Golden Lads Part 2

Another of the peasants was an old man, of weak mind. He kept babbling to himself. It would have been obvious to a child that he was foolish.

The German sentry ordered silence. The old fellow muttered on in unconsciousness of his surroundings. The sentry drew back his bayonet to run him through. A couple of the peasants pulled the old man flat to the ground and stifled his talking.

At five o'clock in the morning German stretcher bearers marched behind the burned houses. Out of the house of the peasant lying next to me three bodies were carried. He broke into a long, slow sobbing.

At six o'clock a monoplane sailed overhead, bringing orders to our detachment. The troops intended for Ghent were turned toward Brussels.

The field artillery, which had been rolled toward the west, was swung about to the east. An officer headed us toward Ghent and let us go. If the Germans had marched into Ghent we would have been of value as a cover for the troops. But for the return to Brussels we were only a nuisance. We hurried away toward Ghent. As we walked through a farmyard we saw a farmer lying at full length dead in his dooryard. We pa.s.sed the convent school of Melle, where Catholic sisters live. The front yard was strewed with furniture, with bedding, with the contents of the rooms.

The yard was about four hundred feet long and two hundred feet deep. It was dotted with this intimate household stuff for the full area. I made inquiry and found that no sister had been violated or bayoneted. The soldiers had merely ransacked the place.

One of my companions in this Melle experience was A. Radclyffe Dugmore, formerly of the Players Club, New York, a well-known naturalist, author of books on big game in Africa, the beaver, and the caribou. For many years he was connected with Doubleday, Page & Co. His present address is Crete Hill, South Nutfield, Surrey.

At other times and places, German troops have not rested content with the mere terrorization and humiliation of religious sisters. On February 12, 1916, the German Wireless from Berlin states that Cardinal Mercier was urged to investigate the allegation of German soldiers attacking Belgian nuns, and that he declined. As long as the German Government has seen fit to revive the record of their own brutality, I present what follows.

A New York physician whom I know sends me this statement:

"I was dining in London in the middle of last April with a friend, a medical man, and I expressed doubt as to the truth of the stories of atrocity. I said I had combatted such stories often in America. In reply, he asked me to visit a house which had been made over into an obstetrical hospital for Belgian nuns. I went with him to the hospital.

Here over a hundred nuns had been and were being cared for."

On a later Sunday in September I visited the Munic.i.p.al Hospital of Ghent. In Salle (Hall) 17, I met and talked with Martha Tas, a peasant girl of St. Gilles (near Termonde). As she was escaping by train from the district, and when she was between Alost and Audeghem, she told me that German soldiers aimed rifle fire at the train of peasants. She was wounded by a bullet in the thigh. My companion on this visit was William R. Renton, at one time a resident of Andover, Ma.s.sachusetts. His present address is the Coventry Ordnance Works, Coventry.

A friend of mine has been lieutenant in a battery of 75's stationed near Pervyse. His summer home is a little distance out from Liege. His wife, sister-in-law, and his three children were in the house when the Germans came. Peasants, driven from their village, hid in the cellar. His sister took one child and hid in a closet. His wife took the two-year-old baby and the older child and hid in another closet. The troops entered the house, looted it and set it on fire. As they left they fired into the cellar. The mother rushed from her hiding place, went to her desk and found that her money and the family jewels, one a gift from the husband's family and handed down generation by generation, had been stolen. With the sister, the baby in arms, the two other children and the peasants, she ran out of the garden. They were fired on. They hid in a wood. Then, for two days, they walked. The raw potatoes which they gathered by the way were unfit for the little one. Without money, and ill and weakened, they reached Holland. This lady is in a safe place now, and her testimony in person is available.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GREEN Pa.s.s, USED ONLY BY SOLDIERS AND OFFICERS OF THE BELGIAN ARMY.

It gives pa.s.sage to the trenches at any hour. The writer, by holding this, and working under the Prime Minister's son, became stretcher-bearer in the Belgian Army.]

The apologists of the widespread reign of frightfulness say that war is always "like that," that individual drunken soldiers have always broken loose and committed terrible acts. This defense does not meet the facts. It meets neither the official orders, nor the cold method, nor the immense number of proved murders. The German policy was ordered from the top. It was carried out by officers and men systematically, under discipline. The German War Book, issued by the General Staff, and used by officers, cleverly justifies these acts. They are recorded by the German soldiers themselves in their diaries, of which photographic reproductions are obtainable in any large library. The diaries were found on the persons of dead and wounded Germans. The name of the man and his company are given.

On Sunday, September 27, I was present at the battle of Alost, where peasants came running into our lines from the German side of the ca.n.a.l.

In spite of sh.e.l.l, shrapnel, rifle, and machine fire, these peasants crossed to us. The reason they had for running into fire was that the Germans were torturing their neighbors with the bayonet. One peasant, on the other side of the ca.n.a.l, hurried toward us under the fire, with a little girl on his right shoulder.

On Tuesday, September 29, I visited Wetteren Hospital. I went in company with the Prince L. de Croy, the Due D'Ursel, a senator; the Count de Briey, Intendant de la Liste Civile du Roy, and the Count Retz la Barre (all of the Garde du General de Wette, Divisions de Cavalerie).

One at least of these gentlemen is as well and as favorably known in this country as in his own. I took a young linguist, who was kind enough to act as secretary for me. In the hospital I found eleven peasants with bayonet wounds upon them--men, women and a child--who had been marched in front of the Germans at Alost as a cover for the troops, and cut with bayonets when they tried to dodge the firing. A priest was ministering to them, bed by bed. Sisters were in attendance. The priest led us to the cot of one of the men. On Sunday morning, September 27, the peasant, Leopold de Man, of No. 90, Hovenier-Straat, Alost, was hiding in the house with his sister, in the cellar. The Germans made a fire of the table and chairs in the upper room. Then, catching sight of Leopold, they struck him with the b.u.t.ts of their guns and forced him to pa.s.s through the fire. Then, taking him outside, they struck him to the ground and gave him a blow over the head with a gunstock and a cut of the bayonet, which pierced his thigh all the way through.

"In spite of my wound," said he, "they made me pa.s.s between their lines, giving me still more blows of the gun-b.u.t.t in the back in order to make me march. There were seventeen or eighteen persons with me. They placed us in front of their lines and menaced us with their revolvers, crying out that they will make us pay for the losses they have suffered at Alost. So we march in front of the troops.

"When the battle began we threw ourselves on our faces to the ground, but they forced us to rise again. At a certain moment, when the Germans were obliged to retire, we succeeded in escaping down side streets."

The priest led the way to the cot of a peasant whose cheeks had the spot of fever. He was Frans Meulebroeck, of No. 62, Drie Sleutelstraat, Alost. Sometimes in loud bursts of terror, and then falling back into a monotone, he talked with us.

"They broke open the door of my home," he said, "they seized me and knocked me down. In front of my door the corpse of a German lay stretched out. The Germans said to me: 'You are going to pay for that to us.' A few moments later they gave me a bayonet cut in my leg. They sprinkled naphtha in my house and set it afire. My son was struck down in the street and I was marched in front of the German troops. I do not know even yet the fate of my son."

Gradually as the peasant talked the time of his suffering came on him.

His eyes began to see it again in front of him. They became fixed and wild, the white of them visible. His voice was shrill and broken with sobs.

"My boy," he said, "I haven't seen him." His body shook with sobbing.

At my request the young man with me took down the statements of these two peasants, turning them into French from the Flemish, with the aid of the priest. In the presence of the priest and one of the sisters the two peasants signed, each man, his statement, making his mark.

Our group pa.s.sed into the next room, where the wounded women were gathered. A sister led us to the bedside of a very old woman, perhaps eighty years old. She had thin white hair, that straggled across the pillow. There was no motion to the body, except for faint breathing. She was cut through the thigh with a bayonet.

I went across the room and found a little girl, twelve years old. She was propped up in bed and half bent over, as if she had been broken at the breast bone. Her body whistled with each breath. One of our ambulance corps went out next day to the hospital--Dr. Donald Renton. He writes me:

"I went out with Davidson, the American sculptor, and Yates, the cinema man, and there had been brought into the hospital the previous day the little girl you speak of. She had a gaping wound on, I think, the right side of her back, and died the next day."

Dr. Renton's address is 110 Hill Street, Garnet Hill, Glasgow.

The young man who took down the record is named E. de Niemira, a British subject. He made the report of what we had seen to the Bryce Committee.

These cases which I witnessed appear in the Bryce Report under the heading of "Alost."[B] Of such is the Bryce Report made: first-hand witness by men like myself, who know what they know, who are ready for any test to be applied, who made careful notes, who had witnesses.

"Why do the Germans do these things? It is not war. It is cruel and wrong," that is a remark I heard from n.o.blemen and common soldiers alike. Such acts are beyond the understanding of the Belgian people.

Their soldiers are kindly, good-humored, fearless. Alien women and children would be safe in their hands. They do not see why the Germans bring suffering to the innocent.

A few understand. They know it is a scientific panic which the German army was seeking to cultivate. They see that these acts are not done in the wilful abandon of a few drunken soldiers, beyond discipline, but that they belong to a cool, careful method by means of which the German staff hoped to reduce a population to servitude. The Germans regard these mutilations as pieces of necessary surgery. The young blond barmaid of the Quatrecht Inn told us on October 4 that a German captain came and cried like a baby in the taproom on the evening of September 7, after he had laid waste Quatrecht and Melle. To her fanciful, untrained mind he was thinking of his own wife and children. So, at least, she thought as she watched him, after serving him in his thirst.

One of the sentries patted the shoulder of the peasant at Melle when he learned that the man had had the three members of his family done to death. Personally, he was sorry for the man, but orders were orders.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHURCH IN TERMONDE WHICH THE WRITER SAW.

The Germans burned this church and four others, a hospital, an orphanage, and 1,100 homes, house by house. Priests, nuns and churches irritated the German Army. This photograph was taken by Radclyffe Dugmore, who accompanied the writer, to witness the methodical destruction.]

I spent September 13 and September 23 in Termonde. Ten days before my first visit Termonde was a pretty town of 11,000 inhabitants. On their first visit the Germans burned eleven hundred of the fifteen hundred houses. They burned the Church of St. Benedict, the Church of St.

Rocus, three other churches, a hospital, and an orphanage. They burned that town not by accident of sh.e.l.l fire and general conflagration, but methodically, house by house. In the midst of charred ruins I came on single houses standing, many of them, and on their doors was German writing in chalk--"Nicht Verbrennen. Gute Leute wohnen hier." Sometimes it would be simply "Nicht Verbrennen," sometimes only "Gute Leute," but always that piece of German script was enough to save that house, though to the right and left of it were ruins. On several of the saved houses the name of the German officer was scribbled who gave the order to spare. About one hundred houses were chalked in the way I have described. All these were unscathed by the fire, though they stood in streets otherwise devastated. The remaining three hundred houses had the good luck to stand at the outskirts and on streets unvisited by the house-to-house incendiaries.

Four days after my first visit the Germans burned again the already wrecked town, turning their attention to the neglected three hundred houses. I went in as soon as I could safely enter the town, and that was on the Wednesday after.

As companions in Termonde I had Tennyson Jesse, Radclyffe Dugmore, and William R. Renton. Mr. Dugmore took photographs of the chalked houses.

"Build a fence around Termonde," suggested a Ghent manufacturer, "leave the ruins untouched. Let the place stand there, with its burned houses, churches, orphanage, hospital, factories, to show the world what German culture is. It will be a monument to their methods of conducting war.

There will be no need of saying anything. That is all the proof we need.

Then throw open the place to visitors from all the world, as soon as this war is over. Let them draw their own conclusions."

BALLAD OF THE GERMANS

In Wetteren Hospital, Flanders, the writer saw a little peasant girl dying from the bayonet wounds in her back which the German soldiers had given her.

Cain slew only a brother, A lad who was fair and strong, His murder was careless and honest, A heated and sudden wrong.

And Judas was kindly and pleasant, For he snared an invincible man.

But you--you have spitted the children, As they toddled and stumbled and ran.

She heard you sing on the high-road, She thought you were gallant and gay; Such men as the peasants of Flanders: The friends of a child at play.

She saw the sun on your helmets, The sparkle of glancing light.

She saw your bayonets flas.h.i.+ng, And she laughed at your Prussian might.