BALLAD OF THE GERMANS

THE GREEN PASS

It gives passage to the trenches at any hour. The writer, by holding this, and working under the Prime Minister's son, became stretcher-bearer in the Belgian Army.

The apologists of the widespread reign of frightfulness say that war is always "like that," that individual drunken soldiers have always broken loose and committed terrible acts. Thisdefense does not meet the facts. It meets neither the official orders, nor the cold method, nor the immense number of proved murders. The German policy was ordered from the top. It was carried out by officers and men systematically, under discipline. The German War Book, issued by the General Staff, and used by officers, cleverly justifies these acts. They are recorded by the German soldiers themselves in their diaries, of which photographic reproductions are obtainable in any large library. The diaries were found on the persons of dead and wounded Germans. The name of the man and his company are given.

On Sunday, September 27, I was present at the battle of Alost, where peasants came running into our lines from the German side of the canal. In spite of shell, shrapnel, rifle, and machine fire, these peasants crossed to us. The reason they had for running into fire was that the Germans were torturing their neighbors with the bayonet. One peasant, on the other side of the canal, hurried toward us under the fire, with a little girl on his right shoulder.

On Tuesday, September 29, I visited WetterenHospital. I went in company with the Prince L. de Croy, the Due D'Ursel, a senator; the Count de Briey, Intendant de la Liste Civile du Roy, and the Count Retz la Barre (all of the Garde du General de Wette, Divisions de Cavalerie). One at least of these gentlemen is as well and as favorably known in this country as in his own. I took a young linguist, who was kind enough to act as secretary for me. In the hospital I found eleven peasants with bayonet wounds upon them—men, women and a child—who had been marched in front of the Germans at Alost as a cover for the troops, and cut with bayonets when they tried to dodge the firing. A priest was ministering to them, bed by bed. Sisters were in attendance. The priest led us to the cot of one of the men. On Sunday morning, September 27, the peasant, Leopold de Man, of No. 90, Hovenier-Straat, Alost, was hiding in the house with his sister, in the cellar. The Germans made a fire of the table and chairs in the upper room. Then, catching sight of Leopold, they struck him with the butts of their guns and forced him to pass through the fire. Then, taking himoutside, they struck him to the ground and gave him a blow over the head with a gunstock and a cut of the bayonet, which pierced his thigh all the way through.

"In spite of my wound," said he, "they made me pass between their lines, giving me still more blows of the gun-butt in the back in order to make me march. There were seventeen or eighteen persons with me. They placed us in front of their lines and menaced us with their revolvers, crying out that they will make us pay for the losses they have suffered at Alost. So we march in front of the troops.

"When the battle began we threw ourselves on our faces to the ground, but they forced us to rise again. At a certain moment, when the Germans were obliged to retire, we succeeded in escaping down side streets."

The priest led the way to the cot of a peasant whose cheeks had the spot of fever. He was Frans Meulebroeck, of No. 62, Drie Sleutelstraat, Alost. Sometimes in loud bursts of terror, and then falling back into a monotone, he talked with us.

"They broke open the door of my home," he said, "they seized me and knocked me down. In front of my door the corpse of a German lay stretched out. The Germans said to me: 'You are going to pay for that to us.' A few moments later they gave me a bayonet cut in my leg. They sprinkled naphtha in my house and set it afire. My son was struck down in the street and I was marched in front of the German troops. I do not know even yet the fate of my son."

Gradually as the peasant talked the time of his suffering came on him. His eyes began to see it again in front of him. They became fixed and wild, the white of them visible. His voice was shrill and broken with sobs.

"My boy," he said, "I haven't seen him." His body shook with sobbing.

At my request the young man with me took down the statements of these two peasants, turning them into French from the Flemish, with the aid of the priest. In the presence of the priest and one of the sisters the two peasants signed, each man, his statement, making his mark.

Our group passed into the next room, where thewounded women were gathered. A sister led us to the bedside of a very old woman, perhaps eighty years old. She had thin white hair, that straggled across the pillow. There was no motion to the body, except for faint breathing. She was cut through the thigh with a bayonet.

I went across the room and found a little girl, twelve years old. She was propped up in bed and half bent over, as if she had been broken at the breast bone. Her body whistled with each breath. One of our ambulance corps went out next day to the hospital—Dr. Donald Renton. He writes me:

"I went out with Davidson, the American sculptor, and Yates, the cinema man, and there had been brought into the hospital the previous day the little girl you speak of. She had a gaping wound on, I think, the right side of her back, and died the next day."

Dr. Renton's address is 110 Hill Street, Garnet Hill, Glasgow.

The young man who took down the record is named E. de Niemira, a British subject. He made the report of what we had seen to the Bryce Committee. These cases which I witnessed appear in the Bryce Report under the heading of "Alost."[B]Of such is the Bryce Report made: first-hand witness by men like myself, who know what they know, who are ready for any test to be applied, who made careful notes, who had witnesses.

"Why do the Germans do these things? It is not war. It is cruel and wrong," that is a remark I heard from noblemen and common soldiers alike. Such acts are beyond the understanding of the Belgian people. Their soldiers are kindly, good-humored, fearless. Alien women and children would be safe in their hands. They do not see why the Germans bring suffering to the innocent.

A few understand. They know it is a scientific panic which the German army was seeking to cultivate. They see that these acts are not done inthe wilful abandon of a few drunken soldiers, beyond discipline, but that they belong to a cool, careful method by means of which the German staff hoped to reduce a population to servitude. The Germans regard these mutilations as pieces of necessary surgery. The young blond barmaid of the Quatrecht Inn told us on October 4 that a German captain came and cried like a baby in the taproom on the evening of September 7, after he had laid waste Quatrecht and Melle. To her fanciful, untrained mind he was thinking of his own wife and children. So, at least, she thought as she watched him, after serving him in his thirst.

One of the sentries patted the shoulder of the peasant at Melle when he learned that the man had had the three members of his family done to death. Personally, he was sorry for the man, but orders were orders.

CHURCH IN TERMONDE

The Germans burned this church and four others, a hospital, an orphanage, and 1,100 homes, house by house. Priests, nuns and churches irritated the German Army. This photograph was taken by Radclyffe Dugmore, who accompanied the writer, to witness the methodical destruction.

I spent September 13 and September 23 in Termonde. Ten days before my first visit Termonde was a pretty town of 11,000 inhabitants. On their first visit the Germans burned eleven hundred of the fifteen hundred houses. They burnedthe Church of St. Benedict, the Church of St. Rocus, three other churches, a hospital, and an orphanage. They burned that town not by accident of shell fire and general conflagration, but methodically, house by house. In the midst of charred ruins I came on single houses standing, many of them, and on their doors was German writing in chalk—"Nicht Verbrennen. Gute Leute wohnen hier." Sometimes it would be simply "Nicht Verbrennen," sometimes only "Gute Leute," but always that piece of German script was enough to save that house, though to the right and left of it were ruins. On several of the saved houses the name of the German officer was scribbled who gave the order to spare. About one hundred houses were chalked in the way I have described. All these were unscathed by the fire, though they stood in streets otherwise devastated. The remaining three hundred houses had the good luck to stand at the outskirts and on streets unvisited by the house-to-house incendiaries.

Four days after my first visit the Germans burned again the already wrecked town, turningtheir attention to the neglected three hundred houses. I went in as soon as I could safely enter the town, and that was on the Wednesday after.

As companions in Termonde I had Tennyson Jesse, Radclyffe Dugmore, and William R. Renton. Mr. Dugmore took photographs of the chalked houses.

"Build a fence around Termonde," suggested a Ghent manufacturer, "leave the ruins untouched. Let the place stand there, with its burned houses, churches, orphanage, hospital, factories, to show the world what German culture is. It will be a monument to their methods of conducting war. There will be no need of saying anything. That is all the proof we need. Then throw open the place to visitors from all the world, as soon as this war is over. Let them draw their own conclusions."

In Wetteren Hospital, Flanders, the writer saw a little peasant girl dying from the bayonet wounds in her back which the German soldiers had given her.

Cain slew only a brother,A lad who was fair and strong,His murder was careless and honest,A heated and sudden wrong.And Judas was kindly and pleasant,For he snared an invincible man.But you—you have spitted the children,As they toddled and stumbled and ran.She heard you sing on the high-road,She thought you were gallant and gay;Such men as the peasants of Flanders:The friends of a child at play.She saw the sun on your helmets,The sparkle of glancing light.She saw your bayonets flashing,And she laughed at your Prussian might.Then you gave her death for her laughter,As you looked on her mischievous face.You hated the tiny peasant,With the hate of your famous race.You were not frenzied and angry;You were cold and efficient and keen.Your thrust was as thorough and deadlyAs the stroke of a faithful machine.You stabbed her deep with your rifle:You had good reason to sing,As you footed it on through FlandersPast the broken and quivering thing.Something impedes your advancing,A dragging has come on your hosts.And Paris grows dim now, and dimmer,Through the blur of your raucous boasts.Your singing is sometimes brokenBy guttural German groans.Your ankles are wet withherbleeding,Your pike is blunt fromherbones.The little peasant has tripped you.She hangs to your bloody stride.And the dimpled hands are fastenedWhere they fumbled before she died.

The Steam Roller, the final method, now operating in Belgium to flatten her for all time, is the most deadly and universal of the three. It is a calculated process to break the human spirit. People speak as if the injury done Belgium was a thing of the past. It is at its height now. The spy system with its clerks, waiters, tourists, business managers, reached directly only some thousands of persons. The atrocities wounded and killed many thousands of old men, women, and children. But the German occupation and sovereignty at the present moment are denationalizing more than six million people. The German conquerors operate their Steam Roller by clever lies, thus separating Belgium from her real friends; by taxation, thus breaking Belgium economically; by enforced work on food supplies, railways, and ammunition, thus forcing Belgian peasants to feed their enemy's army anddestroy their own army, and so making unwilling traitors out of patriots; by fines and imprisonment that harass the individual Belgian who retains any sense of nationality; by official slander from Berlin that the Belgians are the guilty causes of their own destruction; and finally by the fact of sovereignty itself, that at one stroke breaks the inmost spirit of a free nation.

I was still in Ghent when the Germans moved up to the suburbs.

"I can put my artillery on Ghent," said the German officer to the American vice-consul.

That talk is typical of the tone of voice used to Belgians: threat backed by murder.

The whole policy of the Germans of late is to treat the Belgian matter as a thing accomplished.

"It is over. Let bygones be bygones."

It is a process like the trapping of an innocent woman, and when she is trapped, saying,

"Now you are compromised, anyway, so you had better submit."

A friend of mine who remained in Ghent after the German occupation, had German officers billetted in his home. Daily, industriously, theysaid to him that the English had been poor friends of his country, that they had been late in coming to the rescue. Germany was the friend, not England. In the homes throughout Belgium, these unbidden guests are claiming slavery is a beneficent institution, that it is better to be ruled by the German military, and made efficient for German ends, than to continue a free people.

For a year, our Red Cross Corps worked under the direction and authority of the Belgian prime minister, Baron de Broqueville. The prime minister in the name of his government has sent to this country an official protest against the new tax levied by the Germans on his people. The total tax for the German occupation amounts to $192,000,000. He writes:

"The German military occupation during the last fifteen months has entirely prevented all foreign trade, has paralyzed industrial activity, and has reduced the majority of the laboring classes to enforced idleness. Upon the impoverished Belgian population whom Germany has unjustly attacked, upon whom she has brought want and distress, who have been barely saved from starvation by the importation of food which Germany should have provided—upon this population, Germany now imposes a new tax, equal in amount to the enormous tax she has already imposed and is regularly collecting."

GASPAR

One of the dangerous Belgian franc-tireurs, who made it necessary for the German Army to burn and bayonet babies and old women. His name is Gaspar. He is three years old.

The Belgian Legation has protested unavailingly to our Government that Germany, in violation of The Hague Conventions, has forced Belgian workmen to perform labor for the German army. Belgian Railway employees at Malines, Luttre and elsewhere refused to perform work which would have released from the transportation service and made available for the trenches an entire German Army Corps. These Belgian workmen were subjected to coersive measures, which included starvation and cruel punishments. Because of these penalties on Belgians refusing to be traitors, many went to hospitals in Germany, and others returned broken in health to Belgium.

After reading the chapter on the German spy system, a Belgian wrote me:

"That spying business is not yet the worst. Since then, the Germans have succeeded in outdoing all that. The basest and the worst that one can dream of is it not that campaign of slander and blackmail which they originated after their violation of Belgium's neutrality? Of course they did it—as a murderer who slanders his victim—in the hope to justify their crime."

It is evil to murder non-combatants. It is more evil to "rationalize" the act—to invent a moral reason for doing an infamous thing. First, Belgium suffered a vivisection, a veritable martyrdom. Now, she is officially informed by her executioners that she was the guilty party. She is not allowed to protest. She must sit quietly under the charge that her sacrifice was not a sacrifice at all, but the penalty paid for her own misbehavior. This is a more cruel thing than the spying that sapped her and the atrocities practised upon her, because it is more cruel to take a man's honor than his property and his life.

"If the peasants had stayed in their houses, they would have been safe."

When they stayed in their houses they were burned along with the houses. I saw this done on September 7, 1914, at Melle.

"The peasants shot from their houses at the advancing German army."

I saw German atrocities. The peasants did not shoot. It is the old familiar formula of thefranc-tireur. That means that the peasant, not a soldier, dressed in the clothing of a civilian, takes advantage of his immunity as a noncombatant, to secrete a rifle, and from some shelter shoot at the enemy army. The Bishop of Namur writes:

"It is evident that the German army trod the Belgian soil and carried out the invasion with the preconceived idea that it would meet with bands of this sort, a reminiscence of the war of 1870. But German imagination will not suffice to create that which does not exist.

"There never existed a single body offrancs-tireursin Belgium.

"No 'isolated instance' even is known of civilians having fired upon the troops, although there would have been no occasion for surprise if any individual person had committed an excess. In several of our villages the population was exterminated because, as the military authorities alleged, a major had been killed or a young girl hadattempted to kill an officer, and so forth.... In no case has an alleged culprit been discovered and designated by name."

This lie—that the peasants brought their own death on themselves—was rehearsed before the war, as a carefully learned lesson. The army came prepared to find the excuse for the methodical outrages which they practised. In the fight in the Dixmude district, a German officer of the 202,eInfantry had a letter with this sentence on his body:

"There are a lot offrancs-tireurswith the enemy."

There were none. He had found what he had been drilled to find, in the years of preparedness. The front lines of the Yser were raked clear by shell, rifle, and machine-gun fire. The district was in ruins. I know, because I worked there with our Red Cross Corps through those three weeks. The humorous explanation of this is given by one of the Fusilier Marin Lieutenants—that the blue cap and the red pompon of the famous fighting sailors of France looked strangely to the Germans, who took the wearers forfrancs-tireurs, terror suggesting the idea. But this is the kindly humor of Brittany. The saucy sailor caps could not have looked strangely to German eyes, because a few weeks earlier those "Girls with the red pompon" had held the German army corps at Melle, and not even terror could have made them look other than terribly familiar. No. The officers had been faithfully trained to find militant peasants under arms, and to send back letters and reports of their discovery, which could later be used in official excuses for frightfulness. This letter is one that did not get back to Berlin, later to appear in a White Paper, as justification for official murder of non-combatants.

The picture projected by the Great German Literary Staff is too imaginative. Think of that Army of the Invasion with its army corps riding down through village streets—the Uhlan cavalry, the innumerable artillery, the dense endless infantry, the deadly power and swing of it all—and then see the girl-child of Alost, and the white-haired woman, eighty years old—aiming their rifles at that cavalcade. It is a literary creation, not a statement of fact. I have been invillages when German troops were entering, had entered, and were about to enter. I saw helpless, terror-stricken women huddled against the wall, children hiding in their skirts, old men dazed and vague.

Then, as the blue-gray uniforms appeared at the head of the street, with sunlight on the pikes and helmets, came the cry—half a sob, "Les Allemands."

The German fabrications are unworthy. Let the little slain children, and the violated women, sleep in honor. Your race was stern enough in doing them to death. Let them alone, now that you have cleared them from your path to Paris.

Doctor George Sarton, of the University of Ghent writes me:

"During the last months, the Germans have launched new slanders against Belgium. Their present tactics are more discreet and seem to be successful. Many 'neutral' travelers—especially Americans and Swiss—have been to Belgium to see the battlefields or, perhaps, to get an idea of what such an occupation by foreign soldiers exactly amounts to. Of course, these men can seenothing without the assistance of the German authorities, and they can but see what is shown to them. The greater their curiosity, the more courtesy extended to them, the more also they feel indebted to their German hosts. These are well aware of it: the sightseers are taken in their net, and with a very few exceptions, their critical sense is quickly obliterated. We have recently been shown one of the finest specimens of these American tourists: Mr. George B. McCellan, professor of History at Princeton, who made himself ridiculous by writing a most superficial and inaccurate article for the "Sunday Times Magazine".

"When the good folks of Belgium recollect the spying business that was carried on at their expense by their German 'friends,' they are not likely to trust much their German enemies. They know that the Germans are quite incapable of keeping to themselves any fact that they may learn—in whatever confidential and intimate circumstances—if this fact is of the smallest use to their own country. As it is perfectly impossible to trust them, the best is to avoid them, and that is what most Belgians are doing.

"American tourists seeing Belgium through German courtesy are considered by the Belgians just as untrustworthy as the Germans themselves. This is the right attitude, as there is no possibility left to the Belgians (in Belgium) of testing the morality and the neutrality of their visitors. The result of which is that these visitors are entirely given up to their German advisers;all their knowledge is of German origin. Of course, the Germans take advantage of this situation and make a show of German efficiency and organization.—'Don't you know: the Germans have done so much for Belgium! Why, everybody knows that this country was very inefficient, very badly managed ... a poor little country without influence.... See what the Germans have made of it.... There was no compulsory education, and the number of illiterates was scandalously high,' (I am sorry to say that this at least is true.) 'They are introducing compulsory and free education. In the big towns, sexual morality was rather loose, but the Germans are now regulating all that.' (You should hear German officers speak of prostitution in Antwerp andBrussels.) 'The evil was great, but fortunately the Germans came and are cleaning up the country.'—That is their way of doing and talking. It does not take them long to convince ingenuous and uncritical Americans that everything is splendidly regulated by German efficiency, and that if only the Belgians were complying, everything would be all right in Belgium. Are not the Belgians very ungrateful?

"The Belgians do appreciate American generosity; they realize that almost the only rays of happiness that reach their country come from America. They will never forget it; that disinterested help coming from over the seas has a touch of romance; it is great and comforting; it is the bright and hopeful side of the war. The Belgians know how to value this. But, as to what the Germans are doing, good or not, they will never appreciate that—what does it matter? The Belgians do not care one bit for German reforms; they do not even deign to consider them; they simply ignore them. There isone—only one—reform that they will appreciate; the German evacuation. All the rest does not count.When the Germans speak of cleaning the country, the Belgians do not understand. From their point of view, there is only one way to clean it—and that is for the Germans to clear out.

"The Germans are very disappointed that a certain number of Belgians have been able to escape, either to enlist in the Belgian army or to live abroad. Of course, the more Belgians are in their hands, the more pressure they can exert. They are now slandering the Belgians who have left their country—all the 'rich' people who are 'feasting' abroad while their countrymen are starving.

"The fewer Belgians there are in German hands, the better it is. The Belgians whose ability is the most useful, are considered useful by the Germans for the latter's sake. Must it not be a terrible source of anxiety for these Belgians to think that all the work they manage to do is directly or indirectly done for Germany? It is not astonishing that she wants to restore 'business, as usual' in Belgium, and that in many cases she has tried to force the Belgian workers to earn for her. Letme simply refer to the protest recently published by the Belgian Legation. But for the American Commission for Relief, the Belgians would have had to choose between starvation and work—work for Germany—starvation or treason. Nothing shows better the greatness and moment of the American work. Without the material and moral presence of the United States, Belgium would have simply been turned into a nation of slaves—starvation or treason.

"If I were in Belgium, I could say nothing; I would have to choose between silence and prison, or silence and death. Remember Edith Cavell. An enthusiastic, courageous man is running as many risks in Belgium now, as he would have in the sixteenth century under the Spanish domination. The hundred eyes of the Spanish Inquisition were then continually prying into everything—bodies and souls; one felt them even while one was sleeping. The German Secret Service is not less pitiless and it is more efficient.

"The process of slander and lie carried on by the Germans to 'flatten' Belgium is, to my judgment, the worst of their war practices. It is very efficient indeed. But, however efficient it may be, it will be unsuccessful as to its main purpose. The Germans will not be able to bow Belgian heads. As long as the Belgians do not admit that they have been conquered, they are not conquered, and in the meanwhile the Germans are merely aggravating their infamy. It was an easy thing to over-run the unprepared Belgian soil—but the Belgian spirit is unconquerable.

"Belgium may slumber, but die—never."

When men act as part of an implacable machine, they act apart from their humanity. They commit unbelievable horrors, because the thing that moves them is raw force, untouched by fine purpose and the elements of mercy. When I think of Germans, man by man, as they lay wounded, waiting for us to bring them in and care for them as faithfully as for our own, I know that they have become human in their defeat. We are their friends as we break them. In spite of their treachery and cruelty and cold hatred, we shall save them yet. Cleared of their evil dream and restored to our common humanity, they will havea more profound sorrow growing out of this war than any other people, for Belgium and France only suffered these things, but the great German race committed them.

When I went to Belgium, friends said to me, "You must take 'Baedeker's Belgium' with you; it is the best thing on the country." So I did. I used it as I went around. The author doesn't give much about himself, and that is a good feature in any book, but I gathered he was a German, a widely traveled man, and he seems to have spent much time in Belgium, for I found intimate records of the smallest things. I used his guide for five months over there. I must say right here I was disappointed in it. And that isn't just the word, either. I was annoyed by it. It gave all the effect of accuracy, and then when I got there it wasn't so. He kept speaking of buildings as "beautiful," "one of the loveliest unspoiled pieces of thirteenth century architecture in Europe," and when I took a lot of trouble and visited the building, I found it half down, or a butt-end, or sometimes ashes. Icouldn't make his book tally up. It doesn't agree with the landscape and the look of things. He will take a perfectly good detail and stick it in where it doesn't belong, and leave it there. And he does it all in a painstaking way and with evident sincerity.

His volume had been so popular back in his own country that it had brought a lot of Germans into Belgium. I saw them everywhere. They were doing the same thing I was doing, checking up what they saw with the map and text and things. Some of them looked puzzled and angry, as they went around. I feel sure they will go home and give Baedeker a warm time, when they tell him they didn't find things as he had represented.

For one thing, he makes out Belgium a lively country, full of busy, contented people, innocent peasants, and sturdy workmen and that sort of thing. Why, it's the saddest place in the world. The people are not cheery at all. They are depressed. It's the last place I should think of for a holiday, now that I have seen it. And that's the way it goes, all through his work. Things are the opposite of what he says with so muchmeticulous care. He would speak of "gay café life" in a place that looked as if an earthquake had hit it, and where the only people were some cripples and a few half-starved old folks. If he finds that sort of thing gay as he travels around, he is an easy man to please. It was so wherever I went. It isn't as if he were wrong at some one detail. He is wrong all over the place, all over Belgium. It's all different from the way he says it is. I know his fellow-countrymen who are there now will bear me out in this.

Let me show one place. I took his book with me and used it on Nieuport. That's a perfectly fair test, because Nieuport is like a couple of hundred other towns.

"Nieuport," says Herr Baedeker, "a small and quiet place on the Yser."

It is one of the noisiest places I have ever been in. There was a day and a half in May when shells dropped into the streets and houses, every minute. Every day at least a few screaming three-inch shells fall on the village. Aëroplanes buzz overhead, shrapnel pings in the sky. Rifle bullets sing like excited telegraph wires. IfBaedeker found Nieuport a quiet place, he was brought up in a boiler factory.

GOTHIC CHURCH

Baedeker, the distinguished German writer, states that this Fifteenth Century Gothic church in Nieuport has "a modern timber roof." We looked for it.

His very next phrase puzzled me—"with 3500 inhabitants," he says.

And I didn't see one. There were dead people in the ruins of the houses. The soldiers used to unearth them from time to time. I remember that the poet speaks of "the poor inhabitant below," when he is writing of a body in a grave. It must be in that sense that Baedeker specifies those 3500 inhabitants. But he shouldn't do that kind of imaginative touch. It isn't in his line. And it might mislead people.

Think of a stranger getting into Nieuport after dark on a wet night, with his mind all set on the three hotels Baedeker gives him a choice of.

"All unpretending," he says.

Just the wrong word. Why, those hotels are brick dust. They're flat on the ground. There isn't a room left. He means "demolished." He doesn't use our language easily. I can see that. It is true they are unpretending, but that isn't the first word you would use about them, not if you were fluent.

Then he gives a detail that is unnecessary. He says you can sleep or eat there for a "franc and a half." That exactitude is out of place. It is labored. I ask you what a traveler would make of the "1½ fr.pour diner," when he came on that rubbish heap which is the Hotel of Hope—"Hotel de l'Espérance." That is like Baedeker, all through his volume. He will give a detail, like the precise cost of this dinner, when there isn't any food in the neighborhood. It wouldn't be so bad if he'd sketch things in general terms. That I could forgive. But it is too much when he makes a word-picture of a Flemish table d'hôte for a franc and a half in a section of country where even the cats are starving.

His next statement is plain twisted. "Nieuport is noted for its obstinate resistance to the French."

I saw French soldiers there every day. They were defending the place. His way of putting it stands the facts on their head.

"And (is noted) for the 'Battle of the Dunes' in 1600."

That is where the printer falls down. I wasthere during the Battle of the Dunes. The nine is upside down in the date as given.

I wouldn't object so much if he were careless with facts that were harmless, like his hotels and his dinner and his dates. But when he gives bad advice that would lead people into trouble, I think he ought to be jacked up. Listen to this:

"We may turn to the left to inspect the locks on the canals to Ostend."

Baedeker's proposal here means sure death to the reader who tries it. That section is lined with machine guns. If a man began turning and inspecting, he would be shot. Baedeker's statement is too casual. It sounds like a suggestion for a leisurely walk. It isn't a sufficient warning against doing something which shortens life. The word "inspect" is unfortunate. It gives the reader the idea he is invited to nose around those locks, when he had really better quiet down and keep away. The sentries don't want him there. I should have written that sentence differently. His kind of unconsidered advice leads to a lot of sadness.

"The Rue Longue contains a few quaint old houses."

It doesn't contain any houses at all. There are some heaps of scorched rubble. "Quaint" is word painting.

"On the south side of this square rises the dignified Cloth Hall."

There is nothing dignified about a shattered, burned, tottering old building. Why will he use these literary words?

"With a lately restored belfry."

It seems as if this writer couldn't help saying the wrong thing. A Zouave gave us a piece of bronze from the big bell. It wasn't restored at all. It was on the ground, broken.

"The church has a modern timber roof."

There he goes again—the exact opposite of what even a child could see were the facts. And yet in his methodical, earnest way, he has tried to get these things right. That church, for instance, has no roof at all. It has a few pillars standing. It looks like a skeleton. I have a good photograph of it, which the reader can see on page 69. If Baedeker would stand underthat "modern timber roof" in a rainstorm, he wouldn't think so much of it.

"The Hotel de Ville contains a small collection of paintings."

I don't like to keep picking on what he says, but this sentence is irritating. There aren't any paintings there, because things are scattered. You can see torn bits strewed around on the floor of the place, but nothing like a collection.

I could go on like that, and take him up on a lot more details. But it sounds as if I were criticising. And I don't mean it that way, because I believe the man is doing his best. But I do think he ought to get out another edition of his book, and set these points straight.

He puts a little poem on his title page:

Go, little book, God send thee good passage,And specially let this be thy prayerUnto them all that thee will read or hear,Where thou art wrong, after their help to call,Thee to correct in any part or all.

That sounds fair enough. So I am going to send him these notes. But it isn't in "parts" he is "wrong." There is a big mistake somewhere.

"Golden lads and girls all must,As chimney-sweepers, come to dust."

At times in my five months at the front I have been puzzled by the sacrifice of so much young life; and most I have wondered about the Belgians. I had seen their first army wiped out; there came a time when I no longer met the faces I had learned to know at Termonde and Antwerp and Alost. A new army of boys has dug itself in at the Yser, and the same wastage by gun-fire and disease is at work on them. One wonders with the Belgians if the price they pay for honor is not too high. There is a sadness in the eyes of Belgian boy soldiers that is not easy to face. Are we quite worthy of their sacrifice? Why should the son of Ysaye die for me? Are you, comfortable reader, altogether sure that Pierre Depage and André Simont are called on to spill their blood for your good name?

Then one turns with relief to the Fusiliers Marins—the sailors with a rifle. Here are young men at play. They know they are the incomparable soldiers. The guns have been on them for fifteen months, but they remain unbroken. Twice in the year, if they had yielded, this might have been a short war. But that is only saying that if Brittany had a different breed of men the world and its future would contain less hope. They carry the fine liquor of France, and something of their own added for bouquet. They are happy soldiers—happy in their brief life, with its flash of daring, and happy in their death. It is still sweet to die for one's country, and that at no far-flung outpost over the seas and sands, but just at the home border. As we carried our wounded sailors down from Nieuport to the great hospital of Zuydcoote on the Dunkirk highway, there is a sign-board, a bridge, and a custom-house that mark the point where we pass from Belgium into France. We drove our ambulance with the rear curtain raised, so that the wounded men, lying on the stretchers, could be cheered by the flow of scenery. Sometimes, as we crossed that border-line, one of themen would pick it up with his eye, and would say to his comrade: "France! Now we are in France, the beautiful country."

"What do you mean?" I asked one lad, who had brightened visibly.

"The other countries," he said, "are flat and dirty. The people are of mixed races. France is not so."

It has been my fortune to watch the sailors at work from the start of the war. I was in Ghent when they came there, late, to a hopeless situation. Here were youngsters scooped up from the decks, untrained in trenches, and rushed to the front; but the sea-daring was on them, and they knew obedience and the hazards. They helped to cover the retreat of the Belgians and save that army from annihilation by banging away at the German mass at Melle. Man after man developed a fatalism of war, and expressed it to us.

"Nothing can hit you till your time," was often their way of saying it; "it's no use dodging or being afraid. You won't be hit till your shell comes." And another favorite belief of theirs that brought them cheer was this: "The shellthat will kill you you won't hear coming. So you'll never know."

These sailor lads thrive on lost causes, and it was at Ghent they won from the Germans their nickname of "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge." The saucy French of that has a touch beyond any English rendering of "the girls with the red pompon." "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge" paints their picture at one stroke, for they thrust out the face of a youngster from under a rakish blue sailor hat, crowned with a fluffy red button, like a blue flower with a red bloom at its heart. I rarely saw an agingmarin. There are no seasoned troops so boyish. They wear open dickies, which expose the neck, full, hard, well-rounded. The older troops, who go laggard to the spading, have beards that extend down the collar; but a boy has a smooth, clean neck, and these sailors have the throat of youth. We must once have had such a race in our cow-boys and Texas rangers—level-eyed, careless men who know no masters, only equals. The force of gravity is heavy on an old man. Butmarinsare not weighted down by equipment nor muffled with clothing. They gobobbing like corks, as though they would always stay on the crest of things. And riding on top of their lightness is that absurd bright-red button in their cap. The armies for five hundred miles are sober, grown-up people, but here are the play-boys of the western front.

From Ghent they trooped south to Dixmude, and were shot to pieces in that "Thermopylæ of the North."

"Hold for four days," was their order.

They held for three weeks, till the sea came down and took charge. During those three weeks we motored in and out to get their wounded. Nothing of orderly impression of those days remains to me. I have only flashes of the sailor-soldiers curved over and snaking along the battered streets behind slivers of wall, handfuls of them in the Hotel de Ville standing around waiting in a roar of noise and a bright blaze of burning houses—waiting till the shelling fades away.[C]

Then for over twelve months they held wrecked Nieuport, and I have watched them there week after week. There is no drearier post on earth. One day in the pile of masonry thirty feet from our cellar refuge the sailors began throwing out the bricks, and in a few minutes they uncovered the body of a comrade. All the village has the smell of desolation. That smell is compounded of green ditch-water, damp plaster, wet clothing, blood, straw, and antiseptics. The nose took it as we crossed the canal, and held it till we shook ourselves on the run home. Thirty minutes a day in that soggy wreck pulled at my spirits for hours afterward. But those chaps stood up to it for twenty-four hours a day, liftinga cheery face from a stinking cellar, hopping about in the tangle, sleeping quietly when their "night off" comes. As our chauffeur drew his camera, one of them sprang into a bush entanglement, aimed his rifle, and posed.

I recollect an afternoon when we had word of an attack. We were grave, because the Germans are strong and fearless.

"Are they coming?" grinned a sailor. "Let them come. We are ready."

We learned to know many of the Fusiliers Marins and to grow fond of them. How else could it be when we went and got them, sick and wounded, dying and dead, two, six, ten of them a day, for many weeks, and brought them in to the Red Cross post for a dressing, and then on to the hospital? I remember a young man in our ambulance. His right foot was shot away, and the leg above was wounded. He lay unmurmuring for all the tossing of the road over the long miles of the ride. We lifted him from the stretcher, which he had wet with his blood, into the white cot in "Hall 15" of Zuydcoote Hospital. The wound and the journey had gone deeply intohis vitality. As he touched the bed, his control ebbed, and he became violently sick at the stomach. I stooped to carry back the empty stretcher. He saw I was going away, and said, "Thank you." I knew I should not see him again, not even if I came early next day.

There is one unfading impression made on me by those wounded. If I call it good nature, I have given only one element in it. It is more than that: it is a dash of fun. They smile, they wink, they accept a light for their cigarette. It is not stoicism at all. Stoicism is a grim holding on, the jaws clenched, the spirit dark, but enduring. This is a thing of wings. They will know I am not making light of their pain in writing these words. I am only saying that they make light of it. The judgment of men who are soon to die is like the judgment of little children. It does not tolerate foolish words. Of all the ways of showing you care that they suffer there is nothing half so good as the gift of tobacco. As long as I had any money to spend, I spent it on packages of cigarettes.

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