Woman's Experiences in the Great War — Chapters 26-28

THE RETURN FROM BRUSSELS

From Brussels to Ninove, from Ninove to Sottegem, from Sottegem to Ghent, from Ghent to Antwerp; that was how I got back!

At the outskirts of Brussels, on a certain windy corner, I stood, waiting my chance of a vehicle going towards Ghent.

The train-lines were still cut, and the only way of getting out of Brussels was to drive, unless one went on foot.

At the windy corner, accompanied by Jean and his two sisters, I stood, watching a wonderful drama.

There were people creeping in, as well as creeping out, peasants on foot, women and children who had fled in terror and were now returning to their little homes.

It seemed to me as if the Germans must purposely have left this corner unwatched, unhindered, probably in the hope of getting more and more to return.

Little carts and big carts clattered up and came to a standstill alongside an old white inn, and Jean bargained and argued on my behalf for a seat.

There was one tiny cart, drawn by a donkey, with five young men in it.

The driver wanted six passengers, and began appealing to me in Flemish to come in.

"I will drive you all the way to Ghent if you like," he said.

"How much?"

"Ten francs."

Suddenly a hand pulled at my sleeve, and a hoarse voice whispered in my ear: "Non, non, Madam.

You mustn't go with them.

Don't you know who they are?"

It was a rough-faced little peasant, and his blue eyes were full of distress.

I felt startled and impressed, and wondered if the five young men were murderers.

"They are the Newspaper Sellers!"

muttered the blue-eyed peasant under his breath.

If he had said they were madmen his tone could not have been more awestruck.

After a while I found a little cart with two seats facing each other, two hard wooden seats.

One bony horse stood in the shafts.

But I liked the look of the three Belgian women who were getting in, and one of them had a wee baby.

That decided me.

I felt that the terrors of the long drive before me would be curiously lightened by that baby's presence.

Its very tininess seemed to make things easier.

Its little indifferent sleeping face, soft and calm and fragrant among its white wool dainties, seemed to give the lie to dread and terror; seemed to hearten one swiftly and sweetly, seemed to say: "Look at me, I'm only a month old.

But I'm not frightened of anything!"

And now I must say good-bye to Jean, and good-bye to his two plump young sisters.

They are the dearest friends I have in the world--or so it seems to me as I bid them good-bye.

"Bonne chance, Madam!"

they whisper.

I should like to have kissed Jean, but I kissed the sisters instead, then feeling as if I were being cut in halves, I climbed, lonely and full of sinister dread, into the little cart, and the driver cracked his whip, shouting, "Allons, Fritz!"

to his bony horse and off we started, a party of eight all told.

The three Belgian women sat opposite me; two middle-aged men were beside me, and the driver and another man were on the front seat.

Hour after hour we drove, hour after hour there was no sun.

The land looked flat and melancholy under this grey sky, and we were at our old game now.

"Have you seen the Germans?"

"Yes, yes, the Germans are there," pointing to the right.

And we would turn to the left, tacking like a boat in the storm.

Terrific firing was going on.

But the baby, whose name the mother told me was Solange, slept profoundly, the three women chattered like parrots, and the driver shouted incessantly, "Allons, Fritz, allez-Komm!"

and Fritz, throwing back his head, plodded bravely on, dragging his heavy load with a superb nonchalance that led him into cantering up the hills, and breaking into gallops when he got on the flat road again.

Hour after hour Fritz cantered, and galloped and trotted, dragging eight people along as though they were so many pods.

Ce 10. 12. 14. MADAME CREED,

Le passage à Londres, je me permets de me rappeler à votre bon souvenir.

En effet, rappelez-vous votre retour de Bruxelles, en octobre dernier: dans la carriole se trouvaient 2 messieurs et 3 dames (l'une avec un bébé que vous avez tenu dans les bras) dont 2 institutrices.

J'en suis une des deux, Mme.

Stoefs.

J'ai été à Gand espérant vous revoir, mais vous étiez repartie déjà.

Peut être ici à Londres, amais-je ce plaisir.

J'y suis encore jusqu'à la fin de cette semaine, donc soyez assez aimable de me dire où et quand nous pourrions nous rencontrer.

Voici mon adresse: Mme.

Stoefs: Verstegen, 53, Maple Street, W. Au plaisir de vous revoir, je vous présente mes cordiales salutations.

CHARLOTTE STOEFS.

Institutrice à Bruxelles.

One bleak December day in London there came to me this letter, and by it alone I know that Fritz and the baby Solange, and the eight of us are no myth, no figment of my imagination.

We really did, all together, drive all day long through the German-infected country, to east, to west, to north, to south, through fields and byways, and strange little villages, over hills and along valleys, with the cannon always booming, the baby always sleeping and old Fritz always going merry and bright.

By noon, we might have known each other a thousand years.

I had the baby on my knee, the three men cracked walnuts for us all, and everyone talked at once; strange talk, the strangest in all the world.

"So they killed the priest!"

"She hid for two days in the water-closet."

"She doesn't know what has happened to her five children."

"They were stood in a row and every third one was _fusillé_."

"They found his body in the garden!"

"Il est tout-à-fait ruiné."

Then suddenly one of the ladies, who knew a little English, said with a friendly smile: "I have liked very much the English novel--how do you call it--something about a lamp.

Everyone reads it.

It is our favourite English book.

It is splendid.

We read it in French too."

And every now and then for hours she and I would try guessing the name of that something-about-a-lamp book.

But we never got it.

It was weeks later when I remembered "The Lamplighter."

At last we crossed the border from Brabant into Flanders, and galloping up a long hill we found ourselves in Ninove.

It was in a terrific state of excitement.

Here we saw the results of the fighting I had heard at Enghien on the Saturday.

The Germans had pillaged and destroyed.

Houses lay tumbled on the streets, the peasants stood grouped in terror, the air was full of the smell of burning.

At a house where we bought some apples we saw a sitting-room after the Huns had finished it.

Every bit of glass and china in the room was smashed, tumblers, wine-glasses, jugs, plates, cups, saucers lay in heaps all over the floor.

All the pictures were cut from the frames, all the chairs and tables were broken to bits.

The cushions were torn open, the bookshelves toppled forward, the books lay dripping wet on the grey carpet as if buckets of water had been poured over them.

Jam tins, sardine tins, rubbish and filth were all over the carpet, and bottles were everywhere.

It was a low, degrading sight.

CHAPTER XXVII

"THE ENGLISH ARE COMING" I am back in Antwerp and the unexpected has happened.

We are besieged.

The siege began on Thursday.

The mental excitement of these last days passes all description.

And yet Antwerp is calm outwardly, and but for the crowds of peasants, pouring into the city with their cows and their bundles, one would hardly know that the Germans were really attacking us at last.

The Government has issued an order that anyone who likes may leave Antwerp; but once having done so no one will be permitted to return; and that quite decides us; we will remain.

All day long the cannon are booming and pounding; sometimes they sound so near that one imagines a shell must have burst in Antwerp itself; and sometimes they grow fainter, they are obviously receding.

Or so we tell ourselves hopefully.

We are always hopeful; we are always telling each other that things are going better.

Everyone is talking, talking, talking.

Everyone is asking, "What do you think?

Have you heard any news?"

Everyone is saying, "But of course it will be all right!"

"The Germans have been driven back five kilometres," says one civilian.

"Have you heard the news?

The Germans have been driven back six kilometres!"

says another.

And again: "Have _you_ heard the good news?

Germans driven back seven kilometres!"

And at last a curious mental condition sets in.

We lose interest in the cannon, and we go about our business, just as if those noises were not ringing in our ears, even as we sit at dinner in our hotel.

There is one little notice pasted up about the hotel that, simply as it reads, fills one with a new and more active terror than shell-fire:-- "_Il n'y a pas d'eau!

_" This is because the German shells have smashed the Waterworks at Wavre S.

Catherine.

And so, in the meantime, Antwerp's hotels are flooded with carbolic, and we drink only mineral waters, and wait (hopeful as ever) for the great day when the bathrooms will be opened again.

These nights are stiflingly hot.

And the mosquitoes still linger.

Indeed they are so bad sometimes that I put eucalyptus oil on my pillow to keep them away.

How strange that all this terrific firing should not have frightened them off!

I come to the conclusion that mosquitoes are deaf.

The curious thing is, no one can tell, by looking at Antwerp, that she is going through the greatest page in all her varied history.

Her shops are open.

People sit at crowded cafés sipping their coffee or beer.

A

magnificent calm prevails.

There is no sense of active danger.

The lights go out at seven instead of eight.

By ten o'clock the city is asleep, save for the coming and going of clattering troops over the rough-flagged streets and avenues.

Grapes and pears and peaches are displayed in luxuriant profusion, at extraordinarily low prices.

Fish and meat are dearer, but chickens are still very cheap.

The "_Anversois_" still take as much trouble over their cooking, which is uncommonly good, even for Belgium.

And then on Saturday, with the sharpness and suddenness of lightning, the terrible rumour goes round that Antwerp is going to _surrender_,--yes, surrender--rather than run the risk of being destroyed like Louvain, and Termonde, and Aerschot.

The Legation has received orders that the Government is about to be moved to Ostend.

Crowds of people begin to hurry out of Antwerp in motor cars, until the city looks somewhat like London on a Sunday afternoon, half-empty, and full of bare spaces, instead of crowded and animated as Antwerp has been ever since the Government moved here from Brussels.

And then, on Sunday, comes a change.

The news spreads like wild-fire that the Legations have had their orders countermanded early in the morning.

They are to wait further instructions.

Something has happened.

_THE

ENGLISH ARE COMING!

_ CHAPTER XXVIII MONDAY

A golden, laughing day is this 5th of October.

As I fly along in my car I soon sense a new current, vivid and electric, flowing along with the stream of Belgian life.

Oh, the change in the sad, hollow-eyed Belgian officers and men!

They felt that help was coming at last.

All this time they had fought alone, unaided.

There was no one who could come to them, no one free to help them.

And the weeks passed into months, and Liège, and Louvain, and Brussels, and Aerschot, and Namur, and Malines, and Termonde have all fallen, one by one.

And high hopes have been blighted, and the enemy in its terrific strength has swept on and on, held back continually by the ardour and valour of the little Belgian Army which is still indomitable at heart, but tired, very tired.

Haggard, hollow-eyed, exhausted, craving the rest they may not have, these glorious heroes revive as if by magic under the knowledge that other troops are coming to help theirs in this gargantuan struggle for Antwerp.

The yellow khaki seems to sweep along with the blue uniforms like sunlight.

But the gentle-faced, slow-speaking English are humble and modest enough, God knows!

"It's the high-explosive shells that we mind most," says a Belgian Lieutenant to an English Tommy.

"P'raps we'll mind them too," says Tommy humbly.

"We ain't seen them yet!"

At the War Office, Count Chabeau has given me a special permit to go to Lierre.

Out past Mortsell, I notice a Belgian lady standing among a crowd of soldiers.

She wears black.

Her dress is elegant, yet simple.

I admire her furs, and I wonder what on earth she is doing here, right out in the middle of the fortifications, far from the city.

Belgian ladies are seldom seen in these specified zones.

Suddenly her eyes meet mine, and she comes towards me, drawn by the knowledge that we are both women.

She leans in at my car window.

And then she tells me her story, and I learn why she looks so pale and worried.

Just down the road, a little further on, in the region in which we may not pass, is her villa, which has been suddenly requisitioned by the English.

All in a hurry yesterday, Madame packed up, and hurried away to Antwerp, to arrange for her stay there.

This morning she has returned to fetch her dogs.

But voilà!

She reaches this point and is stopped.

The way is blocked.

She must not go on.

No one can pass without a special laisser-passer;

which she hasn't got.

[Illustration: A SPECIAL PERMIT.

] So here, hour after hour, since six o'clock in the morning, she stands, waiting pitifully for a chance to get back to her villa and take away her dogs, that she fears may be starving.

"Mes pauvre chiens!"

she keeps exclaiming.

And now a motor car approaches from the direction of Lierre, with an English officer sitting beside the chauffeur.

I tell him the story of the dogs and ask what can be done.

The officer does not reply.

He almost looks as if he has not heard.

His calm, cool face shows little sign of anything at all.

He merely turns his car round and flashes away along the white tree-shadowed and cannon-lined road that he has just traversed.

Ten minutes go by, then another ten.

Then back along the road flashes the grey car.

And there again is Colonel Farquharson, cool, calm, and unperturbed.

And behind him, in the car, barking joyfully at the sight of their mistress, are three big dogs.

"Mais comme les Anglais sont gentils!"

say the Belgian soldiers along the road.

* * * * * Out of the burning town of Lierre that same day a canary and a grey Congo parrot are tenderly handed over to my care by a couple of English Tommies who have found them in a burning house.

The canary is in a little red cage, and the Tommies have managed to put in some lumps of sugar.

"The poor little thing is starving!"

says a Tommy compassionately.

"It'll be better with you, ma'am."

I bring the birds back in my car to Antwerp.

But the parrot is very frightened.

He will not eat.

He will not drink.

He looks as if he is going to die, until I ask Mr. Cherry Kearton to come and see him.

And then, voilà!

The famous English naturalist bends over him, talks, pets him, and in a few minutes "Coco" is busy trimming Cherry Kearton's moustache with his little black beak, and from that very moment the bird begins to recover.

As I write the parrot and canary sit here on my table, the parrot perching on the canary's cage.

The boom of cannon is growing fainter and fainter as the Germans appear to be pushed further and further back; the canary is singing, and the grey parrot is cracking nuts; and I think of the man who rescued them, and hope that all goes well with him, who, with death staring him in the face, had time and thought to save the lives of a couple of birds.

His name he told me was Sergeant Thomas Marshall of Winston Churchill's Marines.

He said: "If you see my wife ever, you can tell her you've met me, ma'am."

CHAPTER XXIX TUESDAY