Chapter 1

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Fighting In Flanders

By E. Alexander Powell

Special Correspondent Of The New York World With The Belgian Forces In The Field

Author of "The Last Frontier" "Gentlemen Ravers," "The End of the Trail," "The Road to Glory," etc.

With Illustrations From Photographs By Mr. Donald Thompson

To My Friends The Belgians

"I have eaten your bread and salt; I have drunk your water and wine; The deaths you died I have sat beside And the lives that you led were mine."

RUDYARD KIPLING.

Contents

Foreword

I. The War Correspondents

II. The City Of Gloom

III. The Death In The Air

IV. Under The German Eagle

V. With The Spiked Helmets

VI. On The Belgian Battle-Line

VII. The Coming Of The British

VIII. The Fall Of Antwerp

Appendix

Foreword

Nothing is more unwise, on general principles, than to attempt to write about a war before that war is finished and before history has given it the justice of perspective. The campaign which began with the flight of the Belgian Government from Brussels and which culminated in the fall of Antwerp formed, however, a separate and distinct phase of the Greatest of Wars, and I feel that I should write of that campaign while its events are still sharp and clear in my memory and before the impressions it produced have begun to fade. I hope that those in search of a detailed or technical account of the campaign in Flanders will not read this book, because they are certain to be disappointed. It contains nothing about strategy or tactics and few military lessons can be drawn from it. It is merely the story, in simple words, of what I, a professional onlooker, who was accorded rather exceptional facilities for observation, saw in Belgium during that nation's hour of trial.

An American, I went to Belgium at the beginning of the war with an open mind. I had few, if any, prejudices. I knew the English, the French, the Belgians, the Germans equally well. I had friends in all four countries and many happy recollections of days I had spent in each. When I left Antwerp after the German occupation I was as pro-Belgian as though I had been born under the red-black-and-yellow banner. I had seen a country, one of the loveliest and most peaceable in Europe, invaded by a ruthless and brutal soldiery; I had seen its towns and cities blackened by fire and broken by shell; I had seen its churches and its historic monuments destroyed; I had seen its highways crowded with hunted, homeless fugitives; I had seen its fertile fields strewn with the corpses of what had once been the manhood of the nation; I had seen its women left husbandless and its children left fatherless; I had seen what was once a Garden of the Lord turned into a land of desolation; and I had seen its people--a people whom I, like the rest of the world, had always thought of as pleasure-loving, inefficient, easy-going--I had seen this people, I say, aroused, resourceful, unafraid, and fighting, fighting, fighting. Do you wonder that they captured my imagination, that they won my admiration? I am pro-Belgian; I admit it frankly. I should be ashamed to be anything else.

E. Alexander Powell

London, November 1, 1914.

I. The War Correspondents

War correspondents regard war very much as a doctor regards sickness. I don't suppose that a doctor is actually glad that people are sick, but so long as sickness exists in the world he feels that he might as well get the benefit of it. It is the same with war correspondents. They do not wish anyone to be killed on their account, but so long as men are going to be killed anyway, they want to be on hand to witness the killing and, through the newspapers, to tell the world about it. The moment that the war broke out, therefore, a veritable army of British and American correspondents descended upon the Continent. Some of them were men of experience and discretion who had seen many wars and had a right to wear on their jackets more campaign ribbons than most generals. These men took the war seriously. They were there to get the news and, at no matter what expenditure of effort and money, to get that news to the end of a telegraph-wire so that the people in England and America might read it over their coffee-cups the next morning. These men had unlimited funds at their disposal; they had the united influence of thousands of newspapers and of millions of newspaper-readers solidly behind them; and they carried in their pockets letters of introduction from editors and ex-presidents and ambassadors and prime ministers.

Then there was an army corps of special writers, many of them with well-known names, sent out by various newspapers and magazines to write "mail stuff," as dispatches which are sent by mail instead of telegraph are termed, and "human interest" stories. Their qualifications for reporting the greatest war in history consisted, for the most part, in having successfully "covered" labour troubles and murder trials and coronations and presidential conventions, and, in a few cases, Central American revolutions. Most of the stories which they sent home were written in comfortable hotel rooms in London or Paris or Rotterdam or Ostend. One of these correspondents, however, was not content with a hotel window viewpoint. He wanted to see some German soldiers--preferably Uhlans. So he obtained a letter of introduction to some people living in the neighbourhood of Courtrai, on the Franco-Belgian frontier. He made his way there with considerable difficulty and received a cordial welcome. The very first night that he was there a squadron of Uhlans galloped into the town, there was a slight skirmish, and they galloped out again. The correspondent, who was a sound sleeper, did not wake up until it was all over. Then he learned that the Uhlans had ridden under his very window.

Crossing on the same steamer with me from New York was a well-known novelist who in his spare time edits a Chicago newspaper. He was provided with a sheaf of introductions from exalted personages and a bag containing a thousand pounds in gold coin. It was so heavy that he had brought a man along to help him carry it, and at night they took turns in sitting up and guarding it. He confided to me that he had spent most of his life in trying to see wars, but though on four occasions he had travelled many thousands of miles to countries where wars were in progress, each time he had arrived just after the last shot was fired. He assured me very earnestly that he would go back to Michigan Boulevard quite contentedly if he could see just one battle. I am glad to say that his perseverance was finally rewarded and that he saw his battle. He never told me just how much of the thousand pounds he took back to Chicago with him, but from some remarks he let drop I gathered that he had found battle-hunting an expensive pastime.

One of the great London dailies was represented in Belgium by a young and slender and very beautiful English girl whose name, as a novelist and playwright, is known on both sides of the Atlantic. I met her in the American Consulate at Ghent, where she was pleading with Vice-Consul Van Hee to assist her in getting through the German lines to Brussels. She had heard a rumour that Brussels was shortly going to be burned or sacked or something of the sort, and she wanted to be on hand for the burning and sacking. She had arrived in Belgium wearing a London tailor's idea of what constituted a suitable costume for a war correspondent--perhaps I should say war correspondentess. Her luggage was a model of compactness: it consisted of a sleeping-bag, a notebook, half a dozen pencils--and a powder-puff. She explained that she brought the sleeping-bag because she understood that war correspondents always slept in the field. As most of the fields in that part of Flanders were just then under several inches of water as a result of the autumn rains, a folding canoe would have been more useful. She was as insistent on being taken to see a battle as a child is on being taken to the pantomime. Eventually her pleadings got the better of my judgment and I took her out in the car towards Alost to see, from a safe distance, what promised to be a small cavalry engagement. But the Belgian cavalry unexpectedly ran into a heavy force of Germans, and before we realized what was happening we were in a very warm corner indeed. Bullets were kicking up little spurts of dust about us; bullets were tang-tanging through the trees and clipping off twigs, which fell down upon our heads; the rat-tat-tat of the German musketry was answered by the angry snarl of the Belgian machine-guns; in a field near by the bodies of two recently killed cuirassiers lay sprawled grotesquely. The Belgian troopers were stretched flat upon the ground, a veteran English correspondent was giving a remarkable imitation of the bark on a tree, and my driver, my photographer and I were peering cautiously from behind the corner of a brick farmhouse. I supposed that Miss War Correspondent was there too, but when I turned to speak to her she was gone. She was standing beside the car, which we had left in the middle of the road because the bullets were flying too thickly to turn it around, dabbing at her nose with a powder-puff which she had left in the tonneau and then critically examining the effect in a pocket-mirror.

"For the love of God!" said I, running out and dragging her back to shelter, "don't you know that you'll be killed if you stay out here?"

"Will I?" said she, sweetly. "Well, you surely don't expect me to be killed with my nose unpowdered, do you?"

That evening I asked her for her impressions of her first battle.

"Well," she answered, after a meditative pause, "it certainly was very chic."

The third and largest division of this journalistic army consisted of free lances who went to the Continent at their own expense on the chance of "stumbling into something." About the only thing that any of them stumbled into was trouble. Some of them bore the most extraordinary credentials ever carried by a correspondent; some of them had no credentials at all. One gentleman, who was halted while endeavouring to reach the firing line in a decrepit cab, informed the officer before whom he was taken that he represented the Ladies' Home Journal of Philadelphia. Another displayed a letter from the editor of a well-known magazine saying that he "would be pleased to consider any articles which you care to submit." A third, upon being questioned, said naively that he represented his literary agent. Then--I almost forgot him--there was a Methodist clergyman from Boston who explained to the Provost-Marshal that he was gathering material for a series of sermons on the horrors of war. Add to this army of writers another army of photographers and war-artists and cinematograph-operators and you will have some idea of the problem with which the military authorities of the warring nations were confronted. It finally got down to the question of which should be permitted to remain in the field--the war correspondents or the soldiers. There wasn't room for them both. It was decided to retain the soldiers.

The general staffs of the various armies handled the war correspondent problem in different ways. The British War Office at first announced that under no considerations would any correspondents be permitted in the areas where British troops were operating, but such a howl went up from Press and public alike that this order was modified and it was announced that a limited number of correspondents, representing the great newspaper syndicates and press associations, would, after fulfilling certain rigorous requirements, be permitted to accompany his Majesty's forces in the field. These fortunate few having been chosen after much heart-burning, they proceeded to provide themselves with the prescribed uniforms and field-kits, and some of them even purchased horses. After the war had been in progress for three months they were still in London. The French General Staff likewise announced that no correspondents would be permitted with the armies, and when any were caught they were unceremoniously shipped to the nearest port between two unsympathetic gendarmes with a warning that they would be shot if they were caught again.

The Belgian General Staff made no announcement at all. The police merely told those correspondents who succeeded in getting into the fortified position of Antwerp that their room was preferable to their company and informed them at what hour the next train for the Dutch frontier was leaving. Now the correspondents knew perfectly well that neither the British nor the French nor the Belgians would actually shoot them, if for no other reason than the unfavourable impression which would be produced by such a proceeding; but they did know that if they tried the patience of the military authorities too far they would spend the rest of the war in a military prison. So, as an imprisoned correspondent is as valueless to the newspaper which employs him as a prisoner of war is to the nation whose uniform he wears, they compromised by picking up such information as they could along the edge of things. Which accounts for most of the dispatches being dated from Ostend or Ghent or Dunkirk or Boulogne or from "the back of the front," as one correspondent ingeniously put it.

As for the Germans, they said bluntly that any correspondents found within their lines would be treated as spies--which meant being blindfolded and placed between a stone wall and a firing party. And every correspondent knew that they would do exactly what they said. They have no proper respect for the Press, these Germans.

That I was officially recognized by the Belgian Government and given a laisser-passer by the military Governor of Antwerp permitting me to pass at will through both the outer and inner lines of fortifications, that a motor-car and a military driver were placed at my disposal, and that throughout the campaign in Flanders I was permitted to accompany the Belgian forces, was not due to any peculiar merits or qualifications of my own, or even to the influence exerted by the powerful paper which I represented, but to a series of unusual and fortunate circumstances which there is no need to detail here. There were many correspondents who merited from sheer hard work what I received as a result of extraordinary good fortune.

The civilians who were wandering, foot-loose and free, about the theatre of operations were by no means confined to the representatives of the Press; there was an amazing number of young Englishmen and Americans who described themselves as "attaches" and "consular couriers" and "diplomatic messengers," and who intimated that they were engaged in all sorts of dangerous and important missions. Many of these were adventurous young men of means who had "come over to see the fun" and who had induced the American diplomatic representatives in London and The Hague to give them dispatches of more or less importance-- usually less than more--to carry through to Antwerp and Brussels. In at least one instance the official envelopes with the big red seals which they so ostentatiously displayed contained nothing but sheets of blank paper. Their sole motive was in nearly all cases curiosity. They had no more business wandering about the war-zone than they would have had wandering about a hospital where men were dying. Belgium was being slowly strangled; her villages had been burned, her fields laid waste, her capital was in the hands of the enemy, her people were battling for their national existence; yet these young men came in and demanded first-row seats, precisely as though the war was a spectacle which was being staged for their special benefit.

One youth, who in his busy moments practised law in Boston, though quite frankly admitting that he was only actuated by curiosity, was exceedingly angry with me because I declined to take him to the firing-line. He seemed to regard the desperate battle which was then in progress for the possession of Antwerp very much as though it was a football game in the Harvard stadium; he seemed to think that he had a right to see it. He said that he had come all the way from Boston to see a battle, and when I remained firm in my refusal to take him to the front he intimated quite plainly that I was no gentleman and that nothing would give him greater pleasure than to have a shell explode in my immediate vicinity.

For all its grimness, the war was productive of more than one amusing episode. I remember a mysterious stranger who called one morning on the American Consul at Ostend to ask for assistance in getting through to Brussels. When the Consul asked him to be seated he bowed stiffly and declined, and when a seat was again urged upon him he explained, in a hoarse whisper, that sewn in his trousers were two thousand pounds in bank-notes which he was taking through to Brussels for the relief of stranded English and Americans--hence he couldn't very well sit down.

Of all the horde of adventurous characters who were drawn to the Continent on the outbreak of war as iron-filings are attracted by a magnet, I doubt if there was a more picturesque figure than a little photographer from Kansas named Donald Thompson. I met him first while paying a flying visit to Ostend. He blew into the Consulate there wearing an American army shirt, a pair of British officer's riding-breeches, French puttees and a Highlander's forage-cap, and carrying a camera the size of a parlour-phonograph. No one but an American could have accomplished what he had, and no American but one from Kansas. He had not only seen war, all military prohibitions to the contrary, but he had actually photographed it.

Thompson is a little man, built like Harry Lauder; hard as nails, tough as raw hide, his skin tanned to the colour of a well-smoked meerschaum, and his face perpetually wreathed in what he called his "sunflower smile." He affects riding-breeches and leather leggings and looks, physically as well as sartorially, as though he had been born on horseback. He has more chilled steel nerve than any man I know, and before he had been in Belgium a month his name became a synonym throughout the army for coolness and daring. He reached Europe on a tramp-steamer with an overcoat, a toothbrush, two clean handkerchiefs, and three large cameras. He expected to have some of them confiscated or broken, he explained, so he brought along three as a measure of precaution. His cameras were the largest size made. "By using a big camera no one can possibly accuse me of being a spy," he explained ingenuously. His papers consisted of an American passport, a certificate of membership in the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, and a letter from Colonel Sam Hughes, Canadian Minister of Militia, authorizing him to take pictures of Canadian troops wherever found.

Thompson made nine attempts to get from Paris to the front. He was arrested eight times and spent eight nights in guard-houses. Each time he was taken before a military tribunal. Utterly ignoring the subordinates, he would insist on seeing the officer in command. He would grasp the astonished Frenchman by the hand and inquire solicitously after his health and that of his family.

"How many languages do you speak?" I asked him.

"Three," said he. "English, American, and Yankee."

On one occasion he commandeered a motorcycle standing outside a cafe and rode it until the petrol ran out, whereupon he abandoned it by the roadside and pushed on afoot. On another occasion he explained to the French officer who arrested him that he was endeavouring to rescue his wife and children, who were in the hands of the Germans somewhere on the Belgian frontier. The officer was so affected by the pathos of the story that he gave Thompson a lift in his car. As a matter of fact, Thompson's wife and family were quite safe in Topeka, Kansas. Whenever he was stopped by patrols he would display his letter from the Minister of Militia and explain that he was trying to overtake the Canadian troops. "Vive le Canada!" the French would shout enthusiastically. "Hurrah for our brave allies, les Canadiens! They are doubtless with the British at the front"--and permit him to proceed. Thompson did not think it necessary to inform them that the nearest Canadian troops were still at Quebec.

When within sound of the German guns he was arrested for the eighth time and sent to Amiens escorted by two gendarmes, who were ordered to see him aboard the first train for Boulogne. They evidently considered that they had followed instructions when they saw him buy a through ticket for London. Shortly after midnight a train loaded with wounded pulled into the station. Assisted by some British soldiers, Thompson scrambled to the top of a train standing at the next platform and made a flashlight picture. A wild panic ensued in the crowded station. It was thought that a German bomb had exploded. Thompson was pulled down by the police and would have been roughly handled had it not been for the interference of his British friends, who said that he belonged to their regiment. Shortly afterwards a train loaded with artillery which was being rushed to the front came in. Thompson, once more aided and abetted by the British Tommies, slipped under the tarpaulin covering a field-gun and promptly fell asleep. When he awoke the next morning he was at Mons. A regiment of Highlanders was passing. He exchanged a cake of chocolate for a fatigue-cap and fell in with them. After marching for two hours the regiment was ordered into the trenches. Thompson went into the trenches too. All through that terrible day Thompson plied his trade as the soldiers plied theirs. They used their rifles and he used his camera. Men were shot dead on either side of him. A storm of shrapnel shrieked and howled overhead. He said that the fire of the German artillery was amazingly accurate and rapid. They would concentrate their entire fire on a single regiment or battery and when that regiment or battery was out of action they would turn to another and do the same thing over again. When the British fell back before the German onset Thompson remained in the trenches long enough to get pictures of the charging Germans. Then he ran for his life.