Part 19

A cart, heaped high with loot, driven by a fat Landsturmer and pulled by a tiny donkey, came creaking past us. One of our party pulled his kodak from his pocket and inquired of our guardian in English: "May I take a picture?"

His intent evidently escaped the German, who answered cordially:

"Certainly; go ahead. You will find some beautiful things over there on the corner in the house they are getting ready to burn."

We kept our faces under control, and he was too much occupied with his other troubles to notice that we did not avail of his kind permission to join in the pillage.

He was rabid against the Belgians and had an endless series of stories of atrocities they had committed--though he admitted that he had none of them at first hand. He took it as gospel, however, that they had fired upon the German troops in Louvain and laid themselves open to reprisals. To his thinking there is nothing bad enough for them, and his chief satisfaction seemed to consist in repeating to us over and over that he was going the limit. Orders had been issued to raze the town--"till not one stone was left on another," as he said.

Just to see what would happen I inquired about the provision of The Hague Conventions, prescribing that no collective penalty can be imposed for lawless acts of individuals. He dismissed that to his own satisfaction by remarking that:

"All Belgians are dogs, and all would do these things unless they are taught what will happen to them."

Convincing logic!

With a hard glint in his eye he told us the purpose of his work; he came back to it over and over, but the burden of what he had to say was something like this:

"We shall make this place a desert. We shall wipe it out so that it will be hard to find where Louvain used to stand. For generations people will come here to see what we have done, and it will teach them to respect Germany and to think twice before they resist her. Not one stone on another, I tell you--kein Stein auf einander!"

I agreed with him when he remarked that people would come here for generations to see what Germany had done--but he did not seem to follow my line of thought.

While we were talking about these things and the business of burning and looting was pursuing its orderly course, a rifle shot rang out near by. Instantly every soldier seized his rifle and stood waiting for an indication as to what would happen next. In a few seconds a group of soldiers rushed into a house about a hundred feet away. There was a sound of blows, as though a door was being beaten in; then a few shots, and the soldiers came out wiping the perspiration from their faces.

"Snipers!" said our guide, shaking his fist at the house. "We have gone through that sort of thing for three days and it is enough to drive us mad; fighting is easy in comparison, for then you know what you are doing." And then almost tearfully: "Here we are so helpless!"

While he was talking another shot rang out, and then there was a regular fusillade, which lasted for fifteen seconds or so; then an explosion.

Bulle stood not upon the order of his going, but ran for the station, calling back:

"I've had enough of this. Let's get out and go home."

Our friend, the officer, said Bulle was right, and that it would be the part of wisdom for us all to fall back to the station, where we would be near the car in case anything happened. He started off at a good pace, and as we were in no mood to argue we went meekly along in his wake. We overtook Bulle engaged in an altercation with a very drunken soldier, who wanted to see his papers and was insulting about it. Instead of taking the easy course and showing his papers Bulle was opening a debate on the subject, when we arrived and took a hand. Our officer waded into the soldier in a way that would have caused a mutiny in any other army, and the soldier, very drunk and sullen, retreated, muttering, to his armchair on the curb. We then moved on to the station.

Outside the station was a crowd of several hundred people, mostly women and children, being herded on to trains by soldiers, to be run out of the town. They seemed to be decently treated but were naturally in a pitiable state of terror. Just inside the gates of the freight yard were a couple of women telling their troubles to a group of officers and soldiers. They had both lost their husbands in the street-fighting, and were in a terrible state. The officers and men were gathered about them, evidently distressed by their trouble, and trying to comfort them. They had put the older woman in an armchair and were giving her a little brandy in a tea cup. And the same men may have been the ones who killed the husbands....

We went on into the freight yards and were greeted by a number of officers with hopeful talk about a train coming from Brussels with food. We were given chairs and an orderly was despatched for a bottle of wine so that a drink could be given to Bulle, who said that after what he had been through he would appreciate a glass of something comforting.

We settled down and listened to the stories of the past few days. It was a story of clearing out civilians from a large part of the town; a systematic routing out of men from cellars and garrets, wholesale shootings, the generous use of machine guns, and the free application of the torch--the whole story enough to make one see red. And for our guidance it was impressed on us that this would make people respect Germany and think twice about resisting her.

Suddenly several shots rang out apparently from some ruins across the street and the whole place was instantly in an uproar. The lines of civilians were driven helter-skelter to cover--where, I don't know. The stands of arms in the freight yard were snatched up, and in less time than it takes to tell it, several hundred men were scattered behind any sort of shelter that offered, ready for the fray.

I took one quick look about and decided that the substantial freight station was the most attractive thing in sight. In no time I was inside, closely followed by my own crowd and a handful of soldiers. First, we lay down upon the platform, and then, when we got our bearings, rolled over on to the track among a lot of artillery horses that were tethered there.

Apparently a number of civilians, goaded to desperation by what they had seen, had banded together, knowing that they were as good as dead, and had determined to sell their lives as dearly as they could. They had gathered in the ruins of the houses fronting on the station and had opened up on us. There was a brisk interchange of shots, with an occasional tinkle of broken glass and a good deal of indiscriminate cursing by the soldiers, who had taken refuge with us.

The artillery horses did not welcome us very cordially and began to get restive in a way that made us debate whether we preferred staying up on the platform with a chance of being potted or staying under cover and being ingloriously trampled to death. A joint debate on this important question kept us occupied for several minutes. We finally compromised by fishing down a few boxes from the platform and erecting a barricade of sorts to protect us against any stray kicks.

As we sat in the undignified position imposed on us by circumstances, we exchanged various frivolous remarks, not because we felt particularly gay, but because we had to do something to keep ourselves interested and to keep our courage up. Bulle resented this, and raised his head to look at me reproachfully over the barricade, and say: "Don't talk like that; it is nothing short of tempting Providence."

After a time Blount and I decided to make a reconnaissance in force and see how the car was getting on. We crawled along the floor to a place from which we could see out into the square. The soldiers were flat on their stomachs behind a low wall that extended around the small circular park in the centre of the square, and behind any odd shelter they could find. The car lay in the line of fire but had not been struck. We were sufficiently pessimistic to be convinced that it would go up in smoke before the row was over, and took a good look at our shoes to see whether they would last through a walk back to Brussels.

Our officer came out from behind his barricade and showed us where the attacking force was concealed--at least he told us that they were there and we were willing to take his word for it without going across the street to make a first-hand investigation.

He tried to impress us with the black sinfulness of people who would fire upon the German troops, and called our particular attention to the proof now offered us that civilians had started the row by firing on German troops. According to the German story, which was the only one we had heard, civilians had been hunted down like rats in garrets and cellars and shot down in cold blood in the streets when they sought safety in flight. To my mind it was not surprising that men driven to desperation by seeing their friends and neighbours murdered in cold blood, should decide to do any harm possible to the enemy. Three days of the reign of terror that had been described to us was enough to account for anything, and the fact that civilians were firing now did not in any sense prove that they were guilty of starting the trouble. For all we could tell they may have started it or they may not, but firing by them three days after the row began was no proof to any one with the slightest sense of the value of evidence. On the other hand, the story freely told us by the Germans as to their own behaviour, is enough to create the darkest presumptions as to how the trouble started, and would seem to place the burden of proof on them rather than on the Belgians.