Part 7

“In the name of the nation, I fraternally salute the army. Everywhere, Flemings and Walloons, in the cities and in the country, one sole sentiment binds our hearts: Patriotism; one sole vision fills our spirits: our endangered independence; one sole duty imposes itself upon us: a stubborn resistance.

“Under these circumstances two virtues are indispensable: a cool courage, but a strong courage, and a close union of all the Belgian people.

“Both of these virtues have already been demonstrated brilliantly under the eyes of the nation, filled with enthusiasm.

“The perfect mobilisation of our army, the number of voluntary enlistments, the devotion of the civil population, the self-denial of families, have shown, beyond dispute, the consoling bravery which animates the whole Belgian people.

“The time for action has come.

“I have assembled you, Gentlemen, in order to allow the Legislative Chambers to unite with the people in the same spirit of sacrifice.

“You will therefore immediately take measures necessary for war as well as for preservation of public order, under the present circumstances.

“When I look upon this enthusiastic assembly, an assembly in which there is but one party, the side of the Fatherland, where every heart beats in unison, my mind goes back to the Congress of 1830, and I ask you, Gentlemen, are you firmly resolved to maintain the sacred patrimony of your forefathers?

“None in this country but will do his duty.

“The army, strong and disciplined as it is, is equal to its task. My Government and myself have the utmost confidence in its leaders and its soldiers.

“Closely allied with the population, and supported by it, the Government is conscious of its responsibilities and will assume them to the very end with the deliberate conviction that the efforts of each and every one, if united in a spirit of most fervent patriotism, will safeguard the supreme welfare of the country.

“If the foreigner, trampling upon our neutrality, the duties of which we have always scrupulously observed, violates, the territory, he will find every Belgian around his Sovereign, who will never betray his Constitutional Oath, and around the Government invested with the supreme confidence of the entire nation.

“I have faith in our destiny: a country which defends itself cannot but gain the respect of everyone: that country cannot perish.

“German troops have occupied Luxemburg, and are perhaps even now trampling upon Belgian soil. This act is contrary to the law of Nations.”

The rumour ran through Brussels from end to end as with the swift vibrations that at such times shake the sensitive organism of all Latin cities. Nobody who was there will ever forget the torrential and swirling crowds before the Gare du Nord, the fierce cheers and the foreboding silence. The peace of eighty years was broken. Honour and the law of Europe had summoned Belgium into the red ways of war; she went singing and unafraid, but the vision of blood was not hidden from her or from us. As we stood on the café tables roaring “La Brabançonne” we knew that there was a midnight to traverse before the dawn. But we did not know that the upbuilding of three generations of human labour was to be broken by three months of scientific brutality. We did not know that Belgium was passing into her Gethsemane.

On the same day von Emmich had marched his columns across the Rubicon that divides honour from infamy. On the same day some hours later Sir Edward Grey had drawn the sword, and flung away the scabbard.

UNDER THE HEEL OF THE HUN

I.--A WORLD ADRIFT

_Brussels, August 5, 1914._

All Europe is a study in strain. The unexpected swing of events has brought Belgium--Belgium which for eighty years has lived only for a neutral independence--to the centre of the arena. The Waterloo of 1914, as that of 1815, may very well be fought on Belgian soil.

It is impossible to exaggerate the sincere amazement of the man in the street, the man in the café. “We have gorged the Albuches with money. They have blacklegged us in business. We are stuffed with them--bah! our national life is choked with these German sausages. And now! Traitors, cowards, violators of honour and the free Belgian frontier!”

The anti-German feeling is heating rapidly to a frenzy. No more demi-Munichs in the restaurants. Even if the beer be of German nativity, which is sometimes a little in doubt, it must be sold as Belgian. The more discreet patrons had already painted out, or draped in patriotic bunting, all advertisements for German products. But the ruse was not general nor always successful. The window-breakers had already appeared, waving the tricolour, chanting “La Brabançonne.” Every street, and, indeed, every buttonhole, has blossomed as suddenly as the staff of Tannhäuser. Cockades, rosettes, bows, the tricolours of France and Belgium, the red, white and blue of England, flower inexplicably into being. At ten centimes a time we manifest our sympathies, and make dazzling fortunes for the street-sellers.

At the house of a public official one finds a sort of synopsis of the general desolation. The family has just scrambled back from Switzerland. The eldest son, a captain of engineers, had already left for the front, ordered to action too urgently to wait even for a last handshake, a last kiss. His children cannot go out to breathe the air because the governess is German, and therefore liable to patriotic assault. The household is keyed up to any disaster.

At the Post Office there is a tumult that soon settles down into a patient queue outside the savings bank and money-order offices. The cashiers pay out the new five-franc notes; fresh and crisp, obviously and attractively new, they are fingered with distrustful fingers. Then the fingers grow suddenly ashamed of their distrust in the star of Belgium, stuff their notes into their wallets, and step briskly out to the music of the drums that beat in all hearts.

The English declaration of war has evoked extraordinary enthusiasm, and at the same time brought so near the sombre and terrible crisis as to still the expression of that enthusiasm. It was no light-hearted crowd that stood to watch the Red Cross go to the front this morning. They streamed by in commandeered or volunteered motor-cars. Soldiers, unshaven and unslept, lounged with their boots upon cushions that a few days ago ministered to the very dainty masters of luxury. Limousines, taxis, trade-cars all went by laden with stretchers and medicine-cases. Everywhere the smell of rubber and antiseptics. And everywhere the desolating thought that before midnight these snowy bandages will be bloodied, and these stretchers laden with human debris. À la guerre comme à la guerre!

Everywhere girls are hurrying through the streets with tin collecting-boxes. We subscribe to the Red Cross, to funds to support those about to become widows of the sword, to buy milk for the infants. Many of the great hotels have already been offered as hospitals. The gleaming symbol of Geneva--that inexplicable lapse of the soldiers of Europe into plain Christian mercy--is already displayed on them. Shops, big and small, are being prepared to serve as depots for the distribution of food in case of need.

It is impossible not to be with Belgium in the struggle. It is impossible any longer to be passive. Germany has thrown down a well-considered challenge to all the deepest forces of our civilisation. War is hell, but it is only a hell of suffering, not a hell of dishonour. And through it, over its flaming coals, Justice must walk, were it on bare feet.

II.--“EUROPE AGAINST THE BARBARIANS”

_Brussels, August 8._

We may well doubt whether any imagination is large enough to contain the issues of the war. It overwhelms us and freezes our blood fast like a vision of terror from the Apocalypse. What is, perhaps, most terrible of all is the complete and necessary banishment of peace from the scene of Europe. Hereafter there may be a time for such a word, but not now. The arbitration movement to which we had committed so many hopes has gone up in flames like a cardboard Elysium. Europe, we said, was a monstrous contradiction in terms--an armed peace. There is no contradiction now, it is a manual of pure logic after Krupp. The Norman Angell evangel to the money-masters has failed; there is even something noble in the sudden appeal of the financiers of every country to a higher plane of values. You may suspend your International Bureau of Labour which used to function at Brussels. Jaurès is dead; Vandervelde, cherishing _la patrie_ beyond everything else, has joined the Ministry; in Germany, as in France, Belgium, and Great Britain, the comrades are with the colours. When next the committee-room of the Maison du Peuple receives the European chiefs of labour what a change will be there!

As for Serbia, it seems probable that nobody will have time to go to war with her. Her function has been that of the electric button which discharges the great gun of a fortress. And now that the lightnings have been released, what is the stake for which we are playing? It is as simple as it is colossal. It is Europe against the barbarians. The authentic Teuton touch betrayed itself in the gross proposition of bribes, followed by the instant violation of the Belgian frontier. The “big blonde brute” stepped from the pages of Nietzsche out on to the plains about Liége. Brought suddenly to think of it, one realises the corruption of moral standards for which Germany has in our time been responsible. Since Schopenhauer died nothing has come from her in the region of philosophy except that gospel of domination.

And now we suddenly understand that the Immoralists meant what they said. We were reading, not as we thought a string of drawing-room paradoxes, but the advance proof-sheets of a veritable Bullies’ Bible. The General Bernhardis who have been teaching Germany to desire war, to provoke it, to regard it as a creative and not a destructive act, to accept it as merely the inevitable prologue to German domination, have proved to be not only brutal, but formidable. Since Belgium, and its protecting treaty, barred the way, both simply had to go. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted to the strong.” Afterwards it will be the turn of the others. And at the end of the process a monster, gorged with blood and with the torn limbs of civilisation, is to lie sprawled over all Central Europe, while some new metaphysician from Berlin booms heavily into his self-intoxicated brain some new fable of preordination.

I do not wish in any way to exaggerate. France has her corruptions. But the whole set of her thought, even when it abjured Christian “illusions,” was towards solidarity, towards reasonableness, and co-operation. Russia has her vile tyrannies. But from all Russian literature there comes an immense and desolating sob of humility and self-reproach. Great Britain has not yet liquidated her account with Ireland, nor altogether purified her relations with India and Egypt. But Great Britain does not, at any rate, throw aside all plain, pedestrian Christian standards as rubbish. In the Rhineland, too, and in the south there are millions of hearty men and women who are not yet Prussified, and who still think it possible that there may exist a Being greater in some respects than the Imperial Kaiser. But all the central thought of Germany has been for a generation corrupt. It has been foul with the odour of desired shambles.

The issue, then, is Europe against the barbarians. It is not easy, perhaps, for anyone living at home in our islands to develop fully What may be called the European sense. You acquire it as you get your sea legs, quickly, but not without actual experience. There underlies the whole Continent a minutely reticulated system of nerves which convey, and multiply, every shock of feeling from one end of it to the other. Here in Brussels we are, for the time at least, at the central _sensorium_. The élan of Belgium takes possession of you. The courage and anguish of this glorious little nation, fighting now for its very life, stir one to something like the clear mood of its own heroism. In every direction there opens a vista of waste and suffering. Already the long trail of wounded has begun to wind its sorrowful way back to the capital. Prisoners arrive, too simple of aspect, one would think, to be the instruments by which Europe is to be tortured to the pattern of a new devilry. You say to yourself, as you hear all the world saying: C’est incroyable! It is not to be believed. It is a nightmare! And then the conviction shapes itself clearly, settles upon and masters your mind, that this German assault on civilisation has got to be repelled and utterly shattered once and for all.

Had Belgium consented to a free passage across her territory so that the French forts might be evaded, the problem was simply to profit by the slow mobilisation of France, and to strike straight and hard at Paris. On her refusal the problem was to hamstring Belgium. Liége was to be carried by a _coup de main_, and the advance pushed right on to Antwerp. This would have cut the country in two, made anything like an effective Belgian mobilisation impossible, detached outlying places from their supply depots, and left Belgium helpless under the heel of a comparatively small section of the German forces. Both gambits have been countered. There has been no free passage and no surprise victory. The Belgian mobilisation has not been even hampered. The whole German plan was founded on a swift and invincible dash; in the actual event both characteristics are lacking. General Leman and Liége have given the Allies day on invaluable day to come up. The prestige which since 1871 has enveloped the Prussians and their war methods has disappeared at a blow. “Ah!”, says the Belgian pioupiou to you, “those great Prussian teeth that chewed up France in the ’70, they have bitten themselves to fragments against the forts of Liége. Nous sommes un peu là! Eh?”

The great outstanding pinnacle of a fact is, perhaps, the definitive entrance of England into the comity of Europe. Regret it or not, there can be no more isolation. And the other fact, noted here also as of main importance, is the attitude of Ireland. Mr. Redmond’s proffer of friendship, in return for justice, had been made often before, but never in such dramatic circumstances. I am appalled to hear rumours to the effect that Sir Edward Carson proposes at this moment to force Mr. Bonar Law to bedevil the whole situation by a political trick. He actually proposes, one hears, that a course should be followed depriving Ireland of the Home Rule Bill, which is coming to her automatically by the mere efflux of a few weeks. Can such madness still be possible? Is there any imagination left in England?

Here, at the opening of this vast and bloody epic, Great Britain is right with the conscience of Europe. It is assumed that she has reconciled Ireland. A reconciled Ireland is ready to march side by side with her to any desperate trial. And suddenly the lawyer, with the Dublin accent, who had been the chief architect of destruction in the whole Empire, and who was thought to have come to reason, proposes for Ireland what I can only call a Prussian programme. England goes to fight for liberty in Europe and for Junkerdom in Ireland. It is incredible. Were it to come true it would become utterly impossible to act on Mr. Redmond’s speech. Another dream would have gone down into the abyss. Ireland, wounded anew, would turn sullenly away from you. Is that what a sound Tory ought to desire? Will Tory England, enlightened at last as to the real attitude of Ireland, allow such a fatal crime to be committed?

III.--TERMONDE

The fate of Termonde is already known. But I do not apologise for adding to the literature of its devastation an account of a visit which I paid to-day. Imagination lacks the stringency of the scandal actually seen, and we have got, by repeated strokes, to hammer into the imagination of the world the things that Prussia has done in Belgium.

I went from Ghent to Zele by train this morning, and from Zele to Termonde by carriage. They call Ghent the flower-town, and not without some reason. It lies in that part of Flanders in which cultivation is at its most intensive. That is to say, it is the centre of one of the greatest agricultural areas in the world. Near Ghent it was nursery-gardens all the way, a checker-board of colour. The geraniums, we thought, will never again look like fire; they will look like blood. Further into the country fewer flowers and more crops and cattle. Not a square millimetre wasted. All the familiar Flemish picture; the windmill that looks like two combs crossed, and revolving on a pepper-box; the old churches, the old castles, reminiscent of the Spanish persecution; the strong peasant-faces--like those of my own “Ulster,” but Catholic--lined with labour; the wayside statues; the villages, with little beauty save that of fruitful effort.

It is a flat country all the way to Termonde, and especially as one nears the Scheldt. It is well timbered. I noticed again a contrast I have often noticed before. In England the trees look like gentlemen of leisure. If they do any good it is by a sort of graceful accident. In Belgium they look like soldiers. They stand there in planned ranks, repelling the infantry of the winds, drawing the artillery of the rain, sheltering, protecting. Add to them the waving patches of hemp, the corn-stacks, the rich herbage, and you get a closely-tufted and almost impenetrable country. It is striped everywhere also with little canals and ditches, so that any sort of military movement, except over the cobbled roads, must be almost impossible. If one remembers that the environs of the towns are almost the only places open enough for a conflict between any substantial forces, a good many events become more intelligible.

WHAT TERMONDE WAS

But, for the moment, I am concerned with the impression of remoteness and quiet labour which such a country gives. The peasants yield to it. At Zele, at Lokeren, they feel the war as some great demon that has mysteriously passed them by. And then, eight kilometres away, you turn the bend of a country road at the Bridge of Termonde and drive, let us say, from something that looks very like Kent into something that looks very like Hell.

Termonde was---- Let me recall what it was. It was a not unprosperous town of some eleven or twelve thousand people. Though not destitute of commerce and industries, it lived mainly on law (for it was an assize town), on education, and on the army. The two handsomest residences that I saw--one in puce-coloured brick at the approach to the bridge, the other more grandiose in stone and inexplicably saved in the principal street--belonged one to a judge, the other to an avocat. Termonde, like many other places in the Low Countries, had already been lifted into history by war. It repelled Louis XIV with its dykes, but Marlborough took it dry. Such was Termonde.

To-day it is a tumbled avalanche of brick, stone, twisted iron and shattered glass, over which the remaining public buildings rise like cliffs over a flood. I walked every foot of every street. Of the Rue de l’Eglise, the chief street, the Porte de Boom and Church of Notre Dame at one end, and the Hôtel de Ville, Palais de Justice, and Museum at the other are untouched. So is the avocat’s house, of which I have spoken, chalked over with that piteous legend to which one has become so accustomed. Friends here! Please spare! (in German and German characters). The rest of the street is as if the breath of Armageddon had withered it. The post office, the chapel and convent of the Poor Clares, the hospital, the orphanage have all disappeared.

There is no need to multiply descriptive details. It is always the same capricious devastation, the same arabesques of ruin, with which flame searches its mad way through architecture. About one-half of the Grand’ Place has been saved owing to the fact that the Germans were gathered there, drinking champagne, when fire was being sown through the town.

The Marché au Bétail, a pretty little boulevard, has also disappeared. The great College, at its corner, like the other schools, is gone. Each of its façades resembles nothing so much as an X-ray photograph. Through the charred ribs of what was a house the green-red-and-white of a flower-garden flashes the eternal tricolour of nature.

CULTURE AND THE SICK

In the Marché au Lin the Church of the Récolletes and the National Bank lie disembowelled. It was here that the Germans laid on the pavements the sick and wounded while they burned the beds from which they had dragged them and the roof that had sheltered them.

A few small factory buildings on the left bank of the river and the poorest section of the workmen’s quarter remain. The rest of Termonde is a mere heap of bricks. It was; it no longer is. Walking out towards the southern side of the town I came suddenly--everything here happens suddenly--upon a note of desolation, not the most desolate, but the most crying of all. Through a chasm in a shattered façade I saw the white walls of little houses, the white coifs of nuns, and the waving green of trees. It was the Béguinage. Anyone who knows Flanders knows these remote pools of silence, these quiet backwaters where no oar breaks the surface, where the old and spent await death as one courteously awaits an honoured visitor. I stepped in and found myself in an irregular triangle of almshouses. At first nothing seemed to have been touched. But in the centre there was a church, fringed with dwarf cypress. Walking over, I found that it was, like Termonde, a skeleton. The Germans, a nun told me, had on the entreaty of two Dutch ladies, members of the community, consented to spare the cottages. But they insisted on making a bonfire of the “cottage of the Bon Dieu!”

Nothing was lacking in this abomination of desolation. I determined to have some photographs made. Yes! our guide--a big country farmer, who had out of pure courtesy accompanied us from Zele--knew of a photographer who would doubtless be able to do our business. We went to look for him. His street had disappeared, his house with it. We walked back to the _estaminet_ to ask where he might be found.

“But, monsieur! he was one of the first to be shot by the Germans!” Later, on one of the quays we saw a white wooden cross, with lime stamped down about its base. Bystanders told us that it marked the grave of two Belgian civilians. “Ah!” said our farmer, “it is perhaps there!”

ORGANISED INFAMY

Now as to the procedure of the Germans. The facts admit of no doubt. I set aside forthwith any damage caused to Termonde by the bombardment. The bridge was dynamited, a number of houses on the outskirts were shattered by shells. Nobody is childish enough to complain about that. War is war, and, technically, Termonde is a fortified town--though the old fortifications have been dismantled. But the burning was deliberate, scientific, selective, devoid of military purpose.

The German commander demanded a levy of two million francs. The money was not there in the public treasury, and the Burgomaster was not there to save his town as Braun saved Ghent. General Sommerfeld--that is the name that now wears such a nimbus of infamy--had a chair brought from an inn into the centre of the Grand Place. He sat down on it, crossed his legs, and said: “It is our duty to burn the town!”