The Log of a Noncombatant - Horace Green
by Horace Green
Staff Correspondent of the New York Evening Post
Special Correspondent of the Boston Journal
1915
Preface
In the following pages the ego is thickly spread. Their publication is
the result of persuasion from many sources that, before returning to
the war zone, I should put into connected form my personal
experiences as correspondent during the first year of the War of
Nations. A few of these adventures were mentioned in news letters
from the Continent, where I limited myself so far as possible to
descriptions of armies at war and peoples in time of stress; but the
greater part of them were merely jotted down from time to time for my
own benefit in "The Log of a Noncombatant."
Contents
I. From Broadway To Ghent
II. The Second Bombardment Of Termonde
III. Captive
IV. A Clog Dance On The Scheldt
V. The Bombardment Of Antwerp
VI. The Surrender Of Antwerp
VII. Spying On Spies
VIII. The Sorrow Of The People
Appendix: Atrocities
The Log Of A Noncombatant
Chapter I
From Broadway To Ghent
When the war broke out in August, 1914, I was at work in the City
Room of the "New York Evening Post." One morning, during the first
week of activities, the copy boy handed me a telegram which was
signed "Luther, Boston," and contained the rather cryptic message:
--"How about this fight?"
It was some moments before I could recall the time, more than two
years before, when I had last seen the writer, Willard B. Luther,
Boston lawyer, devotee of some, and critic of many kinds of sport.
We had been sitting on that previous occasion--a crowd of college
fellows, including Luther and myself--in a certain room in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from the University in that
neighborhood where Luther had attended the Law School and the
rest of us, on our respective graduation days, had received valuable
pieces of parchment with the presidential signature attached. The
conversation had already run through the question of Votes for
Women, progressive politics, and prize-fights, and before the card
game began it had settled on the last-named, chiefly because of my
own vainglorious description of adventures at Reno, Nevada, at the
time of the Jeffries-Johnson battle for the heavyweight championship
of the world. I remember telling with some gusto of my first
newspaper interview--one with "Bob" Fitzsimmons, then the Old
Man of the ring, and "Gentleman" Jim Corbett, who was Jeffries'
trainer at Reno.
"I had always wanted to see that performance," said Luther, "and
would have gone in a flash if I could have got any one to make the
trip with me. But remember this fact: whenever the next big fight is
held I'm going with you." Later in the evening we shook hands on the
proposition.
At the time that Luther's telegram came I was planning to start for the
Continent as Staff Correspondent of the "New York Evening Post"
and Special Correspondent of the "Boston Journal." Remembering
that Cambridge agreement I immediately wired:--
"Yes. This fight will do."
So that is how it came to pass that Luther and myself boarded the
Campania together, landed in Liverpool, cast about for ways and
means of getting into the scrimmage, and for the first month and a
half of my four months of wandering on the Continent were brother
conspirators, until the duties of partnership called my friend home and
left me without a companion in adventure.
In London we absorbed to some extent a heavy British fog and to a
greater extent British public opinion. We marveled at the exterior calm
of a nation plunged in the greatest of wars, yet fighting, so it seemed
at the time, with its top hat on and its smile still undisturbed. Across
the English Channel three days later the Dutch steam packet
Princess Juliana carried us safely through mine fields and between
lanes of British torpedo boats and torpedo boat destroyers. We
landed on the Continent at Flushing. Thence we headed for The
Hague, Holland, the neutral gateway of northern Europe, where we
found the American Minister, Dr. Henry van Dyke, and his first
secretary, Marshall Langhorne, shouldering the work of the American
Legation in its chameleonesque capacity as bank, post-office,
detective bureau, bureau of information, charity organization, and one
might even say temporary home for the stranded travelers of every
rank and nation.
Antwerp, the temporary capital of Belgium, was at this time invested,
but not yet besieged, by the German army. On the south the city was
already cut off by several regiments of the Ninth and Tenth German
Army Corps under General von Boehn. The River Scheldt and the
Dutch border formed a wall on the north and west. It was to Antwerp,
therefore, that we determined to go. After listening to the usual flood
of warnings against entering the fighting zone, and drinking our fill of
stories of atrocity and hate which every refugee brought across the
border into Holland, we took a couple of reefs in our baggage, and,
hoisting our knapsacks, set our course for the temporary Belgian
capital. By rail we traveled south across the level fields and lush
green meadows of Holland, over bridges ready to be dynamited in
case of invasion, and through training camps of the 450,000 Dutch
soldiers then mobilized along the border. At a little town called
Eschen the train stopped because the Belgians had torn up the
tracks.
Seated on the cross-piece of a joggling two-wheeled ox cart, moving
at the rate of not more than four miles an hour, with a dumb
specimen for a driver, and a volume of Baedeker for interpreter and
guide, we got our first glimpse of the hideous thing called war.
Judging from the looks of the country and the burning villages, we
were on the heels of a devastating army. For three, four, and five
miles on either side of the road beautiful trees lay flat upon the
ground. It was not until we saw groups of Belgian soldiers tearing
down their own walls and hedges and applying match and gasolene
to those which still stood, that we realized that this was a case of
self-inflicted destruction. Farmhouses, stores, churches, old Belgian
mansions, and windmills were either in flames or smouldering ruins.
Where burning had not been sufficient, powder and dynamite had
been applied to destroy landmarks which for centuries had been the
country's pride. As far as the eye could reach the countryside was
flattened to a desert. It reminded me of the Salem fire, through which,
while the piles of debris were still smoking, I had been taken in the
"Boston Journal's" car. But instead of a single town, here for twenty
miles along lay stretched a smouldering waste. The devastation was
for the defensive purpose of giving an unobstructed view to the
cannon of Antwerp's outer fortifications, which on that side covered
one sector of the circle swept by her enormous guns. I should
hesitate to mention the millions of dollars of self-inflicted damage to
Antwerp's suburbs alone. Luther and I did not at the time have the
military password. So that first day was a specimen in the matter of
hold-ups and arrests. From the time that we started across the level
plains which approach the city until we got through the double sector
of forts, we were stopped, questioned, and searched by thirteen
different groups of soldiers. There were marry occasions where, after
one pair of stupid sentries had put us through the grill, a second pair,
watching from a distance of thirty yards or so, promptly repeated the
entire performance. As these fellows spoke only Flemish dialect, our
conversations were not particularly fluent. Frequently there gathered
around us a crowd of gaping peasants, and when the word
"Americaine" came out, there were "Oh's" and "Ah" of astonishment,
or as often, when our explanations were not believed, sibilant hisses
that shaped themselves into the menacing word "Spion." We had
been led to believe that sooner or later a wool-witted sentry would
shoot first and investigate later; but so far they had simply crossed
bayonets, or with their hands up and palms outward had signaled us
to halt.
Our experience that day, as later events proved, was not an
extraordinary occurrence for war-time, especially for those
endeavoring to gain entrance to an invested city. But as our first and
maiden adventure it somewhat shook our nerve. When the grilling
was over we felt about as guilty as any criminal who has been put
through the third degree as practiced in the old police department
days, and I had several times to look over my passport and letters of
credentials to persuade myself that I was really not a spy. Eventually
we were permitted to pass the gates of the Gare du Nord. Once
inside the city gates, we made our way into the Place Verte and went
directly to the Hotel St. Antoine, whose proprietor sent our names to
police headquarters. The St. Antoine was at that time the residence
of the diplomatic corps and the Belgian ministers of state, and was
fifty yards from the Royal Palace and across the street from
headquarters of the Belgian General Staff.
There is no need of describing in detail Antwerp at the time of my first
visit. One or two pictures will suffice to give a rough idea of its
existence up to the time of the bombardment. Try to imagine, for
example, going about your business in New York or Boston or Los
Angeles (of course Antwerp is smaller than these) when your country,
a territory perhaps the size of the New England States, was already
two thirds overrun, burnt, smashed, and conquered by a hostile
nation, whose forces were now within nineteen miles of the gates of
the capital. Imagine that nation's warriors in the act of crushing your
tiny army, whose remnants were already exhausted and on the verge
of despair. Then picture a quaint, sleepy city, with shadowy alleys and
twisting, gabled streets, in which every other store and house was
decorated with King Albert's picture or draped in the red, black, and
yellow banner of the country-a city whose atmosphere was charged
with fear and suspicion and excitement. Sometimes a crowd of a
thousand or two drew one toward the Central Station where
bedraggled refugee families, just arrived from Liege, Termonde,
Aerschot, and Malines, stood on street corner or wagon top and
thrilled the crowd with tales of atrocities and the story of their flight
from their burning homes to the south. Now and then the crowd
parted before the clanging bell of a Red Cross ambulance rushing its
load of bleeding bodies to the hospitals along the Place de Meir.
Nurses, male or female, clung to the ambulance steps. The first one I
saw made a vivid impression on me. She was an English-looking girl
in a new khaki skirt, supporting with one hand what was left of a
blood-dripping head,--the eyes and nose were shot away,--while
out of the other hand she ate with apparent relish a thick rye-bread
sandwich. Occasionally she waved remnants of the sandwich at the
gaping crowd. It struck me as a peculiarly unnecessary exhibition of
her callous fitness for the job of nurse.
During the daytime the ordinary things of life went on, for the good
burghers and shopkeepers went about their business as usual, and,
generally speaking, fought against fear as bravely as the soldiers in
the trenches stood up against the German howitzers. It was only after
dark (when martial law permitted no lights of any kind) that the city
seemed to shiver and suck in its breath; doors were barricaded, iron
shutters came down, and behind them the people talked in whispers.
Military autos, fresh from the firing line, groaned and sputtered at the
doorstep of the St. Antoine; soldiers with pocket lanterns stamped
about the streets. From sheer nervousness after a day of
confinement some citizens, in spite of warnings, groped about the
more important avenues at night. Picture yourself on Broadway or
Tremont Street, with not a light on the street gleaming from a window,
and walking up and down with one hand on your wallet and the other
in the pocket where your Colt automatic ought to be.
Such, very briefly, was the condition of Antwerp at the time when we
arrived. That very evening word came in that the Belgian forces,
which had been engaged with the enemy for five consecutive days of
severe fighting, had retired behind the southern ramparts of the city.
During the night the stream of incoming wounded confirmed the news
of battle. In the moonlight, and later in the gray dawn, I watched the
long lines of Belgian hounds, pulling their rapid-fire guns out toward
the trenches. Many times later I was destined to see them. They
made a picturesque and stimulating sight--those faithful dogs of war
--fettered and harnessed, their tongues hanging out as they lay
patiently beneath the gun trucks awaiting the order to go into action,
or, when the word had been given, trotted along the dusty roads,
each pair tugging to the battle front a lean, gray engine of destruction.
For our purpose the best approach to Brussels was by way of Ghent.
Luther pushed on ahead while I was finishing a story. The following
morning, shouldering my knapsack, which now contained an extra
supply of army rations, and carefully stuffing my different sets of
credentials in different pockets (one for Belgian, one for German, and
one for English consumption), I crossed the River Scheldt and made
a slow and tortuous railway journey to Ghent.
Ghent lies thirty miles west of Antwerp. The trip took seven hours.
During the course of it I passed north of the Belgian lines and through
the western sector of forts, that is to say, Fort St. Nicholas, Fort
Haesdonck, and Fort Tete de Flandre. It was the same road along
which Winston Churchill's English marines and the remnant of the
Belgian forces retreated after the fall of Antwerp.
Ghent resounded with praises of its American Vice-Consul, Julius
Van Hee, a hair-trigger politician and a live wire if there ever was one.
Van Hee, with his intimate knowledge of four languages and the
Yankee knack of being on the right spot at the right time, twice saved
blood-shed in the streets of Ghent and in one instance probably
prevented a repetition of the scenes at Louvain.
In Ghent I again found Luther, with a fine young rumor in his pocket
--a rumor which turned out to be correct--that six German spies were
to be executed next morning at sunrise. The place mentioned was
behind the museum in a public park.
"I suppose we'll take it in," said Luther.
"I don't know about that," I answered; adding that, although
executions might be part of the day's work for a war correspondent, I
drew the line at seeing my first murder before breakfast. The tip was
correct enough except that it mentioned the wrong park.
The following noon the Military Governor, according to regulations,
caused to be posted circulars announcing that the men had been put
to death; but at all events I am glad to say that at that early date I did
not have the experience of watching six blindfolded wretches backed
up against a wall, of seeing the officer drop his arm as a signal, and
of hearing the fatal crack of a dozen muskets, as the bodies
collapsed like a telescope, crumpled inward with the chin upon the
chest, and fell forward to the earth.
Chapter II
The Second Bombardment Of Termonde
September 15th was our day with Henry Verhagen, the tall gray
alderman of the town that was once Termonde.
During all the time I was with him Verhagen did not speak a bitter
word. On the contrary, he was calm--particularly calm as he stood
beside the mound where the Belgian soldiers were buried in the
center of the ruined town, pointed to the pile of bricks where he had
lived, and told us how in two nights he had lost 340,000 francs, his
son, his factory, and his home. It was from him, from the
burgomaster's wife, and from a priest that we learned the story of the
city that had ceased to be.
It was the night before that I had wandered into Ghent alone, without
even the excitement of getting arrested. Luther, who became restive
early the next morning while I was jotting notes in the log-book, went
off in search of adventure. Because of the influence exerted by Vice-
Consul Van Hee an arrangement was very soon made whereby a Belgian
Government car and chauffeur were placed at our disposal. We had no
laissez-passer for the firing line; but we were accompanied by the
United States Consul and not governed by any stipulation as to our
destination. In our Belgian car, decorated with all the American flags
we could find, and "American Consular Service" pasted in huge letters on
the windshield and side flaps, we raced along the Boulevard de
l'lndustrie, swung into the southern suburbs, and, once outside the city
limits, we opened up the exhaust and threw down the throttle as Van Hee
shouted out the order:--"To Termonde!"
Termonde was at that time the scene of determined fighting between
units of the ninth German Corps and the Belgian defenders. Situated
as it is, twenty-one miles southeast of Ghent, it marks the southwest
corner of a square formed by Louvain and Termonde on the south,
by Ghent and Antwerp on the north. It controlled the bridge over the
River Scheldt and with it an important approach to Antwerp, the
capital at that time of Belgium. The heavy German siege guns,
capable of demolishing a first-class fort at a range of several miles,
could not have crossed the river so easily at any other point. For this
reason the Germans particularly wanted Termonde--an open bridge
to Antwerp was always worth the taking. The town had already at that
time been captured and recaptured; wounded and refugees were
swarming into Ghent full of battle stories and tales of terrible
atrocities. So it was Termonde that we vowed we would see.
We first saw Verhagen trudging in the same direction as ourselves on
the level, dusty road two miles southwest of Ghent. As we
approached a cross-road marked by a tavern, a couple of
direction-posts, and nondescript stucco buildings, we made out two
Belgian sentries, with their rifles lifted overhead and indulging in
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 there single houses, even houses built of
boards, were spared at the commander's word. The convent was
burnt and pillaged, stones and mortar littered the street in front of the
Hotel de Ville, and upon the sidewalk lay the famous bells which
came crashing to the street below when shells burst in the belfry.
From cellar to garret nearly every remaining house was
systematically drenched with naphtha and the torch applied, and
when all was over hundreds of gallons were tossed into the River
Scheldt. Over a small group of houses in the poorer section of the
city, where the prostitutes were quartered, grim Prussian humor, or
perhaps a sense of value received, had prompted the conquerors to
write in great white chalk marks in German script, "Gute Leute. Nicht
brennen!" (Good people. Do not burn!)
For an hour we walked through the silence of ashes and stone,
stumbling over timber and debris, tangled and twisted wire, a fallen
statue, broken bells or the cross-piece of a spire; we made our way
through piles of beds, chairs, singed mattresses, and stepped over
the carcass of a horse with its belly bloated and flies feasting on its
glassy eyes. We entered an apothecary shop where the clock still
ticked upon the counter. Thinking there could be no reason of war to
call for the destruction of the orphan asylum, we entered its portals to
investigate. Before us lay burnt beds and littered glass. We searched
what ten days before had been a convent, and crawled over heaps of
logs and brick into narrow alleys that reminded one of Naples or
Pompeii--alleys where the walls stood so close as to hide the light
of sun but not the odor of charred vats and sewage and smouldering,
smelling things, long dead. Not far from there the way widened into
the light, and before us, breaking the rays of sunset, stood the cross
above a heap of cobblestones.
"They are buried here," said Verhagen, "and here too is my house."
Another alderman, a friend of Verhagen, who had been allowed to remain
in Termonde most of the four days that the Germans stayed, had the story
detailed in his little pocket diary. On Thursday, September 3, he said,
he was just leaving his rope and twine factory when he heard the sounds
of musketry to the south. A small force of Belgian outposts were
completely surprised by a part of the Ninth German Army Corps under
General von Boehn. They were completely outclassed. Before retreating,
however, they let the enemy have a couple of volleys. In the return
fire they lost six of their men. They then retreated into the town and
across the bridge.