Golden Lads Part 8

Farewell, dear wife, children, and family.

Your always remaining husband, father, and brother.

ALOYS.

Then Antwerp fell, and a people that had for the first time in memory found itself an indivisible and self-conscious state broke into sullen flight, and its merry, friendly army came heavy-footed down the road to another country. Grieved and embittered, they served under new leaders of another race. Those tired soldiers were like spirited children who had been playing an exciting game which they thought would be applauded.

And suddenly the best turned out the worst.

Sing, Belgians, sing, though our wounds are bleeding.

writes the poet of Flanders; but the song is no earthly song. It is the voice of a lost cause that cries out of the trampled dust as it prepares to make its flight beyond the place of betrayal.

For the Belgian soldiers no longer sang, or made merry in the evening. A young Brussels corporal in our party suddenly broke into sobbing when he heard the chorus of "Tipperary" float over the channel from a transport of untried British lads. The Belgians are a race of children whose feelings have been hurt. The pathos of the Belgian army is like the pathos of an orphan-asylum: it is unconscious.

They are very lonely, the loneliest men I have known. Back of the fighting Frenchman, you sense the gardens and fields of France, the strong, victorious national will. In a year, in two years, having made his peace with honor, he will return to a happiness richer than any that France has known in fifty years. And the Englishman carries with him to the stresses of the first line an unbroken calm which he has inherited from a thousand years of his island peace. His little moment of pain and death cannot trouble that consciousness of the eternal process in which his people have been permitted to play a continuing part. For him the present turmoil is only a ripple on the vast sea of his racial history.

Behind the Tommy is his Devons.h.i.+re village, still secure. His mother and his wife are waiting for him, unmolested, as when he left them. But the Belgian, schooled in horror, faces a fuller horror yet when the guns of his friends are put on his bell-towers and birthplace, held by the invaders.

"My father and mother are inside the enemy lines," said a Belgian officer to me as we were talking of the final victory. That is the ever-present thought of an army of boys whose parents are living in doomed houses back of German trenches. It is louder than the near guns, the noise of the guns to come that will tear at Bruges and level the Tower of St. Nicholas. That is what the future holds for the Belgian. He is only at the beginning of his loss. The victory of his cause is the death of his people. It is a sacrifice almost without a parallel.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A BELGIAN BOY SOLDIER IN THE UNIFORM OF THE FIRST ARMY WHICH SERVED AT LIEGE AND NAMUR.

In the summer of 1915 this costume was exchanged for khaki (see page 148). The present Belgian Army is largely made up of boys like this.]

And now a famous newspaper correspondent has returned to us from his motor trips to the front and his conversations with officers to tell us that he does not highly regard the fighting qualities of the Belgians. I think that statement is not the full truth, and I do not think it will be the estimate of history on the resistance of the Belgians. If the resistance had been regarded by the Germans as half-hearted, I do not believe their reprisals on villages and towns and on the civilian population would have been so bitter. The burning and the murder that I saw them commit throughout the month of September, 1914, was the answer to a resistance unexpectedly firm and telling. At a skirmish in September, when fifteen hundred Belgians stood off three thousand Germans for several hours, I counted more dead Germans than dead Belgians. The German officer in whose hands we were as captives asked us with great particularity as to how many Belgians he had killed and wounded. While he was talking with us, his stretcher-bearers were moving up and down the road for his own casualties. At Alost the street fighting by Belgian troops behind fish-barrels, with sods of earth for barricade, was so stubborn that the Germans felt it to be necessary to mutilate civilian men, women, and children with the bayonet to express in terms at all adequate their resentment. I am of course speaking of what I know. Around Termonde, three times in September, the fighting of Belgians was vigorous enough to induce the Germans on entering the town to burn more than eleven hundred homes, house by house. If the Germans throughout their army had not possessed a high opinion of Belgian bravery and power of r.e.t.a.r.dation, I doubt if they would have released so widespread and unique a savagery.

At Termonde, Alost, Baliere, and a dozen other points in the Ghent sector, and, later, at Dixmude, Ramscappelle, Pervyse, Caeskerke, and the rest of the line of the Yser, my sight of Belgians has been that of troops as gallant as any. The cowards have been occasional, the brave men many. I still have flashes of them as when I knew them. I saw a Belgian officer ride across a field within rifle range of the enemy to point out to us a market-cart in which lay three wounded. On his horse, he was a high figure, well silhouetted. Another day, I met a Belgian sergeant, with a tousled red head of hair, and with three medals for valor on his left breast. He kept going out into the middle of the road during the times when Germans were reported approaching, keeping his men under cover. If there was risk to be taken, he wanted first chance. My friend Dr. van der Ghinst, of Cabour Hospital, captain in the Belgian army, remained three days in Dixmude under steady bombardment, caring unaided for his wounded in the Hospital of St. Jean, just at the Yser, and finally brought out thirty old men and women who had been frightened into helplessness by the flames and noise. Because he was needed in that direction, I saw him continue his walk past the point where fifty feet ahead of him a sh.e.l.l had just exploded. I watched him walk erect where even the renowned fighting men of an allied race were stooping and hiding, because he held his life as nothing when there were wounded to be rescued. I saw Lieutenant Robert de Broqueville, son of the prime minister of Belgium, go into Dixmude on the afternoon when the town was leveled by German guns. He remained there under one of the heaviest bombardments of the war for three hours, picking up the wounded who lay on curbs and in cellars and under debris. The troops had been ordered to evacuate the town, and it was a lonely job that this youngster of twenty-seven years carried on through that day.

I have seen the Belgians every day for several months. I have seen several skirmishes and battles and many days of sh.e.l.l-fire, and the impression of watching many thousand Belgians in action is that of excellent fighting qualities, starred with bits of sheer daring as astonis.h.i.+ng as that of the other races. With no country left to fight for, homes either in ruin or soon to be sh.e.l.led, relatives under an alien rule, the home Government on a foreign soil, still this second army, the first having been killed, fights on in good spirit. Every morning of the summer I have pa.s.sed boys between eighteen and twenty-five, clad in fresh khaki, as they go riding down the poplar lane from La Panne to the trenches, the first twenty with bright silver bugles, their cheeks puffed and red with the blowing. Twelve months of wounds and wastage, wet trenches and tinned food, and still they go out with hope.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BELGIANS IN THEIR NEW KHAKI UNIFORM. IN PRAISE OF WHICH THEY WROTE A SONG.

Albert's son, the Crown Prince Leopold, has been a common soldier in this regiment.]

And the helpers of the army have shown good heart. Breaking the silence of Rome, the splendid priesthood of Belgium, from the cardinal to the humblest cure, has played the man. On the front line near Pervyse, where my wife lived for three months, a soldier-monk has remained through the daily sh.e.l.l-fire to take artillery observations and to comfort the fighting men. Just before leaving Flanders, I called on the sisters in the convent school of Furnes. They were still cheery and busy in their care of sick and wounded civilians. Every few days the Germans sh.e.l.l the town from seven miles away, but the sisters will continue there through the coming months as through the last year. The spirit of the best of the race is spoken in what King Albert said recently in an unpublished conversation to the gentlemen of the English mission:

"The English will cease fighting before the Belgians. If there is talk of yielding, it will come from the English, not from us."

That was a playful way of saying that there will be no yielding by any of the Western Allies. The truth is still as true as it was at Liege that the Belgians held up the enemy till France was ready to receive them. And the price Belgium paid for that resistance was the ma.s.sacre of women and children and the house-to-house burning of homes.

Since rendering that service for all time to France and England, through twenty months of such a life as exiles know, the Belgians have fought on doggedly, recovering from the misery of the Antwerp retreat, and showing a resilience of spirit equaled only by the Fusiliers Marins of France.

One afternoon in late June my friend Robert Toms was sitting on the beach at La Panne, watching the soldiers swimming in the channel.

Suddenly he called to me, and aimed his camera. There on the sand in the sunlight the Belgian army was changing its clothes. The faithful suits of blue, rained on and trench-worn, were being tossed into great heaps on the beach and brand-new yellow khaki, clothes and cap, was buckled on. It was a transformation. We had learned to know that army, and their uniform had grown familiar and pleasant to us. The dirt, ground in till it became part of the texture; the worn cloth, shapeless, but yet molded to the man by long a.s.sociation--all was an expression of the stocky little soldier inside. The new khaki hung slack. Caps were overlarge for Flemish heads. To us, watching the change, it was the loss of the last possession that connected them with their past; with homes and country gone, now the very clothing that had covered them through famous fights was shuffled off. It was as if the Belgian army had been swallowed up in the sea at our feet, like Pharaoh's phalanx, and up from the beach to the barracks scuffled an imitation English corps.

We went about miserable for a few days. But not they. They spattered their limp, ill-fitting garments with jest, and soon they had produced a poem in praise of the change. These are the verses which a Belgian soldier, clad in his fresh yellow, sang to us as we grouped around him on a sand dune:

EN KHAKI

I

Depuis onze mois que nous sommes partis en guerre, A tous les militaires, On a decide de plaire.

Aussi depuis ce temps la, a l'intendance c'est dit, De nous mettr' tous en khaki.

Maint'nant voila l'beau temps qui vient d' paraitre Aussi repetons tous le coeur en fete.

REFRAIN

Regardez nos p't.i.ts soldats, Ils ont l'air d'etre un peu la, Habilles D'la tete jusqu'aux pieds En khaki, en khaki, Ils sont contents de servir, Mais non pas de mourir, Et cela c'est parce qu' on leur a mis, En quelque sorte, la t'nue khaki.

II

Maintenant sur toutes les grand's routes vous pouvez voir Parcourant les trottoirs Du matin jusqu'au soir Les defenseurs Belges, portant tous la meme tenue Depuis que l'ancienne a disparue, Aussi quand on voit I'9e defiler C' n'est plus regiment des panaches.

Meme Refrain.

III

Nous sommes tous heureux d'avoir le costume des Anglais Seul'ment ce qu'il fallait, Pour que ca soit complet.

Et je suis certain si l'armee veut nous mettre a l'aise C'est d'nous donner la solde Anglaise.

Le jour qu'nous aurions ca, ah! quell' affaire Nous n' serions plus jamais dans la misere.

REFRAIN

Vous les verriez nos p't.i.ts soldats, J'vous a.s.sure qu'ils seraient un peu la, Habilles, D'la tete jusqu'aux pieds, En khaki, en khaki, Ils seraient fiers de repartir, Pour le front avec plaisir, Si les quatre poches etaient bien games De billets bleus couleur khaki.

FLIES: A FANTASY

Outside the window stretched the village street, flat, with bits of dust and dung rising on the breaths of wind and volleying into rooms upon the tablecloth and into pages of books. It was a street of small yellow brick houses, a shapeless church, a convent school--freckled buildings, dingy. Up and down the length of it, it was without one touch of beauty.

It gave back dust in the eyes. It sounded with thunder of transports, rattle of wagons, soft whirr of officers' speed cars, yelp of motor horns, and the tap-tap of wooden shoes on tiny peasants, boys and girls.

A little sick black dog slunk down the pavement, smelling and staring. A cart b.u.mped over the cobbles, the horse with a great tumor in its stomach, the stomach as if blown out on the left side, and the tumor with a rag upon it where it touched the harness.

Inside the window, a square room with a litter of six-penny novels in a corner, fifty or sixty books flung haphazard, some of them open with the leaves crushed back by the books above. In another corner, a heap of commissariat stuff, tins of bully beef, rabbit, sardines, herring, and gla.s.ses of jam, and marmalade. On the center table, a large jug of marmalade, ants busy in the yellow trickle at the rim. Filth had worked its way into the red table-cover. Filth was on every object in the room, like a soft mist, blurring the color and outlines of things. In the corners, under books and tins, insects moved, long, thin, crawling. A hot noon sun came dimly through the dirty gla.s.s of the closed window, and slowly baked a sleeping man in the large plush armchair. Around the chair, as if it were a promontory in a heaving sea, were billows of stale crumpled newspapers, some wadded into a ball, others torn across the page, all flung aside in _ennui_.

The face of the man was weary and weak. It showed all of his forty-one years, and revealed, too, a great emptiness. Flies kept rising and settling again on the hands, the face, and the head of the man--moist flies whose feet felt damp on the skin. They were slow and languid flies which wanted to settle and stay. It was his breathing that made them restless, but not enough to clear them away, only enough to make a low buzzing in the sultry room. Across the top of his head a bald streak ran from the forehead, and it was here they returned to alight, after each twitching and heave of the sunken body.

In the early months he had fought a losing fight with them. The walls and ceiling and panes of gla.s.s were spotted with the marks of his long battle. But his foes had advanced in ever-fresh force, clouds and swarms of them beyond number. He had gone to meet them with a wire-killer, and tightly rolled newspapers. He had imported fly paper from Dunkirk. But they could afford to sacrifice the few hundreds, which his strokes could reach, and still overwhelm him. Lately, he had given up the struggle, and let them take possession of the room. They hara.s.sed him when he read, so he gave up reading. They got into the food, so he ate less.

Between his two trips to the front daily at 8 A.M. and 2 P.M., he slept. He found he could lose himself in sleep. Into that kingdom of sleep, they could not enter. As the weeks rolled on, he was able to let himself down more and more easily into silence. That became his life. A slothfulness, a languor, even when awake, a half-conscious forcing of himself through the routine work, a looking forward to the droning room, and then the settling deep into the old plush chair, and the blessed unconsciousness.

He drove a Red Cross ambulance to the French lines at Nieuport, collected the sick and wounded soldiers and brought them to the Poste de Secours, two miles back of the trenches. He lived a hundred feet from the Poste, always within call. But the emergency call rarely came. There were only the set runs, for the war had settled to its own regularity. A wonderful idleness hung over the lines, where millions of men were unemployed, waiting with strange patience for some unseen event. Only the year before, these men were chatting in cafes, and busy in a thousand ways. Now, the long hours of the day were lived without activity in thoughtless routine. Under the routine there was always the sense of waiting for a sudden crash and horror.

The man was an English gentleman. It was his own car he had brought, paid for by him, and he had offered his car and services to the Fusiliers Marins. They had been glad of his help, and for twelve months he had performed his daily duty and returned to his loneliness. The men under whom he worked were the French doctors of the Poste--the chief doctor, Monsieur Claude-Marie Le Bot, with four stripes on his arm, and the courteous, grave administrator, Eustache-Emmanuel Couillandre, a three-stripes man, and a half dozen others, of three stripes and two.

They had welcomed him to their group when he came to them from London.

They had found him lively and likable, bringing gossip of the West End with a dash of Leicester Square. Then slowly a change had come on him.

He went moody and silent.

"What's the matter with you?" asked Doctor Le Bot one day.