The Second Bombardment Of Termonde

September 15th was our day with Henry Verhagen, the tall gray alderman of the town that was once Termonde.

During all the time I was with him Verhagen did not speak a bitter word. On the contrary, he was calm—particularly calm as he stood beside the mound where the Belgian soldiers were buried in the center of the ruined town, pointed to the pile of bricks where he had lived, and told us how in two nights he had lost 340,000 francs, his son, his factory, and his home. It was from him, from the burgomaster's wife, and from a priest that we learned the story of the city that had ceased to be.

It was the night before that I had wandered into Ghent alone, without even the excitement of getting arrested. Luther, who became restive early the next morning while I was jotting notes in the log-book, went off in search of adventure. Because of the influence exerted by Vice- Consul Van Hee an arrangement was very soon made whereby a Belgian Government car and chauffeur were placed at our disposal. We had no laissez-passer for the firing line; but we were accompanied by the United States Consul and not governed by any stipulation as to our destination. In our Belgian car, decorated with all the American flags we could find, and "American Consular Service" pasted in huge letters on the windshield and side flaps, we raced along the Boulevard de l'lndustrie, swung into the southern suburbs, and, once outside the city limits, we opened up the exhaust and threw down the throttle as Van Hee shouted out the order:—"To Termonde!"

Termonde was at that time the scene of determined fighting between units of the ninth German Corps and the Belgian defenders. Situated as it is, twenty-one miles southeast of Ghent, it marks the southwest corner of a square formed by Louvain and Termonde on the south, by Ghent and Antwerp on the north. It controlled the bridge over the River Scheldt and with it an important approach to Antwerp, the capital at that time of Belgium. The heavy German siege guns, capable of demolishing a first-class fort at a range of several miles, could not have crossed the river so easily at any other point. For this reason the Germans particularly wanted Termonde—an open bridge to Antwerp was always worth the taking. The town had already at that time been captured and recaptured; wounded and refugees were swarming into Ghent full of battle stories and tales of terrible atrocities. So it was Termonde that we vowed we would see.

We first saw Verhagen trudging in the same direction as ourselves on the level, dusty road two miles southwest of Ghent. As we approached a cross-road marked by a tavern, a couple of direction-posts, and nondescript stucco buildings, we made out two Belgian sentries, with their rifles lifted overhead and indulging in some acrobatic exercises which we interpreted as a signal to halt. Van Hee swapped cigarettes with them and gossiped in their native tongue, in return for which they gave us some good advice. They warned us to pay no attention to sign-posts, which, in order to fool the enemy, were either marked with false names or else were pointed in the wrong direction. While we were talking, a tall gray alderman came along the road with a greasy package under his arm and at his side a priest—one of those ubiquitous black-robed figures with a hat like an inverted oatmeal bowl.

"Where to?" asked the Vice-Consul of Ghent.

"A Dendermonde," (to Termonde), answered Verhagen, sizing us up as strangers, and using French instead of the local Flemish dialect.

"You know the road?"

"Yes, well," said Verhagen; and so, partly because of charity and partly because we could have him as a useful guide, we took him into the car.

As we sped through the level lanes of poplars, challenged as usual by every Belgian regular or Garde Civique who could boast a uniform, the smooth green meadows of Flanders with their trim hamlets of stucco and tile seemed to deny the reports of savagery we had heard the night before. We had been told, and we had read, of German atrocities, and we had talked with survivors of Louvain. There was pillage, burning, and looting in Louvain, we had agreed, but the cruelty to women and children was the better part myth. And at all events, there was a semblance of cause for that. Perhaps there had been more resistance, more sniping by citizens than generally known, and perhaps the German side had not been fully explained.

Then suddenly Termonde lay before us. The center of the bridge was gone. Splintered timber sticking on end lay in the mud at the river's side, along with iron beams torn by the charges of dynamite. The current was choked with masses of steel and wood. We crawled across some temporary beams reconstructed by Belgian engineers, and entered the ruins with a handful of Termonde's citizens who had come back for the first time to see what was left of their homes.

"I will take you to the center," said Verhagen. "That is where my house was."

A quarter of a mile behind us, as the alderman sat upon a rock beside the gravestone, lay the thin neck of the Upper Scheldt, less than one hundred yards wide at this point, where it curved between the lines of charred and flattened buildings. We could still see the rush of water tumbling and splashing through the wreckage of the bridge we had just crossed. Twice it had been dynamited and twice rebuilt in part, so that at present a single line of slippery beams, suspended a few feet above the water and supported by some heavy wire, was all that remained between ourselves and the retreating road to Ghent. From the direction of Alost came the desultory boom of German guns; across the stream behind us the Belgian outposts whiled away the time with cigarettes and cards. Shaggy horses dozed against the gun trucks, and the men of artillery, some stretched at full length in the sun, others sitting bolt upright with arms folded, slept soundly on the gun carriages. We could hear the stream gurgling. We could hear the creak of a lazy windmill, and, coming somewhere from the smoking piles, the hideous howl of starving hounds. Of other human sounds there were none except the voice of Verhagen.

Ten days before Termonde had been a thriving town; that day it was a heap of smouldering ashes. America had heard a good deal about Tirlemont and Louvain, but not much of Termonde. Because this was a war of millions, it did not count in the news—for it was only a community of twelve thousand inhabitants, as pretty and quaint as the province of Flanders boasts, the prosperous center of its rope and cordage manufacture, with fifteen hundred houses, barracks, two statues, a town-hall, five churches, an orphan asylum, and a convent.

Now only one of the churches stood, as well as the building where the officers were quartered, the Museum of Antiquity, and perhaps a dozen others. Across the moat, which led to the gateway of what were formerly the inner fortifications, were piles of rotting horseflesh. The bronze statue of De Smet, the Jesuit missionary, looked calmly on the scene. All the rest was blotted out. There was no sign of hot-tempered impetuous work of a handful of drunken Uhlans, a fire started in anger and driven by the wind throughout the entire town. There was not a breath of wind. That the night was calm was shown by the fact that here and there single houses, even houses built of boards, were spared at the commander's word. The convent was burnt and pillaged, stones and mortar littered the street in front of the Hotel de Ville, and upon the sidewalk lay the famous bells which came crashing to the street below when shells burst in the belfry. From cellar to garret nearly every remaining house was systematically drenched with naphtha and the torch applied, and when all was over hundreds of gallons were tossed into the River Scheldt. Over a small group of houses in the poorer section of the city, where the prostitutes were quartered, grim Prussian humor, or perhaps a sense of value received, had prompted the conquerors to write in great white chalk marks in German script, "Gute Leute. Nicht brennen!" (Good people. Do not burn!)

For an hour we walked through the silence of ashes and stone, stumbling over timber and debris, tangled and twisted wire, a fallen statue, broken bells or the cross-piece of a spire; we made our way through piles of beds, chairs, singed mattresses, and stepped over the carcass of a horse with its belly bloated and flies feasting on its glassy eyes. We entered an apothecary shop where the clock still ticked upon the counter. Thinking there could be no reason of war to call for the destruction of the orphan asylum, we entered its portals to investigate. Before us lay burnt beds and littered glass. We searched what ten days before had been a convent, and crawled over heaps of logs and brick into narrow alleys that reminded one of Naples or Pompeii—alleys where the walls stood so close as to hide the light of sun but not the odor of charred vats and sewage and smouldering, smelling things, long dead. Not far from there the way widened into the light, and before us, breaking the rays of sunset, stood the cross above a heap of cobblestones.

"They are buried here," said Verhagen, "and here too is my house."

Another alderman, a friend of Verhagen, who had been allowed to remain in Termonde most of the four days that the Germans stayed, had the story detailed in his little pocket diary. On Thursday, September 3, he said, he was just leaving his rope and twine factory when he heard the sounds of musketry to the south. A small force of Belgian outposts were completely surprised by a part of the Ninth German Army Corps under General von Boehn. They were completely outclassed. Before retreating, however, they let the enemy have a couple of volleys. In the return fire they lost six of their men. They then retreated into the town and across the bridge.

Nothing happened after dark, but the next morning at nine o'clock the cannonading started. Inside of half an hour, according to the villagers, the entire German force of the One Hundred and Sixty-second and One Hundred and Sixty-third Uhlans and the Ninetieth Regiment of infantry of the Ninth Army Corps were in the town. They entered simultaneously by three different roads. The burgomaster was ordered immediately to provide rations for the regiment. But the burgomaster was away. He was given twelve hours to return. When he did not return, the burning began, according to the townspeople.

"The soldiers did not wish to burn the town," said one man; "but the orders were orders of war." He recounted that four Uhlans entered his house with a bow, and a knock at the door, politely helped themselves to his cellar, drank a toast to his wife, put his chairs in the street, and sat there playing his phonograph. They said they were sorry, but the house must be burnt. But before pouring on the naphtha and lighting the flame they freed his canary bird. Verhagen and the priest agreed that fright brought on an attack to a woman about to become a mother, and that she fell in the Rue de l'Eglise. A German lieutenant saw the trouble, put her on a stretcher made of window shutters, and called the German army doctor. She was sent to a field hospital and tenderly cared for until she and the child could be moved. Such incidents in strange relief, told by men who had lost everything, lent corroboration, if such were necessary, to the burden of their story of the relentless destruction of the town itself.

Our little band was the first to enter the ruins of Termonde after its abandonment by the Ninth German Army Corps. And by a coincidence, we were the last to leave. That very evening, at precisely the time we were crawling across the broken timbers that spanned the Scheldt and connected us with Belgium-owned Belgium, the Germans again pumped heavy artillery fire into the town. This was later known as the second German bombardment and occupation of Termonde. Because of superior artillery range, the attack had the cruel advantage of the man who can strike and still stay out of reach. On that evening at six-thirty, the Teutons sent a few warning shells into the debris, and then the first column of scouts entered simultaneously by the two southern gates. It was just at six-thirty that our party started back for Ghent.

As we crawled across on all fours the remaining beams cracked beneath our feet and the Belgian engineers called on us to hurry. "Oh, Tiber! Father Tiber," we thought as the last of us got across; but unlike Horatius at the bridge, we were on the right side when engineers applied the match to a small charge of dynamite, and the beams crashed and the remaining planks of Termonde's bridge writhed and twisted in the rushing waters.

Twenty-seven miles away, when we whirled through the gates of Ghent later in the evening, we said "Au revoir" to Verhagen and the mendicant priest, and went to our rooms. At midnight came a rap at the door; my gray-haired alderman broke into the room, bursting with the latest news, his eyes aflame with excitement.

"Revanche!" he exclaimed dramatically; "our enemies have paid for it in blood!"

Sure enough, after a few preliminary shells—a sort of here-we-come salvo—the head of the German column had entered, and a party of staff officers, for purposes of reconnaissance, immediately mounted the spire of the only remaining church. The officers of the Ninth German Army Corps swept the landscape with their glasses, but the level plains gave nothing to their sight. They saw only the ashes of Termonde, the river, and the straight stretch of sandy roads and stucco hamlets beyond.

They did not notice a valley of covered ground and a quarter-mile stretch of trees and shrubbery, where three squads of Belgian field artillery were neatly hidden. Here the men took cover at the first sound of cannonade. Quietly in their retreat the Belgian artillery officers had figured the range and elevation of the cathedral tower, not over fifteen hundred yards away. Just as darkness was setting in and the figures in the belfry were clearly visible, the battery sergeant sharply dropped his arm.

"C-r-r-m-p-h!" coughed the field pieces as the gunners drew the levers home. There were four sharp reports, four flashes of flame and smoke, the crescendo moan of tons of flying steel—and the church tower, the bells, and the German officers came crashing to the ground.