrijk Belangrijk Bericht aan de Kortrijksche Bevolking
I am about to make an appeal to your reason and your sentiments of
humanity.
If, in the course of the unjust war which we are now enduring, it
happens that French or Belgian troops bring German prisoners to our
city, I beseech you to maintain your calm and dignity. These prisoners,
wounded or not, I shall take under my protection, became I say that they
are not really to blame for acts which they have been ordered to do
under threat of cruel punishment.
Yes, I say I shall take them under my protection because my heart bleeds
to think that they, too, have left behind those dear to them--an aged
father, an old mother, a wife, children, sisters, or sweethearts whom
separation has plunged into deepest anguish. Do not forget when you see
these prisoners passing by, I beg of you, and permit yourself to shout
at and insult them. Keep, on the contrary, the respectful silence
appropriate to thinking men. Fellow citizens, if, in these grave and
painful circumstances, you will listen to my advice, if you will recall
that it is now thirty years that I have been your burgomaster and during
all that time of hard work I have never asked a favor of you, I feel
sure that you will obey my request and, on your side, you may be sure
that my gratitude will not be wanting.
A. REYNAEKT, Burgomaster.
Although war had not touched Courtrai as yet, the rumor of it, more
terrifying often than the thing itself, had swept through all Flanders.
Along the level highways leading into Courtrai trooped whole families
carrying babies and what few household things they could fling together
in blankets. Covered wagons overflowed with men, women, and children.
The speed with which rumor spread was incredible. In one village a
group of half-drunken men, who insisted on jeering the Germans were put
at the head of a column and compelled to march several miles before they
were released. The word at once ran the length of dozens of highroads
that the Germans "were taking with them every one between fifteen and
fifty." I heard the same warning repeated on several of the roads about
Courtrai by men and women, panting, red-faced, stumbling blindly on from
they knew not what. Later, I met the same people, straggling back to
their villages, good-naturedly accepting the jibes of those who had
stayed behind.
A linen manufacturer who lived in the village of Deerlyck, not far from
Courtrai, where German scouts had been reported, kindly asked me to come
out and spend the night. For several miles we drove through the densely
populated countryside, past rows of houses whose occupants all seemed to
know him.
Women ran out to stop him and rattled away in Flemish; there were
excited knots of people every few steps, and the heads kept turning this
way and that, as if we were all likely to be shot any minute. 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, and you would have taken him for an Englishman. A
big canvas bag full of golf-clubs leaned against the wall behind him,
and he had been trying to play golf at one of the east-coast seaside
places in England. But one couldn't play in a time like this, and the
young man sighed and waved his hands rather desperately--one couldn't
settle down to anything. So he was going home. To fight ?--I
suggested. Possibly, he said--the army had refused him several years
ago--maybe they would take him now. Very politely, in his quiet manner,
he asked me down to tea. When he stood by the rail watching the tawny
French cliffs draw nearer, one noticed a certain weary droop to his
shoulders, in contrast to his well-tanned, rather athletic-looking,
face--born a little tired, perhaps, like the young nobleman in
Bernstein's "Whirlwind." His baggage was addressed to a Norman chateau.
On the other side was a pink-cheeked boy of seventeen, all French,
though he spoke English and divided his time between writing post-cards
to the boys he had been visiting in England and reading General von
Bernhardi. "The first chapter, 'The Right to Make War,'" he said, "I
understand that--yes! But the second chapter--'The Duty to Make War'"
--he laughed and shook his head.
"No--no--no!" He was the son of an insurance agent who was already at
the front, and, although under age, he hoped to enlist. We drew nearer
Dieppe--tall French houses leaning inward with tricolors in the windows,
a quay with the baggy red breeches of French soldiers showing here and
there--just such a scene as they paint on theatre curtains at home. A
smoky tug whistled uproariously, there was a patter of wooden shoes as
children clattered along the stone jetty, and from all over the crowd
that had come down to greet us came brave shouts of "Eep-eep Hoorah!
Eep-eep Hoorah!"
No news, or at least no reliable news. A lot of wounded had been
brought in, business was stopped, the great beach deserted; some thought
the Germans would be in Dieppe in a day or two. Our train was supposed
to start as soon as the boat arrived and reach Paris before ten that
night. It was after dark before we got away and another day before we
crawled into St. Lazare.
There was a wild rush for places as soon as the gates opened; one took
what one could, and nine of us, including three little children, were
glad enough to crowd into a third-class compartment. Two ladies, with
the three little children, were hurrying away from the battle that their
husbands .thought was going to be fought near Dieppe within a day or
two. From Paris they hoped to get to the south of France. Over and
over again the husbands said good-by, then the guards whistled for the
last time.