Antwerp to Gallipoli - Arthur Ruhl
We met one young fellow as we walked through an empty lateral leading to
a bomb-proof prepared for wounded, and the ambulance officer asked him
sharply how things had been going that morning.
"Oh, very well, sir," he said with the most respectful good humor,
though a shell bursting just then a stone's throw beyond the orchard
made both of us duck our heads. "A bit hot, sir, about nine o'clock,
but only one man hurt. They do seem to know just where we are, sir; but
wait till their infantry comes up--we'll clean them out right enough,
sir."
And, if he had been ordered to stay there and hold the trench alone, one
could imagine him saying, in that same tone of deference and chipper
good humor, "Yes, sir; thank you, sir," and staying, too, till the cows
came home.
We motored down the line to another trench--this one along a road with
fields in front and, about a couple of hundred yards behind, a clump of
trees which masked a Belgian battery. The officer here, a tall,
upstanding, gravely handsome young man, with a deep, strong, slightly
humorous voice, and the air of one both born to and used to command--the
best type of navy man--came over to meet us, rather glad, it seemed, to
see some one. The ambulance officer had just started to speak when
there was a roar from the clump of trees, at the same instant an
explosion directly overhead, and an ugly chunk of iron--a bit of broken
casing from a shrapnel shell--plunged at our very feet. The shell had
been wrongly timed and exploded prematurely.
"I say!" the lieutenant called out to a Belgian officer standing not far
away, "can't you telephone over to your people to stop that? That's the
third time we've been nearly hit by their shrapnel this morning. After
all"--he turned to us with the air of apologizing somewhat for his
display of irritation--"it's quite annoying enough here without that,
you know."
It was, indeed, annoying--very. The trenches were not under fire in the
sense that the enemy were making a persistent effort to clear them out,
but they were in the zone of fire, their range was known, and there was
no telling, when that distant boom thudded across the fields, whether
that particular shell might be intended for them or for somebody's house
in town.
We could see in the distance their captive balloon, and there were a
couple of scouts, the officer said, in a tower in the village, not much
more than half a mile away. He pointed to the spot across the barbed
wire. "We've been trying to get them for the last half-hour."
We left them engaged in this interesting distraction, the little
rifle-snaps in all that mighty thundering seeming only to accent the
loneliness and helplessness of their position, and spun on down the
transverse road, toward another trench. The progress of the motor
seemed slow and disappointing. Not that the spot a quarter of a mile
off was at all less likely to be hit, yet one felt conscious of a
growing desire to be somewhere else. And, though I took off my hat to
keep it from blowing off, I found that every time a shell went over I
promptly put it on again, indicating, one suspected, a decline in what
the military experts call morale.
As we bowled down the road toward a group of brick houses on the left, a
shell passed not more than fifty yards in front of us and through the
side of one of these houses as easily as a circus rider pops through a
tissue-paper hoop. Almost at the same instant another exploded--where,
I haven't the least idea, except that the dust from it hit us in the
face. The motor rolled smoothly along meanwhile, and the Belgian soldier
driving it stared as imperturbably ahead of him as if he were back at
Antwerp on the seat of his taxicab.
You get used to shells in time, it seems, and, deciding that you either
are or are not going to be hit, dismiss responsibility and leave it all
to fate. I must admit that in my brief experience I was not able to
arrive at this restful state. We reached at last the city gate through
which we had left Antwerp, and the motor came to a stop just at the
inner edge of the passage under the fort, and I said good-by to the
young Englishman ere he started back for the trenches again.
"Well," he called after me as I started across the open space between
the gate and the houses, a stone's throw away, "you've had an experience
anyway."
I was just about to answer that undoubtedly I had when--
"Tzee-ee-ee-er-r"--a shell just cleared the ramparts over our heads and
disappeared in the side of a house directly in front of us with a roar
and a geyser of dust. Neither the motor nor a guest's duty now detained
me, and, waving him good-by, I turned at right angles and made with true
civilian speed for the shelter of a side street.
The shells all appeared to be coming from a southeast direction, and in
the lee of houses on the south side of the street one was reasonably
protected. Keeping close to the house-fronts and dodging--rather
absurdly, no doubt--into doorways when that wailing whistle came up from
behind, I went zigzagging through the deserted city toward the hotel on
the other side of town.
It was such a progress as one might make in some fantastic nightmare--as
the hero of some eerie piece of fiction about the Last Man in the World.
Street after street, with doors locked, shutters closed, sandbags,
mattresses, or little heaps of earth piled over cellar windows; streets
in which the only sound was that of one's own feet, where the loneliness
was made more lonely by some forgotten dog cringing against the closed
door and barking nervously as one hurried past.
Here, where most of the shells had fallen the preceding night, nearly
all the houses were empty. Yet occasionally one caught sight of faces
peering up from basement windows or of some stubborn householder
standing in his southern doorway staring into space. Once I passed a
woman bound away from, instead of toward, the river with her big bundle;
and once an open carriage with a family in it driving, with peculiarly
Flemish composure, toward the quay, and as I hurried past the park,
along the Avenue Van Dyck--where fresh craters made by exploding shells
had been dug in the turf--the swans, still floating on the little lake,
placidly dipped their white necks under water as if it were a quiet
morning in May.
Now and then, as the shell's wail swung over its long parabola, there
came with the detonation, across the roofs, the rumble of falling
masonry. Once I passed a house quietly burning, and on the pavement
were lopped-off trees. The impartiality with which those far-off
gunners distributed their attentions was disconcerting. Peering down
one of the up-and-down streets before crossing it, as if a shell were an
automobile which you might see and dodge, you would shoot across and,
turning into a cosey little side street, think to yourself that here at
least they had not come, and then promptly see, squarely in front,
another of those craters blown down through the Belgian blocks.
Presently I found myself under the trees of the Boulevard Leopold, not
far from the British hospital, and recalled that it was about time that
promise was made good. It was time indeed, and help with lifting they
needed very literally. The order had just come to leave the building,
bringing the wounded and such equipment as they could pack into half a
dozen motor-buses and retire--just where, I did not hear--in the
direction of Ghent. As I entered the porte-cochere two poor wrecks of
war were being led out by their nurses--more men burned in the powder
explosion at Waelhem, their seared faces and hands covered with oil and
cotton just as they had been lifted from bed.
The phrase "whistle of shells" had taken on a new reality since
midnight. Now one was to learn something of the meaning of those equally
familiar words, "they succeeded in saving their wounded, although under
heavy fire."
None of the wounded could walk, none dress himself; most of them in
ordinary times would have lain where they were for weeks. There were
fractured legs not yet set, men with faces half shot away, men half out
of their heads, and all these had to be dressed somehow, covered up,
crowded into or on top of the buses, and started off through a city
under bombardment toward open country which might already be occupied by
the enemy.
Bundles of uniforms, mud-stained, blood-stained, just as they had come
from the trenches, were dumped out of the storeroom and distributed, hit
or miss.
British "Tommies" went out as Belgians, Belgians in British khaki; the
man whose broken leg I had lifted the day before we simply bundled in
his bed blankets and set up in the corner of a bus. One healthy-looking
Belgian boy, on whom I was trying to pull a pair of British trousers,
seemed to have nothing at all the matter with him, until it presently
appeared that he was speechless and paralyzed in both left arm and left
leg. And while we were working, an English soldier, shot through the
jaw and throat, sat on the edge of his bed, shaking with a hideous,
rattling cough.
The hospital was in a handsome stone building, in ordinary times a club,
perhaps, or a school; a wide, stone stairway led up the centre, and
above it was a glass skylight. This central well would have been a
charming place for a shell to drop into, and one did drop not more than
fifty feet or so away, in or close to the rear court. A few yards down
the avenue another shell hit a cornice and sent a ton or so of masonry
crashing down on the sidewalk. Under conditions like these the nurses
kept running up and down that staircase during the endless hour or two
in which the wounded were being dressed and carried on stretchers to the
street. They stood by the buses making their men comfortable, and when
the first buses were filled they sat in the open street on top of them,
patiently waiting, as calm and smiling as circus queens on their gilt
chariots. The behavior of the men in the trenches was cool enough, but
they at least were fighting men and but taking the chance of war. These
were civilian volunteers, they had not even trenches to shelter them,
and it took a rather unforeseen and difficult sort of courage to leave
that fairly safe masonry building and sit smiling and helpful on top of
a motor-bus during a wait of half an hour or so, any second of which
might be one's last. There was an American nurse there, a tall, radiant
girl, whom they called, and rightly, "Morning Glory," who had been
introduced to me the day before because we both belonged to that curious
foreign race of Americans. What her name was I haven't the least idea,
and if we were to meet to-morrow, doubtless we should have to be
carefully presented over again, but I remember calling out to her,
"Good-by, American girl!" as we passed in the hall during the last
minute or two, and she said good-by, and suddenly reached out and put
her hand on my shoulder and added, "Good luck!" or "God bless you!" or
something like that. And these seemed at the moment quite the usual
things to do and say. The doctor in charge and the general's wife
apologized for running away, as they called it, and the last I saw of
the latter was as she waved back to me from the top of a bus, with just
that look of concern over the desperate ride they were beginning which a
slightly preoccupied hostess casts over a dinner-table about which are
seated a number of oddly assorted guests.
The strange procession got away safely at last, and safely, too, so I
was told later, across the river; but where they finally spent the night
I never heard. I hurried down the street and into the Rue Nerviens. It
must have been about four o'clock by that time. The bright October
morning had changed to a chill and dismal afternoon, and up the western
sky in the direction of the river a vast curtain of greasy, black smoke
was rolling. The petrol-tanks along the Scheldt had been set afire. It
looked at the moment as if the whole city might be going, but there was
no time then to think of possibilities, and I slipped down the lee side
of the street to the door with the Red Cross flag. The front of the
hospital was shut tight. It took several pulls at the bell to bring any
one, and inside I found a Belgian family who had left their own house
for the thicker ceilings of the hospital, and the nuns back in the wards
with their nervous men. Their servants had left that morning, the three
or four sisters in charge had had to do all the cooking and housework as
well as look after their patients, and now they were keeping calm and
smiling, to subdue as best they could the fears of the Belgian wounded,
who were ready to jump out of bed, whatever their condition, rather than
fall into the hands of the enemy. Each had no doubt that if he were not
murdered outright he would be taken to Germany and forced to fight in
the east against the Russians. Several, who knew very well what was
going on outside, had been found by the nurses that morning out of bed
and all ready to take to the street.
Lest they should hear that their comrades in the Boulevard Leopold had
been moved, the lay sister--the English lady--and I withdrew to the
operating-room, closed the door, and in that curious retreat talked over
the situation. No orders had come to leave; in fact, they had been told
to stay. They did have a man now in the shape of the Belgian gentleman,
and from the same source an able-bodied servant, but how long these
would stay, where food was to be found in that desolate city, when the
bombardment would cease, and what the Germans would do with them--well,
it was not a pleasant situation for a handful of women. But it was not
of themselves she was thinking, but of their wounded and of Belgium, and
of what both had suffered already and of what might yet be in store. It
was of that this frail little sister talked that hopeless afternoon,
while the smoke in the west spread farther up the sky, and she would now
and then pause in the middle of a syllable while a shell sang overhead,
then take it up again.
Meanwhile the light was going, and before it became quite dark and my
hotel deserted, perhaps, as the rest of Antwerp, it seemed best to be
getting across town. I could not believe that the Germans could treat
such a place and people with anything but consideration and told the
little nurse so. She came to the edge of the glass-covered court,
laughingly saying I had best run across it, and wondering where we, who
had met twice now under such curious circumstances, would meet again.
Then she turned back to the ward--to wait with that roomful of more or
less panicky men for the tramp of German soldiers and the knock on the
door which meant that they were prisoners.
Hurrying across town, I passed, not far from the Hotel St. Antoine, a
blazing four-story building. The cathedral was not touched, and indeed,
in spite of the noise and terror, the material damage was comparatively
slight. Soldiers were clearing the quay and setting a guard directly in
front of our hotel--one of the few places in Antwerp that night where
one could get so much as a crust of bread--and behind drawn curtains we
made what cheer we could. There were two American photographers and a
correspondent who had spent the night before in the cellar of a house,
the upper story of which had been wrecked by a shell; a British
intelligence officer, with the most bewildering way of hopping back and
forth between a brown civilian suit and a spick-and-span new uniform;
and several Belgian families hoping to get a boat down-stream in the
morning.
We sat round the great fire in the hall, above which the architect,
building for happier times, had had the bad grace to place a skylight,
and discussed the time and means of getting away. The intelligence
officer, not wishing to be made a prisoner, was for getting a boat of
some sort at the first crack of dawn, and the photographers, who had had
the roof blown off over their heads, heartily agreed with him. I did
not like to leave without at least a glimpse of those spiked helmets nor
to desert my friends in the Rue Nerviens, and yet there was the
likelihood, if one remained, of being marooned indefinitely in the midst
of the conquering army.
Meanwhile the flight of shells continued, a dozen or more fires could be
seen from the upper windows of the hotel, and billows of red flame from
the burning petrol-tanks rolled up the southern sky. It had been what
might be called a rather full day, and the wail of approaching
projectiles began to get on one's nerves. One started at the slamming
of a door, took every dull thump for a distant explosion; and when we
finally turned in I carried the mattress from my room, which faced the
south, over to the other side of the building, and laid it on the floor
beside another man's bed. Before a shell could reach me it would have
to traverse at least three partitions and possibly him as well.
After midnight the bombardment quieted, but shells continued to visit us
from time to time all night. All night the Belgians were retreating
across the pontoon bridge, and once--it must have been about two or
three o'clock--I heard a sound which meant that all was over. It was
the crisp tramp--different from the Belgian shuffle--of British
soldiers, and up from the street came an English voice, "Best foot
forward, boys!" and a little farther on: "Look alive, men; they've just
picked up our range!"
I went to the window and watched them tramp by--the same men we had seen
that morning. The petrol fire was still flaming across the south, a
steamer of some sort was burning at her wharf beside the bridge--
Napoleon's veterans retreating from Moscow could scarcely have left
behind a more complete picture of war than did those young recruits.
Morning came dragging up out of that dreadful night, smoky, damp, and
chill. It was almost a London fog that lay over the abandoned town. I
had just packed up and was walking through one of the upper halls when
there was a crash that shook the whole building, the sound of falling
glass, and out in the river a geyser of water shot up, timbers and
boards flew from the bridge, and there were dozens of smaller splashes
as if from a shower of shot. I thought that the hotel was hit at last
and that the Germans, having let civilians escape over the bridge, were
turning everything loose, determined to make an end of the business. It
was, as a matter of fact, the Belgians blowing up the bridge to cover
their retreat. In any case it seemed useless to stay longer, and within
an hour, on a tug jammed with the last refugees, we were starting
down-stream.
Behind us, up the river, a vast curtain of lead-colored smoke from the
petrol-tanks had climbed up the sky and spread out mushroomwise, as
smoke and ashes sometimes spread out from a volcano. This smoke,
merging with the fog and the smoke from the Antwerp fires, seemed to
cover the whole sky. And under that sullen mantle the dark flames of
the petrol still glowed; to the right, as we looked back, was the
blazing skeleton of the ship, and on the left Antwerp itself, the rich,
old, beautiful, comfortable city, all but hidden, and now and then
sending forth the boom of an exploding shell like a groan.
A large empty German steamer, the Gneisenau, marooned here since the
war, came swinging slowly out into the river, pushed by two or three
nervous little tugs--to be sunk there, apparently, in midstream. From
the pontoon bridge, which stubbornly refused to yield, came explosion
after explosion, and up and down the river fires sprang up, and there
were other explosions, as the crushed Belgians, in a sort of rage of
devastation, became their own destroyers.
By following the adventures of one individual I have endeavored to
suggest what the bombardment of a modern city was like--what you might
expect if an invading army came to-morrow to New York or Chicago or San
Francisco. I have only coasted along the edges of Belgium's tragedy,
and the rest of the story, of which we were a part for the next two
days--the flight of those hundreds of thousands of homeless people--is
something that can scarcely be told--you must follow it out in
imagination into its countless uprooted, disorganized lives. You must
imagine old people struggling along over miles and miles of country
roads; young girls, under burdens a man might not care to bear, tramping
until they had to carry their shoes in their hands and go barefoot to
rest their unaccustomed feet. You must imagine the pathetic efforts of
hundreds of people to keep clean by washing in wayside streams or
ditches; imagine babies going without milk because there was no milk to
be had; families shivering in damp hedgerows or against haystacks where
darkness overtook them; and you must imagine this not on one road, but
on every road, for mile after mile over a whole countryside. What was to
become of these people when their little supply of food was exhausted?
Where could they go? Even if back to their homes, it would be but to
lift their hats to their conquerors, never knowing but that the next
week or month would sweep the tide of war back over them again.
Never in modern times, not in our generation at least, had Europe seen
anything like that flight--nothing so strange, so overwhelming, so
pitiful. And when I say pitiful, you must not think of hysterical women,
desperate, trampling men, tears and screams. In all those miles one saw
neither complaining nor protestation--at times one might almost have
thought it some vast, eccentric picnic. No, it was their orderliness,
their thrift and kindness, their unmistakable usefulness, which made the
waste and irony of it all so colossal and hideous. Each family had its
big, round loaves of bread and its pile of hay for the horses, the bags
of pears and potatoes; the children had their little dolls, and you
would see some tired mother with her big bundle under one arm and some
fluffy little puppy in the other. You could not associate them with
forty-centimetre shells or burned churches and libraries or anything but
quiet homes and peaceable, helpful lives. You could not be swept along
by that endless stream of exiles and retain at the end of the day any
particular enthusiasm for the red glory of war. And when we crossed the
Dutch border that afternoon and came on a village street full of Belgian
soldiers cut off and forced to cross the line, to be interned here,
presumably until the war was over, one could not mourn very deeply their
lost chances of martial glory as they unslung their rifles and turned
them over to the good-natured Dutch guard. They had held back that
avalanche long enough, these Belgians, and one felt as one would to see
lost children get home again or some one dragged from under the wheels.
Chapter V
Paris Again--And Bordeaux: Journal of a Flight from a London Fogs
These notes began in a London fog and ended in the south of France. I
had hoped, on reaching Calais, to work in toward the fighting along the
Yser, but, finding it impossible, decided to turn about and travel away
from the front instead of toward it--down to see Bordeaux while it was
still the temporary capital, and to see what life might be like in the
French provincial towns in war time.
It was not, so the young woman at the hotel desk in London said, what
you would call a fog, because she could still see the porter at the
street-door--yet day after day the same rain, smoky mist, and unbroken
gloom.
One breakfasted and tramped the streets by lamplight, as if there were
no such thing as sun---recalled vaguely a world in which it used to be--
woods with the leaves turning, New York on a bright autumn morning,
enchanted tropical dawns.
Through this viscous envelope--a sort of fungi thrown off by it--
newspapers kept appearing--slaughter and more slaughter, hatred, the
hunt for spies, more hysterical and shrill. One looked for fairness
almost as for the sun, and, merely by blackguarding long enough men who
could not answer back and, after all, were flinging their lives away
bravely over there in France, one ended by giving them the very
qualities they were denied.
They faded out as one picture on a stereopticon screen fades into
another--even as one read "Huns" for the thousandth time the Huns turned
into kindly burghers smoking pipes and singing songs. In the same way
the England of tradition--Shakespeare, Dickens, Meredith, jolly old
rumbling London, rides 'cross country, rows on the river--faded into
this nightmare of hate and smoky lamplight. The psychology was very
simple, but too much, it seems, for censors and even editors. And,
unfortunately, at a time like this not the light-hearted, sportsmanlike
fighting men at the front, nor sober people left behind in homes, but
newspapers are likely to be an outsider's most constant companions.
A sort of spiritual asphyxiation overtook one at last, in which the mere
stony Briticism of the London hotel seemed to have a part. If you awoke
again into that taste of soft-coal smoke, went down to another of those
staggering lamp-lit breakfasts. But why staggering? "Can you not take
coffee and rolls in London as well as in some Paris cafe"? It would seem
so, yet it cannot be done. The mere sight and sound--or lack of sound--
of that warm, softly carpeted breakfast-room, moving like some gloomy,
inevitable mechanism as it has moved for countless years, attacks the
already weakened will like an opiate. At the first bewildering '"Q?"
from that steely-fronted maid the ritual overpowers you and you bow
before porridge, kippers, bacon and eggs, stewed fruit, marmalade,
toast, more toast, more marmalade, as helpless as the rabbit before the
proverbial boa--except that in this case the rabbit swallows its own
asphyxiator.