The answer was ever the same. "In the hospital at the rear, or at the front." "Back in such-and-such a village," etc. Always somewhere else; never where we were.
Let no one attempt to gloss the cruelties perpetrated in Belgium.
My individual wish is to see them pictured as crimson as possible, that men may the fiercer revolt against the shame and horror of this red butchery called war. But this is a record of just one observer"s reactions and experiences in the war zone. After weeks in this contested ground, the word "atrocity" now calls up to my mind hardly anything I saw in Belgium, but always the savageries I have witnessed at home in America.
For example, the organized frightfulness that I once witnessed in Boston. Around the strikers picketing a factory were the police in full force and a gang of thugs. Suddenly at the signal of a shrill whistle, sticks were drawn from under coats and, right and left, men were felled to the cobblestones. After a running fight a score were stretched out unconscious, upon the square. As blood poured out of the gashes, like tigers intoxicated by the sight and smell thereof, the a.s.sailants became frenzied, kicking and beating their victims, already insensible. In a trice the beasts within had been unleashed.
If in normal times men can lay aside every semblance of restraint and decency and turn into raging fiends, how much greater cause is there for such a transformation to be wrought under the stress of war when, by government decree, the sixth commandment is suspended and killing has become glorified. At any rate my experiences in America make credible the tales told in Belgium.
But there are no pictures of these outrages such as the Germans secured after the Russian drive into their country early in the war.
Here are windrows of mutilated Germans with gouged eyes and mangled limbs, attesting to that same senseless b.e.s.t.i.a.l ferocity which lies beneath the veneer.
All the photographers were fired with desire to make a similar picture in Belgium, yet though we raced here and there, and everywhere that rumor led us, we found it but a futile chase.
Through the Great Hall in Ghent there poured 100,000 refugees.
Here we pleaded how absolutely imperative it was that we should obtain an atrocity picture. The daughter of the burgomaster, who was in charge, understood our plight and promised to do her best.
But out of the vast concourse she was able to uncover but one case that could possibly do service as an atrocity.
It was that of a blind peasant woman with her six children. The photographers told her to smile, but she didn"t, nor did the older children; they had suffered too horribly to make smiling easy.
When the Germans entered the village the mother was in bed with her day-old baby. Her husband was seized and, with the other men, marched away, as the practice was at that period of the invasion, for some unaccountable reason. With the roof blazing over her head, she was compelled to arise from her bed and drag herself for miles before she found a refuge. I related this to a German later and he said: "Oh, well, there are plenty of peasant women in the Fatherland who are hard at work in the fields three days after the birth of their child."
The Hall filled with women wailing for children, furnished heartrending sights, but no victim bore such physical marks as the most vivid imagination could construe into an atrocity.
"I can"t explain why we don"t get a picture," said the free lance.
"Enough deviltry has been done. I can"t see why some of the stuff doesn"t come through to us."
"Simply because the Germans are not fools," replied the movie- man; "when they mutilate a victim, they go through with it to the finish. They take care not to let telltales go straggling out to d.a.m.n them."
Some one proposed that the only way to get a first-cla.s.s atrocity picture was to fake it. It was a big temptation, and a fine field for the exercise of their inventive genius. But on this issue the chorus of dissent was most emphatic.
The nearest that I came to an atrocity was when in a car with Van Hee, the American vice-consul at Ghent. Van Hee was a man of laconic speech and direct action. I told him what Lethbridge, the British consul, had told me; viz., that the citizens of Ghent must forthwith erect a statue of Van Hee in gold to commemorate his priceless services. "The gold idea appeals to me, all right," said Van Hee, "but why put it in a statue!" He routed me out at five one morning to tell me that I could go through the German lines with Mr. Fletcher into Brussels. We left the Belgian Army cheering the Stars and Stripes, and came to the outpost of sharpshooters.
Crouching behind a barricade, they were looking down the road.
They didn"t know whether the Germans were half a mile, two miles, or five miles down that road.
Into that uncertain No-Man"s-Land we drove with only our honking to disturb the silence, while our minds kept growing specters of Uhlans the size of Goliath. Fletcher and I kept up a hectic conversation upon the flora and fauna of the country. But Van Hee, being of strong nerves, always gleefully brought the talk back to Uhlans.
"How can you tell an Uhlan?" I faltered.
"If you see a big gray man on horseback, with a long lance, spearing children," said Van Hee, "why, that"s an Uhlan."
Turning a sharp corner, we ran straight ahead into a Belgian bicycle division--scouting in this uncertain zone. In a flash they were off their wheels, rifles at their shoulders and fingers on triggers.
Two boys, gasping with fear, thrust their guns up into our very faces. In our gray coats we had been taken for a party of German officers. They were positive that a peasant was hanging in a barn not far away. But we insisted that our nerves had had enough for the day. Even Van Hee was willing to let the conversation drift back to flowers and birds. We drove along in chastened spirit until hailed by the German outpost, about five miles from where we had left the Belgians. No-Man"s-Land was wide in those days.
But what is it that really const.i.tutes an atrocity? In a refugee shed, sleeping on the straw, we found an old woman of 88. All that was left to her was her shawl, her dress, and the faint hope of seeing two sons for whom she wept. Extreme old age is pitiful in itself.
With homelessness it is tragic. But such homeless old age as this, with scarce one flickering ray of hope, is double-distilled tragedy. If some marauder had bayoneted her, and she had died therefrom, it would have been a kindly release from all the anguish that the future now held in store for her. Of course that merciful act would have const.i.tuted an atrocity, because it would have been a breach in the rules of the war game.
But in focusing our attention upon the violations of the code, we are apt to forget the greater atrocity of the violation of Belgium, and the whole hideous atrocity of the great war. That is getting things out of proportion, for the sufferings entailed by these technical atrocities are infinitesimal alongside of those resulting from the war itself.
Another point has been quite overlooked. In recounting the atrocities wrought by Prussian Imperialism, no mention is made of those that it has committed upon its own people. And yet at any rate a few Germans suffered in the claws of the German eagle quite as cruelly as any Belgians did. One fine morning in September three Germans came careening into Ghent in a great motor car. They were dazed to find no evidence of their army which they supposed was in possession. Before the men became aware of their mistake, a Belgian mitrailleuse poured a stream of lead into their midst, killing two of them outright. The third German, with a ball in his neck, was rescued by Van Hee and placed under the protection of the American flag.
Incidentally that summary action, followed by a quick visit to the German general in his camp on the outskirts, saved the city. That is a long story. It is told in Alexander Powell"s "Fighting in Flanders," but it suffices here to state that by a pact between the Belgian burgomaster of Ghent and the German commandant it was understood that the wounded man was not to be considered a prisoner, but under the jurisdiction of the American Consulate.
A week after this incident Van Hee paid his first visit to this wounded man in the Belgian hospital. He was an honest fellow of about forty--the type of working-man who had aspired to nothing beyond a chance to toil and raise a family for the Fatherland.
Weltpolitik, with its vaunting boast of "World-power or Downfall,"
was meaningless to him and his comrades gathered in the beer- gardens on a Sunday.
Suddenly out of this quiet, uneventful life he was called to the colors and sent killing and burning through the Belgian villages.
His officers had told him that it would be a sorry thing for any German soldier to be captured, for these Belgians, maddened by the pillage of their country, would take a terrible revenge upon any luckless wretches that fell into their hands. Now, more suddenly than anything else had ever happened in his life, a bullet had stabbed him in the throat and he found himself a prisoner at the mercy of these dreaded Belgians.
"Why are they tending me so carefully during these last seven days?" "Are they getting me ready for the torturing?" "Are they making me well in order that I may suffer all the more?" Grim speculation of that kind must have been running through his simple mind. For when we opened the door of his room, he slunk cowering over to his bed, staring at us as if we were inquisitors about to lead him away to the torture chamber, there to suffer vicariously for all the crimes of the German army.
His body, already shrunken by overwork, visibly quivered before us, the perspiration beading on his ashen face.
We had come to apprise him of his present status as a citizen under the protectorate of America.
Van Hee approached the subject casually with the remark: "You see, you are not a Frenchman!"
"No, I am not a Frenchman," the quailing fellow mechanically repeated.
"And you are not a Belgian," resumed Van Hee.
He was not quite sure about disclaiming that, but he saw what was expected of him. So he faltered: "No, I am not a Belgian." "And you are not an Englishman, eh?" According to formula he answered: "No, I am not an Englishman!" but I sensed a bit more of emphasis in the disavowal of any English taint to his blood.
Van Hee was taking this process of elimination in order to clear the field so that his man could grasp the fact that he was to all intents an American, and at last he said:
"No longer are you a German either."
The poor fellow was in deep seas, and breathing hard. Everything about him proclaimed the fact that he was a German, even to his field-gray uniform, and he knew it. But he did not venture to contradict Van Hee, and he whispered hoa.r.s.ely: "No, I am not a German either."
He was completely demoralized, a picture of utter desolation.
"If you are not German, or Belgian, or French, or English, what are you then?"
The poor fellow whimpered: "0 Gott! I don"t know what I am."
"I"ll tell you what you are. You"re an American!" exclaimed Van Hee with great gusto. "That"s what you are--an American! Get that? An American!"
"Ja, ja ich bin ein Amerikaner!" he eagerly cried ("Yes, yes, I am an American!"), relieved to find himself no longer a man without a country. Had he been told that he was a Hindoo, or an Eskimo, he would have acquiesced as obediently.
But when he was shown an American flag and it began to dawn on him that he had nothing more to fear from his captors, his tenseness relaxed. And when Van Hee said: "As the American consul I shall do what I can for you. What is it you want the most?"
a light shone in the German"s eyes and he replied:
"I want to go home. I want to see my wife and children."
"I thought you came down here because you wanted to see the war," said Van Hee.
"War!" he gasped, and putting hands up to his eyes as if to shut out some awful sights, he began muttering incoherently about "Louvain," "children screaming," "blood all over his breast,"
repeating constantly "schrecklich, schrecklich." "I don"t want to see any more war. I want to see my wife and my three children!"