Antwerp to Gallipoli A Year of the War on Many Fronts-and Behind Them

ll Of

astern horizon as they had rumbled, nearer and nearer, for a fortnight, were now beyond the outer line of forts and within striking distance of the town. That night, an hour or two after midnight, in my hotel by the water-front, I awoke to the steady clatter of hoofs on cobblestones and the rumble of wheels. I went to the window, on the narrow side street, black as all streets had been in Antwerp since the night that the Zeppelin threw its first bombs, an

ngaged in- down the quay and across the pontoon bridge-the only way over the Scheldt-over to the Tete-de-Flandres and the road to Ghent. They were strung along the street next morning, boots mud-covered, mud-stained, intrenching shovels hanging to their belts, face

red and tanned like an Indian squaw with work in the fields, yet with a fine, well-made face, pushing a groaning wheelbarrow. A strap went from the handles over her shoulders, and, stopping now and then to ask the news, she would slip off this harness, gossip for a time, then push on again. That afternoon under my window there was a tall wagon, a sort of hay wagon, in which there were twenty-two little tow-headed children, none more than eight or ten and several almost babies in arms. By the side of the wagon a man, evidently father of some of them, stood buttering the end of a huge round loaf of bread and cutting off slice after slice, which the older children

litary automobile-to two of the hospitals. In one, a British hospital on the Boulevard Leopold, the doctor in charge was absent for the moment, and there was no one to ans

English voice, without further a

she was the wife of a British general and had two sons in the army, and a third-"Poor boy!" she murmured, more to him than to me-on one of the ships in the North Sea. I arranged to come back next morning t

down on Paris and were rolled back again, and while the little nation

the garrison had sought momentary refuge and where most of them were killed, burned, and blackened. One strong, good-looking young fellow, able to eat and live apparently, was shot through the temples and blind in both eyes. It was the hour for carrying those well enough to stand it out into the court and givi

t him down, and then, reaching out and pat

eets and still the endless procession of carts and wagons and shivering people, one might have forgotten, in that cheerfully lighted room, that we were not in times of peace. We eve

n. One had come to think of it, almost, as nothing but a sound; and to listen with a detached and not unpleasant

oom !" was followed by a crash as if lightning had struck a house a little way down the street. As I hurried to the window there came an

as if racing to their goal. And then the crash or, if farther away, muffled explosion as anot

nded it to be, tremendous. It is not easy to describe nor to be imagined by those who had not lived in that threatened city-the last Belgian stronghold-and felt that

nnot stir from your tracks, and meanwhile "Boom

treets, and the quay, which had begun to clear by this time, was again jammed. I threw on some clothes, hurried to the street. A rank smell of kerosene hung in the air; presently a petr

ed up as far as the cathedral without seeing anything but black and silent streets. Every one in the hotel was up and dressed by this time. Some were for leaving at once; one family, piloted

y four hundred thousand people-emptied itself in earnest. Citizens and soldiers, field-guns, motor-trucks, wheelbarrows, dog-carts, hay-ricks, baby-carriages, droves of people on foot, all flowing down to the Scheldt, the

hough retreating Belgian soldiers were a part of it, and one of the German aeroplanes, a mere speck against the blue, was looking calmly down overhead. Nor did they touch

uet, half torn away. They had come in from the trenches, where their comrades were now waiting, with their helpless little rifles, for an enemy, miles away, who lay back at his ease and pounded them with his big guns. I asked

e zone of fire, with the London bus trailing behind, and pick up wounded. It wasn't a particularly pleasant job, he said, jerking his head toward the distant firing, and frankly he wa

the fire. The city wall, along which are the first line of forts, drew near, then the tunnel passing under it, and we went through without pausing and on down the road to Malines. We were beyond the town now, bowling rapidly out into the flat Belgian country, and, clinging there to the running-board with the October wind blowing quite through a thin fl

nith had somehow been ripped across like a tightly stretched piece of silk, and a shell from the Belgian fort under w

German shell had gone over us and burst behind the Belgian fort. Under this gigantic antip

enty of dead horses along the roads in France, but they had been so for days. This one's blood was no

bandages littered the deserted room, and an electric chandelier was still burning. The young officer pointed to some trenches

e a brick farmhouse with a vista in front of barbed-wire entanglement and a carefully cleaned firing field stretching out to a village and trees about half a mile away. They had looked very interesting and difficult, th

for an enemy that would not come, while a captive balloon a mile or two away to the eastward and an aeroplane sailing far overhead gave the ranges, and they waited for the shrapnel to burst. The trenches were hasty affairs, narrow and shoulder-deep, very like trenches for gas or water pipes, and reasonably safe except when a shell burst directly overhead. One had struck that morning just on the inner rim

edition for their first sight of war. The London papers are talking about it as I am writing this-how this handful of nine thousand men, part of them recruits who scarcely knew one end of a rifle from another, were flung across the Channel on Sunday night and rushed up to the front t

agination, perhaps, or at least of "nerves," left them as calm and casual as if they were but drilling on the turf of Hyde Park. And with it persisted that almost equally unshakable sense of class, that touching confidence in one's superiors- t

eading to a bomb-proof prepared for wounded, and the ambulance

beyond the orchard made both of us duck our heads. "A bit hot, sir, about nine o'clock, but only one man hurt. They d

ould imagine him saying, in that same tone of deference and chipper good h

with a deep, strong, slightly humorous voice, and the air of one both born to and used to command-the best type of navy man-came over to meet us, rather glad, it seemed, to see some one. The ambulance officer had just started to speak when ther

to stop that? That's the third time we've been nearly hit by their shrapnel this morning. After all"-he turned to us wit

t to clear them out, but they were in the zone of fire, their range was known, and there was no telling, when that distant

officer said, in a tower in the village, not much more than half a mile away. He pointed

ad, toward another trench. The progress of the motor seemed slow and disappointing. Not that the spot a quarter of a mile off was at all less likely to be hit, yet one felt conscious of a growing desire to be somewh

ily as a circus rider pops through a tissue-paper hoop. Almost at the same instant another exploded-where, I haven't the least idea, except that the dust from it hit us in the f

admit that in my brief experience I was not able to arrive at this restful state. We reached at last the city gate through which we had left Antwerp, and the

open space between the gate and the houses, a sto

appeared in the side of a house directly in front of us with a roar and a geyser of dust. Neither the motor nor a guest's duty now

e was reasonably protected. Keeping close to the house-fronts and dodging-rather absurdly, no doubt-into doorways when that

street, with doors locked, shutters closed, sandbags, mattresses, or little heaps of earth piled over cellar windows; streets in which the only sound was that

staring into space. Once I passed a woman bound away from, instead of toward, the river with her big bundle; and once an open carriage with a family in it driving, with peculiarly Flemish composure, toward the quay, and as I hurried pas

The impartiality with which those far-off gunners distributed their attentions was disconcerting. Peering down one of the up-and-down streets before crossing it, as if a shell were an automobile which you might see and dodge, y

literally. The order had just come to leave the building, bringing the wounded and such equipment as they could pack into half a dozen motor-buses and retire-just where, I did not hear-in the direction of Ghent. As I entere

Now one was to learn something of the meaning of those equally familiar

red legs not yet set, men with faces half shot away, men half out of their heads, and all these had to be dressed somehow, covered up, crowded

ust as they had come from the trenches, were dumpe

One healthy-looking Belgian boy, on whom I was trying to pull a pair of British trousers, seemed to have nothing at all the matter with him, until it presently appeared that he was speechless

ly waiting, as calm and smiling as circus queens on their gilt chariots. The behavior of the men in the trenches was cool enough, but they at least were fighting men and but taking the chance of war. These were civilian volunteers, they had not even trenches to shelter them, and it took a rather unforeseen and difficult sort of courage to leave that fairly safe masonry building and sit smiling and helpful on top of a motor-bus during a wait of half an hour or so, any second of which might be one's last. There was an American nurse there, a tall, radiant girl, whom they called, and rightly, "Morning Glory," who had been introduced to me the day before because we both belonged to that curious foreign race of Americans. What her name was I haven't the least idea, and if we were

city might be going, but there was no time then to think of possibilities, and I slipped down the lee side of the street to the door with the Red Cross flag. The front of the hospital was shut tight. It took several pulls at the bell to bring any one, and inside I found a Belgian family who had left their own house for the thicker ceilings of the hospital, and the nuns back in the wards with their nervous men. Their servants had left that morning, the three or four sisters in charge had had to do all the cooking and housework a

gian gentleman, and from the same source an able-bodied servant, but how long these would stay, where food was to be found in that desolate city, when the bombardment would cease, and what the Germans would do with them-well, it was not a pleasant situation for a handful of women. But it was not of themselves she was thinking, but of th

and people with anything but consideration and told the little nurse so. She came to the edge of the glass-covered court, laughingly saying I had best run across it, and wondering where we, who had met twice now under such

in front of our hotel-one of the few places in Antwerp that night where one could get so much as a crust of bread-and behind drawn curtains we made what cheer we could. There were two American photographers and a correspondent who had spent the night before in the cellar of a house,

t wishing to be made a prisoner, was for getting a boat of some sort at the first crack of dawn, and the photographers, who had had the roof blown off over their heads, heartily agreed with him. I did not like to leav

a rather full day, and the wail of approaching projectiles began to get on one's nerves. One started at the slamming of a door, took every dull thump for a distant explosion; and when we finally turned in I carried the mattress fro

, and once-it must have been about two or three o'clock-I heard a sound which meant that all was over. It was the crisp tramp-different from the Belgian shuffle-of Br

laming across the south, a steamer of some sort was burning at her wharf beside the bridge- Napoleon's veterans r

ss, and out in the river a geyser of water shot up, timbers and boards flew from the bridge, and there were dozens of smaller splashes as if from a shower of shot. I thought that the hotel was hit at last and that the Germans, having let civilians escape over the bridge, were turning

e, merging with the fog and the smoke from the Antwerp fires, seemed to cover the whole sky. And under that sullen mantle the dark flames of the petrol still glowed; to the right, as we looked back, wa

tugs-to be sunk there, apparently, in midstream. From the pontoon bridge, which stubbornly refused to yield, came explosion after explosion, and up and

ion into its countless uprooted, disorganized lives. You must imagine old people struggling along over miles and miles of country roads; young girls, under burdens a man might not care to bear, tramping until they had to carry their shoes in their hands and go barefoot to rest their unaccustomed feet. You must imagine the pathetic efforts of hundreds of people to keep clean by washing in wayside streams or ditches; imagine babies going without milk because there was no milk to be

s. Each family had its big, round loaves of bread and its pile of hay for the horses, the bags of pears and potatoes; the children had their little dolls, and you would see some tired mother with her big bundle under one arm and some fluffy little puppy in the other. You could not associate them with forty-centimetre shells or burned churches and libraries or anything but quiet homes and peaceable, helpful lives. You could not be swept along by that endless stream of exiles and retain at the end of the day any particular enthusiasm for