Woman's Experiences in the Great War — Chapters 29-31

It is Tuesday now.

At seven o'clock in the morning old sad-eyed Maria knocks at my door.

"Good news, Madame!

Malines has been retaken!"

That is cheering.

And old Maria and myself, like everyone else, are eager to believe the best.

The grey day, however, is indescribably sombre.

From a high, grassy terrace at the top of the hotel I look out across the city towards the points where the Germans are attacking us.

Great black clouds that yet are full of garish light float across the city, and through the clouds one, two, three, four aeroplanes can be seen, black as birds, and moving continually hither and thither, while far below the old town lies, with its towers and gilded Gothic beauty, and its dark red roofs, and its wide river running to meet the sea.

I go down to the War Office and see Commandant Chabeau.

He looks pale and haggard.

His handsome grey eyes are full of infinite sadness.

"To-day it would be wiser, Madame, that you don't go out of the city," he says in his gentle, chivalrous voice.

"C'est trop dangereux!"

I want to ask him a thousand questions.

I ask him nothing, I go away, back to the hotel.

One o'clock, and we learn that the fighting outside is terribly hot.

Two o'clock.

Cars come flying in.

They tell us that shells are falling about five miles out, on Vieux Dieux.

Three o'clock.

A man rushes in and says that all is over; the last train leaves Antwerp to-night; the Government is going; it is our last chance to escape.

"How far is Holland?"

asks someone.

"About half an hour away," he answers.

I listen dreamily.

Holland sounds very near.

I wonder what I am going to do.

Am I going to stay and see the Germans enter?

But maybe they will never enter.

The unexpected will happen.

We shall be saved at the eleventh hour.

It is impossible that Antwerp can fall.

"They will be shelling the town before twenty-four hours," says one young man, and he calls for another drink.

When he has had it he says he wishes he hadn't. "They will never shell the town," says a choleric old Englishman.

And he adds in the best English manner, "It could never be permitted!"

Outside, the day dies down.

The sound of cannon has entirely ceased.

One can hear nothing now, nothing at all, but the loud and shrill cries of the newsboys and women selling _Le Matin d'Anvers_ and _Le Métropole_ in the streets.

A strange hushed silence hangs over the besieged city, and through the silence the clocks strike six, and almost immediately the _maître d'hôtel_ comes along and informs us that we ought to come in to dinner soon, as to-day the lights must go out at nightfall!

But I go into the streets instead.

It seems to me that the population of Antwerp has suddenly turned into peasants.

Peasants everywhere, in crowds, in groups, in isolated numbers.

Bareheaded women, hollow-cheeked men, little girls and boys, and all with bundles, some pathetically small, done up in white or blue cloths, and some huge and grotesque, under which the peasants stagger along through the streets that were fashionable streets only just now, and now have turned into a sort of sad travesty of the streets of some distant village.

A curious rosy hue falls over the faces in the streets, the shop-windows glow like rubies, the gold on the Gothic buildings burns like crimson fire.

Overhead a magnificent sunset is spreading its banners out over the deserted city.

Then night falls; the red fades; Antwerp turns grey and sombre.

But the memory of that rose in the west remains, and in hope we wait, we are still waiting, knowing not what the morrow may bring forth.

CHAPTER XXX WEDNESDAY

Last night the moon was so bright that my two pets, rescued from the ruins of Lierre, woke up and began to talk.

Or was it the big guns that woke them, the canary, and the grey Congo parrot?

It might have been!

For sometimes the city seemed to shake all over, and as I lay in bed I wondered who was firing: Germans, Belgians, English, which?

About three o'clock, between dozing and listening to the cannon, I heard a new sound, a strange sound, something so awful that I almost felt my hair creep with horror.

It was a man crying in the room under mine.

Through the blackness of the hour before dawn a cry came stealing: "_Mon fils!

Mon fils!

_" Out of the night it came, that sudden terrific revelation of what is going on everywhere beneath the outward calm of this nation of heroes.

And one had not realised it because one had seen so few tears.

One had almost failed to understand, in the outer calm of the Belgians, what agony went on beneath.

And now, in the midnight, the veil is torn aside, and I see a human heart in extremis, writhing with agony, groaning as the wounded never groan, stricken, bleeding, prostrate, overwhelmed with the enormity of its sorrow.

"_Mon fils!

Mon fils!

_" Since I heard that old man weeping I want to creep to the feet of Christ and the Mother of Christ, and implore Their healing for these poor innocent broken hearts, trodden under the brutal feet of another race of human beings.

* * * * * At four, unable to sleep, I rose and dressed and went downstairs.

In the dim, unswept palm court I saw a bearded man with two umbrellas walking feverishly up and down, while the sleepy night porter leaned against a pillar yawning, watching for the cab that the _chass_ had gone to look for.

It came at last, and the bearded gentleman, with a sigh, stepped in, and drove away into the dusky dawn, a look of unutterable sadness seeming to cloak his face and form as he disappeared.

"_Il est triste, ce monsieur là_," commented our voluble little Flemish porter.

"He is a Minister of the Government, and he must leave Antwerp, he must depart for Ostend.

His boat leaves at five o'clock this morning."

"So the Government is really moving out," I think to myself mechanically.

A little boy runs in from the chill dawn-lit streets.

It is only half-past four, but a Flemish paper has just come out.

--_Het Laatste Nieuws.

_ The boy throws it on the table where I sit writing to my sister in England, who is anxious for my safety.

I struggle to find out what message lies behind those queer Flemish words.

_De Toestand Te Antwerpen Is Zeer Ernstig.

_ What does it mean?

_Zeer Ernstig?

_ Is it good?

Is it bad?

I don't know the word.

I call to the night porter, and he comes out and translates to me, and as I glean the significance of the news I admire that peasant boy's calm.

"_La situation à Anvers est grave_" he says.

"The Burgomaster announces to the population that the bombardment of Antwerp and its environs is imminent.

It is understood, of course" (translating literally), "that neither the threat nor the actual bombardment will have any effect on the strength of our resistance, which will continue to the very last extremity!"

So we know the worst now.

Antwerp is not to hand herself over to the Germans.

She is going to fight to the death.

Well, we are glad of it!

We know it is the only thing she could have done!

* * * * * And now the hotel wakes right up, and dozens of sleepy, worn, hollow-cheeked officers and soldiers in dirty boots come down the red-carpeted stairs clamouring for their _café-au-lait_.

The morning is very cold, and they shiver sometimes, but they are better after the coffee and I watch them all go off smoking cigarettes.

Poor souls!

Poor souls!

After the coffee, smoking cigarettes, they hurry away, to....

The day is past sunrise now, and floods of golden light stream over the city, where already great crowds are moving backwards and forwards.

Cabs drive up continually to the great railway station opposite with piles of luggage, and I think dreamily how very like they are to London four-wheelers, taking the family away to the seaside!

And still the city remains marvellously calm, in spite of the ever-increasing movements.

People are going away in hundreds, in thousands.

But they are going quietly, calmly.

Processions of black-robed nuns file along the avenues under the fading trees.

Long lines of Belgian cyclists flash by in an opposite direction in their gay yellow and green uniforms.

The blue and red of the French and English banners never looked brighter as the wind plays with them, and the sunlight sparkles on them, while the great black and red and gold Belgian flags lend that curious note of sombre dignity to the crowded streets.

But not a word of regret from anyone.

That is the Belgian way.

Belgians all, to-day I kneel at your feet.

Oh God, what those people are going through!

God, what they are suffering and to suffer!

How can they bear it?

Where do they get their heroism?

Is it--it must be--from Above!

[Illustration: BELGIAN REFUGEES IN HOLLAND] CHAPTER XXXI THE CITY IS SHELLED

That day, seated in wicker chairs in the palm court, we held a counsel of war, all the War-Correspondents who were left.

The question was whether the Hotel Terminus was not in too dangerous a position.

Its extreme nearness to the great railway station made its shelling almost inevitable when the bombardment of the city began in earnest.

We argued a lot.

One suggested one hotel, one another.

To be directly northward was clearly desirable, as the shells would come from southward.

Mr. Cherry Kearton, Mr. Cleary, and Mr. Marshall, decided on the Queen's Hotel, somewhere near the quay.

Their point was that it would be easier to get away from there.

Mr. Robinson and Mr. Phillips refused to change from the Terminus.

Mr. Fox, Mr. Lucien Arthur Jones, and myself chose the Wagner, as being in the most northerly direction, the farthest away from the forts, and the nearest to the Breda Gate, which led to Holland.

In the moonlight, after dinner, taking my canary with me, I moved to my new quarters, accompanied to the doors by that little band of Englishmen, Cherry Kearton carrying my parrot.

It was then ten o'clock.

Strange things were to happen before we met again.

Precisely at eleven the first shell fell.

Whiz!

It fled in a fury across the sky and burst somewhere in the direction of the Cathedral.

As it exploded I shut my eyes, clenched my hands, and sank on the floor by my bedside, saying to myself, "God, I'm dead!"

And I thought I was too.

The enormity of that sound-sensation seemed to belong to a transition from this world to the next.

It scarcely seemed possible to pass through that noise and come out alive.

That was the first shell, and others followed quickly.

The Hotel was alive immediately.

Sleep was impossible.

I crept down into the vestibule.

It was all dark, save for one little light at the porter's door!

I got a chair, drew it close to the light and sat down.

I had a note-book and pencil, and to calm and control myself and not let my brain run riot I made notes of exactly what people said.

I sat there all night long!

Every now and then the doors would burst open and men and women would rush in.

Once it was two slim, elegant ladies in black, with white fox stoles, who had run from their house because a shell had set fire to the house next door.

They came into the pitch-black vestibule, moving about by the little point of light made by their tiny electric torch.

They asked for a room.

There was none.

So they asked to sit in the dark, empty restaurant, and as I saw them disappear into that black room where many refugees were already gathered, sleeping on chairs and floors and tables I could not help being amazed at the strangeness of it all, the unlikeness of it all to life,--these two gently-nurtured sisters with their gentle manners, their white furs, their electric light, gliding noiselessly along the burning, beshelled streets, and asking for a room in the first hotel they came to without a word about terror, and with expressions on their faces that utterly belied the looks of fright and terror that the stage has almost convinced us are the real thing.

Swing goes the door and in comes a man who asks the porter a question.

"Is Monsieur L. here?"

"Oui, Monsieur," replies the porter.

"Where is he?"

"He is in bed."

"Go to him and tell him that a shell has just fallen on the Bank of Anvers.

Tell him to rise and come out at once.

He is a Bank Official and he must come and help to save the papers before the bank is burned down!

Tell him Monsieur M. , the Manager, came for him."

Swing, and the Bank Manager has gone through the door again out into that black and red shrieking night.

Swing again, and three people hurry in, three Belgians, father, mother and a little fair-haired girlie, whom they hold by each hand, while the father cradles a big box of hard cash under one arm.

"The shells are falling all around our home!"

they say.

The porter points to the restaurant door.

"Merci bien," and "Je vous remerci beaucoup," murmur father and mother.

They vanish into the dark, unlit restaurant with its white table-cloths making pale points athward the stygian blackness of the huge room.

Then an Englishman comes down the stairs behind me, flapping his Burberry rainproof overcoat.

He is a War-Correspondent.

"What a smell!"

he says to the porter.

"Is gas escaping somewhere?"

"No, sir," says the porter, pulling his black moustache.

He is very distrait and hardly gives the famous War-Correspondent a thought.

"It _is_ gas!"

persists the War-Correspondent.

"There must be a leakage somewhere."

He opens the door.

A horrible whiff of burning petroleum and smoke blows in, and a Belgian soldier enters also.

"What's the smell?"

asks the War-Correspondent.

"The Germans are dropping explosives on the city, trying to set fire to it," answers the Belgian.

"Good lor, I must have a look!"

says the War-Correspondent.

He goes out.

Two wounded officers come down the stairs behind me.

"Bill, please, porter.

How much?

We must be off now to the forts!"

"Don't know the bill," says the porter.

"I'm new, the other man ran away.

He didn't like shells.

You can pay some other time, Messieurs!"

"Bien!"

says the officers.

They swing their dark cloaks across their shoulders and pass out.

They come back no more, no, never any more.

Then an old, old man limps in on the arm of a young, ever-young Sister of Mercy.

"He is deaf and dumb," she says, "I found him and brought him here.

He will be killed in the streets."

Her smile makes sunshine all over the blackness of that haunted hall;

the mercy of it, the sweetness of it, the holiness are something one can never forget as, guiding the old man, she leads him into the dark restaurant and tends him through the night.

Then again the door swings open.

"The petroleum tanks have been set on fire by the Belgians themselves!"

says a big man with a big moustache.

"This is the end."

He is the proprietor himself.

And here up from the stairs behind us that lead down into the cellars, comes his wife, wrapped in furs.

"Henri, I heard your voice.

I am going.

I cannot stand it.

I shall flee to Holland with little Marie.

Put me into the motor car.

My legs will not carry me.

I fear for the child so much!"

A kiss, and she and little Marie flee away through the madness of the night towards the Breda Gate and the safety of some Dutch village across the border.

Every now and then I would open the swing-doors and fly like mad on tip-toe to the corner of the Avenue de Commerce, and there, casting one swift glance right and left, I would take in the awful panorama of scarlet flames.

They were leaping now over the Marché Aux Souliers, the street which corresponds with our Strand.

While I watched I heard the shrieking rush of one shell after another, any one of which might of course well have fallen where I stood.

But I knew they wouldn't. I felt as safe and secure there in that shell-swept corner as if I had been a child again, at home in silent, sleepy, far-away Australia!

The fact is when you are in the midst of danger, with shells bursting round you, and the city on fire, and the Germans closing in on you, and your friends and home many hundreds of miles away, your brain works in an entirely different way from when you are living safely in your peaceful Midlands.

Quite unconsciously, one's ego asserts itself in danger, until it seems that one carries within one a world so important, so limitless, and immortal, that it appears invincible before hurt or death.

This is an illusion, of course; but what a beautiful and merciful one!

When danger comes your way this illusion will begin to weave a sort of fairy haze around you, making you feel that those shrieking shells can never fall on you!

Seldom indeed while I was at the front did I hear anyone say, "I'm afraid."

How deeply and compassionately considerate Nature is to us all!

She has supplied us with a store of emotional glands, and fitted us up with many a varying sensation, of which curiosity is the liveliest and strongest.

Then when it comes to a race between Fear and Curiosity, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred Curiosity wins hands down.

In real danger our curiosity, and our unconscious but deep-seated belief in the ego, carry us right over the frightful terrors that we imagine we should feel were we thinking the thing out quietly in a safe land.

_Then_, we tremble and shiver!

_Then_, we remember the word "Scream."

_Then_, we understand the meaning of fear!

_Then_, we run (in our thoughts) into caves and cellars.

But when the real thing comes we put our heads out of the windows, we run out into the streets, we go towards danger and not away from it, driven thither by the mighty emotion of Curiosity, which, when all is said and done, is one of the most delightful because the most electrifying of all human sensations.

Is this brutal?

Is it hard-hearted?

Is it callous, indifferent, cruel?

_No_!

For it bears no relation to our feelings for other people, _it only relates to our own sensations about ourselves_.

When a group of wounded Belgians comes limping along, you look into their hollow, blackened faces, you feel your heart break, and all your soul seems to dissolve in one mighty longing to die for these people who have sacrificed their all for _you_; and you run to them, you help them all you can, you experience a passionate desire to give them everything you have, you turn out your pockets for them, you search for something, anything, that will help them.

No!

You are not callous because you are curious!

Quite the reverse, in fact.

You are curious because you are alive, because you dwell in this one earth, and because you are created with the "sense" that you have a right to see and hear all the strange and wonderful things, all the terrors as well as all the glories that go to make up human existence.

Not to care, not to want to see, not to want to know, that is the callousness beyond redemption!

CHAPTER XXXII