Atrocities And The Socialist "With these sentries holding us up at every cross-roads, there is no use trying to get to Antwerp," said the free-lance. "Yes, there is," retorted the chauffeur. "Watch me the next time." He beckoned to the first sentry barring the way, and, leaning over, whispered into the man's ear a single word. The sentry saluted, and, stepping to one side, motioned us on in a manner almost deferential. We had hardly been compelled to stop. After our tedious delays this was quite exhilarating. How our chauffeur obtained the password we did not know, nor did we challenge the inclusion of 8 francs extra in his memorandum of expenses. As indicated, he was a man of parts. The magic word of the day, "France," now opened every gate to us. Behind the Antwerp fortifications the Belgian sappers and miners were on an organized rampage of destruction. On a wide zone every house, windmill and church was either going up in flames or being hammered level to the ground. We came along as the oil was applied to an old house and saw the flames go crackling up through the rafters. The black smoke curled away across the wasted land and the fire glowed upon the stolid faces of the soldiers and the trembling woman who owned it. To her it was a funeral pyre. Her home endeared by lifetime memories was being offered up on the altar of Liberty and Independence. Starting with the invaders on the western frontier, clear through to Antwerp by the sea, a wild black swathe had been burnt. By such drastic methods space was cleared for the guns in the Belgian forts, and to the advancing besiegers no protection would be offered from the raking fire. The heart of a steel-stock owner would have rejoiced to see the maze of wire entanglement that ran everywhere. In one place a tomato-field had been wired; the green vines, laden with their rich red fruit, were intertwined with the steel vines bearing their vicious blood-drawing barbs whose intent was to make the red field redder still. We had just passed a gang digging man-holes and spitting them with stakes, when an officer cried: "Stop! No further passage here. You must turn back." "Why?" we asked protestingly. "The entire road is being mined," he replied. Even as he spoke we could see a liquid explosive being poured into a sort of cup, and electric wires connected. The officer pictured to us a regiment of soldiers advancing, with the full tide of life running in their veins, laughing and singing as they marched in the smiling sun. Suddenly the road rocks and hell heaves up beneath their feet; bodies are blown into the air and rained back to the earth in tiny fragments of human flesh; while brains are spattered over the ground, and every crevice runs a rivulet of blood. He sketched this in excellent English, adding: "A magnificent climax for Christian civilzation, eh! And that's my business. But what else can one do?" For the task of setting this colossal stage for death, the entire peasant population had been mobilized to assist the soldiers. In self-defense Belgium was thus obliged to drive the dagger deep into her own bosom. It seemed indeed as if she suffered as much at her own hands, as at the hands of the enemy. To arrest the advancing scourge she impressed into her service dynamite, fire and flood. I saw the sluice-gates lifted and meadows which had been waving with the golden grain of autumn now turned into silver lakes. So suddenly had the waters covered the land that hay- cocks bobbed upon the top of the flood, and peasants went out in boats to dredge for the beets and turnips which lay beneath the waters. The roads were inundated and so we ran along an embankment which, like a levee, lifted itself above the water wastes. The sun, sinking down behind the flaming poplars in the west, was touching the rippling surface into myriad colors. It was like a trip through Fairyland, or it would have been, were not men on all sides busy preparing for the bloody shambles. After these elaborate defensive works the Belgians laughed at any one taking Antwerp, the impregnable fortress of Western Europe. The Germans laughed, too. But it was the bass, hollow laugh of their great guns placed ten to twenty miles away, and pouring into the city such a hurricane of shell and shrapnel that they forced its evacuation by the British and the Belgians. Through this vast array of works which the reception committee had designed for their slaughter, the Germans came marching in as if on dress parade. A few shells were even now crashing through Malines and had played havoc with the carillon in the cathedral tower. During a lull in the bombardment we climbed a stairway of the belfry where, above us, balanced great stones which a slight jar would send tumbling down. On and up we passed vents and jagged holes which had been ripped through these massive walls as if they were made of paper. It was enough to carry the weight of one's somber reflections without the addition of cheerful queries of the movie-man as to "how would you feel if the German gunners suddenly turned loose again?" We gathered in a deal of stone ornaments that had been shot down and struggled with a load of them to our car. Later they became a weight upon our conscience. When Cardinal Mercier starts the rebuilding of his cathedral, we might surprise him with the return of a considerable portion thereof. To fetch these souvenirs through to England, we were compelled to resort to all the tricks of a gang of smugglers. I made also a first rate collection of German posters. By day I observed the location of these placards, announcing certain death to those who "sniped on German troops," "harbored courier- pigeons," or "destroyed" these self-same posters. At night with trembling hands I laid cold compresses on them until the adhering paste gave way; then, tucking the wet sheets beneath my coat, I stole back to safety. At last in England I feasted my eyes on the precious documents, dreaming of the time when posterity should rejoice in the possession of these posters relating to the German overlordship of Belgium, and give thanks to the courage of their collector. Unfortunately, their stained and torn appearance grated on the aesthetic sensibilities of the maid. "Where are they?" I demanded on my return to my room one time, as I missed them. "Those nasty papers?" she inquired naively. "Those priceless souvenirs," I returned severely. She did not comprehend, but with a most aggravatingly sweet expression said: "They were so dirty, sir, I burned them all up." She couldn't understand why I rewarded her with something akin to a fit of apoplexy, instead of a liberal tip. That day was a red-letter one for our photographers. They paid the price in the risks which constantly strained their nerves. But in it they garnered vastly more than in the fortnight they had hugged safety. But, despite all our efforts, there was one object that we were after that we never did attain. That was a first-class atrocity picture. There were atrocity stories in endless variety, but not one that the camera could authenticate. People were growing chary of verbal assurances of these horrors; they yearned for some photographic proof, and we yearned to furnish it. "What features are you looking for?" was the question invariably put to us on discovering our cameras. "Children with their hands cut off," we replied. "Are there any around here?" "Oh, yes! Hundreds of them," was the invariable assurance. "Yes, but all we want is one—just one in flesh and bone. Where can we find that?" 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 assailants 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 bestial 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 damn them." Some one proposed that the only way to get a first-class 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 constitutes 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 constituted 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. |