CHAPTER XXXV

THE CITY SURRENDERS

Antwerp has surrendered!

It is Friday morning. All hope is over. The Germans are coming in at half-past one.

"Well," Says Mr. Lucien Arthur Jones at last, at the end of a long discussion between him and Mr. Frank Fox and myself, "if you have really decided to stay, I'm going to give you this key! It belongs to the house of some wealthy Belgians who have fled to England. There is plenty of food and stores of all kind in the house. If need be, you might take shelter there!"

And he gave me the key and the address, and I,--luckily for myself,--I remembered it afterwards.

With a queer little choke in my throat, I stood on the hotel door-step, watching those two Englishmen on their bicycles whirling away down the Avenue de Commerce.

In a moment they were swallowed up from my sight in the black pall of cloud and smoke that hung above the city, dropping from the leaden skies like long black fringes, and hovering over the streets like thick funeral veils.

So they were gone!

The die was cast. I was alone now, all alone in the fated city.

At first, the thought was a little sickening.

But after a minute it gave me a certain amount of relief, as I realised that I could go ahead with my plans without causing anyone distress.

To feel that those two men had been worrying about my safety, and were worrying still, was a very wretched sensation. They had enough to think of on their own account! Somehow or other they had now to get to a telegraph wire and send their newspapers in England the story of Antwerp's fall, and the task before them was Herculean. The nearest wires were in Holland, and they had nothing but their bicycles.

Turning back into the big, dim, deserted restaurant, I went to look for the old patronne, whose black eyes dilated in her sad, old yellow face at the sight of me in my dark blue suit, and white veil floating from my little black hat.

"What, Madame! But they told me _les deux Anglais_ have departed. You have not gone with them?"

"Listen, Madame! I want you to help me. I am writing a book about the War, and to see the Germans come into Antwerp is something I ought not to miss. I want to stay here!"

"_Mais, c'est dangereux, Madame! Vous êtes Anglaise!_"

"Well, I'm going to change that; I'm going to be Belgian. I want you to let me pretend I'm a servant in your hotel. I'll put on a cap and apron, and I'll do anything you like; then I'll be able to see things for myself. It'll only be for a few hours. I'll get away this afternoon in the motor. But I must see the incoming of the Germans first!"

The old woman seemed too bewildered to protest, and afterwards I doubted if she had really understood me from the way she acted later on.

Just at that moment Henri drove up in the motor, and came to a standstill in front of the hotel.

The poor fellow looked more dead than alive. His pie-coloured face was hollow, his lips were dry, his eyes standing out of his head. He was so exhausted that he could scarcely step out of the car.

"I am sorry I am late," he groaned, "but it was impossible, impossible."

"You needn't worry about me, Henri," I whispered to him reassuringly. "I'm not going to try to get out of Antwerp for several hours. In fact, I am going to wait to see the Germans come in!"

Henri showed no surprise. There was no surprise left in him to show.

"Bon!" he said. "Because, to tell you the truth, Madame, I wouldn't go out of the city again just now. I couldn't do it. Getting to Holland, indeed," he went on, between gasps as he drank off one cup of coffee after another, "it's like trying to get through hell to get to Paradise ... I've been seven hours driving about four miles there and back. It was horrible, it ... was unbelievable ... the roads are blocked so thick that there are no roads left. A million people are out there, struggling, fighting, and trying to get onwards, lying down on the earth fainting, dying."

And he suddenly sat down upon a chair, and fell fast asleep.

The sharp crack, crack of rifle fire woke him about five minutes later, and we all rushed to the door to see what was happening.

Oh, nerve-racking sight!

Across the grey square, through the grey-black morning, dogs were rushing, their tongues out.

The gendarmes pursuing them were shooting them down to save them the worse horrors of starvation that might befall them if they were left alive in the deserted city at the mercy of the Germans.

Madame X, a sad, distinguished-looking woman, a refugee from Lierre, whose house had been shelled, and who was destined to play a strange part in my story later on, now came over to us, and implored Henri to take her old mother in his car round to the hospital.

"She is eighty-four, _ma pauvre mère_! We tried to take her to Holland, but it was impossible. But now that the bombardment has ceased and the worst is over, it seems wiser to remain. In the hospital the mère will be surely safe! As for us, my husband and I, truly, we have lost our all. There is nothing left to fear!"

I offered to accompany the old lady to the hospital, and presently we started off. Henri and I, and the old wrinkled Flemish woman, and the buxom young Flemish servant, Jeanette.

We drove along the Avenue de Commerce, down the Avenue de Kaiser, towards the hospital. The town was dead. Not a soul was to be seen. The Marché aux Souliers was all ablaze; I saw the Taverne Royale lying on the ground. Next to it was the Hotel de l'Europe, bomb-shattered and terrific in its ruins. I thought of Mr. Jeffries of the _Daily Mail_ and shivered; that had been his hotel. The air reeked with petroleum and smoke. At last we got to the hospital.

The door-step was covered with blood, and red, wet blood was in drops and patches along the entrance.

As I went in, an unforgettable sight met my eyes.

I found myself in a great, dim ward, with the yellow, lurid skies looking in through its enormous windows, and its beds full of wounded and dying soldiers; and just as I entered, a white-robed Sister of Mercy was bending over a bed, giving the last unction to a dying man. Some brave _petit Belge_, who had shed his life-blood for his city, alas, in vain!

All the ordinary nurses had gone.

The Sisters of Mercy alone remained.

And suddenly it came to me like a strain of heavenly music that death held no terrors for these women; life had no fears.

Softly they moved about in their white robes, their benign faces shining with the look of the Cross.

In that supreme moment, after the hell of shot and shell, after the thousands of wounded and dead, after the endless agonies of attack and repulse and attack and defeat and surrender, something quite unexpected was here emerging, the essence of the Eternal Feminine, the woman supreme in her sheer womanhood; and like a bright bird rising from the ashes, the spirit of it went fluttering about that appalling ward.

The trained and untrained hospital nurses, devoted as they were, and splendid and useful beyond all words, had perforce fled from the city, either to accompany their escaping hospitals, or beset by quite natural fears of the Huns' brutality to their kind.

But the Sisters of Mercy had no fears.

The Cross stood between them and anything that might come to them.

And that was written in their faces, their shining gentle faces....

Ah yes, the Priests and the half-forgotten Sisters of Mercy have indeed come back to their own in this greatest of all Wars!

Moving between the long lines of soldiers' beds I paused at the side of a little bomb-broken Belgian boy whose dark eyes opened suddenly to meet mine.

I think he must have been wandering, poor little child, and had come back with a start to life.

And seeing a face at his bedside he thought, perhaps, that I was German.

In a hoarse voice he gasped out, raising himself in terror:

"_Je suis civil!_"

Poor child, poor child!

The fright in his voice was heart-breaking. It said that if the "_Alboches_" took him for a _soldat_, they would shoot him, or carry him away into Germany....

I bent and kissed him.

"_Je suis civil!_"

He was not more than six years old.

* * * * *

In another room of the hospital I found about forty children, little children varying from six months to five years. Some gentle nuns were playing with them.

"Les pauvres petites!" said one of the sisters compassionately. "They've all been lost, or left behind; there's no one to claim them, so we have brought them here to look after them."

And the baby gurgled and laughed, and gave a sudden leap in the sweet nun's arms.

Out of the hospital again, over the blood-stained doorstep, and back into the car.

There were a few devoted doctors and priests standing about in silence in the flower-wreathed passage entrance to the hospital. They were waiting for The End, waiting for the Germans to come in.

I can see them still, standing there in their white coats, or long black cassocks, staring down the passage.

A great hush hung over everything, and through the hush we slid into the awful streets again, with the houses lying on the ground.

Before we had gone far, we heard shouts, and turning my head I discovered some wounded soldiers, limping along a side-road, who were begging us to give them a lift towards the boat.

We filled the car so full that we all had to stand up, except those who could not stand.

Bandaged heads and faces were all around me, while bandaged soldiers rode on the foot-board, clinging to whatever they could get hold of, and then we moved towards the quay. It was heart-breaking to have to deny the scores of limping, broken men who shouted to us to stop, but as soon as we had deposited one load we went back and picked up others and ran them back to the quay, and that we did time after time. A few of the men were our own Tommies, but most were Belgians. Backwards and forwards we rushed, backwards and forwards, and now that dear Henri's eyes were shining, his sallow, pie-coloured face was lit up, he no longer looked tired and dull and heavy, he was on fire with excitement. And the car raced like mad backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, venturing right out towards the forts and back again to the quay, until at last reaction set in with Henri and he was obliged to take the car back to the hotel, where he fell in a crumpled heap in a corner of the restaurant.

As we came in the patronne handed me a note.

"While you were out," she said, looking at me sorrowfully, "M. Fox and M. Jones returned on their bicycles to look for you."

Then I read Mr. Fox's kind message.

"We have managed to secure passages on a special military boat for Flushing that leaves at half-past eleven and of course we have got one for you. We have come back for you, but you are not here. Your car has arrived, so you will be all right, I hope. You have seen the bombardment through, bravo!"

I was glad they had got away. But for myself some absolutely irresistible force held me to Antwerp, and I now slipped quietly out of the hotel and started off on a solitary walk.