Part 11 (1/2)
Here and there, on the princ.i.p.al street, in a row of ruins, stood a single house that was intact and undamaged. It was plain enough to be seen that pains had been taken to spare it from the common fate of its neighbors. Also, I glimpsed one short side street that had come out of the fiery visitation whole and unscathed, proving, if it proved anything, that even in their red heat the Germans had picked and chosen the fruit for the wine press of their vengeance.
After Herve we encountered no more destruction by wholesale, but only destruction by piecemeal, until, nearing Liege, we pa.s.sed what remained of the most northerly of the ring of fortresses that formed the city's defenses. The conquerors had dismantled it and thrown down the guns, so that of the fort proper there was nothing except a low earthen wall, almost like a natural ridge in the earth.
All about it was an entanglement of barbed wire; the strands were woven and interwoven, tangled and twined together, until they suggested nothing so much as a great patch of blackberry briers after the leaves have dropped from the vines in the fall of the year. To take the works the Germans had to cut through these trochas. It seemed impossible to believe human beings could penetrate them, especially when one was told that the Belgians charged some of the wires with high electricity, so that those of the advancing party who touched them were frightfully burned and fell, with their garments blazing, into the jagged wire brambles, and were held there until they died.
Before the charge and the final hand-to-hand fight, however, there was sh.e.l.ling. There was much sh.e.l.ling. Sh.e.l.ls from the German guns that fell short or overshot the mark descended in the fields, and for a mile round these fields were plowed as though hundreds of plowshares had sheared the sod this way and that, until hardly a blade of gra.s.s was left to grow in its ordained place. Where sh.e.l.ls had burst after they struck were holes in the earth five or six feet across and five or six feet deep. Sh.e.l.ls from the German guns and from the Belgian guns had made a most hideous hash of a cl.u.s.ter of small cottages flanking a small smelting plant which stood directly in the line of fire. Some of these houses--workmen's homes, I suppose they had been--were of frame, sheathed over with squares of tin put on in a diamond pattern; and you could see places where a sh.e.l.l, striking such a wall a glancing blow, had scaled it as a fish is scaled with a knife, leaving the bare wooden ribs showing below. The next house, and the next, had been hit squarely and plumply amids.h.i.+ps, and they were gutted as fishes are gutted. One house in twenty, perhaps, would be quite whole, except for broken windows and fissures in the roof--as though the whizzing sh.e.l.ls had spared it deliberately.
I recall that of one house there was left standing only a breadth of front wall between the places where windows had been. It rose in a ragged column to the line of the roof-rafters--only, of course, there was neither roof nor rafter now. On the face of the column, as though done in a spirit of bitter irony, was posted a proclamation, signed by the burgomaster and the military commandant, calling on the vanished dwellers of this place to preserve their tranquillity.
On the side of the fort away from the city, and in the direction whence we had come, a corporal's guard had established itself in a rent-asunder house in order to be out of the wet. On the front of the house they had hung a captured Belgian bugler's uniform and a French dragoon's overcoat, which latter garment was probably a trophy brought back from the lower lines of fighting; it made you think of an old-clothes-man's shop. The corporal came forth to look at our pa.s.ses before permitting us to go on. He was a dumpy, good-natured-looking Hanoverian with patchy saffron whiskers sprouting out on him.
”Ach! yes,” he said in answer to my conductor's question. ”Things are quiet enough here now; but on Monday”--that would be three days before-- ”we shot sixteen men here--rioters and civilians who fired on our troops, and one grave-robber--a dirty hound! They are yonder.”
He swung his arm; and following its swing we saw a mound of fresh-turned clay, perhaps twenty feet in length, which made a yellow streak against the green of a small inclosed pasture about a hundred yards away. We saw many such mounds that day; and this one where the ign.o.ble sixteen lay was the shortest of the lot. Some mounds were fifty or sixty feet in length. I presume there were distinguis.h.i.+ng marks on the filled-up trenches where the German dead lay, but from the automobile we could make out none.
As we started on again, after giving the little Hanoverian the last treasured copy of a paper we had managed to keep that long against continual importunity, a big Belgian dog, with a dragging tail and a sharp jackal nose, loped round from behind an undamaged cow barn which stood back of the riven sh.e.l.l of a house where the soldiers were quartered. He had the air about him of looking for somebody or something.
He stopped short, sniffing and whining, at sight of the gray coats bunched in the doorway; and then, running back a few yards, with his head all the time turned to watch the strangers, he sat on his haunches, stuck his pointed muzzle upward toward the sky and fetched a long, homesick howl from the bottom of his disconsolate canine soul. When we turned a bend in the road, to enter the first recognizable street of Liege, he was still hunkered down there in the rain. He finished the picture; he keynoted it. The composition of it--for me--was perfect now.
I mean no levity when I say that Liege was well shaken before taken; but merely that the phrase is the apt one for use, because it better expresses the truth than any other I can think of. Yet, considering what it went through, last month, Liege seemed to have emerged in better shape than one would have expected.
Driving into the town I saw more houses with white flags--the emblem of complete surrender--fluttering from sill and coping, than houses bearing marks of the siege. In the bombardment the sh.e.l.ls mostly appeared to have pa.s.sed above the town--which was natural enough, seeing that the princ.i.p.al Belgian forts stood on the hilltops westward of and overlooking the city; and the princ.i.p.al German batteries--at least, until the last day of fighting--were posted behind temporary defenses, hastily thrown up, well to the east and north.
Liege, squatted in the natural amphitheater below, practically escaped the fire of the big guns. The main concern of the noncombatants, they tell me, was to shelter themselves from the street fighting, which, by all accounts, was both stubborn and sanguinary. The doughty Walloons who live in this corner of Belgium have had the name of being sincere and willing workers with bare steel since the days when Charles the Bold, of Burgundy, sought to curb their rebellious spirits by razing their city walls and ma.s.sacring some ten thousand of them. And quite a spell before that, I believe, Julius Caesar found them tough to bend and hard to break.
As for the Germans, checked as they had been in their rush on France by a foe whom they had regarded as too puny to count as a factor in the war, they sacrificed themselves by hundreds and thousands to win breathing s.p.a.ce behind standing walls until their great seventeen-inch siege guns could be brought from Essen and mounted by the force of engineers who came for that purpose direct from the Krupp works.
In that portion of the town lying west of the Meuse we counted perhaps ten houses that were leveled flat and perhaps twenty that were now but burnt-out, riddled hulls of houses, as empty and useless as so many shucked pea-pods. Of the bridges spanning the river, the princ.i.p.al one, a handsome four-span structure of stone ornamented with stone figures of river G.o.ds, lay now in shattered fragments, choking the current, where the Belgians themselves had blown it apart. One more bridge, or perhaps two--I cannot be sure--were closed to traffic because dynamite had made them unsafe; but the remaining bridges, of which I think there were three, showed no signs of rough treatment. Opposite the great University there was a big, black, ragged scar to show where a block of dwellings had stood.
Liege, to judge from its surface aspect, could not well have been quieter. Business went on; buyers and sellers filled the side streets and dotted the long stone quays. Old Flemish men fished industriously below the wrecked stone bridge, where the debris made new eddies in the swift, narrow stream; and blue pigeons swarmed in the plaza before the Palais de Justice, giving to the scene a suggestion of St. Mark's Square at Venice.
The German Landwehr, who were everywhere about, treated the inhabitants civilly enough, and the inhabitants showed no outward resentment against the Germans. But beneath the lid a whole potful of potential trouble was brewing, if one might believe what the Germans told us. We talked with a young lieutenant of infantry who in more peaceful times had been a staff cartoonist for a Berlin comic paper. He received us beneath the portico of the Theatre Royale, built after the model of the Odeon in Paris. Two waspish rapid-fire guns stood just within the shelter of the columns, with their black snouts pointing this way and that to command the sweep of the three-cornered Place du Theatre. A company of soldiers was quartered in the theater itself. At night, so the lieutenant said, those men who were off duty rummaged the costumes out of the dressing rooms, put them on, and gave mock plays, with music. An officer's horse occupied what I think must have been the box office. It put its head out of a little window just over our heads and nickered when other horses pa.s.sed. Against the side of the building were posters advertising a French company to play the Gallicized version of an American farce--”Baby Mine”--by Margaret Mayo. The borders of the posters were ornamented with prints of American flags done in the proper colors.
”Yes, Liege seems quiet enough,” said the lieutenant; ”but we expect a revolt to break out at any time. We expected it last night, and the guard in the streets was tripled and doubled; and these little dears”-- patting the muzzle of one of the machine guns--”were put here; and more like them were mounted on the porticoes of the Hotel de Ville and the Palais de Justice. So nothing happened in the city proper, though in the outskirts three soldiers disappeared and are supposed to have been murdered, and a high officer”--he did not give the name or the rank-- ”was waylaid and killed just beyond the environs.
”Now we fear that the uprising may come to-night. For the last three days the residents, in great numbers, have been asking for permits to leave Liege and go into neutral territory in Holland, or to other parts of their own country. To us this sudden exodus--there seems to be no reason for it--looks significant.
”These people are naturally turbulent. Always they have been so. Most of them are makers of parts for firearms--gunmaking, you know, was the princ.i.p.al industry here--and they are familiar with weapons; and many of the men are excellent shots. This increases the danger. At first they were content to ambush single soldiers who strayed into obscure quarters after dark. Now it is forbidden for less than three soldiers in a party to go anywhere at night; and they think from this that we are afraid, and are growing more daring.
”By day they smile at us and bow, and are as polite as dancing masters; but at night the same men who smile at us will cheerfully cut the throat of any German who is foolish enough to venture abroad alone.
”Besides, this town and all the towns between here and Brussels are being secretly flooded with papers printed in French telling the people that we have been beaten everywhere to the south, and that the Allies are but a few miles away; and that if they will rise in numbers and destroy the garrisons re-enforcements will arrive the next morning to hold the district against us.
”If they do rise it will be Louvain all over again. We shall burn Liege and kill all who are suspected of being in league against our troops.
a.s.suredly many innocent ones will suffer then with the guilty; but what else can we do? We are living above a seething volcano.”
Certainly, though, never did volcano seethe more quietly.
The garrison commander would not hear of our visiting any of the wrecked Belgian fortresses on the wooded heights behind the city. As a reason for his refusal he said that explosives in the buried magazines were beginning to go off, making it highly dangerous for spectators to venture near them. However, he had no objection to our going to a certain specified point within the zone of supposed safety. With a noncommissioned officer to guide us we climbed up a miry footpath to the crest of a low hill; and from a distance of perhaps a hundred yards we looked across at what was left of Fort Loncin, one of the princ.i.p.al defenses.