This kept up for four days and nights. We kept going as hard as our waning strength would permit and we were cautious in the extreme. Even at that we had many narrow escapes.
[Sidenote: Crossing the Lippe River.]
Our greatest difficulty was when we struck the Lippe River. Our first plan was to swim across, but we found that we had not the strength left for this feat. We lost a day as a result. The second night we found a scow tied up along the bank and got across that way.
[Sidenote: Rapid progress, though starving.]
By this time we were slowly starving on our feet, we were wet through continuously, and such sleep as we got was broken and fitful. Before we had been four days out we were reduced to gaunt, tattered, dirty scarecrows. We staggered as we walked and sometimes one of us would drop on the road through sheer weakness. Through it all we kept up our frenzy for speed and it was surprising how much ground we forced ourselves to cover in a night. And, no matter how much the pangs of hunger gnawed at us, we conserved our fast dwindling supply of biscuit. Less than two biscuits a day was our limit!
Finally we reached a point that I recognized from my previous attempt to escape. It was about four miles from the border. We had two biscuits left between us. The next day we feasted royally and extravagantly on those two biscuits. No longer did we need to h.o.a.rd our supplies, for the next night would tell the tale.
[Sidenote: Safe past the German sentries.]
By the greatest good fortune night came on dark and cloudy. Not a star showed in the sky. We crawled cautiously and painfully toward the border. At every sound we stopped and flattened out. Twice we saw sentries close at hand, but both times we got by safely. Finally we reached what we judged must be the last line of sentries. We had crawled across a ploughed field and reached a road lined on both sides with trees where sentries were pa.s.sing up and down.
"It"s the border!" we whispered.
When the nearest sentry had reached the far end of his beat we doubled up like jack-knives and dashed across that road, plunging through the trees on the other side. Not a sound came from the sentries. We struck across fields with delirious speed, we reeled along like drunken men, laughing and gasping and sometimes reaching out for a mutual handshake.
[Sidenote: Across the border in Holland.]
Then we got a final scare. Marching up the road toward us was what looked like a white sheet. Our nerves were badly shattered, and that moving thing froze my blood, but it was a scare of brief duration. The sheet soon resolved itself into two girls in white dresses, walking up the road with a man. We scurried to the side of the road as soon as we made them out. Then I decided to test the matter of our whereabouts and stepped out to accost them.
"Have you a match?" I asked in German.
The man did not understand me!
We were in Holland--_and free_!
Little was heard from the Belgians themselves of the hardships and suffering endured by them under the rule of the Germans. Occasionally, however, an eye-witness from the outside was able to present some aspects of the terrible picture. The narrative of such an eye-witness is given in the following pages.
UNDER GERMAN RULE IN FRANCE AND BELGIUM
J. P. WHITAKER
[Sidenote: The German iron heel on Roubaix.]
Toward the end of March, 1915, a distinct change became noticeable in the policy of the German military authorities, and for the first time the people of Roubaix began to feel the iron heel. The allied Governments had formally declared their intention of blockading Germany and the German Army had been given a sharp lesson at Neuve Chapelle.
Whether these two events had anything to do with the change, or whether it was merely a coincidence, I do not know; the fact remains that our German governors who had hitherto treated us with tolerable leniency chose about this time to initiate a regime of stringent regulation and repression.
[Sidenote: Identification papers.]
The first sign of the new policy was the issue of posters calling on all men, women, and children over the age of 14 to go to the Town Hall and take out identification papers, while all men between 17 and 50 were required also to obtain a control card.
Up to this time I had escaped any interference from the Germans, perhaps because I scarcely ventured into the streets for the first two months of the German occupation, and possibly also because, from a previous long residence in Roubaix, I spoke French fluently. Strangely enough, though I went to the Town Hall with the rest and supplied true particulars of my age and nationality, papers were issued to me as a matter of course, and never during the whole two years and more of my presence in their midst did the enemy molest me in any way.
[Sidenote: Control cards for men of military age.]
The only incident which throws any light on this curious immunity occurred about the middle of 1915. Like all other men of military age, I was required to present myself once a month at a public hall, in order to have my control card, which was divided into squares for the months of the year, marked in the proper s.p.a.ce with an official stamp "Kontrol, July," or "August," or whatever the month might be. We were summoned for this process by groups, first those from 17 to 25, then those from 25 to 35, and so on. Hundreds of young fellows would gather in a room, and one by one, as their names were called, would take their cards to be stamped by a noncommissioned officer sitting at a table on the far side of the room. On the occasion I have in mind, the noncommissioned officer said to me, "You are French, aren"t you?" I answered, "No." "Are you Belgian?" "No," again. "You are Dutch, then?" A third time I replied "No."
At this stage an officer who had been sauntering up and down the room smoking a cigarette came to the table, took up my card, and turning to the man behind the table, remarked, "It"s all right. He"s an American."
I did not trouble to enlighten him. That is probably why I enjoyed comparative liberty.
[Sidenote: The German policy of enslavement.]
Enslavement is part of the deliberate policy of the Germans in France.
It began by the taking of hostages at the very outset of their possession of Roubaix. A number of the leading men in the civic and business life of the town were marked out and compelled to attend by turns at the Town Hall, to be shot on the spot at the least sign of revolt among the townspeople.
[Sidenote: Treatment of girl mill operatives who refuse to work.]
Not a few of the mill owners were ordered to weave cloth for the invaders, and on their refusal were sent to Germany and held to ransom.
Many of the mill operatives, quite young girls, were directed to sew sandbags for the German trenches. They, too, refused, but the Germans had their own ways of dealing with what they regarded as juvenile obstinacy. They dragged the girls to a disused cinema hall, and kept them there without food or water until their will was broken.
Barbarity reached its climax in the so-called "deportations." They were just slave raids, brutal and undisguised.
[Sidenote: The deportations or slave raids.]
[Sidenote: Taken to an unknown fate.]
The procedure was this: The town was divided into districts. At 3 o"clock in the morning a cordon of troops would be drawn round a district--the Prussian Guard and especially, I believe, the Sixty-ninth Regiment, played a great part in this diabolical crime--and officers and noncommissioned officers would knock at every door until the household was roused. A handbill, about octavo size, was handed in, and the officer pa.s.sed on to the next house. The handbill contained printed orders that every member of the household must rise and dress immediately, pack up a couple of blankets, a change of linen, a pair of stout boots, a spoon and fork, and a few other small articles, and be ready for the second visit in half an hour. When the officer returned, the family were marshaled before him, and he picked out those whom he wanted with a curt "You will come," "And you," "And you." Without even time for leave-taking, the selected victims were paraded in the street and marched to a mill on the outskirts of the town. There they were imprisoned for three days, without any means of communication with friends or relatives, all herded together indiscriminately and given but the barest modic.u.m of food. Then, like so many cattle, they were sent away to an unknown fate.
[Sidenote: Girls put to farm labor.]
Months afterward some of them came back, emaciated and utterly worn out, ragged and verminous, broken in all but spirit. I spoke with numbers of the men. They had been told by the Germans, they said, that they were going to work on the land. They found that only the women and girls were put to farm labor.
[Sidenote: Men do construction work in Ardennes.]
[Sidenote: Very little food.]
[Sidenote: No complaints permitted.]
The men were taken to the French Ardennes and compelled to mend roads, man sawmills and forges, build masonry, and toil at other manual tasks.
Rough hutments formed their barracks. They were under constant guard both there and at their work, and they were marched under escort from the huts to work and from work to the huts. For food each man was given a two-pound loaf of German bread every five days, a little boiled rice, and a pint of coffee a day. At 8 o"clock in the morning, after a breakfast consisting of a slice of bread and a cup of coffee, they went to work. At 4 o"clock in the afternoon they returned for the night and took their second meal--dinner, tea, and supper all in one. Often they were buffeted and generally ill-used by their taskmasters. If they fell ill, cold water, internally or externally, was the invariable remedy.
Once a commission came to see them at work, but they had been warned beforehand that any man who complained of his treatment would suffer for it. One of them was bold enough to protest to the visitors against a particularly flagrant case of ill-usage. That man disappeared a few days later.
[Sidenote: The Belgian frontier is closed.]
Long before this the food problem had become acute in Roubaix.
Simultaneously with the establishment of the system of personal control over the inhabitants the Germans closed the frontier between France and Belgium and forbade us to approach within half a mile of the border line. The immediate effect of this isolation was to reduce to an insignificant trickle the copious stream of foodstuffs which until then poured in from Belgium--not the starving Belgium of fiction, but the well supplied Belgium of fact.
[Sidenote: Fabulous prices for meat.]