The History of the World War I. Various Authors
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little piece of the Low Countries, so small I walked across it in two hours, was all that remained of Belgium in the last days of October. A tide-water stream, the Yser, ebbed and flowed through the sunken fields, and there King Albert with his remnant of an army stopped the German military machine in its advance on Calais. If he and his forty thousand men had been crushed back ten miles farther they would have been fighting on French soil. The Yser was the last ditch in Belgium.
The Belgians were able to hold that mere strip of land against more men and better artillery because they had determined to die there. Some of those who had not yet paid the price of death told me. They were not tragic about it. There was no display of heroics. They said it seriously, but they smiled a little, too, over their wine glasses, and the next morning they were back in the firing-line.
I counted on my American passport and my permit de sejour in Paris seeing me through the zone of the fighting, and they did. At the station at Dunkirk, when I admitted I had no laisser passer, an obliging gendarme led me to his commander, and he placed his visée on my passport without question. He asked me whether I was a correspondent, and I confessed to it, but it seemed only to facilitate the affair. Earlier experiences had made me feel that the French gendarmes were my natural enemies, but I have had a kindlier regard for them since.
Troop trains.
The train I was on had ten cars full of French and Belgian soldiers. The Belgians had all been recently re-equipped. On other troop trains which passed us going forward there were many more Belgian soldiers, some of whom I had seen only a few hours earlier in the streets of Calais without rifles. As their trains passed now I could see them studying the mechanism and fondling their new firearms.
Coming in through the suburbs of Dunkirk we passed hundreds of children perched on the fences singing the Marseillaise. Nor were their voices flat and colorless like most school children's. They felt every word they sang, and they put their little hearts into it. Looking back along the side of the cars at the faces of soldiers leaning out, I could see they were touched by the faith of the children.
In Dunkirk.
As I rattled along on the cobbles of Dunkirk half an hour later I heard an explosion with a note unfamiliar to me. It sounded close, too, but it did not seem to bother the people of the street. A few children ran behind their mothers' skirts and a young girl hurried from the middle of the street to the protection of an archway, but that was all.
Standing up in the fiacre I could see a thin smoke about three hundred feet away in a garden in the direction from which the explosion came, and high in the evening sky I could barely make out an aeroplane. "A German bomb?" I asked the driver in some excitement.
"Oh, yes," he replied, cracking his whip, "we usually get three or four every afternoon about this time, but they have not hurt any one."
Dunkirk that night answered the description of what a threatened town which was not afraid should look like. It had none of the depressing atmosphere of Calais. All the refugees and the wounded were passed on to a safer place. It was full of French, English, and Belgian soldiers, with a scattering of sailors and breezy officers from both the French and English navies. They kept the waiters in the cafés on the run, and there was only an occasional bandage showing from under a cap or around a hand to indicate these men were engaged in any more serious business than a manœuvre.
Armored motor-car.
In the street, however, in front of the statue of Jean Bart, an armored Belgian motor-car was standing. It was built with a turret where the tonneau usually is and it was covered with thick sheet steel right down to the ground. Just in front of the driver was a slit with a lip extending over it, giving it somewhat the effect of the casque belonging to an ancient suit of armor. That was the only opening except the one for the barrel of the rapid-fire gun in the turret. The armor was dented in a dozen places where bullets had glanced off, but it had only been penetrated at one spot, about six inches from the muzzle of the gun. From the soldier at the steering gear I learned that that bullet had passed over the shoulder of the man in the turret.
Bombardment of Nieuport.
Twenty-four hours later, at Nieuport, when the German shells seemed to be falling in every street and on every house, I saw this car again, going forward at not less than forty miles an hour. The turret was being swung to bring the gun-muzzle forward, as if the gunner were expecting to go into action almost immediately. As the last of the Belgian trenches were just the other side of the town, I have no doubt that he did.
A walk to the firing line.
Getting out of Dunkirk was rather more of a problem than going in. To obtain permission to ride toward the Belgian line in any kind of conveyance was an elaborate performance, and quite properly so, as I soon learned. There were preparations for defence going on there which should not have been publicly known. The country was full of spies. Four suspects had been picked up on the boat coming from Folkestone. If I had realized what I was to see in the next few miles I would not have attempted what I did. But, as I was anxious to get on and the firing-line was only twenty miles away, I decided to walk.
A French hat and a French suit of clothes, I think, were alone responsible for my success in passing through the city gate. Two military automobiles were stopped and forced to show their credentials, but I strolled through unmolested. Once outside, the reservists guarding the various barricades let me pass as soon as I showed them my passport viséd in Dunkirk. I was stopped many times, too, trying each time not to give an appearance of too great interest in the works of defence being built all around me.
Sand-dune barricades.
Even though this cannot be published for some time I do not feel free to tell what these defences were. I have no doubt there are complete descriptions of these works in the hands of the German army, their spy system is so thorough, but I would not care to have any military secrets escape through anything I write. I think I can go so far as to say, though, that I received a liberal education in how to barricade sand-dunes and low-lying fields.
Ten miles out of Dunkirk I was surprised to see a civilian on a bicycle, as civilians were no longer permitted to go near the theatre of war on bicycles, a precaution taken against spies. As he approached I recognized Mr. J. Obels, the Belgian correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, whom I had last seen under arrest near Brussels when the German army first passed through Belgium. He told me he had been kept in prison seventeen days by the German military governor of Brussels, but, once released, was given every possible kind of pass. I was relieved to see him alive and free.
As Obels left me to continue his journey to Dunkirk and on to London to deliver his own "copy," he advised me to go directly to Furnes, the most considerable town in what was left of Belgium, and have my passport viséd again. So I continued down the long, flat highway, bordered on both sides by sunken fields, toward the cannonading I could now hear ahead. The road had been fairly full of automobiles, motor-trucks, motorcycles, and bicycles over its whole length, but it became crowded now with the addition of a long string of Parisian motor-buses taking several infantry regiments forward. A whole artillery division of yellow French "Schneiders" also took up its share of the wide road, and at the barricades there were traffic blockades lasting at times for ten minutes.
The road to Furnes.
All the way from Dunkirk I had been struck by the character of the land. As I approached Furnes, the dykes were being opened and half the fields were already inundated. It seemed a poor country for military operations. There were at most three highways, all defended. They could only be taken at a price no army could afford, and any departure from them meant being mired in the heavy fields, now being hastily harvested of a bumper crop of sugar-beets: at one place a whole French regiment in uniform was gathering the beets preparatory to inundation. With the dykes open these fields would be covered with four feet of water half the time. The only possible course for an army was over the sand-dunes, which lay a mile to the north, looking like the imitation mountains you see in the scenic-railways at every amusement resort in the United States.
Tommies' battles on the sand-dunes.
A reservist with whom I walked a mile or so told me Dunkirk had never been successfully