Golden Lads Part 7

"Too far," he replied, mournfully, "only a dot at that distance."

Now, all the parts had fitted into the pattern, the gay green gra.s.s growing out of the stacked barrels and carts, and the sullen, silent, waiting mitrailleuse which can spit death in a wide swathe as it revolves from side to side, like the full stroke of a scythe on nodding daisies. The bark of it is as alarming as its bite--an incredibly rapid rat-tat that makes men fall on their faces when they hear, like wors.h.i.+pers at the bell of the Transubstantiation.

"She talks three hundred words to the minute," said Romeyn to me.

"How are you coming?" I asked.

"Great," he answered, "great stuff. Now, if only something happens."

He had planted his tripod fifty feet back of the barricade, plumb against a red-brick, three-story house, so that the lens raked the street and its defenses diagonally. Thirty minutes we waited, with sh.e.l.l fire far to the right of us, falling into the center of the town with a rumble, like a train of cars heard in the night, when one is half asleep. That was the sense of things to me, as I stood in the street, waiting for h.e.l.l to blow off its lid. It was a dream world, and I was the dreamer, in the center of the strange unfolding sight, seeing it all out of a m.u.f.fled consciousness.

Another quarter hour, and Rossiter began to fidget.

"Do you call this a battle?" he asked.

"The liveliest thing in a month," replied the lieutenant.

"We've got to brisk it up," Rossiter said. "Now, I tell you what we'll do. Let's have a battle that looks something like. These real things haven't got speed enough for a five-cent house."

In a moment, all was action. Those amazing Belgians, as responsive as children in a game, fell to furiously to create confusion and swift event out of the trance of peace. The battered giant in the Sava released a cloud of steam from his car. The men aimed their rifles in swift staccato. The lieutenant dashed back and forth from curb to curb, plunging to the barricade, and then to the half dozen boys who were falling back, crouching on one knee, firing, and then retreating. He cheered them with pats on the shoulder, pointed out new unsuspected enemies. Then, man by man, the thirty perspiring fighters began to tumble. They fell forward on their faces, lay stricken on their backs, heaved against the walls of houses, wherever the deadly fire had caught them. The street was littered with Belgian bodies. There stood Rossiter grinding away on his handle, snickering green-clad Belgians lying strewn on the cobbles, a half dozen of them tense and set behind the barricade, leveling rifles at the piles of fish. Every one was laughing, and all of them intent on working out a picture with thrills.

The enemy guns had been growing menacing, but Rossiter and the Belgians were very busy.

"The sh.e.l.ls are dropping just back of us," I called to him.

"Good, good," he said, "but I haven't time for them just yet. They must wait. You can't crowd a film."

Ten minutes pa.s.sed.

"It is immense," began he, wiping his face and lighting a smoke, and turning his handle. "Gentlemen, I thank you."

"Gentlemen, we thank you," I said.

"There's been nothing like it," he went on. "Those Liege pictures of Wilson's at the Hippodrome were tame."

He'd got it all in, and was wasting a few feet for good measure.

Sometimes you need a fringe in order to bring out the big minute in your action.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STREET FIGHTING IN ALOST.

This is part of the motion-picture which we took while the Germans were bombarding the town.]

Suddenly, we heard the wailing overhead and louder than any of the other sh.e.l.ls. Louder meant closer. It lasted a second of time, and then crashed into the second story of the red house, six feet over Rossiter's head. A shower of brown brick dust, and a puff of gray-black smoke settled down over the machine and man, and blotted him out of sight for a couple of seconds. Then we all coughed and spat, and the air cleared.

The tripod had careened in the fierce rush of air, but Rossiter had caught it and was righting it. He went on turning. His face was streaked with black, and his clothes were brown with dust.

"Trying to get the smoke," he called, "but I'm afraid it won't register."

Maybe you want to know how that film took. We hustled it back to London, and it went with a whizz. One hundred and twenty-six picture houses produced "STREET FIGHTING IN ALOST." The daily ill.u.s.trated papers ran it front page. The only criticism of it that I heard was another movie man, who was sore--a chap named Wilson.

"That picture is faked," he a.s.serted.

"I'll bet you," I retorted, "that picture was taken under sh.e.l.l fire during the bombardment of Alost. That barricade is the straight goods.

The fellow that took it was shot full of gas while he was taking it.

What's your idea of the real thing?"

"That's all right," he said; "the ruins are good, and the smoke is there. But I've seen that reel three times, and every time the dead man in the gutter laughed."

"CHANTONS, BELGES! CHANTONS!"

Here at home I am in a land where the wholesale martyrdom of Belgium is regarded as of doubtful authenticity. We who have witnessed widespread atrocities are subjected to a critical process as cold as if we were advancing a new program of social reform. I begin to wonder if anything took place in Flanders. Isn't the wreck of Termonde, where I thought I spent two days, perhaps a figment of the fancy? Was the bayoneted girl child of Alost a pleasant dream creation? My people are busy and indifferent, generous and neutral, but yonder several races are living at a deeper level. In a time when beliefs are held lightly, with tricky words tearing at old values, they have recovered the ancient faiths of the race. Their lot, with all its pain, is choicer than ours. They at least have felt greatly and thrown themselves into action. It is a stern fight that is on in Europe, and few of our countrymen realize it is our fight that the Allies are making.

Europe has made an old discovery. The Greek Anthology has it, and the ballads, but our busy little merchants and our clever talkers have never known it. The best discovery a man can make is that there is something inside him bigger than his fear, a belief in something more lasting than his individual life. When he discovers that, he knows he, too, is a man.

It is as real for him as the experience of motherhood for a woman. He comes out of it with self-respect and gladness.

The Belgians were a soft people, pleasure-loving little chaps, social and cheery, fond of comfort and the cafe brightness. They lacked the intensity of blood of unmixed single strains. They were cosmopolitan, often with a command over three languages and s.n.a.t.c.hes of several dialects. They were easy in their likes. They "made friends" lightly.

They did not have the reserve of the English, the spiritual pride of the Germans. Some of them have German blood, some French, some Dutch. Part of the race is gay and volatile, many are heavy and inarticulate; it is a mixed race of which any iron-clad generalization is false. But I have seen many thousands of them under crisis, seen them hungry, dying, men from every cla.s.s and every region; and the ma.s.s impression is that they are affectionate, easy to blend with, open-handed, trusting.

This kindly, haphazard, unformed folk were suddenly lifted to a national self-sacrifice. By one act of defiance Albert made Belgium a nation. It had been a mixed race of many tongues, selling itself little by little, all unconsciously, to the German bondage. I saw the marks of this spiritual invasion on the inner life of the Belgians--marks of a destruction more thorough than the sh.e.l.ling of a city. The ruins of Termonde are only the outward and visible sign of what Germany has attempted on Belgium for more than a generation.

Perhaps it was better that people should perish by the villageful in honest physical death through the agony of the bayonet and the flame than that they should go on bartering away their nationality by piece-meal. Who knows but Albert saw in his silent heart that the only thing to weld his people together, honeycombed as they were, was the shedding of blood? Perhaps nothing short of a supreme sacrifice, amounting to a martyrdom, could restore a people so tangled in German intrigue, so netted into an ever-encroaching system of commerce, carrying with it a habit of thought and a mouthful of guttural phrases.

Let no one underestimate that power of language. If the idiom has pa.s.sed into one, it has brought with it molds of thought, leanings of sympathy.

Who that can even stumble through the "_Marchons! Marchons_!" of the "Ma.r.s.eillaise" but is a sharer for a moment in the rush of glory that every now and again has made France the light of the world? So, when the German phrase rings out, "Was wir haben bleibt Deutsch"--"What we are now holding by force of arms shall remain forever German"--there is an answering thrill in the heart of every Antwerp clerk who for years has been leaking Belgian government gossip into German ears in return for a piece of money. Secret sin was eating away Belgium's vitality--the sin of being bought by German money, bought in little ways, for small bits of service, amiable pa.s.sages destroying nationality. By one act of full sacrifice Albert has cleared his people from a poison that might have sapped them in a few more years without the firing of one gun.

That sacrifice to which they are called is an utter one, of which they have experienced only the prelude. I have seen this growing sadness of Belgium almost from the beginning. I have seen thirty thousand refugees, the inhabitants of Alost, come shuffling down the road past me. They came by families, the father with a bag of clothes and bread, the mother with a baby in arms, and one, two, or three children trotting along.

Aged women were walking, Sisters of Charity, religious brothers. A cartful of stricken old women lay patiently at full length while the wagon b.u.mped on. They were so nearly drowned by suffering that one more wave made little difference. All that was sad and helpless was dragged that morning into the daylight. All that had been decently cared for in quiet rooms was of a sudden tumbled out upon the pavement and jolted along in farm-wagons past sixteen miles of curious eyes. But even with the sick and the very old there was no lamentation. In this procession of the dispossessed that pa.s.sed us on the country road there was no one crying, no one angry.

I have seen 5000 of these refugees at night in the Halle des Fetes of Ghent, huddled in the straw, their faces bleached white under the glare of the huge munic.i.p.al lights. On the wall, I read the names of the children whose parents had been lost, and the names of the parents who reported a lost baby, a boy, a girl, and sometimes all the children lost.

A little later came the time when the people learned their last stronghold was tottering. I remember sitting at dinner in the home of Monsieur Caron, a citizen of Ghent. I had spent that day in Antwerp, and the soldiers had told me of the destruction of the outer rim of forts.

So I began to say to the dinner guests that the city was doomed. As I spoke, I glanced at Madame Caron. Her eyes filled with tears. I turned to another Belgian lady, and had to look away. Not a sound came from them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BELGIAN OFFICER ON THE LAST STRIP OF HIS COUNTRY.]

When the handful of British were sent to the rescue of Antwerp, we went up the road with them. There was joy on the Antwerp road that day.

Little cottages fluttered flags at lintel and window. The sidewalks were thronged with peasants, who believed they were now to be saved. We rode in glory from Ghent to the outer works of Antwerp. Each village on all the line turned out its full population to cheer us ecstatically. A bitter month had pa.s.sed, and now salvation had come. It is seldom in a lifetime one is present at a perfect piece of irony like that of those shouting Flemish peasants.

As Antwerp was falling, a letter was given to me by a friend. It was written by Aloysius Coen of the artillery, Fort St. Catherine Wavre, Antwerp. He died in the bombardment, thirty-four years old. He wrote:

Dear wife and children:

At the moment that I am writing you this the enemy is before us, and the moment has come for us to do our duty for our country. When you will have received this I shall have changed the temporary life for the eternal life. As I loved you all dearly, my last breath will be directed toward you and my darling children, and with a last smile as a farewell from my beloved family am I undertaking the eternal journey.

I hope, whatever may be your later call, you will take good care of my dear children, and always keep them in mind of the straight road, always ask them to pray for their father, who in sadness, though doing his duty for his country, has had to leave them so young.

Say good-by for me to my dear brothers and sisters, from whom I also carry with me a great love.