Chapter III: The Belgian Engagements: Eghezee, Haelen

In a country, or town, under war conditions, all the usual facilities of civilisation are suspended. Post, telegraph and train cease, so far as civilians are concerned. Trams, carriages and automobiles are required for military purposes. Movement out of, or even within, a town is practically stopped. Not only are the countries sorted out by nationalities, but even each town and village. A strange face is an object of suspicious inquiry. A stranger finds it difficult to stay at places where he is; it is all but impossible for him to leave them. Permits of a particular kind are needed for any journey; and these are constantly changing. The precautions are, of course, necessary, especially to counteract an elaborate spy-system, such as that of the Germans. They place, however, immense difficulties in the way of war correspondence. To get the necessary permits for motor travel, the only method of safe passage for a correspondent, is a matter of much time and difficulty. When they are obtained, there remains to find a car still unrequisitioned, and the services of a driver free from military service and of absolutely sound nerves. In this I was exceptionally fortunate. To "Lèon the chauffeur" is due the success which attended my first efforts to get near the battle line, our pleasant reception in almost all cases there, and our not infrequent escapes from awkward situations. I was able to make some small return in the rescue of his jolly family of babies from Brussels on the morning of the German entry.

Our first excursion towards the actual fighting was a race down the Belgian lines as far as Namur, to visit the French troops. They had then just reached the Meuse, and were lined, holding the bank towards Dinant.

Liége had fallen. A few forts were said to be holding out; but communications were cut off.

Brussels, Friday.

A dash down the fighting lines to the south to-day showed us at points along the route signs of the fierce little fights which have taken place. The Belgians have held their positions magnificently.

Our car was stopped every few miles to convey wounded. In these hot days the troops, lying waiting along the trenches, have been greatly suffering from the sun. The Belgian army cap is highly unpractical. We carried a load of some five thousand handkerchiefs, which were distributed, as well as the usual journals and cigarettes.

There were intervals of sunlit fields--then masses of dark uniformed troops. Occasionally chains and wire entanglements appeared suddenly through the trees by the wayside.

French troops--jolly fellows, fit and in great spirits--were in Namur. The sight of cyclists returning from the little victory at Eghezee, garlanded with flowers, was tremendously acclaimed.

As we returned in the exquisite summer night we kept passing the shadows of moving troops in the thin darkness. Three times we heard the sound of sabots and singing, where the peasants and children were gathered round the priests, under the trees, in supplicatory services to the Virgin. As a contrast, twice again during the rush home through the night there was a flash and report from a nervous sentry, and one bullet struck our car.

The Belgian army lay along the line Diest, Tirlemont, Jodoigne, stretching towards Namur. The Headquarters were at Louvain. It covered Brussels, and at the same time anticipated a flanking movement on the north, by Hasselt. The main body occupied field trenches and forts protected by wire entanglements. It was continually harried by the countless bodies of roving Uhlans, and suffered considerably from the heat, as it lay unoccupied in the trenches. It had done magnificently in the forts; how would it do in the field? It was a time of waiting, of small distracting engagements. None of us knew where the real stroke would fall.

I spent the next few days at Louvain and in various villages on the lines, visiting the wounded in the cottages and shelters.

Thursday.

Barricades and guards on every road. The country absolutely at peace. The peasants working at the crops. But "the Prussians"--for we do not speak of "Germans"--are pressing us on the north; they are threatening and breaking in on the south. The first menaces, but the second may compel our retreat on Antwerp.

As we run out of Brussels down the shady avenues we are blocked by little mazes of tram-cars, dragged across the road. Further on, at every corner, crossing and hamlet, there are barriers of waggons, of driven logs or piled trees. From these the Civil Guard threaten with levelled guns. Dangerous citizens, in mediæval hats; they loose off on suspicion, and are as zealous as most amateurs. They will run on to a roof to shoot at an aeroplane 2,000 feet above them, regardless of damage that may be done by their falling bullets.

Further from the town the uniforms get more patchy; a bowler hat with the colours of Belgium round it is one of the smartest insignia. In the hamlets we have the peasants in blouses; but with business-like rifles, readily handled. Good fellows; stern on their job; but, once satisfied, ready to laugh back and exchange news. And everywhere ubiquitous jolly children, scrambling about, even on the barriers behind the bayonets. A little blue monster, with a large bottle, hopped and chuckled with glee as a surly guard all but fired on us from mere boredom.

We are racing down the line to Namur. Small engagements with Uhlans are of hourly occurrence to-day in the domestic-looking fields. The châteaux are deserted. Everyone has an anxious eye on the horizon.

My red ensign is saluted cheerily by the soldiers, but it has to be explained to the sturdy peasant guards. An officer stops me to tell me that I am an Englishman, and to explain that he is riding on a horse this morning captured from the Germans. The German horses are good; but the Belgians ride better.

We are practically among the Namur defences. The challenges come every two minutes, or less. The fields are scarred with modern "forts"; great wire entanglements, twisted boughs, and red and yellow trenches, sometimes roofed with the new-cut crops. Little bodies of soldiers, small, wiry, intelligent men and boys, with pleasant faces already rough with exposure, crowd round to chat and to welcome the cigarettes and newspapers.

"There has been a skirmish here," they tell us; "Two prisoners are in that cottage"; "Three wounded in the church"; and again and again they ask, "Where are the English?" and "How many are the French?" Ah, if we knew! For the Belgian army has played the hero in fort and open field; but many know they are hard-pressed. Our talk is of the demoralisation of the Germans, and of their hunger when captured.

In the middle of a little green wood, sheltered from aeroplanes, suddenly we are in a fort. Vicious guns are trained on to a cottage-hedge in full flower, that has been left standing to screen them for the time. Close beside them, some twenty boys are bathing in a shady pool. But they are curiously quiet. The chances of fight and death are too near. And, as in all wars, there are terrible stories growing of the savagery of the enemy.

Dark, waspish little soldiers lie seemingly at haphazard through the fields, and they fill the streets of Namur. The town is oddly still. Even the huge masonry of the fortress, hanging above the beautiful wooded gorge of the Meuse, seems to share in a suppressed, shifting quiet of expectancy.

We wheel out of the town, this time not to see again our French friends, but away to where the pressure is closest. Only last night an audacious German detachment of some 300 pressed within a few miles of the town, at Eghezee, and paid for its folly. Taking possession of the Chateau of Boneff, they looted the house, and sat down to cook rice on the stubble slope by the road. An airman marked them down. A small body of Belgians crept along the road, from Namur, "on all fours," occupied the trenches already prepared in the potato slope opposite--finding no sentries or outposts--and swept the detachment at close range. Prisoners, dead, and wounded, few were able to retreat; but the remainder had some revenge a few hours later on a rash cyclist contingent of Belgians which followed them too far.

While I walked the field the horses were still being charred and buried, the saddlery and cooking pots collected.

Cavalry patrols of dark, hard-bitten little soldiers speckled the country round. A careworn young lieutenant arrested me the first time. He hardly attended to the papers, rolling a cigarette and murmuring courteously and constantly: "There are so many spies about."

As we pushed on and out on field tracks for a further view, the car appeared to materialise a succession of cantering patrols out of the empty sunlit spaces of fields. Some were courteous: some not. But all, fortunately, had more serious business to attend to in the end.

At last we spied a more stealthy line of jogging helmets circuiting behind trees far ahead. This time we decided that arrest, even after a race, would be the lesser risk to take. We turned and spurted back, our doubts confirmed by seeing two or three unexpected lines of dots concentrating upon us or our pursuers. We spun through them and back on to the larger road. A few shots heard later, a long way behind, gave us the feeling of having acted as a convenient decoy for at least one party of the dreaded Uhlans.

Our next arrest, shortly afterwards, was by a fierce-looking commandant, on an exceptionally fine horse. He was softened by the red ensign and the success of his own attempts to talk English. We agreed that it was difficult to make certain when we were or were not well within the front, since the two forces were "all in and out along here." He, too, wished to know "Where are the English?" He had captured two dragoons that day with his own hand. Some of his troops had the metal German lances slung on their shoulders.

On our straight run back to Namur, by entanglements and trenches and constant challenges, we watched with pleasure an aeroplane circling above the tremendous hill fortress; certainly, we thought, a Belgian, because of its low flight.

Half-an-hour later, as I was getting food in the lively centre of the town, there came the now familiar rush of the highly-strung crowd. In a small cart, supported by four workmen, an old, respectably-dressed shop-keeper was being drawn to the hospital with shattered legs and terribly wounded head. He had been struck down in the street by the explosion of a dynamite hand-grenade, flung from the aeroplane which we had watched circling against the sunset. The senseless, wanton savagery of war.

Our return in the dark seemed likely to be sensational, for rumour had it that the Prussians were pressing in again on the north near Wavre. Up to Wavre we merely had the not infrequent incident of a guard, who had forgotten to light his lamp to stop us, trying to repair his omission by firing after our tail-lamp.

At Wavre, in the half-lit street, we met stretchers passing through the mute groups of men and children, a grim sign of near conflict.

Here a genial commandant stopped me for a talk. He had been at Eghezee, and was now on his way to "receive" a small German column that was pushing in on the east under cover of night. A surprise had been arranged by the Belgians.

He brought me up the road north-east from Wavre. We left the car under dark trees; and he directed me to a hillock on the right. After an age of waiting, little dispersed flashes and reports came from the hollow in the dark in front. The Germans were getting into touch. It was the first time I had heard the mitrailleuse, like the ripping of rough canvas.

Answering flash and snarl came from a rough semicircle of shadow in front and on the south side of them. Larger guns came into action on the north, muffled behind slopes. There is little to see by day in a modern battle unless one takes part. Nothing to see at night. I was due back. When I left the commandant, to return through Wavre, the stretchers were passing through empty streets.

It was not yet apparent what line the German northern armies were about to adopt for their main advance. The Uhlan screen prevented exact reconnoitring. We were aware that the French troops were coming up; and there seemed to be signs that they intended either to throw across a number of regiments to assist the Belgians east and south of Brussels, or to form a continuous line with the Belgian army on a curve from Diest to Namur. The latter plan would have forced a great battle in the neighbourhood of Genappe, south of Waterloo. At the same time I was aware that the Government were anxious both on account of the small numbers of French crossing the frontier and at the apparent slowness of their advance. We did not know of the strategy that had concentrated the French armies upon Alsace-Lorraine, or, consequently, of the time necessary for the alteration of the balance of troops towards the north. It was rumoured, as it appears now among the Germans also, that the British force would either advance by Brussels, and hold a position in the centre of the defensive loop from the north of Hasselt to the French positions upon the Meuse and Sambre, or cover Antwerp and the Belgian left wing, thus preventing a turning movement of the Germans along the frontier of Dutch Limburg.

The position became clearer when the news arrived of the advance of German army corps across the Meuse; and of the great concentration that was proceeding in the neighbourhood of Hasselt. It was still supposed, however, to be largely a movement of cavalry.

Heavy fighting was reported on Thursday and Friday at Haelen. Friday was a brilliant sunny day. It was full of surprises. We forced our way along rough lanes, to run suddenly into small reserves or batteries hidden from the aviators under trees. At times we had to move hazardously with one wheel in a ditch, as we passed lines of munition waggons, or crowded along jogging lines of cavalry. We skirted behind the trenches from Louvain to Diest, and thence to Haelen.

Haelen, Friday.

Fine fellows these little Belgians; intelligent and quick to respond. Rather weary now and strained, for many of them have been already long in the field. Day and night they have been fighting at odds of ten to one. They are men who think, and they fight the better for it. A desperately exhausting fight it is. Dispersed in parties over their immense front, they have to rush and concentrate the moment that one of the small squadrons of German cavalry, infinitely scattered, is signalled. Some, thus, have been in three separate engagements on one day, in different places. But they are as stout-hearted as ever. Tell them what the world thinks of their heroism, and they smile with half humorous pleasure. Tell them what we guess of the nearness of their allies, and they crowd round with an unselfconscious delight that is not for themselves but for their nation and their cause.

As we pass among them, in their "rest" moments, it is easy to make them cluster, laughing like a crowd of alert boys; but in the fighting line they are tense as wires, with a concentrated sternness that the Germans are learning to respect.

"I have sabred two this morning," a powerful, brown-faced lad, a cavalryman, who had just finished bandaging a German dragoon with a broken back, said to me drowsily to-day. This was in a cottage at Haelen.

Haelen, the wrecked village, where the Belgians have proved their heroism in the field, has to-day been the scene of renewed attacks and unshaken resistance. The Germans, who lost 2,000 out of 5,000 in the two days' fighting, had to fall back upon the base of their army corps at Kermpt; but they have been pressing, pressing forward again in overwhelming numbers.

The fields outside the village are a terrible sight: littered with dead men and horses, broken guns, twisted lances. In one trench alone twelve hundred Germans were being buried, and the harrow was passed over the brown scar as soon as it was filled in. Cottages burned and black with shell fire, with dead cattle in the sheds. There were furrows where the shell had ploughed; and trampled heaps in the crops and among the bloodstained roots, where the charging horses had been mown down in masses.

Among the fragments of leather and helmets were a number of scraps of letters and postcards, carried by the soldiers in case of death, and a German collection of sacred songs for the campaign. These things are better left as they lie, and it is unwise, in running between rival armies, to risk carrying "mementoes" of battle. One very touching letter, however, that I found here, was carried home by a friend, and as my translation has already appeared, it may be reproduced:

"Sweetheart,

Fate in this present war has treated us more cruelly than many others. If I have not lived to create for you the happiness of which both our hearts dreamed, remember that my sole wish is now that you should be comforted. Forget me. Create for yourself some contented home that may restore to you some of the greater pleasures of life.

For myself, I shall have died happy in the thought of your love. My last thought has been for you and for those I leave at home. Accept this, the last kiss, from him who loved you."

A German biplane hovered overhead as I examined the positions in the field. I was anxious to make sure of the German line of advance. I drove forward over the village bridge, the scene of savage fighting and bombardment, but still just standing, and unexpectedly found myself behind the fighting line, facing a renewed German advance. Every house in the village was wrecked and looted. The street was littered with broken bottles and remnants. The church tower was gaping with holes: the Belgians, too, had had to use it to train their guns upon, during the German occupation. The walls still standing were pierced for rifle fire.

As we moved across the long-contested bridge and up the broken bullet-scarred street it was to the sound of cannon. Waggons bringing up fresh ammunition poured past us. On the stones under the walls knots of soldiers, too weary to shift their feet, lay sleeping during their hour of release from the front.

At intervals round the battered church wall came the stretchers, with the still more quiet dead.

I had visited three field ambulances along the line from Louvain during the day. Now for the fourth time I was admitted to the improvised ambulance rooms, well knowing what I should find. For the Belgian remains true to his civilisation. The wounded German prisoners, as they came in, were treated with just the same care, their death dignified with the same respect as that of our own friends. And yet the stories that are told of their cruelty to the peasants, and sincerely believed by the soldiers, are terrible. "But"--said a little rough, unshaven peasant infantryman to me--"we are men who feel. Whatever our enemies may do, we shall continue as we have begun--to the end."

I was even allowed to speak to some of the wounded in their own language. Not one had a word of complaint. Poor fellows, they all believed they had been fighting against the French! I think two of the finest men I have ever seen were a Belgian corporal and a German private, who lay dying to-day of bullet wounds, in half-burnt villages a few miles apart. In the cottage yard a peasant woman, with four children round her, who had seen her house sacked, was making coffee over a wood fire for the wounded Germans.

But the air round us was overcharged. The Belgians had been surprised in some woods as they advanced from the village this morning. They had lost heavily. Now they were holding the position well, but the Germans, in spite of losses, were closing in. Their advanced firing parties were at the moment within 300 yards of the village. At any instant their cavalry, whose lances and helmets lay mixed with smashed bottles about the village square, relics of the past day, might sweep round the defence.

All of a sudden one of the changes of mood common to nerves at such crises came over the soldiers about us. The faces hardened. We were under arrest. The fact of my talking German to the wounded, a mistake I learned to avoid later, was sufficient to brand me a spy. I had taken the precaution to translate each sentence to the sergeant in charge, but he denied it when I referred to him. Men in the "war state" are hardly responsible. I was taken, by the sentries, past a barricade, held by infantry with Maxims, to the headquarters. The major commanding, furiously issuing orders, sending out supports, etc., from the parlour of the last cottage in the street, was too occupied to give me full attention. "I have the right to shoot you: you ought to be shot, of course," was all he had time to exclaim at intervals. After a hurried, unsatisfactory talk I moved outside, and waited, among sullen faces. And I could see, a few yards off, the little sunlit glade of trees, where the Belgians were moving and firing, as they covered the entrance to the village.

An important prisoner was hurried in, and then away in a car. In the bustle some change occurred. Another major was in command. A tall, scholarly-looking man, utterly incongruous in such a scene, shouting abrupt orders in a cultivated voice. At last he had a moment for me. "I am perfectly satisfied; but we are in war. You will, I hope, excuse my forbidding your advance; in fact, it is impossible: the enemy command the road: good day"--he bowed me out with my guard. Immediately only sunny faces round us again; but still with the fixed, absent eyes, that tell of danger, close and realised.

It had not been my wish to advance further. In fact, the car was already turned, ready for a race back if the Germans broke in. We waited for a few more minutes to laugh that look out of the eyes of our friendly soldiers. Then we moved slowly back along the line of ruins, the traces of death, that made but a single battlefield of the fight of to-day and the fights of two days ago. We zigzagged through the sleeping soldiers, stretched unstirring on the cobble stones. The roar of a German aeroplane passed again over our heads; and the firing sounded nearer, both to north and south.

As I circled towards Diest, the roads were choked with munition and reinforcements. A column of infantry wheeled to take up a position in a beet-field on our left. A squadron of cavalry in the brown busby clattered past to head off Uhlans reported on our right. The village streets were barricaded with waggons; but the crowds of anxious, waiting women, boys, and children laughed and chaffed back at us as we waited at the barriers on the roads for a gap to be made for our passage.

Supports, and more waggons, and the constant rushing cars of officers. The orchards were full of cavalry horses, many of them captured from the Germans. The waiting soldiers grinned as I remarked on the fact that some of them were wearing the boots of German prisoners, even German regimental breeches. The Belgian mobilisation had to be carried out in two days. Many of the troopers have had to complete their kit at the German expense.

An officer swung into the car. He had come out of Liége to "rest." He is one of the only two survivors of the party of seven who fought hand to hand with and killed the seven or more Germans who rode into Liége to assassinate General Léman. "We watched them riding up the street; they were waving a white flag. My friend said, 'They have just killed a sentry.' We fired--thus; and they fired; and their four officers fell; and the others we killed; but only two of us were left."

As the sun set, long processions of Red Cross waggons, followed by lines of trudging assistants, and some priests, blocked the roads.

The troops were moving back into cantonments. A Division was being sent back to "rest." They swarmed over the fields and surged round the car for news. Through the wire entanglements, and over the trenches and bough-fortifications pressed a host of women. A number of wives and mothers, who had come long distances for a last sight--some of them had walked over twenty miles to find the right quarter--were thrust at us enthusiastically from the roadside, and the car was filled so as to save, if only a few of them, the twelve miles of tramp to a railway. Many had carried heavy baskets of provisions; but the troops are so well fed that they were not needed. Delicate, educated women, they waved courageous farewell to their husbands, private soldiers with serious sensitive faces, men of the learned professions, and poured into my ears the stories of hardship that their men were undergoing.

As we passed, the towns seemed full of silent women waiting for news. Small bodies of troops moved out now and again across the market squares to repulse approaching Uhlans.

At one town we traversed, Louvain, the King was in council with the staff. At Diest a huge crowd was acclaiming a joyful report about the English, that sent us, too, on our way with very particular reason for cheering.

In the last run in, through the dark, we were again made useful: this time to convey a special mission to the War Office in Brussels.

The Germans entered Diest soon after we left.

This was the beginning of the great German flood, that lapped like a slow tide from Hasselt, to Haelen, to Diest, and bursting upon Louvain in the next days, poured irresistibly across Belgium.