IN A MOME 
 OF T 
 
 i 
 
 V* 
 
 R-WKAUFTEMAN
 
 IN A MOMENT OF TIME
 
 OTHER BOOKS BY 
 
 REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN: 
 
 Novels : 
 
 The House of Bondage 
 
 The Sentence of Silence 
 
 Running Sands 
 
 The Spider's Web 
 
 The Chasm 
 
 Jarvis of Harvard 
 
 The Things That Are Csesar's 
 
 Jim (To be published in 
 May) 
 
 Romances: 
 
 Miss Frances Baird, Detec- 
 tive 
 
 My Heart and Stephanie 
 
 Anthologies: 
 
 The Book of Love 
 The Book of Friendship 
 The Book of Gratitude 
 The Book of Good Cheer 
 
 Ethics and Economics: 
 The Way of Peace 
 What Is Socialism? 
 
 A Collection of Short Stories: 
 The Girl That Goes Wrong 
 
 A Volume of Epigrams: 
 The Bachelor's Guide 
 
 Verse : 
 •'Little Old Belgium"
 
 : -4 
 
 From a photograph by A. II. Savage Landor from L' Illustration. 
 
 All that Is Left Them 
 
 The King and Queen of the Belgians on an unconquered strip of 
 
 sea beach.
 
 IN A MOMENT 
 OF TIME 
 
 Things Seen on the Bread-Line 
 of Belgium 
 
 BY 
 
 REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN 
 
 "n 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 
 1915
 
 Copyright, 1915, 
 Bv MOFFAT, YARD & COMPANY
 
 TO 
 THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN 
 
 OF BELGIUM, 
 TO 
 
 THEIR AGED AND INFIRM: 
 
 To those kindly, peaceable, courageous 
 folk, those thousands who, "in a moment 
 of time," have been robbed of husbands, 
 sons and lovers; who have been tortured, 
 violated; who have lost their homes and 
 means of livelihood; who today face star- 
 vation because their protectors scorned 
 temptation and set honor above life; 
 to them and 
 
 10 
 ALL THOSE AMERICANS 
 
 who are helping them in their dark 
 hour of need. 
 
 Belgium, jnd Aug., 1914: 
 
 And the devil, taking him up into a high mountain, showed unto him 
 all the kingdoms of the world in o moment of time. And the devil said 
 unto him : 
 
 "All this power will I give thec, and the glory of them: for that is 
 delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will, I give it. If thou there- 
 fore will worship me, all sluill be thine." 
 
 " Get thee behind me, Satan; for it is written, ' Thou shall worship 
 the Lord thy God, and hi in only slialt thou serve. "
 
 PREFACE 
 
 It was my fortune to see something of Bel- 
 gium in wartime, and I have here tried to tell at 
 least a part of what I saw. Nevertheless, ex- 
 cept perhaps for the narrative of the early rush 
 to Ostend and the final bombardment of Ant- 
 werp, this is not, in current phrase, "another 
 war-book" at all : it is not an account of deeds 
 observed on the Firing-Line; it is at best but 
 an inadequate record of some incidents ob- 
 served on the Bread-Line. When I read Mr. 
 E. Alexander Powell's vivid "Fighting in 
 Flanders" and Mr. Richard Harding Davis's 
 thrilling chronicle of his experiences "With the 
 Allies," I perceived immediately that a record 
 of what little I observed of actual fighting 
 would have small value beside those better-in- 
 formed volumes. But I did see enough of the 
 actual fighting and enough of the suffering of 
 those who could not fight to know that of the 
 
 vii
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 latter and their needs too much could not be 
 written: to feel that it is the duty of every 
 American man and woman who has any first- 
 hand knowledge of the Belgian non-combat- 
 ants' distress to lay that knowledge before the 
 generous people of the United States. This, 
 then, simply represents my small contribution 
 to the needs of Belgium's innocent dispos- 
 sessed; I have merely tried to tell my fellow- 
 countrymen, as well as I hurriedly can, a little 
 of what I know of events and conditions that 
 call, and cannot call in vain, for every bit of 
 such help as material gifts can convey. 
 
 As for my own attitude toward the rights 
 and wrongs of the present war, it is enough to 
 say that, though the first of August, 19 14, 
 found me a neutral, I soon became but a partial 
 neutral, and what I subsequently saw of the 
 things done to inoffensive Belgian burghers and 
 villagers left me, if a neutral, a very partial one 
 indeed. I cannot do better than quote Mr. 
 Powell: "I am pro-Belgian; I should be 
 ashamed to be anything else." Frankly, it is 
 in this spirit that I have written. I have not
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 told all that I saw or heard, but I have sup- 
 pressed nothing that was to the advantage of 
 the Germans, nothing that was to the disad- 
 vantage of the Belgians. Several of the in- 
 cidents narrated came to me at second-hand, 
 but T have set down nothing that did not have 
 plentiful corroboration, and I have repeated 
 nothing that did not come from reliable sources 
 and persons of authority. 
 
 Some portions of certain chapters in this 
 book were originally published in The Saturday 
 Evening Post, Leslie's Weekly, the London 
 Chronicle, the London Express, the Philadel- 
 phia Ledger, the Philadelphia North American 
 and the New York Times. My thanks are due 
 to the editors of those publications for their 
 permission to reprint. 
 
 These portions were of considerable assist- 
 ance to me, but so far as form was concerned, 
 they for the most part required, when taken 
 from the daily or weekly press and placed in 
 a book, to be entirely rewritten. 1 landed in 
 New York from England on January 5th, and 
 found that, if it were to appear in time to be
 
 x PREFACE 
 
 of any effect in assisting the work of the vari- 
 ous committees for Belgian relief, the manu- 
 script of this volume must be completed by the 
 fifth of February. That condition I have 
 managed to meet ; but it necessitated writing at 
 a speed that I am fully aware has left a great 
 deal to be desired. I hope only that, whatever 
 the lapses due to this hurry, they will not im- 
 pede the appeal that I have tried to make. 
 
 R. W. K. 
 
 New York, 
 
 5th February, 191 5.
 
 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 SUNSHINE IN BELGIUM 
 
 I suppose it did rain, sometimes, in Belgium. 
 It must have, you know. The land was a gar- 
 den, and there can't, alas, be gardens without 
 rain, so I suppose Belgium had its wet days 
 even before its Dark Day began. I can't, how- 
 ever, remember any — back there. To be sure 
 my wife says that, on her first visit to Antwerp, 
 there was rain every other hour; but I have 
 only her word for it. To be sure, too, in one 
 of my old diaries I find the entry : 'To Bruges 
 on horseback; good roads; some rain" — and, 
 by severe concentration, I do seem to get the 
 faint impression of a few drops falling between 
 vast patches of blue; yet that is probably more 
 suggestion than memory; it is all anything but 
 
 13
 
 14 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 convincing. Certainly I shall ever remember 
 the land as it was during my last stay in it be- 
 fore the Great Storm. No, I really don't recol- 
 lect any rain in that Belgium whatever. To 
 me it will always remain Smiling Belgium, a 
 country of sunshine. 
 
 There are some children born with the mus- 
 cles of their brows so formed that they cannot 
 frown: Belgium was one of these children. 
 Here and there comes a bit of gently rolling 
 country; behind Namur lies the forest of Ar- 
 dennes, whence Sir Walter's "Wild Boar" took 
 his soubriquet; but the billows of that rolling 
 country were as smiles passing over the earth's 
 face, and wherever the Ardennes threatened a 
 grim wildness, dead-and-gone Belgians had 
 planted a pretty sixteenth-century chateau to 
 laugh the threat away. All the rest of the land 
 is flat ; it is a chess-board on which the squares 
 were green fields, or immaculate villages, and 
 the dividing-lines hedges, or canals, or long, 
 straight, white roads bordered by twin rows of 
 Lombardy-poplars that converged at the van- 
 ishing-point. Louvain was only eighty-two
 
 SUNSHINE IN BELGIUM 15 
 
 feet above sea-level, Bruges is scarcely thirty. 
 Belgium was topographically impeded from 
 frowning, and she loved the inhibition. 
 
 The people themselves were sunshine-folk. 
 Not fair-weather friends in the sense of the 
 proverbial expression — loyal friends for all 
 weathers, the Belgians I knew — but folk that 
 had sunshine coursing through their veins, and 
 could not get rid of it without bleeding to death. 
 They have bled enough now ; but then — 
 
 You were warmed by it the moment you 
 landed in Belgium. The douaniers winked at 
 a few extra cigars ; the State Railways took you 
 over a system innocent of that melancholy con- 
 trivance elsewhere known as a first-class car- 
 riage; the country-folk smiled at you as you 
 passed among their smiling fields; the cities 
 beamed on you from Gothic spire and Flemish 
 tavern. "Brussels" — so runs the Latin rhyme 
 — "rejoices in its noble men, Antwerp in wealth, 
 Ghent in halters, Bruges in pretty girls, Lou- 
 vain in pundits and Malines in fools": from 
 only the third and sixth of those statements do 
 I dissent, and I call your attention to the fact
 
 16 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 that even the monk who made them could find 
 no adequate verb but "gawdere." 
 
 Its adequacy persisted until the August of 
 1 9 14. Industrious, but quiet, the Belgians 
 were ; thrifty, but generous and, excepting the 
 Danes, the most hospitable folk under Heaven. 
 Troubles, industrial and other, there sometimes 
 were, but troubles met with a brave smile and 
 contested with a sympathy for the man on the 
 other side of the question: I remember a 
 striking miner — "We must win," said he, "be- 
 cause we are right ; but we must not forget that 
 our mine-owners think themselves right also." 
 Those Belgians loved peace and were of a gen- 
 eration unacquainted with war. They main- 
 tained a great sea-trade, but were a stay-at- 
 home nation: one friend of mine, who lived 
 within fifty miles of the coast, never saw the 
 ocean until carried in a hospital-ship to Eng- 
 land. Their ideals were simple: to obey the 
 laws; to earn as much money as would keep 
 them through a gentle old age ; to rear children 
 that would follow in their parents' ways, and 
 to do this cheerfully, enjoying work and taking
 
 SUNSHINE IN BELGIUM 17 
 
 time to play, glad to be alive and thanking God 
 for their gladness. 
 
 Belgium was once the battle-ground of some 
 of the fiercest of religious-wars (to use that ex- 
 traordinary phrase) in history, and yet it had 
 become of all lands the least religiously trou- 
 bled. I do not mean that the Belgians were 
 irreligious. On the contrary, they were a pious 
 people; but I do mean that they become respec- 
 ters of the individual's right to believe as he 
 pleases, and that to each of them his religion 
 was something to be glad of and not frightened 
 or angry about. I think a Belgian peasant put 
 it correctly: ''There are," he said, "only three 
 religions in Belgium — the Church, the Protes- 
 tants and the Socialists." The Socialists — 
 well, they were what their Mr. Vandervelde is, 
 which is to say very able ; the Protestants were 
 very able too; and as for the Catholics, who 
 were in a vast majority, they trooped happily 
 to their beautiful churches: I never saw a 
 frowning priest in Belgium. 
 
 Until Germany and the other Great Powers 
 declared it a neutral country, Belgium had been
 
 18 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 well called the cock-pit of Europe, had been the 
 convenient field whereto the champions of her 
 big neighbors adjourned to fight out their dif- 
 ferences ; and yet, once that neutrality appeared 
 assured, Belgium itself became of all nations 
 the most trustingly pacific. Switzerland was 
 guarded by her Alps ; Belgium lay open by sea 
 and land. Belgium was between states that 
 shook their fists at one another across that se- 
 rene head; here were desirable industries, a 
 delectable commerce, an envied ocean-coast. 
 Belgium's wonderful forts had been built more 
 as interesting military experiments than with 
 any thought of actual need; the Belgian army 
 no alien considered seriously. The little coun- 
 try's one real guard was the pledges of the sur- 
 rounding governments. That was the one real 
 chain of effective fortifications: that Scrap of 
 Paper; but it was backed by the sworn honor 
 of mighty peoples: nothing could harm Bel- 
 gium. What had people and kingdom to fear ? 
 I used to ask Belgians about their country's 
 position in case of a European conflict: many
 
 SUNSHINE IN BELGIUM 19 
 
 sorts of questions of every sort of people. I 
 received only one sort of answer : 
 
 ''They have given their promise to respect 
 our neutrality. They themselves, jointly, im- 
 posed neutrality upon us. That Belgium 
 should be overrun or invaded, that Belgium 
 should be involved in any European war which 
 could occur — it is quite impossible. We have 
 the word of all of them." 
 
 That was it, and they said it with a kindly 
 smile for my absurd, my preposterous, fore- 
 bodings: the statesman and the peasant, the 
 rich merchant of Antwerp and the small 
 farmer of West Flanders. What I suggested 
 simply could not be. 
 
 Especially did the people trust Germany. 
 One found it so everywhere. A cabinet-min- 
 ister said to me: 
 
 "Germany has promised to respect our neu- 
 trality, and Germany does not break her word. 
 The Germans are not liars." 
 
 Said a business-man of Antwerp: 
 
 "Belgium's commercial relations with Ger-
 
 20 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 many are of the closest and most friendly sort. 
 There are hundreds of Germans in Belgium 
 whom Belgium has made rich. We do all that 
 we can to attract German capital, and, in re- 
 turn, Belgian money pours into Germany: 
 Germany is grateful." 
 
 "Germany," declared an Hainaut peasant — • 
 "Germany is Belgium's big brother." 
 
 This faith had one effect that testifies to the 
 genuineness of its cause. National-anthems 
 are born of international conflicts, or of the ex- 
 pectation of such conflicts. So strong was the 
 Belgian's belief in the Prussian-signed treaty 
 to preserve Belgium's neutrality that he never 
 made himself, musician though he is, a na- 
 tional-hymn. All over England, now, they are 
 playing "La Brabangonne" in the belief that 
 it has always been to Belgium what "God Save 
 the King" is to Great Britain. "La Braban- 
 gonne" was not that. It was, as its name 
 should plainly show, a provincial song of the 
 district of Brabant; it was no more national 
 than "The Lancashire Lass" is "Rule Britan- 
 nia," or than "Maryland, My Maryland" is
 
 SUNSHINE IN BELGIUM 21 
 
 "The Star-Spangled Banner." Only this war 
 has raised it, among the Belgians themselves, 
 to the plane of a national-anthem. 
 
 Perhaps I have given you the impression 
 that the Belgians of the Sunny Belgium did 
 not love their country. If so, I have erred. 
 Nowhere, as the terrible test has proved, was 
 there a stronger love of country. But, in 
 quietness, the Belgian's patriotism was quiet. 
 He did not dream of invasion ; he had no visions 
 of conquest. To raise his land to a world- 
 power was never among a Belgian's thoughts. 
 His national pride was the reverse of that; it 
 was pride in the contented littleness of Bel- 
 gium; his national ambition was to show the 
 world a compact, self-sufficient state whose 
 glory was her peace. 
 
 Have I wandered from my talk about the 
 physical characteristics of the Belgium and the 
 Belgians that I used to know? My excuse is 
 that those characteristics reflected themselves 
 in the mental concepts of the people: Bel- 
 gium was quiet and peaceful, because Belgium 
 was merry and clean.
 
 22 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 Belgian cleanliness, orderliness: I wonder 
 if ever there were elsewhere their like. The 
 sort of people that have a fondness for the word 
 "quaint" used to apply it to the Belgians, who 
 merited it because they had attitude without 
 pose, because they seized fast hold of every- 
 thing modern and used it with the simple prac- 
 ticality that all other modern peoples have lost. 
 Over on the Isle of Marken, the mother, already 
 half out of her Amsterdam clothes, screams to 
 her daughter: "Another tourist-boat is com- 
 ing ; hurry and put on your fishermaid-costume 
 — het te laat is!" And the dutiful girl strips 
 herself of the latest fashions and prepares to 
 attract twentieth-century money by donning 
 eighteenth-century draperies. The Belgians 
 learned nothing of that from their Dutch 
 cousins: they were themselves, in season and 
 out of it. Nor did they import from southern 
 Italy an association of ideas between the dirt 
 of the present and the monuments of the past ; 
 in the Belgium that smiled, age did not necessi- 
 tate uncleanliness, nor did godliness and the 
 worship of God.
 
 SUNSHINE IN BELGIUM 2$ 
 
 "You can eat from the cobble-stones of Ant- 
 werp/' a Belgian used to say to me, "as safely 
 as from a plate in London." 
 
 Eat well you certainly could, anywhere in 
 Belgium. Americans generally called Belgian 
 cookery greasy; but that was because they did 
 not know where to go for the really Belgian 
 food. There were hundreds of wayside-inns 
 where two-francs-fifty bought a dejeuner such 
 as no ingenunity can discover and no money 
 purchase in New York; and of the cities Ar- 
 nold Bennett was right when he said ! that the 
 dinners of Brussels surpassed all others in the 
 world; nowhere could one — and, better, two — 
 dine so delicately well as at the "Filet de Sole" 
 in the rue Gretry, at the "Lion d'Or" in the 
 same street — at any of the right restaurants in 
 Brussels. 
 
 In the largest city and the smallest hamlet 
 there was a deal of excellent thought given to 
 f«>od and drink — not to absinthe or whisky, for 
 of drunkenness there was comparatively little, 
 but to the lighter wines and the local beers of 
 »"Your United States." (Harper & Bros.)
 
 24 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 the estaminets: the bitter U it set of Ghent, the 
 sugared Witbeer of Louvain ; the Faro and the 
 Brum, and the twenty years' old Gneuse Lam- 
 bic. Food and drink, so right that none 
 wanted too much of either, and dancing, too, 
 and music. Not alone the grand operas of 
 Brussels; for everywhere, after work, the peo- 
 ple played. Why, once, in Bruges, I counted 
 three cafes chant ants on one side of the Groote 
 Markt facing the monument to Jan Breidel and 
 Pieter de Conine and looking over to the old 
 Tour des Halles. The thirteenth-century tur- 
 rets of that Belfry echoed back a quite passa- 
 ble imitation of a song from "High Jinks," 
 which I had last heard in the Casino on Broad- 
 way, and when the singer had obeyed the sum- 
 mons of the encore, she sat down at a table 
 and completed, by the addition of her brother- 
 er's overcoat, the well-intentioned beginning 
 made by an abortive skirt. Yet the next day 
 Bruges was another city : the tongues of a hun- 
 dred bells called a pious population to church. 
 There was the hum of Sunday silks and the 
 scent of Sunday soaps. Round-faced Flem-
 
 SUNSHINE IN BELGIUM 25 
 
 ings, with round-faced sons and daughters, 
 marched to their churches and, in the after- 
 noon, walked beside their sleepy, tree-shaded 
 canals; and I remember my own walk on one 
 of those Sundays, to the quietest, most peace- 
 ful place in the world : a square of green sward 
 and drooping elms shut in by the old church of 
 Ste. Elizabeth and the spick-and-span white- 
 washed houses of the sisters of the Bcguinage. 
 I have done a little walking in the Belgian coun- 
 tryside, too, and come to many a tiny inn by 
 night : the first warning that the inn was near 
 was always music. 
 
 This can be no attempt at a guide to Bel- 
 gium : too many Americans knew it well in the 
 days of its sunshine, and of those Americans 
 one at least has not the heart to write at length 
 of smiles that have since given way to tears 
 so very bitter. The green countryside where 
 men tilled the earth and loved it — men that 
 spoke the French of the northwest, men that 
 spoke the Romanic Walloon tongue, and men 
 that spoke the Flemish which the Duke of Alva 
 once made a secret language — none that saw it
 
 \JQ 
 
 26 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 can forget its warm charm. The delight of 
 the dunes about Knocke; the innocent gayety 
 of Heyst, with its laughing women that none 
 ever thought would sob, and its brilliant pink- 
 and-orange soldiers that none ever guessed 
 could fight; its promenade a mile long and 
 twenty-odd yards across ; its romping children 
 and its military-bands forever playing seren- 
 ades : who that has been there does not remem- 
 ber them? In every traveler's mind there 
 must remain these pictures: the university 
 at Louvain, which, on the day when Colum- 
 bus sailed from Palos, was beginning to won- 
 der whether the world were round ; Ghent's St. 
 Bavon and her docks where, only a year ago, 
 ships traded in cargoes of flowers; Antwerp's 
 busy streets about her Gothic cathedral and 
 colonnaded Hotel de Ville; the gayety of Brus- 
 sels; the smiling quiet of ancient Bruges. 
 
 About their canvases in a hundred churches 
 flitted the happy ghosts of Hans Memling and 
 Peter Paul Rubens, of the two David Teniers 
 and Roger van der Weyden, of the three 
 Brueghels and the two Van Eycks. Proud of
 
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 SUNSHINE IN BELGIUM 27 
 
 the peace that their hard struggles had at last 
 secured, the spirits of Belgium's long catalogue 
 of heroes must have gathered now and then in 
 many a gray keep and on many a disused tower. 
 In the quiet sunshine of a thousand fertile 
 fields, among the whirring machinery of count- 
 less prospering factories, their descendants, 
 reared to kindness and bred to comfort, went 
 their busy ways by day and made their simple 
 merriment by night. Contented, useful, indus- 
 trious, generous: smiling Belgium was all of 
 these. 
 
 She had the memory of a splendid past, the 
 certainty of an honorable present, the promise 
 of a warless future — the country of sunshine.
 
 II 
 
 STORM 
 
 If "War is Hell" — and none can doubt it now 
 — then, when I returned to Belgium in August 
 last, I came to the back door of Tophet — and 
 the door was wide open. I passed at Ostend 
 the night of that day on which the German 
 army occupied Brussels and was said to be 
 throwing out its advance-line toward Ghent. 
 
 I had known Ostend more or less intimately 
 for four or five years. Only a few months be- 
 fore its great change, I had answered one of 
 its smiling good-byes — the seductive "au re- 
 voir" of a town that was then one of the six 
 gayest and most fashionable seaside resorts in 
 the world. There, set beautifully in the midst 
 of a countryside both industrial and agricul- 
 tural, was a city of pleasure, with a winter 
 population of about forty-three thousand, 
 
 which the first months of summer never failed 
 
 28
 
 STORM 29 
 
 to raise to eight hundred and seventy-five thou- 
 sand. Then the crowds came there to be 
 happy ; now — 
 
 But let me first recall it as it used to be: 
 
 y 
 
 From nine o'clock in the morning until five 
 o'clock at night, the broad beach is alive with 
 laughing men and pretty women in those scanty 
 bathing-suits that inevitably accompany the 
 modesty of bathing-machines. The Digue, 
 that great stone dyke, often thirty-five feet 
 wide, which runs along the three miles of coast 
 to Mariakirke, is lined with grandiose hotels 
 and flamboyant private villas, and is packed by 
 idlers who have come here to spend money ac- 
 cumulated in every coinage of the two hemi- 
 spheres. Military bands are playing Viennese 
 waltzes; love is being made in ten languages. 
 Six thousand persons are seated in the Kur- 
 saal's concert-hall, six hundred are dancing in 
 its ballroom; to its gaming-salon have come 
 gamblers from over three-quarters of the 
 earth. And all the while the sturdy little 
 trains are steaming into the Station d'( )stende- 
 ville, and the sturdy little boats are chugging
 
 30 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 up to Ostende-quai, disgorging more bathers, 
 lovers, dancers, gamesters: belles of the Paris 
 boulevards, beaux of Unter den Linden and the 
 Ringstrasse, brokers from Wall Street, invalids 
 from St. Petersburg, card sharps from London. 
 
 All that has ended. When last I left Ostend 
 in the dawn of an August morning, it looked as 
 the Lake Front of Chicago must have looked 
 during the Great Fire. When I recall this 
 later picture, I know that nowhere have I ever 
 had so poignantly brought home to me the dire 
 completeness with which a week of war can 
 wipe out a century of peace. 
 
 For, in this later picture, the city is still 
 overcrowded, but not with merrymakers; the 
 beach is still alive, but not with laughter. The 
 hotels are closed, the villas shuttered, the bands 
 silenced, the idlers called away. The feet that 
 danced have fled; where the gambler clinked 
 his coins there rattle the bones of poverty; on 
 those yellow sands where lovers so lately whis- 
 pered, fear elbows fear. The trains bring 
 soldiers; the highways pour in refugees; most
 
 STORM 31 
 
 of the boats, except those used for govern- 
 mental purposes, have ceased to run. 
 
 Those women of the boulevards have re- 
 turned to a stern and saddened Paris; those 
 beaux of Berlin and Vienna are bearing death 
 and destitution to Belgium or facing bullets on 
 the Danube ; the Wall Street broker is in Liver- 
 pool, vainly trying to draw against his now 
 valueless letter-of-credit for a steerage-passage 
 home; the Russian invalids are being hurried 
 across Denmark, and the London plunger has 
 gone back to an England that clamors for more 
 and more men to send to the front. Its guests 
 departed, its industries discontinued, its port 
 empty, Ostend the garish has become a city of 
 Dreadful Night; is little better than it was in 
 1604, when, with the French and English, as 
 now, its allies, it capitulated, after a three- 
 years siege, to Ambrogio di Spinola, the 
 Genoese. 
 
 Our boat, on which I may as well at once 
 say that I had no business to be, had lurched 
 through the earlier darkness without a light
 
 Z2 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 showing. To me, standing well forward on 
 the spray-soaked deck, it seemed that we could 
 not yet be anywhere near shore: we were but 
 a black thing pitching desperately about limit- 
 less black space — when suddenly we were 
 drenched in a hideous blue radiance. 
 
 I can give you no idea of the shock except 
 to say that it must have been much as it would 
 be for a blind man were he to regain his sight 
 at an instant when his unexpected eyes were 
 fixed on the noonday sun. Under it, we were 
 worse than blind. I believe that there was no 
 one on board who did not stagger from this 
 sudden effulgence as though from a blow in 
 the face. It was war-time Ostend's combined 
 military searchlights accurately spying us out, 
 plucking us from our secret darkness with a 
 long arm of illumination that made our ap- 
 proach more public than an approach at two 
 o'clock in the afternoon. 
 
 There were sharp orders — megaphonic cries 
 out of the night — there was the clank of ma- 
 chinery. Our engines jolted, stopped; chains 
 rattled; a whirling boat jumped alongside, and
 
 STORM 33 
 
 an officer and six soldiers swarmed, like so 
 many rats, over the dipping rail. 
 
 That officer, when he had satisfied himself 
 of our captain, came upon me. I had a camera 
 and a pair of field-glasses slung across my 
 shoulders. He turned a pocket flashlamp on 
 my passport, marked it, returned it and said: 
 
 "It is necessary that you surrender this 
 camera.'' He spoke the thick French of a 
 Fleming. "When you leave the port to return 
 to England, it will he given hack to you; but 
 now not to surrender it is to be arrested." 
 
 I was not yet used to war: I said I was an 
 American citizen, and — 
 
 "It is necessary that you surrender this 
 camera," he interrupted me by repeating. 
 "When you leave this port to return to Eng- 
 land, it will be given back to you ; but now not 
 to surrender it is to be arrested." 
 
 I was not arrested. 
 
 When he had possessed himself of my cam- 
 era, he asked : 
 
 "Are you a journalist?" 
 
 T told him no ; for when I entered newspaper
 
 34 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 work, eighteen years ago, the head copyreader 
 assured me that I should never become one. 
 Besides, the English newspapers had flung 
 broadcast the information that all correspond- 
 ents in Belgium not citizens of one of the allied 
 powers would be shot. Everything considered, 
 I held it best to account for my presence at 
 Ostend in another way; so I said that I was an 
 American tourist and added what appeared to 
 me to be an adequate reason for such a person 
 to be at such a place on such an occasion : long 
 experience had shown me that Europeans con- 
 sider all American tourists a little crazy, and 
 I wanted every allowance possible made for 
 me. 
 
 Then the officer looked at my binoculars and 
 saw that they were of German manufacture. 
 I had to produce my passport again and ex- 
 plain that I had bought my glasses in New 
 Orleans. . . . 
 
 Ostend, when they finally permitted me 
 ashore, was less familiar to me than when I 
 visited it for the first time. That first time, 
 I knew it by pictures and guide-books; later,
 
 STORM 35 
 
 as I have said, I came to know it well from 
 many visits there; now I could scarcely find my 
 way about in it. The very streets seemed to 
 have shifted their positions: it was a night- 
 mare-town. 
 
 Picture to yourself Atlantic City in mid- 
 season — its gayety stopped as by a single shot; 
 its visitors fled in fright; its accustomed life 
 brought to a standstill, sudden and complete. 
 Imagine the bulk of its male citizens, as its 
 music ceased in the middle of a bar, whisked 
 away to battle. Imagine military rule then as 
 suddenly substituted for civil law — the banks 
 closed; food-prices mounting; the electric cars 
 with women conductors, and old men in the 
 drivers' places ; no boats in the Inlet ; no rolling- 
 chairs, no ponies, no bathers in view ; the hotels 
 shut tight; sentinels at the corners; Philadel- 
 phia captured by an advancing enemy ; Camden 
 occupied ; a wing of the invaders creeping upon 
 Manhattan; a line of flaming battle all along 
 the Pennsylvania boundary to the New York 
 State line; and the hostile forces, with death in 
 their hands, coming nearer — nearer — over the
 
 36 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 flatlands, perhaps through the water, now and 
 then visibly through the clouds of the air. 
 Pour into that Atlantic City, thus disorgan- 
 
 v 
 
 ized, stunned, panic-smitten, three times its ac- 
 customed population, in the shape of all the 
 country-folk from the Delaware River on the 
 west and from all the nearby towns to the 
 south and north. Fill the Pennsylvania Rail- 
 road Station with them; fill the Reading Rail- 
 way Station; crowd them along all the pave- 
 ments of all the streets, up the Boardwalk and 
 down ; toss them on to the beach — women, chil- 
 dren and old men, some wounded, more ill, all 
 robbed of their material possessions, and many 
 of them robbed of the lives of those they loved 
 best on earth. 
 
 Do this, and you have Ostend as I saw it. 
 
 It was a town of wandering and frightened 
 ghosts unable to give any reason for the start 
 of that horror which had overtaken them — a 
 town full of those who mourned their dead and 
 themselves expected at any hour to die. 
 
 Ostend faces the North Sea — a body of 
 water that has not yet had its bloody rebaptism
 
 STORM 37 
 
 as the German Ocean — with the canal running 
 at right angles on the east. Our hoat had 
 come up this latter, and I landed at the 
 Station Maritime. That brought me well to 
 the back of the city, to reach the center of 
 which I had to cross a drawbridge to the Quai 
 de l'Empcreur and so make my way past the 
 Church of St. Peter and St. Paul to the wide 
 rue de la Chapelle and the town-hall. 
 
 No sooner had I come to the plaza on which 
 stands the big, twin-towered church than I was 
 in the midst of the refugees; and from that 
 moment, wherever I went about the town, I 
 remained surrounded by them. I was caught 
 in a troubled, forward-trudging, endless tide, 
 making northward — rustics in all the pictur- 
 esque costumes of their respective country- 
 sides; women with babies at their breasts; 
 toddling children crying and tugging at their 
 mothers' skirts or their grandfathers' jackets; 
 white-haired men bent double with age; girls 
 with swollen eyes and boys with lips com- 
 pressed; the lame, the blind and the deformed. 
 
 I saw one young woman in a bedraggled
 
 38 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 wedding-dress, the veil hanging in tatters 
 down her back to her heels, her hair flying, a 
 veritable Ophelia. They told me that her 
 fiance had been called to the front on the day 
 preceding that set for her wedding: she had 
 become insane and insisted on wearing her 
 marriage costume when she fled with her 
 mother from the oncoming Germans. 
 
 I saw two tottering graybeards with crepe 
 rosettes on their hats, and they explained to 
 me that they had been mourners at a funeral 
 in their village when, with a clattering of hoofs 
 and a rattle of shots, an advance party of 
 Uhlans suddenly appeared: the coffin was 
 dumped into its grave; the service ended in a 
 sentence; the entire funeral party took to its 
 heels. 
 
 The majority of these fugitives were in their 
 bright holiday clothes, the pretty fete-garb that 
 artists have for centuries celebrated, that cam- 
 era-bearing tourists have for years "snapped," 
 and that the omnipresent picture-postcard has 
 everywhere familiarized. I asked why this 
 was so.
 
 STORM 39 
 
 "Because," was always the answer, "they 
 are the best we have, these clothes. This 
 was the easiest way to carry them, and we 
 did not want to leave them behind for the 
 
 >> 
 
 enemy. 
 
 It is difficult to convey by merely written 
 words the horror of these flight-soiled and 
 dust-stained gala garments in that night of 
 terror and of death. 
 
 Every human being at all able to carry any- 
 thing carried some bundle, always heavier than 
 the weakness of its bearer should have had to 
 endure, filled with such household treasures 
 — old heirlooms, convertible property, or pa- 
 thetic keepsakes — as could be snatched in the 
 first high heat of flight. One woman of sev- 
 enty had a bulging cotton handkerchief tied to 
 her shrunken waist: it was stuffed with the 
 silver buttons cut from the clothes of her long 
 dead parents — "the happier for being dead," 
 said she — and from those of her husband and 
 50ns, now somewhere on the firing-line. Here 
 Uld there a bearer stumbled or was jostled by 
 :i companion, and her bundle fell to the paw-
 
 40 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 ment and burst open, belching its poor contents 
 into the dirty street. 
 
 Along the curb fugitives, fainting from 
 wounds or worn out from exertion, would fall 
 or sink to the ground, and lie or sit there inert, 
 spent, until a soldier would shoulder his way 
 through the press and rouse the weary or carry 
 off the ill. Some were bleeding, more were 
 bandaged, nearly all were footsore. 
 
 The streets were only partially lighted — the 
 streets of that Ostend which the Belgians used 
 to call their "White City." Every few paces, 
 his bayonet fixed to his musket, an infantry- 
 man stood on guard. Hussars rode by, scat- 
 tering the throngs that filled every thorough- 
 fare — throngs, as I should earlier have noted, 
 uncannily silent. The market-place, the Pare 
 Leopold, and the whole outdoors of the town, 
 from the sea to the rue du Claire, and from 
 the canal to the avenue de la Reine, were full 
 of these Belgian villagers, disqualified by age 
 or sex or infirmities from fighting and driven 
 out of their homes by the German invasion of
 
 STORM 41 
 
 a land whose neutrality the German had sworn 
 to respect. 
 
 The beach was packed with bivouacking 
 refugees; whole families, less their military- 
 members, were huddled about the piles of bun- 
 dles that they had flung together in their 
 Flemish hamlets before running from those 
 cottages which had housed their ancestors for 
 generations and leaving them to destruction. 
 On the paved streets, the newcomers, though 
 they rarely spoke, made a deafening tattoo 
 with their wooden shoes, and in every open 
 space they heaped their hampers, trussed 
 belongings and hodge-podge salvage. Still 
 others, mixed with a sprinkling of wounded 
 soldiers, flooded the railway station, sat on de- 
 crepit trunks and handbags, sprawled sick or 
 sleeping on the floor. And finally, from along 
 the seacoast and by every highway and bypath 
 that leads from the southeast, trudged and 
 straggled in the vast majority: those peasants 
 who had been unable to find standing-room 
 in the cars or money to pay for it.
 
 42 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 "Where do you expect to go?" — Again and 
 again I asked that question. 
 
 Nobody knew. 
 
 "What do you expect to do?" 
 
 The answer was always the same : a helpless 
 gesture with the eloquently opened hands. 
 
 None appeared to have considered his ulti- 
 mate destination, or seemed much to care, so 
 long as that destination was somewhere away 
 from the Germans and somewhere near the sea 
 No provision, so far as I could learn, had as 
 yet been made by the municipal authorities to 
 feed or house these seekers for the city's pro- 
 tection; of individual charity there was a great 
 deal, much of it touching; but of organized 
 charity there was then no visible sign. Yer. 
 everybody was sure that the invaders would 
 come in, out of their prescribed way, to the 
 sea-front: with the agrarian's faith in stone 
 walls, everybody trusted to this town for shel- 
 ter; their single object was to get as far away 
 from the hostile army as possible and to re- 
 main there as long as might be. 
 
 Rumor, of course, was rampant and gen-
 
 ' ' ■ wood, New ) 
 
 HERE Av,\', PKOM im. GERM i SOMEWHERE Nl \i< 
 
 i mi: Si \"
 
 STORM 43 
 
 erally unfounded: the Germans had set fire to 
 Ghent; a party of Uhlans had reached Bruges 
 and blown up its famous bell-tower ; the burgo- 
 master of Alost had been hanged from a lamp- 
 post. And the odd thing was — the odd thing 
 and, in at least one fine sense, the splendid 
 thing — that they had more to say, these peas- 
 ants, of the wrong done their country than of 
 the horrors wrought upon themselves. Per- 
 haps they had been too severely stunned by 
 their individual misfortunes to be ready at 
 once to speak of them; perhaps those injuries 
 were too deep for immediate discussion: that 
 would be the cynic's, and it might be the right, 
 explanation. For my own part, I like to think 
 otherwise, and my acquaintance with the Bel- 
 gian character supports me. In any case, the 
 fact remains that every refugee whom I talked 
 with during that panic-night — and I talked 
 with scores — spoke first of his country and 
 spoke only under pressure of himself. It was 
 not that the fugitives resented the inquiries of 
 a stranger; on the contrary, they seemed par- 
 ticularly anxious to dlSCUSS the violation of
 
 44 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 Belgian neutrality with any one having the 
 smallest chance of reaching the American pub- 
 lic's ear : the truth, I am convinced, was higher 
 than casually appears. These wanderers had 
 been despoiled of everything save what they 
 carried in their arms and on their backs ; they 
 had nothing — absolutely nothing — besides ; 
 sons, fathers, brothers had been slaughtered; 
 daughters, mothers, sisters had been ravished ; 
 penury was upon them, starvation scarce a day 
 beyond ; and yet their chief thought was of their 
 country. 
 
 "But what have we done — what has the lit- 
 tle Belgium done ?" That was ever their query 
 of the unanswering sky. "Always we have 
 considered the great Germany as it were our 
 big brother who had promised to protect us, 
 and suddenly it bids us help it against our own 
 pledge to another neighbor, and when we pro- 
 test, it burns not only our forts, but our houses ; 
 it kills not only our soldiers, but our women, 
 our old men, our children! Why? We can- 
 not guess; we receive no reply but the bullet. 
 Why?"
 
 STORM 45 
 
 One different note I heard. It was sounded 
 by the quavering voice of an octogenarian : two 
 days before he had been the owner of a small 
 house and garden near Auderghem, on the 
 Termonde road; to-night he was penniless and 
 starving. 
 
 "Where is the Belgian cottager's quarrel 
 with the cottager of Germany?" he cried. 
 "Does it matter to us whether Russia and 
 Servia killed that Austrian Grand Duke, or 
 only Servia alone? Are our crops any better 
 or any surer because Germany gains a seaport 
 or France retakes Alsace and Lorraine? Not 
 a bit ; but, just as if it mattered everything, we 
 must die for it!" 
 
 Later, some such feeling I found in every 
 one of them : they must die for it ; and yet they 
 were dying without any more complaint than 
 can be put in the compass of a few questions — 
 some in stolid hatred; some stoically; many 
 with gladness. In their own disillusioned way, 
 even the bitterest were splendidly loyal. It 
 was a significant fact that, among all those 
 hundreds of the dispossessed and fugitive,
 
 46 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 there was not one sound-bodied man of fight- 
 ing-age : those were all at the war. 
 
 Women and children and old men — every 
 road leading away from the German advance 
 must have been stained with their blood. I 
 talked with a tottering woman of twenty-five 
 whose husband had been called to the colors 
 and killed in the first day's fighting about 
 Liege. She had with her a son of five, who 
 was staggering under the weight of his eight- 
 een-months-old sister; another sister carried a 
 basket as large as herself, and the mother had 
 in her arms an infant that she vowed had been 
 born to her on the roadside only thirty-six 
 hours before. 
 
 "Have you no relatives?" I asked her. 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "No friends?" 
 
 "They are dead or lost since the day before 
 yesterday." 
 
 "Then what will you do ?" I helplessly urged 
 her. 
 
 She made the sign of the cross. 
 
 'What the good God wishes," she said. 
 
 tcy
 
 STORM 47 
 
 A few yards behind her, a girl, who might 
 have been eighteen years old, was lying where 
 she had fallen a minute since. She was beau- 
 tiful, with black hair and creamy skin; and her 
 face, illuminated by the rays of a lantern in 
 the hand of a passing fugitive, was very calm. 
 A wound, some one explained, had reopened: 
 a wound inflicted by a stray shot some days 
 bince. I bent over to speak to her: she was 
 dead. 
 
 Making my way out of the town, I stemmed 
 the human tide along the Bruges Canal, near 
 Stalhillebrugge. A white-bearded man that I 
 passed was carrying in his arms a black-haired 
 little girl of three or four years, sound asleep. 
 
 "Your granddaughter?" I asked. 
 
 No, she was not his granddaughter. 
 
 It was not pleasant to persist in probing 
 wounds still raw, but I persisted: 
 
 "Surely not your daughter?" 
 
 "No," he said simply. 'The poor little one 
 was wandering along the road witli the rest of 
 us and said her mother had been hurt in a 
 cannonade in their village — killed, I suppose.
 
 48 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 I do not know whose child she is. My faith! 
 There are many such in these bitter days, 
 monsieur." 
 
 I nearly stumbled over two youngsters, 
 tramping hand in hand — a boy and a girl, the 
 former manfully supporting and encouraging 
 his companion. They spoke French of sorts, 
 as many of these Fleming peasants seemed to 
 do; and I found that they were brother and 
 sister, aged respectively ten and eight. 
 
 "And yet you are alone in this crowd? 
 Where is your father ?" I asked. 
 
 The boy's answer came proudly : 
 
 "My father is one of our little soldiers. He 
 is with his regiment. By now, they say, he is 
 safe in one of the Antwerp forts: they will 
 never take those forts, the Germans." 
 
 "And your mother?" 
 
 The little girl began to cry. 
 
 "We do not know," she sobbed. 
 
 The boy beckoned me aside. 
 
 "It is not good that my sister should under- 
 stand," he whispered. "While she was at the 
 cottage of a neighbor, a German shell struck
 
 STORM 49 
 
 our house. It tumbled the roof down on us. 
 My mother was cookine. A beam hit her and 
 crushed her against the fireplace. She was 
 killed. Jeanne — that is my sister's name: 
 Jeanne — I have not told: she is too young to 
 be told." 
 
 I could multiply these instances by many 
 gathered during that one night's observations : 
 but to what purpose? I have set down a few, 
 and these merely to give a hint of the whole. 
 Xor have I selected the worst, for the worst 
 may not be told. No victim of the invader — 
 I repeat it because it seems to me so full of 
 meaning — was eager to volunteer his testi- 
 mony; there was none of the volubility of the 
 mendicant ; none of the whine of the beggar, the 
 loquacity of him who wants charity. The bar- 
 est facts were all that were mentioned, and these 
 only upon a repeated questioning not willingly 
 undertaken on my part, but undertaken in a 
 desire to learn and report to my own country 
 a little of the tremendous truth. The refugees 
 in Ostend expected nothing; they had almost 
 ceased to hope for anything; they had lied
 
 50 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 from their ruined homes because there was 
 nothing left for them to live upon, because they 
 could not fight, because they were driven, not 
 so much by fear of the German sword, already 
 red with the blood of their relatives and friends, 
 as by the blind human instinct that makes for 
 flight when fight has become impossible. They 
 were unimportant people; had they all stayed 
 in their homes to be slain there, the great world 
 would not have missed them, would have got 
 along quite comfortably ; probably not a dozen 
 of them had been known beyond a radius of ten 
 miles from his native hamlet; I dare say they 
 really didn't matter — but they were uncom- 
 monly like you and me. 
 
 One other detail merits mention here : Even 
 in those early days of the war, when the queer 
 censorship in England was delighting in the 
 full exercise of its power, and when almost no 
 news was allowed to trickle into the columns 
 of the free British press — even then in Eng- 
 land, where I was living, we had begun to hear 
 something about that ill-treatment accorded by 
 the German troops to non-combatants, the full
 
 STORM 51 
 
 accounts of which were already stirring 
 America. About this I made more inquiries 
 than one. 
 
 A cripple, whose deformity saved him from 
 military service, said that he had been in a 
 hamlet near Oreys when the enemy entered it. 
 
 "I was in my cousin's cottage," he said. 
 ''We heard the noise of horses' hoofs, and then 
 the smashing of doors and the tinkle of glass 
 from breaking windows. German soldiers 
 came into the room in which we were sitting, 
 so quickly that we had not yet got to the win- 
 dow to look out to see what was the matter. 
 That was the way always: everything hap- 
 pened so quickly that it was over before one 
 could understand what it was all about. . . . 
 Those soldiers beat me and the women. Why ? 
 I don't know why. When my cousin protested 
 — when he asked them why they did it — they 
 knocked his brains out with their rifle-butts 
 before his old wife's eyes." 
 
 I had heard that the Germans always de- 
 clared such actions to be reprisals fur resistance 
 "ii the part of non-combatants; but in Ostend 1
 
 52 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 was told only one story that could at all sub- 
 stantiate that contention. It was this : 
 
 A young mother said that, in her village, the 
 invaders had shot several private citizens and 
 burned their houses, but not without first ac- 
 cusing the victims of firing on the passing 
 soldiery. 
 
 "Were those accusations true?" I wondered. 
 
 She did not know. There had been firing 
 from some of the other houses; but whether 
 or not from those subsequently burned, she 
 could not be sure. Even if there had been 
 offenses, the offenders were only women and 
 children and old men : a squad of a half-dozen 
 healthy soldiers could have ended the troubles 
 by a few arrests. Her neighbor, a woman of 
 her own age, had been flogged for tossing a pot 
 of boiling water on the enemy's troops; and 
 another, a friend, was treated even worse when 
 she showed herself loath to furnish food to the 
 invaders. 
 
 "But what would you?" asked my informant. 
 "My neighbor's man had been killed by them
 
 STORM 53 
 
 at Liege; and as for my friend, is it that we 
 should feed the enemies of our country?" 
 
 Elsewhere I shall tell some of the tales that 
 I heard of deeds done against the defense- 
 less and the unoffending. Here it is pleasant 
 to he ahle to set down two stories of a different 
 sort : 
 
 A man who must have been nearly ninety, 
 and was mounted on a horse correspondingly 
 ancient, said that the animal had been brought 
 to him by some German soldiers when he told 
 them he had a younger brother in Ostend who, 
 could he but reach that city, would care for 
 him ; and an old woman showed me a handful 
 of German money — one mark and two mark 
 pieces — which she said a Prussian lieutenant 
 had given her to facilitate her journey to her 
 daughter's Ostend home. Among all the too- 
 well authenticated tales of German atrocities, 
 it is good to place these two stories of another 
 sort. I wish that I knew the names of those 
 soldiers and that lieutenant and could record 
 them here.
 
 54 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 One other word I should say here and now, 
 and that has to do with the Germans as marks- 
 men. My previous observation of target- 
 practice in the German army had given me a 
 low opinion of these men as rifle-shots; and, 
 since the first days of the war, the American, 
 French and English newspapers united in the 
 declaration that the contest showed the Ger- 
 man infantryman to be a poor hand with a gun. 
 That opinion, I am told, still obtains in this 
 country : so far as I am concerned, it was con- 
 troverted during this visit to Ostend and has 
 never since been reestablished. 
 
 There, among all the soldiers and fugitives 
 that I talked with, every word of testimony 
 belied the current rumor. I heard, indeed, 
 some remarkable tales of German shooting 
 skill, and nearly every wounded soldier that I 
 saw had been hit in either the head or chest. 
 Moreover, I am bound to add that the wounds 
 were clean : the bullets that made them had not 
 been flattened and were not "soft-nosed." 
 Signs of wrong were plentiful enough, and 
 some of them must be told in another chapter ;
 
 STORM 55 
 
 but I discovered no proof that the use of the 
 dum-dum was among the crimes committed by 
 the Germans in Belgium. 
 
 I walked some miles in the general direction 
 followed by the Bruges Canal, dodging sen- 
 tries without difficulty, and stopping to talk 
 with scores of refugees. I was going along 
 a track that, in times of peace, is a highway of 
 industry; but so far as the night would let me 
 judge, that industry has been hopelessly crip- 
 pled. 
 
 Every citizen of Ostend whom I spoke 
 with substantiated this impression. Mills are 
 empty, factories silent ; the crops rot in the 
 fields; commerce is dead. It is as if some 
 enormous and final blight had settled upon the 
 entire countryside. It is a situation that, if 
 brought about by flood or plague, would cause 
 meetings for succor and open subscription-lists 
 for assistance in every country throughout the 
 civilized — or once civilized — world. It means 
 poverty and death — it has already brought 
 poverty and death — to thousands of people 
 who have never seen more than the maps of
 
 56 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 Germany, of Austria, of Turkey: it is the 
 seamy side of the glorious coat of War. . . . 
 
 I turned about and joined the army of fugi- 
 tives, falling into slow step between a woman 
 nursing her baby and her grandfather nursing 
 a bullet-shattered arm. The wayside was 
 cluttered with debris: peasants had tried to 
 carry away only what was of some little value 
 among their scant possessions, and had found 
 that little too much, and flung it aside; and 
 other peasants were too heavily laden to assist 
 or rob. Some women had stretched them- 
 selves beside their poor treasures and fallen 
 asleep with those treasures for pillows. A 
 few were praying. Others were crying softly 
 from wounds, illness and hunger. 
 
 It was good to come again to the Station 
 Maritime — and to my scrupulously-returned 
 camera. It was better to feel the engines 
 chugging under my feet and, in the red dawn, 
 the spray of the familiar and unchanged North 
 Sea on my face. 
 
 I did not want to look back, but I had to look 
 back. As we pulled out into the open water,
 
 STORM 57 
 
 I fancied I could still see that haggard, silent 
 tide of peasants in their ruined festival clothes, 
 with their only remaining possessions in those 
 heavy bundles — old men, cripples, women and 
 children: the chaff of war, ill, starving, de- 
 spoiled. Overhead there soared what looked 
 like a sinister bird of prey, surviving from 
 some wild antediluvian era. 
 
 "That's a German aeroplane," said the mate, 
 who stood beside me. "A taubc, that's wot 
 its name is: a dove, you know, sir. Dove o' 
 peace! Wot?" He spat into the blue water, 
 then returned his now reflective gaze to that 
 monster of the sky. 'They tell me," he pres- 
 ently resumed, "that it's costing, in pay, ammu- 
 nition and food, four million four hundred 
 thousand pounds a day to run this war, and 
 the half o' that comes out o' Germany." 
 
 For the Germans' pay, ammunition and food 
 — for their soldiers, in other words — almost 
 eleven million dollars a day to wipe the very 
 name of Belgium from the map of Europe. 
 How much, among the Germans themselves, in 
 spoiled industry and commerce — in human
 
 58 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 blood and human life, off as well as on the fir- 
 ing-line — in the heartbreak of German women 
 and the ruin of German children ? How much 
 in shattered ideals — in the setback to civiliza- 
 tion — in the reawakening of the savage, who 
 sleeps, at best of times, so lightly in us all? 
 Belgium? For a while, at least, they have 
 succeeded there; they have indeed obliterated 
 her. But the hand that wiped her from the 
 map of Europe has engraved her on the hearts 
 of men. 
 
 I
 
 Ill 
 
 WEATHER-SIGNALS 
 
 What brought about so terrible a change upon 
 the once smiling face of Belgium? This and 
 all it stands for: 
 
 Extract from a Proclamation to the Municipal 
 Authorities of the City of Liege. 
 
 August 22, 1914. 
 The inhabitants of the town of Andenne, after 
 having declared their peaceful intentions, have 
 made a surprise attack on our troops. 
 
 It is with my consent that the Commander-in- 
 Chief has ordered the whole town to be burned 
 and that about one hundred people have been 
 shot. 
 
 I bring this fact to the knowledge of the city 
 of Liege, so that citizens of Liege may realize 
 the fate with which they are menaced if they 
 adopt a similar attitude. 
 
 The General Commanding in Chief, 
 (Signed) Von Bulow. 
 
 That quotation is no manufactured evidence. 
 It is an authentic copy from a proclamation is- 
 
 59 

 
 60 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 sued by the German general in command of the 
 German army at Liege. It has never been 
 denied, either by him or by his Government. 
 It is a fair sample of a flood of German military 
 proclamations issued throughout Belgium. It 
 states the German's case in the German's own 
 words. 
 
 Contrast with this the proclamations that, 
 upon the staggeringly amazing advent of the 
 invaders, the Belgian Government issued and 
 caused to be posted in every Belgian city, town, 
 village and countryside. They dotted the 
 walls ; they met the most casual eye along every 
 road; they were amplified by the personal in- 
 structions of every policeman in every locality. 
 Reprinted frequently in the newspapers of the 
 United States, they are already familiar to all 
 Americans. It is sufficient here to repeat that 
 these proclamations instructed "the civil popu- 
 lation not to participate in any way in military 
 operations" and commanded the surrender to 
 the authorities of all arms in the possession of 
 civilians. 
 
 It has been suggested by some German sym-
 
 WEATHER-SIGNALS 61 
 
 pathizers that the Belgians were so illiterate as 
 to be unable to read these proclamations. The 
 reply to that, laving aside the verbal digests of 
 the proclamations made everywhere by the po- 
 lice, is to be found in a Belgian governmental 
 report on illiteracy made in 1913. In treating 
 of the provinces in which the German atrocities 
 were subsequently committed, this report shows 
 the percentage of illiteracy, among men liable 
 to militia service and may therefore be taken 
 as a fair test of the entire younger population — 
 in other words, of the people whom the invad- 
 ers charged with firing upon German troops. 
 Here are the figures : 
 
 Illiterates. 
 
 Per Cent. 
 
 For the Province of Brabant 1. 1 5 
 
 For the Province of Liege O.99 
 
 For the Province of Limbourg O.52 
 
 For the Province of Luxembourg . . . 0.20 
 For the Province of Namur . . . 0.29 
 
 Obviously, we must seek our explanation 
 elsewhere. 
 
 The Kingdom of Belgium, as it existed in 
 August, T914, was a neutral country, and had
 
 62 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 been since its beginning. Neutrality was in- 
 herent in its inception. In fact, only on its 
 promise of neutrality did the Great Powers al- 
 low it to come into being. Upon its declaration 
 of independence, those Powers — Prussia, Aus- 
 tria, Russia, France and England — on June 
 26, 1831, signed and promulgated "The Treaty 
 of Eighteen Articles," which specifically or- 
 dered : 
 
 "Belgium, within the limits traced in con- 
 formity with the principles laid down in the 
 present preliminaries, shall form a perpetually 
 neutral State. The Five Powers, without 
 wishing to intervene in the internal affairs of 
 Belgium, guarantee her that perpetual neutral- 
 ity as ivell as the inviolability of her terri- 
 tory. . . . 
 
 "By just reciprocity, Belgium shall be held 
 to observe this same neutrality toward all the 
 other States and to make no attack on their 
 internal or external tranquillity whilst always 
 preserving the right to defend herself against 
 any foreign aggression." 
 
 These same terms were reiterated in the de-
 
 WEATHER-SIGNALS 63 
 
 finitive treaty of January 23, 1839, accepted by 
 Belgium and guaranteed by the Powers. 
 
 From that year until last, all parties kept 
 their pledge. Belgium maintained no army, 
 save for the purposes of defense; England, 
 France, Russia and the Germanic empires 
 never trespassed. "When, in 1870, as now, the 
 two of those Powers lying on either side of 
 Belgium were at war, she was left unmolested: 
 her neutrality was considered so sacred that 
 even the German wounded in France might not 
 be carried through her territory to their home- 
 hospitals. 
 
 Germany, indeed, was especially punctilious 
 and protective. Not only once, but often, she 
 officially expressed her friendliness and was at 
 pains to pose as Belgium's protector. No 
 longer ago than 1910, Kaiser Wilhelm II paid, 
 at Brussels, a state visit to the King of the 
 Belgians, formally pronounced his admiration 
 of Belgium's institutions and thanked that na- 
 tion for it^ many kindnesses to German resi- 
 dent- and for the opportunities that it gave 
 them to make their fortunes within its borders.
 
 64 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 In 191 3, the same Kaiser sent his general, von 
 Emmich, as his empire's special representative 
 to the Belgian King's fete at Liege, bearing 
 "the solemn assurance" of Germany's friend- 
 ship and protection. 
 
 Then, on Sunday, the second of August, 
 1 914, Germany handed Belgium the following 
 ultimatum and demanded a reply within twelve 
 hours: 
 
 ''The German Government has received positive in- 
 formation according to which French forces intend to 
 march upon the Meuse by way of Givet and Namur. 
 This information leaves no doubt as to France's inten- 
 tion to march upon Germany through Belgian terri- 
 tory. The Imperial German Government cannot help 
 fearing that Belgium, in spite of her willingness to 
 prevent this, may not be in a position to repulse, with- 
 out assistance, a French movement of such propor- 
 tions. This fact is significant evidence of a French 
 attack directed against Germany. 
 
 "It is Germany's imperative duty of self-preserva- 
 tion to forestall this attack of the enemy. 
 
 "The German Government would greatly regret if 
 Belgium should regard as an act of hostility directed 
 against herself the fact that the steps taken by Ger- 
 many's enemies oblige her, on her side, to violate Bel- 
 gian territory.
 
 WEATHER-SIGNALS 65 
 
 "In order to avoid any misunderstanding, the Ger- 
 man Government declares the following: 
 
 "ist: Germany does not contemplate any hostile 
 act against Belgium. If Belgium — in the war which is 
 imminent — will consent to adopt an attitude of friendly 
 neutrality toward Germany, the German Government 
 on the other hand promises that, when peace is con- 
 cluded, it will protect the Kingdom and all its posses- 
 sions to their fullest extent. 
 
 "2nd : Germany promises, on the condition set 
 forth above, to evacuate Belgian territory as soon as 
 peace is concluded. 
 
 "3rd: If Belgium preserves a friendly attitude, 
 Germany declares herself ready, in concurrence with 
 the authorities of the Belgian Government, to buy for 
 ready cash everything necessary to its troops, and to 
 indemnify Belgium for the damage caused in her ter- 
 ritory. 
 
 "4th: Should Belgium behave in a hostile manner 
 toward German troops, especially by placing difficulties 
 in the line of their march, or by resisting with the forts 
 of the Meuse, or by destroying highways, railroads and 
 tunnels or other works, Germany shall be obliged to 
 consider Belgium as an enemy. 
 
 "In that case, Germany will make HO promises to the 
 Kingdom, but will leave to the decision of anns the 
 regulation of the ultimate relations of the two States 
 toward each other. The German Government is justi- 
 fied in hoping that this eventuality will not arise, and 
 that the Belgian Government will take appropriate 
 steps to prevent its arising. In that case the friendly
 
 66 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 relations of the two States will become closer and more 
 lasting." 
 
 Belgium's reply is already famous. It was 
 to this effect : 
 
 "The intentions which she (Germany) attributes to 
 France are in contradiction to the formal declarations 
 made to us under date of August ist in the name of 
 the Government of the Republic. 
 
 "Moreover, if, contrary to our expectations, the 
 country's neutrality should be violated by France, Bel- 
 gium would fulfill its international duties, and her 
 army would oppose a most vigorous resistance to the 
 invader. 
 
 "The treaties of 1839, confirmed by the treaties of 
 1870, perpetuate Belgium's independence and neutral- 
 ity under the guarantee of the Powers, and especially 
 under the guarantee of the Government of his Majesty 
 the King of Prussia. 
 
 "Belgium has always faithfully observed her inter- 
 national obligations; she has fulfilled her duties in a 
 spirit of loyal impartiality; she has neglected no oppor- 
 tunity to maintain her neutrality and to cause it to be 
 respected by others. 
 
 "The attack upon her independence with which Ger- 
 many menaces her is a flagrant violation of the law of 
 Nations. 
 
 "No strategic interest can justify the violation of 
 that right. 
 
 "The Belgian Government, by accepting the propo- 
 sitions mentioned, would sacrifice its national honor
 
 ' ■:■■ B ' in refute 
 in /I me ^ '' 
 
 'I me King 01 nn Bei ci 
 
 ' u ! /eminent be disappointed in its expectations 
 
 it is resolved to repulse by every means in its power an at- 
 ' ■■ upon i' j nghi
 
 WEATHER-SIGNALS 67 
 
 and betray at the same time its duty toward Europe. 
 
 "Conscious of the role which Belgium has played for 
 more than eighty years in the civilized world, it refuses 
 to believe that its independence can only be preserved 
 at the price of a violation of its neutrality. 
 
 "If the Belgian Government be disappointed in its 
 expectations, it is resolved to repulse by every means 
 in its power any attack upon its rights." 
 
 A part of what instantly followed, the world 
 already knows; the whole of those horrors it 
 can never know. Here and now, considering 
 that the Belgian reply speaks for itself, I want 
 to call your attention to some of the italicized 
 phrases in the German ultimatum: the italics, 
 of course, are my own. 
 
 Germany, which helped to make Belgium's 
 birth as a nation dependent upon her neutrality, 
 has offered only one excuse for the German 
 army's violation of that neutrality: she has said 
 that, at the time of issuing her ultimatum to 
 Belgium, French troops had already entered 
 Belgium. But she has never produced one 
 scrap of evidence to support this contention ; of 
 the alleged proofs that she discovered upon her 
 seizure of the Belgian Government offices in
 
 68 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 Brussels — as if, were they guilty of conspiracy 
 with France, the Belgians, leisurely evacuating 
 their capital, would be fools enough to leave 
 such incriminating documents behind them! — 
 she has, among all her frantic attempts at jus- 
 tification, failed to publish a single instance; 
 and, above all, she did not mention this French 
 invasion in her ultimatum : at a moment when 
 she desperately wanted an excuse to send her 
 own troops into Belgium, at a moment when 
 her diplomats were racking their brains for 
 raising to the plane of "a military necessity" 
 what is now shown to be no more than a bar- 
 baric advantage, Germany could find nothing 
 better to charge than "positive information" of 
 France's intention. 
 
 This cannot be too strongly insisted upon. 
 The tone of that ultimatum was not the tone of 
 diplomatic suggestion and polite innuendo; it 
 was a downright threat. Not even a German 
 apologist would call it restrained. Had Ger- 
 many had "positive information" of France's 
 actual invasion instead of "positive informa- 
 tion" of "France's intention" to invade, the
 
 WEATHER-SIGXALS 69 
 
 tone of this very ultimatum shows that she 
 would have shouted it to Belgium and blazoned 
 it to the world. Is it to be supposed that a 
 spy-system which can obtain "positive informa- 
 tion" of the mere intention of an enemy's 
 inarch, could not obtain any information of an 
 actual march on the part of that enemy? 
 
 We are compelled, then, to conclude that 
 Germany was telling the truth when, on August 
 2d, her ultimatum made it clear that she had 
 no belief in a French violation of Belgian neu- 
 trality as a thing already accomplished — com- 
 pelled to conclude that she was then telling the 
 truth in spite of her later declarations that she 
 was lying. Therefore, when Belgium bravely 
 asserted her right to resist invaders, Germany, 
 on her own showing, "violated Belgian terri- 
 tory/' the neutrality of which she had sworn to 
 protect. She did this "making no promises" 
 in case of resistencc to her, although, in the 
 same breath admitting Belgium's "willingness 
 to prevent" I'rance's alleged intention to in- 
 vade. Tn other words, she perjured herself for 
 DO better reason than that she had heard
 
 70 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 France intended to commit perjury. It was 
 only two days after the issuance of the ultima- 
 tum that, from the tribune of the Reichstag, 
 the Chancellor of the German Empire admit- 
 ted: 
 
 "Our troops have occupied Luxembourg, 
 and are perhaps even now trampling upon Bel- 
 gian soil: This act is contrary to the law of 
 Nations." 
 
 It might be pleaded that, in resistence to an 
 invader who is breaking "promises voluntarily 
 given," a civilian population would have some 
 excuse. In the case of Belgium, there is no 
 necessity so to plead. Consider the facts. 
 
 The Belgian Government did, as we have 
 seen, its best to keep its non-combatant citizens 
 within bounds: its hands are, beyond all cavil, 
 clean. All that the Germans seriously charge 
 is that the Belgian Government's efforts were 
 here and there futile. 
 
 Is this correct? Did Belgian civilians dis- 
 obey their Government's instructions? Let us 
 grant, for the sake of argument, that they did. 
 Let us grant that certain villagers, surprised
 
 WEATHER-SIGNALS 71 
 
 and robbed by the troops of a Power which they 
 had previously believed to be friendly, offered, 
 in defense of their "threatened homes," a cer- 
 tain impotent resistance : one, a dozen, a score, 
 even a scattered hundred, against the vast Im- 
 perial German Army. By the Second Article of 
 the Hague Convention, "if the arms be carried 
 openly and the rules of warfare be respected," 
 such acts are authorized u as long as the terri- 
 tory is not effectively invested and occupied by 
 the enemy." l 
 
 Go further. Admit what cannot possibly in 
 every case be true : admit that, in each instance 
 of outrage, the arms of those Belgian civilians 
 who were said to shoot, had not been "carried 
 openly"; that "the rules of warfare" were not 
 respected; that the immediate territory ivas at 
 those times "effectively invested and occupied 
 by the enemy," does ordinary justice and com- 
 mon humanity — I am not talking now of "civi- 
 lized" war, but of the ordinary justice and 
 common humanity that we had a right to expect 
 
 »"The Case for Belgium." Published for the Belgian 
 
 Delegates to the United States by the Macmillun Company, 
 I9I4-
 
 J2 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 some trace of in a Germany who sought to im- 
 pose her Culture on a world — does such justice 
 and such humanity hold a "whole population 
 collectively responsible for the acts of a small 
 number of individuals?" * 
 
 But we may as well consider even the rules 
 of "civilized" war. "If," as the Belgian dele- 
 gates well pointed out, "the son of the burgo- 
 master at Aerschot had been convicted of the 
 killing of the German officer; if some inhabit- 
 ants of Louvain had really fired upon German 
 troops, the Germans might have had the au- 
 thors of such acts punished under the law of 
 the conqueror ; instead, by taking hostages, by 
 executing innocent men, by disseminating 
 everywhere terror, fire and death, by substitut- 
 ing — as savages do — joint responsibility for 
 individual responsibility, they have dishonored 
 warfare and forever destroyed the guaranties 
 which the law of nations accords to peaceful 
 and non-combatant civilians. If such actions 
 were not held up to universal reproof, then 
 nothing would remain of this International 
 
 i Ibid.
 
 WEATHER-SIGNALS 7$ 
 
 Law, which, for the last half century, civilized 
 peoples have striven for and codified." 
 
 Upon that point, the same delegates tellingly 
 quote Bluntschli, a jurist whose word is author- 
 itative: 
 
 "The present International Law denies entirely the 
 right to dispose arbitrarily of the fate of individuals, 
 and docs not admit of ill-treatment or violence against 
 them. Personal security, honor and liberty are private 
 rights which the' laws of war do not permit to be at- 
 tacked. The enemy may take such steps only as are 
 necessary for military operations or necessary for the 
 safety of the State." 
 
 My father used to tell the story of a famous 
 defense at law set up by a woman who was sued 
 for breaking a pitcher that a neighbor had lent 
 her. 
 
 This defendant contended: 
 
 "i. The pitcher was not broken when I re- 
 turned it. 
 
 "2. The pitcher was broken when lent me. 
 
 "3. T never borrowed the pitcher." 
 
 That line of defense is closely paralleled by 
 the general defense of Germany's actions in 
 Belgium. It runs:
 
 74 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 a . 
 
 I. There were no hardships upon non-com- 
 batants for non-combatants to resist. 
 
 "2. The non-combatants resisted the hard- 
 ships that we imposed upon them. 
 
 "3. The entire population was in arms : there 
 were no non-combatants." 
 
 If one of these statements is true, the re- 
 maining two are false. If any is true, the 
 terms of the Hague Convention and Blunt- 
 schli's undisputed interpretation of Interna- 
 tional Law still remain to convict the German 
 Army. 
 
 Only two arguments are left, and these are 
 as mutually contradictory as their predecessors. 
 They are that there were perhaps "a few iso- 
 lated cases of green German soldiers who got 
 out of hand and ran amuck at the start of the 
 war," and that the Belgian testimony of un- 
 warranted outrages, of rape and murder, is a 
 pack of lies. But the German horrors in Bel- 
 gium cannot be convincingly interpreted as the 
 result of "green soldiers" getting "out of 
 hand": although such cases are indeed com- 
 mon to every war, unavoidable in every war —
 
 WEATHER-SIGNALS 75 
 
 although they constitute one of the deep dam- 
 nations of war itself — here in Belgium we 
 have as the offender an invading army which 
 has in almost every other respect made good 
 its long boast of the utmost in efficiency, of 
 discipline down to the minutest detail; and yet 
 this army commits continuous outrages not 
 only after the opening battles, but throughout 
 three months of warfare. Lies? Some of 
 course there are — even there is some epidemic 
 of lying. But are we to assume that the entire 
 population is infected ; that hundreds of volun- 
 tary witnesses, unknown to one another and 
 unacquainted with one another's testimony, 
 could corroborate one another by mere coinci- 
 dence — that, in brief, the whole Belgian race 
 is a race of inspired liars? 
 
 Against such a preposterous supposition it 
 is necessary to set nothing. Nevertheless, I 
 set two undenied facts. Nobody that has 
 passed through a looted Belgian town has 
 failed to see chalked on certain rare doors some 
 such phrase as "These people are friendly; do 
 not plunder"; the passing German officers, if
 
 y6 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 indeed they themselves did not cause it to be 
 written, must either have seen it or been crim- 
 inally negligent: does it, or does it not, imply 
 that plundering was going on? Remember 
 that chalked phrase, and then remember that it 
 was the great Bismarck himself who said: 
 
 "Above all, you must inflict on the inhabit- 
 ants of invaded towns the maximum of suffer- 
 ing, so that they may become sick of the strug- 
 gle and may bring pressure to bear upon their 
 government to discontinue it. You must leave 
 the people through whose land you march only 
 their eyes to weep with." 
 
 Read, also, the words of von Bernhardi in 
 "Germany and the Next War" and see how 
 their acid philosophy, quite harmless in intelli- 
 gent hands, will surely be transmuted in the 
 brutal minded into direct command to slaugh- 
 ter and burn and steal. 
 
 Read, last of all, the super-brutal cynicism 
 of Prof. Treitschke, who would improve the 
 human species by extinguishing those he 
 liked least. 
 
 When you have pondered these amazing
 
 WEATHER-SIGNALS 77 
 
 beliefs of the German philosophers you will no 
 longer have to see pictures of slaughtered Bel- 
 gian women and children in order to be con- 
 vinced of the reality. You will know that the 
 philosophy of the German war-mad, in which 
 Almighty God is curiously uncounted, could 
 have produced naught else.
 
 IV 
 
 AVALANCHE 
 
 In the preceding chapter there was frequent 
 reference to the report of the Belgian Dele- 
 gates to the United States. The body of that 
 report is so full of carefully sifted evidence of 
 rape, murder, torture and wanton destruction 
 that one may well wonder why any writer 
 should now pause to add to it. It would seem, 
 too, that if those delegates left anything un- 
 said, what they left has been abundantly sup- 
 plied by the newspapers' war-correspondents 
 and by the authors of several books about the 
 war, who have had far better opportunities for 
 observation and investigation than fell to my 
 lot. My answer is this : I know what has al- 
 ready been done over here for Belgium's suffer- 
 ing non-combatants, and I am proud of my 
 country's present response to their appeal ; but, 
 
 since my return to America, I have found that 
 
 78
 
 AVALANCHE 79 
 
 a large portion of our public is still withhold- 
 ing its help because it is still unconvinced of the 
 necessity for help. No land is so ready with 
 its charity as is this land, but no land is so 
 level-headed; Americans are generous, but 
 they do not like to have their generosity im- 
 posed upon; they will gladly give their last cent 
 available, but the native of every State "comes 
 from Missouri." In view of this, not one 
 piece of evidence concerning the wrongs done 
 in Belgium should be lost; the telling of the 
 slightest instance may bring some new bit 
 of assistance — and every bit is desperately 
 needed. 
 
 Realizing, however, that what I saw of Ger- 
 man atrocities was, after all, seen with the eyes 
 of an outsider by no means so well furnished 
 with powers to take him about among the 
 scenes of destruction as the accredited corre- 
 spondents at the front, I shall here concern 
 myself not with such after-evidences as I 
 chanced to observe, but with the testimony 
 given me by eye- witnesses of the actual hap- 
 pening- and by some of the victims themselves.
 
 80 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 To repeat every convincing tale that was told 
 me would be to make a book far larger than 
 this book may be ; it would be the narrative of 
 some details that may better be left — and can 
 safely be left — to the discriminating imagina- 
 tion of the reader ; and it would be to pile hor- 
 ror upon horror until my audience was sated 
 beyond any response to Belgium's needs. My 
 task is, therefore, largely one of selection. 
 
 The stories told me, though they for the 
 most part passed the mere inventive powers of 
 their tellers, and though they varied as much 
 in detail as they corresponded in tenor and con- 
 viction, were generally characterized by the 
 qualities that I noticed in those told by the early 
 refugees to Ostend. They had a brevity, a 
 bare statement of fact, that conveyed a special 
 sense of horror. When the speakers were of 
 the class that has acquired the gift of verbal 
 picture-making, they were as a rule still too 
 stunned to employ that gift. This, neverthe- 
 less, they had to the last man and woman 
 among them — almost to the last child: they 
 had a wonderful, a touching faith in what
 
 1/ 
 o 
 
 u 
 
 z — 
 
 ■J ■=■ 
 
 : 
 u 
 
 u 
 
 rt 
 /. 
 
 rt 
 
 o 
 
 r 
 
 o
 
 AVALANCHE 81 
 
 America could and would do for them. One 
 and all, they were possessed by that splendid 
 belief in the greatness and goodness of the 
 Republic beyond the seas. Over and over 
 again — from the lips of the aged, who had seen 
 burnt the little houses and gardens that they 
 had for years labored to maintain; from the 
 tongues of women whose husbands had been 
 shot down in plain view of their helpless 
 wives; out of the mouths of newly-made 
 orphans — I heard the words: 
 
 "America is doing so much; it can do so 
 much; it will do so much. When America 
 knows all, we shall be saved. Yours is the 
 great peaceful nation; it is the true Power at 
 The Hague; it will stop these infamies." 
 
 I have not always, I fear, been a very loyal 
 American; but no American could think ill of 
 his country when he realized how these home- 
 less and stricken people of a foreign land 
 believed in the charity and justice of the United 
 States. 
 
 Another note was often repeated, especially 
 by those refugees from villages along the
 
 82 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 German border where no real fighting had 
 taken place between the hordes of the invader 
 and the little army of Belgium. This was the 
 note of absolute bewilderment at the sudden- 
 ness of the catastrophe. Even in that coun- 
 try, it reminded me of stories that I have heard 
 Swiss mountaineers tell of avalanches in the 
 Alps: 
 
 "We were at work. We were doing nothing 
 wrong. We were at work in our fields, and 
 they made us stop our work." 
 
 There was a man of perhaps seventy years. 
 His face was bandaged. He had worked for 
 a generation as a small farmer, and the soil 
 had called until he bent double toward it. 
 
 "In the village north of mine," he said, 
 "there was a company of our little soldiers; 
 but they were not in our village. Then we did 
 not even know that they were anywhere near. 
 Along the road beside which I was working 
 came some men on bicycles. They passed and 
 presently returned. Then they came back 
 again, and this time with them a great, great
 
 AVALANCHE 83 
 
 many soldiers on foot — soldiers in gray and 
 wearing helmets: Germans. They called me 
 out of the field. I am old, you observe, and I 
 walk slowly. When I did not come quickly 
 enough to please them, two ran forward and 
 pricked me with their bayonets. You see this 
 cut in my cheek." 
 
 He loosened the bandage. Just below his 
 right cheek-bone an ugly red wound sliced the 
 wrinkled skin. 
 
 "There is another wound in my shoulder," 
 he went on. "When their officer saw these 
 things done, he laughed; but he told his men 
 to be careful, because, he said, I and my fellow- 
 villagers should presently be needed. 
 
 "We went on into the village. Out of each 
 field, the Germans gathered all the workers, 
 women as well as men. Also in the village 
 itself. There they put us in front of them — 
 two of our women had babies at the breast. 
 If we lagged, they said, we should be shot, and 
 those of us nearest the soldiers were pricked 
 on by the soldiers' bayonets. At a turn of the
 
 84 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 road, we saw, ahead of us, a line of Belgian 
 infantry, their rifles ready. The German offi- 
 cers said to us : 
 
 " 'You will stoop down when we fire, and, 
 when we have fired, you will stand again and 
 march forward with us behind you. If you 
 disobey, we shall kill you where you stand/ 
 
 ''We did it — most of us. We had to. We 
 were helpless. One of the women with a baby 
 was perhaps too much afraid; she fell before a 
 shot was fired. An officer nodded, and a 
 soldier put his bayonet through her breast as 
 she lay on the ground. She screeched and 
 died. 
 
 " 'Now you see what will happen to you !' — 
 The officers said that. 
 
 "They kicked the woman's body aside, and 
 the body of the crying baby, and we marched 
 on . . . When the firing became general, I 
 pretended to be shot ; I fell down and rolled into 
 the ditch beside the road." 
 
 Some instances have been cited in America 
 of the burgomaster and parish priest of one 
 village or another being seized by the enemy
 
 AVALANCHE 85 
 
 on entering a hamlet and held as hostages. 
 These instances were not rare; they were the 
 custom, a part of the plan of campaign. When 
 the invaders remained overnight in the village, 
 those hostages were kept under guard. If, 
 during the night, a drunken soldier's insult to 
 a villager's wife was resented by her husband 
 — if, an Uhlan having drunk a cottager's wine, 
 tried to seize that cottager's daughter and was 
 struck by her father — then the priest and 
 burgomaster would be marched into the village 
 street, the people called out and the hostages 
 executed. More often the exacted atonement 
 was still more widely vicarious: 
 
 "It is with my consent that the Commander- 
 in-Chief has ordered the whole town to be 
 burned and that about one hundred people have 
 been shot. I bring this fact to the knowledge 
 of the city of Liege so that the citizens of 
 Liege may realize the fate with which they are 
 menaced." 
 
 I am far from denying that certain of the 
 hundreds of stories of rape were false. In 
 Antwerp, in the early days of the war, the com-
 
 86 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 man salutation of the professional peripatetic 
 was some such fabrication. But the mere fact 
 that these stories were seized upon as credible 
 by those women is some evidence to the preva- 
 lence of outrages upon innocent girls. The 
 Belgian Commission alone has authenticated 
 many cases beyond all shadow of doubt, and to 
 these have been added scores of equally unim- 
 peachable instances gathered by reputable war- 
 correspondents. There are the stories told to 
 nurses in faltering syllables by young girls 
 whose relatives, having been murdered, could 
 not have put the words into their mouths, and 
 whose previous upbringing precluded the 
 theory that they could have learned in any way 
 save that at which they hinted some of the. 
 deeds done to them. Not infrequently these 
 deeds were of a sort of which only alienists and 
 madmen have a real knowledge. I know some- 
 thing of the Belgian people, and I know that 
 the details of the stories to which I refer would 
 never have been known by their narrators — in 
 some instances, children of ten and twelve —
 
 AVALANCHE 87 
 
 had those narrators not been the victims of the 
 crimes that they described. 
 
 ". . . So they killed my father and mother," 
 said a little girl of fifteen: "those four soldiers 
 that came into our house after the servants had 
 run away. They did it because my father was 
 a notary and had papers about, and the Ger- 
 mans said he was a spy spying on them. And 
 then — " She hid her face, but ears and neck 
 were crimson. "And then — You know what I 
 mean, madame," she sobbed in the nurse's 
 arms: "those four bad men!" 
 
 A Belgian soldier put another case in another 
 manner. His company was passing through a 
 town that the Germans had temporarily evacu- 
 ated: 
 
 "There was a naked old woman hanging 
 from a telegraph-pole. She was quite dead, 
 and there were bayonet-wounds in her breast. 
 But what had happened to her before she was 
 hanged and bayoneted — that was far worse 
 than hanging." 
 
 A small boy, who said that he had been the
 
 88 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 errand-boy at the shop of a wine-merchant in 
 Huy, told me this : 
 
 "The German soldiers came to our shop and 
 demanded wine. My master gave it and, when 
 they had drunk, asked payment. Just then a 
 German lieutenant came in the door and heard 
 my master. The lieutenant said: 'We have 
 conquered your country; conquerors do not 
 pay, they take/ He took a bottle himself, 
 knocked the head off it and drank. The ragged 
 glass cut his lips, and this made him angry. 
 He took another bottle and knocked my master 
 down with it. He told the soldiers to take all 
 they wanted, and he must have told other 
 soldiers when he went out into the street, for 
 some more came in. They drank all they 
 could and then broke bottles and smashed casks 
 and poured the wine on the floor. They looted 
 the cellars. Then they went out and set fire to 
 all the houses in two streets. That was to- 
 ward the end of August. . . ." 
 
 "When I ran away from my village on the 
 Ghent-road" — it is a woman of thirty that is 
 speaking now, and she carries a five-years-old
 
 AVALANCHE 89 
 
 boy swathed in bloody bandages over wounds 
 caused by flying particles of flying shell — "all 
 the people left alive in the village ran with me, 
 for the Germans had told us that they would 
 burn the place and that all remaining would be 
 shot. When we were quite exhausted, we came 
 to a shrine by the road, and our cure, who was 
 with us, stopped us there to pray. We knelt 
 in the road, monsieur, and we prayed for our 
 country. We prayed also for our dear dead, 
 and our husbands who were at the war, and we 
 prayed that the Blessed Virgin would inter- 
 cede for us — since surely we must have done 
 some grave wrong to be so punished, though 
 what it was we do not know — and that, now 
 our little houses were gone, we might be given 
 some work — oh, any sort of honest work — to 
 do in order to feed our little ones. And even 
 while we were praying, some of those Germans, 
 having followed us on horseback from our vil- 
 lage, rode up and said we had committed a 
 crime to stop when they had told us to go on. 
 And so they took five of the old men and stood 
 them in the road and shot them. One was my
 
 90 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 father. They did not let us stay to bury my 
 father." 
 
 That desire to work is another characteristic 
 of your Belgian. Since returning to America, 
 I have heard a few cynics, who knew nothing of 
 the people of Belgium, say that most of the 
 refugees had become so used to charity as to 
 want to live on it for the rest of their lives. 
 Anybody at all acquainted with the Belgian 
 character is aware that a scorn of idleness, a 
 love of thrift and a pride in his work is incul- 
 cated in the Belgian. These are national traits. 
 Nothing else could have made Belgium the 
 wealthy country that it was until August, 19 14. 
 Among a nation made homeless, there must 
 inevitably be found a few shirkers ; but I ven- 
 ture to say that you could never find fewer any- 
 where than can be found among these suddenly 
 dispossessed Belgians. Nearly all, they are 
 willing to undertake any task — the once richest 
 of them — however menial it may be. They 
 want only justice for their country and work 
 for themselves. This woman whose father
 
 AVALANCHE 91 
 
 had been shot down at his prayers put it truly: 
 "Any sort of honest work in order to feed our 
 little ones.'' 
 
 How many unoffending fugitives were mas- 
 sacred in their endeavors to escape will, of 
 course, never be known. One old farmer told 
 me of crossing a small stream that was clogged 
 by the bodies of such refugees. "I saw them 
 heaped there," he said with a dramatic sense 
 unusual in his fellows : "The water had climbed 
 up behind them and was just trickling over the 
 top of the pile. Perhaps they were better so: 
 what are we that are alive to find to live by?" 
 Nothing, it would certainly seem, remains to 
 them. What they had, in their own land, 
 amassed by years of slow toil and painful denial 
 has vanished. Such strength as was left them 
 was often sapped by the shock of their losses, 
 by the sights confronting them, by terrible 
 journeys through flooded fields under pelting 
 rain, by wounds, illness, starvation. In their 
 native-land are the Germans; the hands of 
 France are full; in willing, but sadly tried Eng-
 
 92 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 land and in America, they have added to all 
 these disadvantages the disadvantage of an 
 alien tongue. . . . 
 
 The complete destitution of the dispossessed 
 is a tribute to the vaunted thoroughness of the 
 race whose national hero admonished it to 
 leave its enemies "only their eyes to weep with." 
 Many a refugee has told me incidents abun- 
 dantly bearing out those of the "fire-blackened 
 houses" where Mr. Powell saw hanging "white 
 flags made from sheets and table-cloths and 
 pillow-cases — pathetic appeals for the mercy 
 which was not granted"; not a few have con- 
 firmed the same author's statement that at 
 Aerschot and Louvain the Germans "broke the 
 windows of houses and threw in sticks which 
 had been soaked in oil and dipped in sulphur," 
 and that at Termonde, evacuated by the inhabi- 
 tants before the enemy entered it, "they used a 
 motor-car equipped with a large tank for petrol, 
 a pump, a hose and a spraying-nozzle." * I 
 have been shown some of the small rings of 
 guncotton, about an inch in diameter, such as 
 
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 AVALANCHE 93 
 
 were used at Termonde, carried in bagsful by 
 the German troops and, when ignited, spreading 
 fire by a series of leaps actuated by their own 
 explosion. Where the invader destroyed, he 
 destroyed utterly. 
 
 I was lucky enough to talk to several fugi- 
 tives from Liege, Louvain, Dinant, Malines 
 and Aerschot. Said a citizen of the first-named 
 of these, a man of wealth and education: 
 
 "We had been warned what would happen if 
 we citizens offered armed resistance, but when 
 the blow fell, it fell with only a few of us, if 
 any, knowing that such futile resistance or re- 
 prisal had been attempted. For my part, I 
 have yet to learn of any. The Germans fired 
 the rue des Pitteurs, the Place de l'Universite 
 and the Quai des Pecheurs without so much as 
 telling the sleeping inhabitants what it was pro- 
 posed to do. It was only the choking smoke 
 that wakened me and my family. Our house 
 was in flames. Of course we ran out of it. 
 The German troops in the street fired on us as 
 we came out, wounding my daughter. In the 
 same manner fifteen persons were killed.
 
 94 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 Later I saw a group of German soldiers flinging 
 about a young girl in the open street of a 
 suburb. I protested. They told me that they 
 meant to kill her, and my entreaties for her life 
 merely got me a blow with a rifle-butt that 
 knocked me down. As I lay there, I saw them 
 bayonet the girl. I know of no reason for this 
 outrage, and I am sure that the victim knew of 
 none. A seven-years-old boy was playing with 
 a toy-musket — one of those children's toys that 
 shoot a stick for five yards and would not hurt a 
 baby: a passing soldier shot the little fellow, 
 declaring that the lad had pointed the gun at 
 him.". . . 
 
 "There is no manner of doubt," said a mer- 
 chant of Louvain, "that in my city the alleged 
 firing of non-combatants upon German troops 
 was, in reality, German soldiers firing on a 
 party of their comrades whom they mistook for 
 a Belgian force. I knew it because I saw it. 
 S*o did many others. Our Government has 
 now the full evidence. Certainly the Germans 
 themselves knew it; they spoke of it about the 
 town. But either because their error angered
 
 AVALANCHE 95 
 
 them against the whole world, or because they 
 wanted a pretext for destruction, they soon 
 charged the shooting to the citizens, and the 
 massacre and burning followed.". . . 
 
 "The Germans say that there were Belgian 
 troops in our town when it was bombarded and 
 its historic monuments destroyed," a Malines 
 physician said to me. "That is not true. I 
 had just made a tour of the town, and I know 
 that what I say is the fact. More than that, 
 the Germans knew it. German officers subse- 
 quently admitted it in my hearing; but they 
 said that the bombardment was necessary for 
 'its moral effect.' " 
 
 The case of once beautiful Dinant is thus 
 stated by Victor Yseux, a barrister, a Doctor 
 of Laws and a former president of the Belgian 
 Bar Association : 
 
 "On the 2 1 st of August, at about 9 o'clock 
 in the evening, German troops came into Dinant 
 d( >\vn the road from Ciney and entered Dinant 
 by the Rue St. Jacques. Xo sooner were they 
 in the town than they began firing into the 
 windows of the houses. They killed a work-
 
 96 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 man who was returning to his own house and 
 wounded another inhabitant, forcing him to 
 cry 'Long live the Kaiser !' They bayoneted a 
 third in the abdomen. Swaggering into the 
 cafes, they seized the liquor, got drunk and, 
 going out, set fire to several houses. 
 
 "At 6:30 a. m. of the next Sunday, German 
 soldiers of the One Hundred and Eighth Regi- 
 ment of Infantry invaded the Church of the 
 Premonstratensian Fathers, ordered the con- 
 gregation to leave, separated the men from the 
 women, and shot fifty of the former. About 
 an hour later, the Germans unreservedly gave 
 themselves up to pillage and arson. They went 
 from house to house, driving the inhabitants 
 into the street, then pillaging and firing the 
 dwellings. Such inhabitants as tried to escape 
 their insults were shot. About nine in the 
 morning, the soldiery, driving before them by 
 blows from the butt-ends of rifles men, women 
 and children, pushed them all into the public 
 square, where they were kept prisoners for nine 
 hours while their houses were being burnt and 
 robbed. When the women asked what was to
 
 AVALANCHE 97 
 
 be done with them, the guard answered that 
 they were to be shot. 
 
 "At last, a Captain separated the men from 
 the women and children. The women were 
 placed in front of a rank of infantry soldiers, 
 the men were then ranged along a wall. The 
 front rank of them was ordered to kneel. A 
 platoon of soldiers drew up. The women cried 
 for mercy on their husbands, sons and brothers, 
 but the officer ordered his men to fire. There 
 had been no inquiry and no pretense of trial. 
 Perhaps twenty of the inhabitants were only 
 wounded, but fell among the dead. The 
 soldiers fired a new volley into the heap of them. 
 Several citizens escaped this double discharge, 
 shammed dead for more than two hours, re- 
 maining motionless among the corpses, and, 
 when night fell, escaped to the hills. Eighty- 
 four dead were left on the square." 
 
 That was not the only massacre at Dinant. 
 A party of German soldiers found some citizens 
 in the cellars of a brewery in the Eaubourg St. 
 Pierre and shot them. On another occasion, 
 workmen employed by a M. I Iimmor hid them-
 
 98 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 selves, their wives and children in the cellar of 
 their employer's factory. Forced by hunger, 
 they at last came out, carrying a white flag. 
 Every man was instantly shot. "Nearly all 
 the men in the Faubourg de Neffe were 
 executed en masse," Dr. Yseux continues, "and 
 in another quarter a dozen were slaughtered in 
 a cellar. An old woman and all of her chil- 
 dren were killed in their cellar. A man of 
 sixty-five, his wife, his son and his daughter 
 were shot against a wall. Other inhabitants 
 were taken in a barge as far as the rock of 
 Bayard and shot there, among them a woman 
 eighty-three years old. 
 
 "A group of men and women had been locked 
 in the court of the prison. A German ma- 
 chine gun, placed on the hill above, opened fire 
 on them, and an old woman and three other 
 persons were brought down. Meanwhile, sol- 
 diers not engaged in the killing sacked the 
 houses of the town, after which they set fire 
 to it. 
 
 "Before the Germans came there, Dinant had 
 fourteen hundred houses; it now has only two
 
 AVALANCHE 99 
 
 hundred. Its factories have been practically 
 obliterated. At least seven hundred of its in- 
 habitants have been killed; others have been 
 taken to Germany and are there held prisoners; 
 the majority are refugees ; a few who remained 
 in the town are dying from hunger." * 
 
 Three accounts have been given of the cause 
 of the Aerschot massacre. The Belgians have 
 one; the Germans two and each of those two 
 contradicts the other. Nobody denies that 
 Josef Hielemans, the burgomaster, a brewer 
 and miller with a reputation for mildness and 
 docility, had issued many proclamations and 
 circulars commanding the townsfolk to placate 
 the invaders. Nobody denies that he asked the 
 German Chief of Staff and some of his officers 
 to dine at the Hielemans house. The one Ger- 
 man story says that the citizens rose and at- 
 tacked their conquerors in disregard of these 
 friendly advances on the part of their burgo- 
 master; the other says that M. Hielemans' son 
 shot his father's guest of honor at table and 
 that the subsequent massacre was by way of 
 
 1 Substantially, this same account was published by Dr. 
 Yscux in the New York Times for January 24, 1915.
 
 ioo IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 reprisal : the alleged murderer zvas fifteen years 
 old. The Belgian story, as I heard it, is that 
 the slaughter was started by the killing of a 
 German officer in the Grande Place, who was 
 hit by a stray bullet from one of the guns of 
 some German troops engaged in "shooting up 
 the town," like a pack of desperadoes in our 
 own long past Wild West, with a view to ter- 
 rifying the inhabitants. If you admit one 
 German version, you give the lie to the other; 
 if you accept the Belgian, you have an account 
 that conforms to the proved action of German* 
 troops in a score of other Belgian towns and 
 villages. 
 
 To the many stories of the massacre, I shall 
 add but one. It was told in England by a 
 slim, dark woman, whose splendid eyes and 
 drawn face made more eloquently clear than 
 her words the infamies that she had looked 
 upon. Mme. von de Pol fled to England with 
 her three children, of whom the oldest is 
 scarcely eleven years of age. She herself is 
 still in her early thirties. She speaks German, 
 French, Flemish and English. Gently reared,
 
 AVALANCHE 101 
 
 she still bears the tokens of her upbringing. 
 She spoke coherently and in the voice of cultiva- 
 tion. Her gestures were few; her voice was 
 low and even. 
 
 "I was," she said, "the wife of a leather 
 merchant. We were prosperous and happy in 
 a pleasant home. That was until the morning 
 of the nineteenth of August. Now it is over. 
 My husband I have not seen since the Germans 
 occupied Aershot. 
 
 "On that morning the town was bombarded 
 for nearly an hour and a half from nine o'clock, 
 houses crumbling to dust about our own. 
 Then the Germans entered. They behaved 
 like beasts. They dragged the inhabitants, 
 who hid in their cellars, out into the streets and 
 shut hundreds of them into the church as pris- 
 oners. It was then that my husband disap- 
 peared. 
 
 "I had sent, thank God, my children a few 
 miles* away to Ryckevorscl. For myself, I 
 escaped death because I spoke German and pre- 
 tended not to be afraid, although how I 
 achieved that deception I do not know, for to
 
 102 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 me it seemed that I never ceased to tremble. 
 While seeing many of my neighbors shot in the 
 streets, I managed to say that I was a German, 
 and the soldiers at last chalked on the door of 
 my house the words : 
 
 " 'A German lady, living alone. Save this 
 place unconditionally.' 
 
 "You say that the Germans declare their 
 actions to have been the result of shooting on 
 the part of the inhabitants on the evening after 
 the German occupation began. That declara- 
 tion cannot be true, because the Germans began 
 their butchery and devastation as soon as they 
 had arrived. They battered their way into 
 the cellars where the frightened people were 
 hiding and brought them out at the bayonet's 
 point: I saw them. They outraged women 
 and girls, they burned, stole, killed. M. Hiele- 
 mans' warehouse held food enough to feed the 
 town for two years: they shipped it to Ger- 
 many. My husband's warehouse they stripped 
 clean. 
 
 "House after house they burned. In some 
 of these I know that there were people ill and
 
 AVALANCHE 103 
 
 unable to leave. My milkmaid they murdered ; 
 they shot dead a recently married couple, my 
 neighbors. Nearby, they shot first a husband, 
 then his wife, then her baby. They even 
 seemed to think that they were merciful, be- 
 cause they said: 'We do not torture; we kill 
 outright.' 
 
 "On the evening of the nineteenth, as I know 
 of my own knowledge, a great body of the 
 people of the town were taken to an open field 
 and tossed down there, their arms bound behind 
 them. After they had been left thus all night 
 long, one in every three of these peaceful folk 
 was called to stand out and was shot, while 
 their friends and relatives were forced to wit- 
 ness the massacre. A hundred and sixty-nine 
 were killed. Those who were left were kicked 
 and beaten out of the town. 
 
 "I remained in Aerschot after the Belgians 
 retook it and until it was once more taken by 
 the Germans. Then the Germans were worse 
 than they had been at first. Before his wife's 
 eyes they shot the railroad-station-master; 
 near his house they killed a woman and her
 
 104 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 three months' old baby. I know a man, once a 
 prosperous printer, who was compelled to look 
 on while one of his sons was shot and while 
 the arm of another was cut off in such a man- 
 ner that he died of the wound. I have heard, 
 on the best authority, that several of our 
 priests were murdered. 
 
 "What we few survivors went through, I 
 cannot tell you. For two entire weeks we 
 scarcely slept, and never once during that time 
 did we dare to take our clothes off, or go to bed 
 in the ordinary manner." 
 
 She paused. She put her slim, dark hand to 
 her forehead: it was almost the only gesture 
 that she had employed. 
 
 "Those things which I remember," she said, 
 "I shall never be able to forget. But much I 
 have forgotten. It was too terrible to remem- 
 ber. I am not sorry that I have forgotten it." 
 
 Mme. von de Pol was not the only Belgian 
 that talked of the murder of babies and young 
 children. I heard of many such atrocities, 
 along with stories of Germans firing on the 
 white flag and on the Red Cross, as well as two
 
 AVALANCHE 10 
 
 3 
 
 or three of their use of these and the Belgian 
 banner for luring detachments of the Belgians 
 into their clutches. Here, however, I shall tell 
 but one, and that because it comes from an 
 American. His name I am permitted only to 
 indicate, because his wife is still suffering from 
 the shock of the experience and further pub- 
 licity would only aggravate that shock. I shall 
 
 therefore call him "Mr. S " and merely add 
 
 that he is a man well known and a member of a 
 prominent New England family. ' 
 
 Mr. S and his wife had been motoring 
 
 on the Continent and, the war having started, 
 were making through Belgium for the coast. 
 They had, as they supposed, all the papers 
 necessary for their protection. While still in- 
 side the German lines in the invaded country, 
 they passed a ruined village and overtook a boy 
 and a girl, aged about nine and five years. The 
 children, weeping, said that their parents had 
 been killed and that they had fallen hopelessly 
 behind the column of refugees hurrying from 
 their village. They had no knowledge of the
 
 106 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 whereabouts of any of their relatives or 
 friends ; they were hungry and penniless. Mr. 
 
 and Mrs. S took these waifs into their car. 
 
 At first their only thought was to deliver the 
 children to the Belgian authorities in some safe 
 town ; but soon the hapless condition of the lit- 
 tle fugitives, and their simple and appealing 
 manner, completely won the Americans' hearts : 
 they must be taken to their rescuers' own New 
 England home and there kept, perhaps until, 
 the war over, some relative should be dis- 
 covered, or, failing such discovery, for the re- 
 mainder of their lives. 
 
 No such outcome was to be. A few miles 
 along the road, a squad of German soldiers 
 stopped the car. They found the Americans' 
 papers in order — but what about the children? 
 
 Mr. S explained. 
 
 "They must get out of the car," said the sol- 
 dier in command. 
 
 The children got out. 
 
 "They cannot go with you," said the officer. 
 
 Mr. S protested. His wife pleaded. 
 
 The soldier became angry; he ordered the
 
 AVALANCHE 107 
 
 children shot. The sentence was immediately 
 executed. 
 
 For my part, I do not consider those children 
 the most unhappy of the Belgians. I do not 
 consider the most unhappy of the Belgians the 
 murdered women and old men, who died amid 
 the smoking ruins of their houses. The most 
 unhappy of the Belgians are the survivors of 
 this Teutonic avalanche: the wife of the once 
 rich merchant, the widow of the once contented 
 cottager, the homeless old men and women, the 
 children and babies left alone in a ravished 
 country, the legions that have been driven re- 
 sourceless into alien lands, the non-combatant 
 thousands who are starving in that land of their 
 own where,, but a few months since, they lived 
 in peace and plenty. . . . 
 
 What of them?
 
 y 
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 
 
 There will be small order in this chapter, and 
 but little form, because what I have here to 
 describe is an end of order ; it is that enemy of 
 form: chaos. Elsewhere I have called refu- 
 gee-flooded Ostend the Back-Door of Hell ; but 
 even when I left Ostend I did not really believe 
 in Hell. — I believe in it now; I have been 
 there. . . . 
 
 At first, after I entered Antwerp, there was 
 only one hint of approaching disaster: a dis- 
 tant muttering from the south, as I have heard 
 thunder-storms mutter over their brewing 
 wrath across Yorkshire moors. Ceaselessly,, 
 regularly, stubbornly, that far rumble pro- 
 ceeded, now and again breaking into a single 
 sharp report, or rising to. a piercing scream. 
 Away down there, clouds of smoke beat the 
 still October air. Then the reports, the 
 
 108
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 109 
 
 screams, would cease; but always the obligato 
 of those tremendous basses continued. 
 
 In the heart of the city, everything was still. 
 There was a quiet, oppressive, but orderly. 
 The streets were almost empty, and the shops 
 were closed. One store alone, it seemed, was 
 open for business, displaying placards from 
 the hands of an amateur sign-painter, which 
 announced "bargains in cellar-beds" ; that is to 
 say, beds constructed for use in the shallow 
 Antwerp cellars, where the inhabitants might 
 hide from the expected shell-fire. But other- 
 wise the house fronts were rows of tombs; 
 they reminded one of a walk through Pere 
 Lachaise: the doors barred, the shutters bolted; 
 and it was strange to pass along these death- 
 like thoroughfares and see, fluttering from a 
 thousand sealed fronts, the gay flag of Bel- 
 gium. 
 
 That was not the only flag in view: all the 
 historic and public buildings flew the 1 tanner 
 of the Hague Convention, in order to warn the 
 poising enemy of spots where even his shells 
 might not fall with impunity. This, at a stiller
 
 no IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 air-level, hung limply; however, above the 
 hotel de ville and trembled, as if asking for 
 mercy, over the fourteenth-century Gothic ca- 
 thedral, the jewel of the Low Countries, around 
 which circled a pair of silent and watchful Bel- 
 gian aeroplanes. 
 
 Every little while, a Boy Scout, his som- 
 brero pulled over his nose, his green cape fly- 
 ing, would dart around a corner, on government 
 service, as most Belgian Boy Scouts were — 
 a messenger, perhaps, from the school-building 
 in the Avenue du Commerce, which, after the 
 flight from Brussels, had become the nation's 
 Foreign Bureau; a dispatch-bearer from the 
 Ministry of State, then quartered in the Hotel 
 St. Antoine, or a miniature legate from one of 
 the offices that had taken refuge in the Grand 
 Hotel. Once there passed a shovel-hatted 
 priest in swirling cassock, the Red Cross blaz- 
 ing on his arm and about his neck a necklace 
 of rolls suspended, bound for the firing-line. 
 In the distance, a dog-battery crossed the 
 street's end, and twice motor-cars from the 
 Pare des Automobiles Militaires at the steam-
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP in 
 
 ship docks shot across the way : when war was 
 declared, the army immediately commandeered 
 every automobile obtainable, wiping all speed- 
 laws from the statute-slate, and now the mili- 
 tary machines dashed along city-thoroughfares 
 as I have never seen cars dash save in the quest 
 of that modern grail, the Vanderbilt Cup. 
 
 My course lay through what is usually the 
 busiest portion of the city and along the Ave- 
 nue de Keyser and the Place de Meir. In the 
 former street, at other times so merry with 
 its pavement-cafes, there was scarcely anybody 
 to be seen. In the long mile which, through 
 happier times, had been to Antwerp what the 
 Strand is to London, the Municipal Banquet- 
 ing Hall was now as dark as a prison ; the The- 
 atre des Yarietes, where I had sat through the 
 merriest of Erench comedies, was become a 
 closed barn; the sole sign of life was the sentry 
 pacing up and down before the palace. 
 
 The last fortress of a nation, Antwerp, until 
 a few months since a thoroughly modern city 
 of four hundred thousand inhabitants, bad re- 
 turned to its mediaeval order without its me-
 
 ii2 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 diaeval grandeur. Its southern suburbs had 
 been obliterated to make place for miles upon 
 miles of trenches, pits, barbed-wire entangle- 
 ments. Its richest citizens and its most pros- 
 perous tradesmen had become paupers. Un- 
 der martial-law, its cafes were all but closed; 
 since the Zeppelin attack in August, its elec- 
 tric-lighting system had been out of commis- 
 sion, and all other illumination was shut off 
 nightly at eight o'clock, when the street-cars 
 ceased running. Letters addressed to any 
 country save France, Russia or England had 
 to be posted unsealed; scarcely any personal 
 telegrams could leave or enter; the telephone 
 could be used only for governmental or mili- 
 tary purposes. All sale of spirits was forbid- 
 den. Now, a German shell having destroyed 
 the municipal water-plant at Lierre, water was 
 a luxury. 
 
 Yet this city was once the busiest in the 
 world, surpassing even Venice and Genoa: in 
 the days when Antwerp sent the largest ships 
 over all the Seven Seas, and Antwerp's fair 
 was the greatest of all earth's markets, Flem-
 
 Cop\r I II IcrurouJ .' 
 
 A.MU i 
 
 "It was Iiar<l to believe her doomed, . . . this home of <K- Vos and 
 Quinten Mai j , ol both the Teniei i, and Van I >y< k."
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 113 
 
 ish rugs were sold in Persia and Flemish pray- 
 er-mats to the Turk. It was hard to believe 
 her doomed at last, this home of de Vos and 
 Ouinten Matsys, of Seghers, Jordaens, both 
 the Teniers and Van Dyck. Just around that 
 deserted corner remained the house in which 
 Rubens lived and died. Godfrey de Bouillon 
 had been margrave here; this stronghold had 
 suffered eight sieges; the Northmen burnt it; 
 the still-remembered Furie Espagnolc swept 
 across its walls ; Alexander of Parma for four- 
 teen months invested it; Carnot tried to hold 
 it in the War of Liberation; the Dutch bom- 
 barded it during the- revolution of 1830, and the 
 French in 1S32; Brialmont, in the middle eight- 
 een-hundreds, made it "the best fortification in 
 Europe." 
 
 Hard indeed to believe it was doomed at last : 
 too hard for many an inhabitant, who was soon 
 to pay heavily for his inability to doubt those 
 engineering feats of Brialmont. Until the 
 last two days of the siege, belief would not 
 waver. Outside, their ranks decimated by 
 a rain of explosives from guns beyond range
 
 ii4 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 of all reply, the little Belgian army lay face to 
 face with death; its men had fought for days 
 without resting; many of them had been hur- 
 ried from Liege and Malines and brought by 
 boat to Antwerp; the ambulance-service was 
 crippled; the field-hospitals overflowed; the 
 dead were unburied. Nevertheless, the citizens 
 of Antwerp, inside its walls, continued firm. 
 Had not all the military-experts in the world 
 pronounced their town impregnable? Up to 
 the morning of that fatal Wednesday, the pop- 
 ulation believed in their fortifications as truly 
 as the passengers on the Titanic believed in 
 the security of their ice-shattered steamer. 
 
 The new turn of opinion was first voiced by 
 that mighty gossip, the man at whose house I 
 was to stop. 
 
 "The end is sure soon to arrive," he de- 
 clared. "Von Besler, one of the German gen- 
 erals, sent word of it to-day. He told the neu- 
 tral ministers to bid us be ready, and Deguise, 
 our Military Commandant, warned all to go 
 who feared to die. Thousands" — he nodded 
 over his shoulder — "are streaming out of the
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 115 
 
 city now: that part of the town is not quiet, I 
 assure you." 
 
 "And how do the rest of the people think it 
 will end?" 
 
 He shook his head: 
 
 "The Communal Council has unanimously 
 voted that we resist till the last day. But this 
 is the end. The Allies? Poof! It seems that 
 they .have their hands full over the border, 
 those allies. To-night will witness well the 
 start of the termination." 
 
 He was as certain of it as I was. This 
 morning, he had heard, the Germans had put 
 into position their tremendous forty-two cen- 
 timeter guns, the mere appearance of which 
 had brought about the capitulation of Mau- 
 beuge. Both of us momentarily expected to 
 hear them : we were destined not to hear them 
 until Thursday night. 
 
 "Last evening," chattered my host, "shells 
 wrecked a church in the outskirts, and one shell 
 descended in the rue Yolk. People said that 
 the wild beasts in the Zoological Gardens had 
 escaped their broken cages. That was false,
 
 n6 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 but this afternoon the attendants were killing 
 the lions and tigers. To-night the enemy be- 
 gin in earnest. My faith, if they chose, they 
 could reach us now !" 
 
 He was full of this sort of gossip: Prince 
 Rupprecht of Bavaria, brother-in-law to the 
 Belgian Queen, was with the besiegers; the 
 Americans' efforts to save the cathedral would 
 be futile, for though the Germans had been 
 given a map with Antwerp's public buildings 
 plainly marked, they had said that they had a 
 right to direct their fire especially against such 
 places in order to terrify the population into 
 demanding a surrender. 
 
 "It is allowed by international law," he said. 
 
 Small bodies of troops were now almost the 
 only people to be seen moving through the 
 streets, and there passed us, with heads erect 
 and faces set, a company of infantry of which 
 the oldest soldier could not have been more 
 than nineteen : the last scrapings of the military 
 net, these boys that had never yet placed finger 
 to trigger must be tossed before that onrush of 
 German veterans.
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 117 
 
 A covered wagon rattled by, going in the 
 opposite direction. Erom a careless corner 
 two pairs of bare feet extended, still upward 
 pointing, jolting horribly with every jolt of the 
 vehicle. 
 
 "Dead from a military hospital," said my 
 friend. 
 
 "But the feet — why are they bare?" 
 
 He shrugged. 
 
 "That is the order; it is necessary. Boots 
 are valuable; the living need them, and the 
 dead do not walk." 
 
 Above, a long, graceful arc of pale smoke, 
 the track of a shell, was lazily dispersing, and 
 southward soared a black observation Taube, 
 the petrel that foretells the storm. What 
 could that airman be thinking of the little peo- 
 ple below him as, a destroying angel hesitant, he 
 gazed down on the city that from his elevation 
 must have seemed a gigantic chessboard on 
 which the pawns had gone mad: a medley of 
 1 icant i fnl but tiny buildings and delicate spires 
 and, under the shadow of those nearest the 
 avenues of escape, columns of whirling dust —
 
 n8 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 animated dust, stricken human beings, scram- 
 bling for their lives along the few outlets be- 
 neath a smiling sky. 
 
 Something of that scramble I saw later in 
 the afternoon. It was the spectacle that I had 
 seen before at Ostend, but on a larger scale. 
 I had heard from Amsterdam that half a mil- 
 lion fugitive Belgian non-combatants were al- 
 ready in Holland, and that every Dutch train 
 from the frontier was groaning under more. 
 I had been told that the fortv miles of road to 
 Ghent were already packed with refugees. I 
 knew that all the boats for England were over- 
 laden and that — the west Belgian railways, 
 like the entire Belgian telegraph-system, hav- 
 ing at last been preempted for military uses — 
 all the highways were filling with the fleeing 
 throng. "From our towers," said an old sac- 
 ristan of the cathedral, "every smallest path 
 out of the city and away from the Germans 
 looks as if it were a great black snake wrig- 
 gling forward." Antwerp, I was informed, 
 had already sent twenty-five thousand of its 
 own citizens to Rosendaal, or through it, and
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 119 
 
 now this outpouring, beginning at dawn and 
 recalling the pictures of the flights of Tartar 
 tribes, continued without abatement. Into 
 that falling "strongest fortress of Europe" had 
 streamed for shelter the entire surviving popu- 
 lation of its outlying towns and countryside; 
 out of it these again were streaming, these 
 and, as it seemed, the rest of the people of 
 Antwerp itself: six hundred thousand souls. 
 
 Once, long ago, I sat high on a tree-limb near 
 the edge of a Colorado forest and saw, pass- 
 ing under me, the creatures of the primaeval 
 woods running away from a forest-fire. All 
 the native animosities of the bush were for- 
 gotten; all the differences of genus and species, 
 the natural antipathies, the ages-old feuds, the 
 primordial blood-lusts were lost sight of; the 
 beast of prey trotted harmless beside its tra- 
 ditional victim; every instinct of contention 
 was submerged in the instinct of flight from 
 an elemental foe. What I saw on this after- 
 noon in Antwerp as much resembled that in 
 kind as it was greater in numbers and degree. 
 
 Most of the fugitives sought escape by
 
 120 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 water, and the multitudes jammed and dammed 
 every street leading to the quays, every 
 crooked alley that ran toward the north and 
 west. The river resembled a Chinese city's 
 water-front on the festival-day of an Oriental 
 river-god; it was dark with all conceivable 
 sorts of craft, each laden far beyond the dan- 
 ger-point with little children and frail women, 
 with the crippled and the old; the boats of a 
 hundred descriptions bumped and collided; it 
 would have been possible to walk miles about 
 the river's surface dry-shod. 
 
 Many of the very rich had long ago fled from 
 their villas at Eeckeren and Cappellen in their 
 motor-cars, returning the cars for government- 
 uses from the border. Now, in the city proper, 
 porters there were none, and cabs were so rare 
 as to fetch, at sale, the prices of Amsterdam's 
 best diamonds; so that one saw well-to-do 
 heads of families staggering under the weight 
 of trunks, their wives limping along with 
 heavy satchels in their hands, and their chil- 
 dren dragging bulged canvas-bags through the 
 dirt. Often these people begged a lift in the
 
 THE RED RAIX IN ANTWERP 121 
 
 ramshackle cart of some farmer escaping from 
 a burning- village. Social distinctions were 
 trampled under foot, and the distinctions of 
 mere wealth had practically ceased to exist. 
 There were a few lucky people in carriages, 
 more in what had once been the delivery-wag- 
 ons of their thriving shops ; some were mounted 
 on mules, on horses, on bicycles. 
 
 The poorer folk proceeded with push-carts 
 before them, in much the manner in which the 
 Mormons crossed our American prairies, the 
 carts heaped high with a jumble of household 
 goods and sometimes a baby or two tied on top. 
 A lame boy was trundling his paralytic mother 
 in an invalid's chair, and there was a scattering 
 of perambulators loaded, until their springs 
 cracked, with any freight save that for which 
 they were intended. I saw a group of women 
 draw itself from the mass and surround and 
 screen another woman, fallen to the ground: a 
 new life was coming into the world among 
 these thousands fleeing for their lives — subse- 
 quently, T heard of sixteen similar instances 
 
 urring that day among the tremendous
 
 122 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 crowds that trudged along the road to the 
 Dutch frontier. There was but little jostling, 
 and I noticed no fighting; but the men swore, 
 the women sobbed, the children whimpered, 
 and all the while, from the black south, there 
 came the stubborn rumble of that malign thun- 
 derstorm, ever seeming to press closer and 
 closer, ever threatening to break over the lag- 
 gards among the runaways' crippled rear- 
 guard. 
 
 I heard a barefoot woman of the fields asking 
 in French for a few centimes from an old man 
 in a frock-coat and silk-hat, who was being 
 driven in an open carriage at the snail's pace 
 made necessary by the congestion of the street. 
 
 "I have only the clothes on my back," he an- 
 swered. "I lost my all when my house and 
 factory were burned at Dinant. To-day I have 
 given this driver all the money that I have left 
 in the world to drive me to- the frontier." 
 
 The driver confirmed this by a stolid nod. 
 He gave the woman a franc. 
 
 Night had fallen by the time I returned to the 
 house : a cold night, but clear and full of stars
 
 THE RED RAIX IN ANTWERP 123 
 
 of which the pale radiance would every little 
 while be dimmed by the penetrating search- 
 lights from the river-forts as they Hashed their 
 dancing shafts across the darkened city. 
 
 "I think," said I, "that I shall go to bed 
 early." 
 
 My host regarded me as if I were not quite 
 sane. 
 
 "Go to bed?'' he repeated. "Then you will 
 be the only sound human being in Antwerp that 
 does." 
 
 I have no doubt but that he was almost liter- 
 ally correct, yet I held to my purpose. There 
 was not any bravado about it: I had had no 
 sleep on my way here, and, had he clapped a 
 pistol to my head, I should nevertheless have 
 speedily been nodding. So I made him amazedly 
 show me my way upstairs, where I kicked off my 
 boots, lay down in a fourposter and, wrapped 
 in my own blanket, was soon unconscious. 
 
 Soon, but not long. In spite of my utter 
 weariness, my sleep became fitful. Once a 
 searchlight's ray flashed bluely in at the win- 
 dow and across my face and wakened me.
 
 124 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 Then a dog howled, whom, shortly, a verita- 
 ble chorus echoed. It seemed that this had 
 scarcely at length subsided before there came, 
 not localized, but as if from over the entire 
 city, a great panting breath, regularly drawn, 
 as of some wounded monster of the earliest 
 world. I remembered Zola's account of 
 Sedan on the eve of "La Debacle." Out of 
 the streets there rose mingled sounds and 
 muffled, sounds incomplete, mournful : the trot 
 of distant cavalry, the roll of drums, the tramp 
 of marching men, and, far away, the mutter- 
 ing of the approaching storm. . . . 
 
 A loud explosion wakened me. I jumped 
 out of bed while the glass from the window 
 tinkled at my feet. Another explosion fol- 
 lowed as I was drawing on my boots, and, I 
 think, a third. In that moment, the sound of 
 my host, beating with both fists on my bed- 
 room door, was scarcely louder than the crack- 
 ling of logs on a hearth. 
 
 "The Zeppelins!" he gasped as I admitted 
 him. "Again the Zeppelins !"
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 125 
 
 There may or may not have been Zeppelins : 
 my informant, at any rate, declared that he 
 had heard four bombs from them. They had 
 passed close at hand, just over the southern 
 portion of the city. One thing- was certain: 
 here, in whatever manner, was what he had 
 called "the start of the termination." 
 
 We ran downstairs : it were more correct to 
 say that we fell down. As a heavier man, I 
 fell the faster and, on landing, began to fumble 
 with the knob of the street-door. 
 
 "Not that way! Not that way!" called my 
 host. "Have you indeed lost your senses? 
 That door leads to the open air." 
 
 "I know it," I said. "I—" 
 
 "But the cellar — it is to the cellar that we 
 must go! There alone is any portion of pro- 
 tection." 
 
 Several men that ought to know — among 
 them, Mr. Guy Whitlock, who is a lieutenant 
 in the navy and understands more about shell- 
 fire than I hope ever to master — have since told 
 me that, in a long-continued bombardment, 
 they would prefer, for its chances of safety,
 
 126 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 an open park to the cellar of a house, and, in 
 most of the cases that I have met with, impulse 
 backs this no doubt reasoned decision. To flee 
 to the cellars at the first sign of a real bom- 
 bardment had, however, been the advice beaten 
 into every non-combatant's head by the mallet 
 of Belgian authority since the war began, and, 
 now that this advice was recalled to me, it as- 
 sumed complete possession of my mind. 
 Moreover, I confess without shame that my up- 
 permost impulse now immediately became one 
 to creep as deep into the earth as I could go — 
 an impulse that returned more than once dur- 
 ing that night and the day that followed it. 
 But I reflected that, if all prognostications were 
 true, I was probably in for a part of the 
 heaviest bombardment that any city has ever 
 known since cannon were invented, and that to 
 go belowstairs would be to miss seeing a bit of 
 something that no man had ever seen before. 
 I certainly was afraid to go into the street — 
 very badly afraid indeed — but, I argued with 
 myself, and aloud to my companion, that we 
 should really be safer there than under a house
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 127 
 
 the whole weight of which might at any instant 
 be precipitated upon us. 
 
 He was not convinced. He had seen more 
 of bombardments than I had, and his expe- 
 rience inclined him to the opinion opposed to 
 that which I later heard Mr. \\ nitlock express. 
 
 "You forget the bits of shell and the flying 
 pieces of tile and chimney," he warned me. 
 
 Nevertheless I converted myself; and he, 
 though by no means converted, would not let me 
 fare forth alone. Besides, he said, he was "of 
 a curiosity notorious": he would go out with 
 me. 
 
 I offered him the second of my automatics. 
 
 He refused it. 
 
 "To what use?"' he sufficiently demanded. 
 "To shoot the sky?" 
 
 He flung wide the door. 
 
 Over the black housetops on our right, in the 
 direction of the Avenue de l'lndustrie, a crown 
 of flames was rising into the air: the Falais de 
 Justice, we were later told, struck by one of the 
 bomb . In the southwest, another glow, 
 wavering, but far broader, came, as we learned,
 
 128 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 from the petroleum tanks at Hoboken. We 
 were standing in a wild uncertainty when two 
 more explosions resounded, one close upon the 
 other and both from the south. Then, with a 
 mounting shriek, a shell burst over that por- 
 tion of the town. The noise seemed to shat- 
 ter all that remained of the rightful silence of 
 night. Another shriek followed and another. 
 They were the opening notes' of the great bom- 
 bardment. 
 
 I remember looking at my watch by the light 
 of my electric-torch. Something had happened 
 to it; it was going at an amazing rate; but it 
 showed exactly thirty-six minutes after 
 eleven. 1 
 
 In many parts of the city, perhaps in most 
 of it, the remaining population heeded the of- 
 ficial advice and fled to their cellars — already 
 
 1 1 am precise about this, because I have since heard that 
 there is considerable difference of opinion as to the hour 
 at which the bombardment started. Mr. Powell, who is far 
 and away the most trustworthy authority and seems to have 
 kept his head throughout all the horrors of Antwerp's fall, 
 sets the time as "about ten p. m." The German official re- 
 ports, on the other hand, set it at midnight. My watch was a 
 wrist-watch, and I had taken it off when I lay down. On 
 jumping out of bed, I knocked it from pillow to floor, and it 
 had subsequently to be thoroughly repaired. Some time it 
 certainly gained on that night before I thought to consult it; 
 but even this did not bring it up to the German calculation.
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 129 
 
 fitted out, with food and bedding', against such 
 a contingency — and there stayed until the end 
 of the bombardment, or until such time as they 
 joined the last rush of those who escaped from 
 Antwerp before the Germans entered. At a 
 later hour, I passed through streets after 
 streets that were like those of a formerly de- 
 vastated town enduring a second devastation 
 after its people were dead and buried. Again, 
 I saw, on that night as well as during its suc- 
 cessor, crowds run out of their cellars and make 
 for the free exits from the city; once, during a 
 lull in the firing, I heard the rattle of their run- 
 ning feet in the thoroughfare next me, while 
 that in which I stood was empty. But at this 
 first moment, and in the part of Antwerp in 
 which I then was, those streets which had been 
 so deserted by day were filled with darting fig- 
 ures : anxious men and frightened women fol- 
 lowing that instinct of civilization which, at 
 whatever inconvenience, even through what- 
 ever dangers, impels one toward a fire. The 
 police did not interfere, nor did any sentries; 
 nobody hindered us, save as we blindly hin-
 
 130 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 dered one another. On all lips were the same 
 questions : 
 
 "Where is it? — Were there Zeppelins? — 
 How many? — What was hit? — Has the bom- 
 bardment begun?'' 
 
 And, equally ignorant though they were, all 
 answered with haphazard conviction : it was the 
 Ecole Normale, the Synagogue on the Avenue 
 du Sud, and the Institut de Commerce; there 
 had been a score of Zeppelins; shells had fallen 
 on the Engineers' Barracks; now they were 
 coming farther and farther into the city; three 
 had exploded close by the United States Con- 
 sulate ; one had torn the facade from the Hos- 
 pital for the Aged ; the bombardment had been 
 going on for an hour ! 
 
 That state of mind was to be expected ; it was 
 the fruit of existing conditions. All the sepa- 
 rate trifles which composed the mosaic of these 
 people's accustomed existence had been plucked 
 from their pattern; a few days ago the whole 
 order of their life had suddenly stopped. 
 There were no street-cars, no electric-lights, no 
 telephones, telegraphs, postal-arrangements,
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 131 
 
 banks ; there was no work, no play and no com- 
 munication with the outside world. Men, 
 women and children, they now found them- 
 selves shut in a dead city with a volcano vomit- 
 ing overhead. 
 
 On a run, bumping, stumbling over unseen 
 impediments into unguessed gutters, my friend 
 and I forged our jostling way toward the near- 
 est glow. It grew brighter with every second, 
 and with every second the shrieks of the shells 
 increased, redoubling their numbers and in- 
 tensity, until they seemed to be tearing out our 
 brains. 
 
 We crossed the Avenue du Sud : flames were 
 indeed coming from a building that must have 
 been the law-courts. Ahead of us, in the rue 
 des Feintres, other flames, but as yet fainter, 
 were licking at the Musce Royal that houses 
 the best collection of Old Masters in the Low 
 Countries. I found myself laughing hysteri- 
 cally : 
 
 "In a room on the ground-floor over there" 
 — T pointed — "T remember a statue by Cha- 
 trousse called 'Fellow-feeling' : it's the statue of
 
 132 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 a French soldier and a German soldier turned 
 friends!" 
 
 We passed on. We passed a house that 
 somebody said had been struck by one of the 
 Zeppelin bombs : the top floors had been ground 
 to dust and poured through those beneath them. 
 
 At the next corner we were knocked down by 
 a rush of people coming from the opposite di- 
 rection, running away from the shots that had 
 already destroyed their homes. Some one — in 
 that rush I could not make out whether he was 
 a gendarme or a member of the Garde Civique 
 — hurried by. 
 
 "To the cellars !" he shouted. "Get into the 
 cellars !" 
 
 A few of us may have heeded him ; the ma- 
 jority ran on. I saw him overturned by the 
 tide that he had tried to stem. Directly before 
 us, the Hippodrome appeared to be exhaling 
 fire. Temporarily exhausted, more by the 
 noise than by our exertions, we sank on the 
 pavement against a house-wall, and I began to 
 count the shells : they were exploding, as nearly 
 as I could calculate, at the rate of five to the
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP. 133 
 
 minute. The concussions rattled the tiles, 
 toppled chimney-pots, shook houses like an 
 earthquake. Every man present thought he 
 heard the forty-two centimeter guns ; but just 
 then none did hear them: they were reserved 
 for a final horror. 
 
 I had felt no sting, but, now that I was at 
 partial rest, J became aware of a dampness on 
 my forehead. I touched it and then looked at 
 my fingers in the flare of the next explosion: 
 blood. Something had just nicked my scalp. 
 
 "I've been hit," I said tragically. 
 
 My friend grunted. 
 
 -'Never mind," said he; "you were getting 
 bald at all events." 
 
 I do not know how long we sat there. I re- 
 member that my head so ached from the noise 
 that the imminent prospect of having it blown 
 off did not greatly alarm me. It must have 
 been at one o'clock in the morning that a redder 
 red sprang up a few blocks below us, and, mak- 
 ing toward it, we discovered that the new south- 
 station of the Antwerp- Alost line was being de- 
 stroyed. Then a great double' chrysanthemum
 
 134 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 of fire opened in the sky beyond the Pepiniere, 
 and a shout was raised that the entire Berchem 
 district was in flames. I believe we covered the 
 distance in fifteen minutes. 
 
 I saw the great Baltimore fire : it was a terri- 
 ble thing, but, lacking the shrapnel, it seemed a 
 child's bonfire to this. To our startled eyes, 
 the whole district appeared as a furnace filled 
 with vaulting flames and bellowing smoke, shot 
 through by draughts of sparks and riddled by 
 howling shells. The noise and the effect of 
 those shots hurtling above and about us was 
 like nothing so much as it would be to stand in 
 the center of the closest-built portion of New 
 York's Second Avenue with the houses in 
 flames on either hand and, overhead, two rush- 
 ing trains passing each other with a deafening 
 clatter and hurling hot iron below — indeed, the 
 shell-sounds resembled uncommonly the noise 
 of the elevated; but here, combined in one 
 dreadful uproar with the flight and bursting of 
 the projectiles, were the noises of the tumbling 
 walls, the cries of the dispossessed and the 
 yells of the wounded and dying.
 
 THE RED RAIX IN ANTWERP 135 
 
 The heat "blistered our faces, singed our hair ; 
 the tumult of the flames was like the breakers 
 on a rocky coast, and the noise of the explo- 
 sions deafened. Every little while, a house 
 that, a moment since, stood intact would, as if 
 of its own volition, belch forth a sheet of fire ; 
 an instant later, its neighbor would collapse 
 amid a hail of stones and a throat-filling cloud 
 of mortar. Parties of squealing women and 
 of men shouting and sweating plunged through 
 the incandescent mist, their heads low, their 
 hands before their blackened faces. Under the 
 choking scent of burning wood and powder, the 
 superheated atmosphere held, now and again, 
 another odor, which sickened: the odor of hu- 
 man flesh frying in its own fat. For intermin- 
 able moments the soot would blind us and the 
 noise stupefy; we helpless onlookers could 
 neither see nor hear one another: each soul 
 seemed alone in a universal and cataclysmic 
 Hell. . . . 
 
 It was close upon two o'clock when the bom- 
 bardment shifted its objective, and the iron 
 Central Station suffered. Directly in front of
 
 136 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 that building, with shells tearing up the paving 
 all about him, a man sat on a trunk and was 
 saying over and over again: 
 
 "Berchem is burnt — all Berchem — but two 
 steamers leave for Ostend in the morning." 
 
 It was from this station that a squad of sol- 
 diers finally ordered us home; but my friend 
 refused to go until he had some information 
 from them. Would Antwerp be destroyed? 
 He frankly proposed not to believe their an- 
 swer, but he would rather be shot immediately 
 than go away without securing it. 
 
 Probably the corporal in charge was by this 
 time used to madmen. 
 
 "If it is destroyed," said he, "the Germans 
 will be no better off, for they would need a 
 large garrison here, while our troops could 
 then join with the main army of the French 
 arid English.' ' 
 
 My friend snorted. 
 
 "What of that?" he demanded. "Where 
 will our houses be by that time?" 
 
 All the while we were indoors, the ear- 
 piercing bombardment, which none would have
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 137 
 
 believed could become heavier, grew more and 
 more intense. It was like the long-drawn-out 
 finale of some horrible and titanic symphony 
 wherein the hideous music climbed higher and 
 higher, note upon intolerable note, beyond all 
 human dreaming. When, by day, I again re- 
 turned to the street, it was to see only what I 
 had already seen, hear what I had already 
 heard : fortunately there was no wind, but the 
 rue du Roi was burning, the rue du Prince, the 
 rue Eronberg, the avenue Margrave and the 
 avenue Tournhout were in flames. Some said 
 that the police had emptied the oil-tanks before 
 their ignition; others that the burning oil was 
 flowing down the river toward the pontoon- 
 bridge, which was the only way of escape to the 
 east. There was no daylight : there was merely 
 a twilight of acrid smoke through which flames 
 roared and shrapnel screeched. 
 
 'They have two hundred guns at work," a 
 limping soldier told me: "twenty-eights and 
 thirties. Out there" — he waved his hand to 
 indicate the inner line of forts — "it is a slaugh- 
 ter-house."
 
 138 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 I hurried on, this time alone. The once 
 splendid Avenue des Arts was full of broken 
 masonry. For one moment the zenith cleared : 
 at my feet lay the bodies of two women and a 
 child, bloody and contorted; the face of one 
 was a red pulp, and about it circled a spiral of 
 flies ; overhead the air was balmy, the sun high 
 and warm, the blue sky burdened with a lumin- 
 ous peace. Then the dark horizon climbed up- 
 ward, hid the housetops, blotted out the heavens 
 and coffined me in the ruined street. 
 
 The cathedral was still safe, though one of 
 the shells, which were now carrying all the 
 way to the Scheldt, had fallen in the Place 
 Verte that faces it, and a cafe across from this 
 had been injured. But the cathedral was 
 lucky. The southern thoroughfares especially 
 looked as if there had been a revolution and 
 men had died upon the barricades. Heaps of 
 crumbled stones had been tossed across them; 
 electric-light wires curled from curb to curb; 
 here and there a vast hole yawning in the rows 
 of buildings, like that of a tooth knocked out 
 from a set otherwise perfect, told how a single
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 139 
 
 house had been battered out of existence; again 
 a whole row of houses was reduced to such a 
 cluttered heap of debris that the very street 
 lines were obliterated. One place had been 
 clipped clean of its top floor; two sides of a 
 room had been beaten out in another. Bodies 
 of the innocent dead became a sight more fre- 
 quent, horribly mutilated. . . . 
 
 I went again northward. I had thought, ten 
 hours ago, that all Belgium was being emptied; 
 but throughout this day also the stream of 
 refugees continued. The withdrawal of the 
 garrison had begun, and columns of wounded 
 and exhausted soldiers were marching across 
 the city and toward the pontoon-bridge — regi- 
 ment after decimated regiment of men that 
 moved as if they were so many exhausted au- 
 tomata, staggering, their eyes staring, their 
 faces black with powder, their early nineteenth- 
 century uniforms of green and orange and 
 crimson torn, stained, often flapping in the 
 wind. The noise of their marching feet was 
 frequently the only sound that broke the brief 
 intervals of silence between cannon-shots.
 
 140 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 And the civilians ? Men said that the Dutch 
 mayors were warning away fugitives because 
 Holland could house no more: they might as 
 well have warned those animals which I once 
 saw flying from a forest-fire. The few remain- 
 ing boats, of whatever sort, resembled life- 
 rafts at a wreck, the pontoon-bridge appeared 
 to be awash under its swarming weight. 
 Spilled bundles bobbed in the water, disgorg- 
 ing their heterogeneous contents. Not far 
 away, I saw a long file of blue-clad children 
 merging with the crowd: the wards of an 
 orphanage fired by the bombardment. All 
 about, the smell of sweat and dirt was pressed 
 back upon the bodies from which it rose by the 
 thickened atmosphere, and over the shuffling 
 and squirming multitude of burden-bearers, the 
 shells roared and barked, spitting lead and iron. 
 
 I watched them, giving what small help I 
 could, until the military took possession of the 
 bridge, and I remained in the open until four 
 o'clock in the afternoon. We had now suf- 
 fered almost as acutely as those who were hit. 
 Imagine the scrape of a fiddle-bow across an
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 141 
 
 e-string, kept up for one entire day; imagine the 
 screech of a locomotive's whistle enduring, not 
 five minutes, but for a night and a day without 
 end. The mere din of it caused physical re- 
 sults, and the gutters in the neighborhood of 
 the fugitives soon resembled the scuppers of a 
 channel-steamer in a cross-sea. If one could 
 only have replied, struck a single blow, fired a 
 single shot in response, and then died; that 
 would have been easy. But impotently to be 
 shut up here while the sky rained destruction: 
 this was the supreme agony. 
 
 When I got back to the house, my host was 
 full of news, gathered, apparently, by sitting 
 there and seeing no one : the Germans would re- 
 spect only one of the Hague-flags, that upon the 
 cathedral ; they were directing their fire so as to 
 avoid all such Antwerp property as was owned 
 by German subjects; the roof of the hotel de 
 ville was stove in ; the arsenal was in ashes ; 
 so was the military hospital ; the prison having 
 been shattered, the convicts were released; 
 fifty German steamers and Rhinecraft, held at 
 the docks, had been blown up; an earth-shaking
 
 142 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 explosion and a spreading fan of light on the 
 horizon had testified to the Belgians' annihila- 
 tion of one of their own forts; the government- 
 stored cargoes from those German ships held 
 by the war's outbreak at Antwerp's quays were 
 being looted by the remaining populace ; the oil 
 had been run from the Hoboken tanks so that 
 the enemy could not ship it to Germany, where 
 it was sadly needed. Of some of these rumors 
 I have since received confirmation; a part was 
 probably false; much of it was contradictory; 
 but one piece, and that the most important, ap- 
 peared at once to come from a reliable source : 
 a friend of my host was a member of the Garde 
 Civique; this man's commanding-officer had in- 
 timated that the Garde was about to be ordered 
 to the hotel de ville to give up their arms. 
 
 There was only one meaning to attach to 
 this: the authorities were preparing to sur- 
 render. It was decided that I should leave the 
 city immediately. 
 
 Toward ten o'clock at night there came a lull 
 in the shell-fire. Not guessing that this was 
 but our enemies' pause for breath before their
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 143 
 
 last crushing effort, we took it as an opportune 
 moment — and, as the event seemed to prove, all 
 the remaining civilians in Antwerp, save those 
 who never left it, shared our point of view. 
 
 We opened the door: it was a night without 
 a stir of wind ("Thank God, there is no wind !" 
 my host muttered, as we passed into the street) ; 
 but we had gone only the briefest distance be- 
 fore the investing artillery, as if realizing that 
 the end was near, redoubled its superhuman 
 efforts. Within a few minutes there was cer- 
 tain evidence that the cannonade was now gen- 
 eral; the entire city, save for the possible ex- 
 emption of such buildings as the cathedral, 
 seemed blistering and bursting under one great 
 down-pour of fire and iron. All Antwerp 
 seemed ablaze; the air in the street was like 
 that in a ship's engine-room. 
 
 We started on a trot for the river-road. 
 Street-lamp there was none, and the atmos- 
 phere was alight only with a livid incandescence 
 that illuminated the destruction, but betrayed 
 one's feet. Shells seemed to break over our 
 very heads, tiles dropped by our ears, now and
 
 144 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 then the street heaved and splintered ahead of 
 us. I said to myself that nothing could be more 
 terrible — and just then the more terrible hap- 
 pened. 
 
 A rare light — 'perhaps it was a searchlight — 
 was playing on a portion of the street far ahead 
 of me. Suddenly something bolted past above 
 my head toward that light — something hot, 
 scorching, and of tremendous size, something 
 that roared like a frightened train and sped like 
 a meteoric sun. The very draft of it seemed 
 first to suck me upwards and then hurl me far 
 forward and sidewise on my face. I fell, as a 
 man might fall before a cyclonic blast from the 
 furnace where worlds are made ; but, as I fell, I 
 saw, or thought I saw, that meteoric sun ex- 
 plode up there where the searchlight played. 
 If I thought of anything, it was of an earth- 
 quake. I know that there shot out a sheet of 
 flame that must have been two or three hundred 
 feet wide and fully as high. I know that a 
 Niagara of stones and clay leaped upward 
 from the distant spot. I know that a hail of 
 pulverized stone poured all about me, and that
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 145 
 
 the detonation rocked the city of Antwerp as a 
 giant might rock a cradle that he stumbled over. 
 I know that now; but then all that I knew 
 clearly was that all our previous alarms had 
 been trifles and that this at last was the begin- 
 ning of the forty-two centimeter guns. 
 
 We staggered at last to our feet; we blund- 
 ered here and there and into another wide 
 thoroughfare and were immediately engulfed 
 by a tremendous mob whose desperate destina- 
 tion was our own. Instantly we became drops 
 of that shouting, scrambling, struggling tidal- 
 wave of sheer humanity in the bulk of which — 
 householders flinging away their rescued treas- 
 ures, husbands forgetting wives and mothers 
 becoming separated from children — there sur- 
 vived only the brute-instinct of self-preserva- 
 tion. The air crackled like marble under ham- 
 mer-blows ; the ears ached, the head throbbed, 
 the brain reeled. Civilization, progress, cul- 
 ture: this seemed the end of them; it was as if 
 they had never existed, or, having existed, had 
 been as smiling masks t<> cover f<»r a day the 
 snarling face of the tiger that is Man.
 
 146 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 Lesser shells were nothing now. They fell 
 hot in our midst and mowed people down : the 
 crowd seemed to trample their screaming 
 mouths into silence. Again and again the 
 blasts enveloped us. Of one the shock hurled 
 my friend and me, still, fortuitously together, 
 into a darkened gateway. A half-dozen sol- 
 diers lay there, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion 
 amid all this pandemonium and carnage; their 
 faces were drawn by weariness, white with 
 fatigue where they were not black with powder ; 
 already they looked dead. A shell exploded 
 over the house next door, tearing off its cornice. 
 
 "They're getting close again," said my 
 friend. "We must move on." 
 
 We replunged into the mob. We had not 
 gone a hundred yards when, behind us, there 
 was a frightful crash. I looked back: the 
 house before which we had been pausing 
 pitched, over those sleeping soldiers, bodily 
 into the street. 
 
 A stampede of shouting carbineers swept out 
 of a side-street, bowling over all who stood in 
 their way. Our wave swerved to the left and
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 147 
 
 into a dark thoroughfare. From the crowd an 
 old woman seized my arm ; she spoke with mul- 
 tiplicity of fumbling gestures, her very fingers 
 trembling, but she spoke Flemish and, even if 
 I could have understood the language, I should 
 not have been able to hear more than a separate 
 word or two. She put my hand to her breast, 
 and I felt that her dress was wet and sticky 
 with blood. 
 
 Once more the light increased and the noise. 
 Again and again explosions flung us to the 
 street. Weighted with a destruction before 
 which the powers of cordite seem puerile, a shell 
 from a forty-two centimeter gun would strike 
 a building and the entire structure would vanish 
 in a puff of smoke — absolutely vanish, so that 
 when the smoke cleared, there was nothing 
 where it had stood save a great hole in the 
 ground. Now, so highly increased was the ac- 
 tivity of even the lesser cannon that when they 
 alone were in action, one had to shout to be 
 heard at all by his neighbor. 
 
 Most of what happened T do not remember. 
 Once T tried to think of my home, of the quiet
 
 148 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 order of my daily life, of the busy routine of 
 peaceful cities: it was inconceivable; it was 
 something that I must have dreamed a thou- 
 sand years ago. I lost my friend ; I saw a shell 
 coming and plunged against a closed door. It 
 gave way, and I staggered into a room where a 
 woman sat calmly knitting. She looked at me 
 without surprise, even without curiosity, not 
 speaking. When the explosion was over, I 
 went out. The last that I saw of her, she was 
 still knitting, as unmoved as a god. 
 
 Back in the crowd, people were now dropping 
 out on every side, not heeded. There was the 
 strong odor of slaughter. Here a man flung 
 up his hand, yelled and pitched forward on his 
 face ; there another lay by the curb with blood 
 flowing from his mouth. I remember picking 
 up a child whose leg was shattered and giving it 
 into the care of some persons in a nearby house 
 — and yet I wonder if I really did this. As we 
 neared the exit from this city of horrors, the 
 struggle grew, and the bitterness of fights for 
 places in advance was added to that of death 
 from bursting shrapnel.
 
 THE RED RAIN IN ANTWERP 149 
 
 All the abominations of battle reached their 
 climax. I think that if anybody had been so 
 silly as to tell those men that the race had pro- 
 gressed since it was apes, they would have died 
 of laughter at his preposterous supposition. 
 Women became sick from the throat-biting 
 stench of the exploding shells; some of them 
 lay in the doorways, wrapping their skirts about 
 their heads to lessen by some smallest frac- 
 tion that insufferable uproar. One man, ap- 
 parently quite resolute of heart, lost all control 
 of his legs; we read of people's knees knocking 
 together in fright : this man seemed less afraid 
 than most, but his muscles ceased to function, 
 and his knees so beat together that he collapsed. 
 In front of me, another man's head leapt from 
 his shoulders; for an instant his trunk stood 
 erect, from the stump that was his throat a red 
 fountain spurting upward, then the decapitated 
 body crumpled grotesquely to the street. I 
 bent stupidly toward it, but a woman behind me 
 urged me on; slipping, nevertheless, she sought 
 with a careless kick, to shove the corpse out of 
 her way; its hand seemed to wave at her de-
 
 150 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 risively. An instant later, as a shell de- 
 scended, she sank on her knees to pray. . . . 
 
 That was the end of it : we gained the River- 
 road. We had begun to believe those shells to 
 be malevolent deities bent on the cutting to 
 pieces of a world, to be at least possessed of a 
 consciousness of their own, a diabolic con- 
 sciousness ; they were angered by the old town's 
 refusal to surrender, enraged by its resistance; 
 they were avenging the failures of their prede- 
 cessors: they were devils gone mad with the 
 smell of blood and the din of destruction. In 
 half an hour more, all that was behind us. I 
 looked back at the roofs and towers silhouetted 
 against a red glare, covered by a huge pall of 
 smoke. On every side flames seemed to leap 
 heaven-high. Antwerp lay there burning like 
 Valhalla. _.
 
 VI 
 
 AT THE GRAVE OF A GREAT TRADITION 
 
 I had lived in England for four years; but, 
 from its outbreak, I never quite understood 
 what this war meant to her until a certain dark, 
 autumnal day, months after the war began. I 
 had done a little — a very little — toward help- 
 ing England's work for the Belgian refugees 
 that sought her shores; but I never until then 
 understood the spirit back of that work. 
 
 London on that day was wrapped in a pall 
 of yellow fog. It lay heavily on the broad 
 streets; it swathed the tops of buildings as if it 
 were some strange veil of mourning about a 
 myriad of widowed heads; its fringes crossed 
 a leaden sky through which no faintest hint of 
 blue could pierce. 
 
 London shivered with the dispiriting cold. 
 Raw and penetrating, the November chill 
 gleamed wetly on the pavements. It crept 
 
 151
 
 152 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 through the damp walls of shops and factories, 
 shot between the crevices of rat-eaten tene- 
 ments, gnawed its way into the vitals of palaces. 
 
 London was silent. The greatest city in the 
 world, the roar of whose traffic is one of the 
 pat phrases of travel-talk, now scarcely whis- 
 pered; it breathed low. The mighty Strand, 
 daily choked by howling vehicles, presented to 
 view an empty roadway lined by motionless in- 
 fantrymen shrunk into brown overcoats and 
 resting upon bayoneted rifles. The pavements 
 from Charing Cross to Ludgate Hill were 
 jammed with a throng that stood still. Black 
 thousands made a solid mass of humanity along 
 Northumberland Avenue and Victoria Em- 
 bankment, from Trafalgar Square to St. Paul's, 
 and yet scarcely a sound was heard. 
 
 And this was at ten o'clock of a week-day 
 morning in the heart of the capital of one of 
 the greatest civilizations that our earth has 
 borne. It was a moment that future historians 
 will celebrate in pompous periods as perhaps 
 the foremost crisis of the world-war. It was 
 the moment when a mighty nation at the high-
 
 AT THE GRAVE 153 
 
 tide of its struggle for sheer existence paused 
 to do honor to its past. England, the Island 
 Kingdom, and Britain, the globe-empire, were 
 paying their last tribute to one of their hero- 
 dead. 
 
 For two hours that human sea had remained 
 at somber rest. For two hours in the yellow 
 fog, the biting cold, the dour quiet. It was 
 waiting the funeral-procession of the spare 
 figure loved by every Briton under the name of 
 "Bobs," of that general who had warned it of 
 this European struggle and whom, loving, it 
 had failed to heed: it was waiting the funeral- 
 procession of Field-Marshal Lord Roberts of 
 India and Africa, of Madras and Kandahar. 
 
 Half-past ten — and a great gun boomed 
 solemnly, muffled by the fog, from the direction 
 of St. James's Park. A few faint strains of 
 music followed, painfully creeping through the 
 
 Iden air. That shot was the first of nineteen 
 minute-guns fired by the Hampshire Artillery; 
 that music was Chopin's "Marche Funebre" 
 played by the military-band in the closed court- 
 yard of Charing Cross Railway station. The
 
 154 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 special train had arrived from Ascot, where 
 the private services had been held, and the coffin 
 had been carried to a gun-carriage, escorted 
 by a detail of the Royal Horse Artillery, while 
 a guard of honor came to salute, and the chiefs 
 of the Empire's army and navy stood by bare- 
 headed in the now steadily falling rain. 
 
 The crowd stirred. Along the ganglia of its 
 mighty organism there passed, from the barred 
 station-gates to the barrier stretching across 
 the street before St. Paul's, a long-drawn sigh. 
 The line of great-coated soldiers shivered. 
 Here and there one of the many new special 
 constables, in their novel uniform of dark over- 
 coat and peaked caps, hurried across the 
 Strand. Again the gun boomed, and again. 
 The music came nearer. There was the sound 
 of thousands catching breath, leaning forward, 
 searching that billowing curtain of sulphurous 
 fog which barred the thoroughfare. 
 
 One expected the usual heralds. One waited 
 for the blare of trumpets, the brisk clatter of 
 hoofs, the cheers that greet every parade. 
 
 There was none of these. The music had
 
 AT THE GRAVE 155 
 
 ceased; the steps of the marchers dragged; the 
 multitudes watched with lips compressed as the 
 fog-curtains parted and the procession came 
 through. 
 
 "Slow march" was the order, and slowly 
 marching they advanced. First a line of 
 pipers, the London Scottish, their weird instru- 
 ments swinging dumbly at the breast. After 
 them, to the sole accompaniment of scraping 
 boots, column upon column of soldiers — the 
 Fourteenth County of London Battalion of the 
 London Scottish, the Fifth Battalion of the 
 Royal Sussex, the Fourth of the Grenadier 
 Guards — not in the bright plaid and scarlet 
 with which the old London was familiar, but 
 all in somber greatcoats, their muskets re- 
 versed, passing between the twin rows of guar- 
 dians at the curbs who rested on their arms. 
 More and more they came, these mourning 
 military, out of the fog from the Embankment, 
 along a briefly visible strip of mid-day twilight, 
 and then down New Bridge-street and into the 
 fog once more. 
 
 It was this silence that was hardest to bear.
 
 156 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 It was intense, abnormal. The multitude 
 gasped as if in loud relief when, having passed 
 into the yellow clouds that enveloped the thor- 
 oughfares about St. Paul's, the band of the 
 Scots Guards resumed the music of the Chopin 
 march. 
 
 Came the Second Battalion of the Irish 
 Guards, fresh from the battlefields of northern 
 France; a khaki-coated detachment of the 
 Royal Naval Brigade, a company of cadets and, 
 in uniforms of light blue and gray, some boys 
 from the Officers-Training Corps at Eton. 
 Then, through the curtain, stepped a group of 
 little mules, each with a queer pack upon its 
 back and each led by a man in a dull red turban. 
 
 "The Indian mountain-batteries," whispered 
 somebody — what talk there was came always in 
 a whisper: "See the guns they carry strapped 
 to them?" 
 
 A battery of the Royal Horse Artillery fol- 
 lowed, and after it a single gun-carriage. 
 
 That gun-carriage bore something draped 
 with the Union Jack. On the flag was a red 
 velvet case on which rested glittering insignia.
 
 
 — 

 
 AT THE GRAVE 157 
 
 Behind, a black-liveried groom led a nervously- 
 stepping horse. 
 
 There was a soft new sound along the street : 
 the watching thousands were removing their 
 hats. Here was the gun-carriage to save 
 which Lord Roberts's only son had given his 
 life in South Africa. This was the dead mar- 
 shal's charger; those were his baton, service- 
 cap and medals; that Hag which he had fought 
 for covered the body of "Bobs." 
 
 The crowd stood uncovered in the now pelt- 
 ing rain. They seemed scarcely to see the 
 group of distinguished officers that came be- 
 hind the coffin. Followed — in dull khaki and 
 not in their shining breastplate and gay scarlet 
 and blue — the Royal Horse Guards and the 
 First Life Guards, King Edward's Horse in 
 full complement bringing up the rear. The 
 multitude of London was standing almost re- 
 gardless of them while they filed past in a 
 seemingly endless line, long after the head of 
 the procession had entered St. Paul's. 
 
 That historic cathedral, the last home of so 
 many of England's famous soldier and sailor
 
 158 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 dead, though open now only to ticket-holders, 
 was well nigh filled an hour before the funeral- 
 service began. Its coronals of lights fell dimly 
 over tattered battle-flags that had waved in 
 fields where the kingdom won her glory and the 
 Empire her empiry. Only a faint twilight pre- 
 vailed. The stained-glass of the windows was 
 a series of dark patches, brown like dried blood. 
 The always great distances assumed the air of 
 immensity. The splendid dome held a cloud of 
 mist, and far away into the cloistered shadows 
 faded a huge congregation in civilian black or 
 service uniform with here and there a lonely 
 coat of red. 
 
 Half-past eleven: a door swung open and 
 a number of men in red robes, the Lord Mayor 
 and Sheriffs of London, passed to their seats 
 in the choir. Eleven- f orty : in flowing vest- 
 ments black and white, the Bishop of London 
 and his fellow-priests passed down the main 
 aisle to the great entrance to meet the dead man 
 there. 
 
 The next moments were moments of tense 
 waiting. Played by the band of the Royal
 
 AT THE GRAVE 159 
 
 Artillery, Schubert's ''Adieu," which Lord 
 Roberts loved, tore at the heartstrings of the 
 attending - throng. Violins sang with the pierc- 
 ing sweetness of nightingales; the pure notes 
 of a harp took up the refrain and died away in 
 echoes, trailing through the distant dome. 
 The music of the Funeral March sobbed forth. 
 There came the marrow-chilling roll of artil- 
 lery-like kettledrums, broken by the shattering 
 rifle-crash of snare-drums, and then the ar- 
 rived procession was proceeding toward the al- 
 tar in the east. 
 
 "I am the Resurrection and the Life . . ." 
 The cathedral clergy led the way, their choir 
 
 following. The coffin came next, borne high 
 on the shoulders of eight sergeants who had 
 served in the armies under "Bobs' " comniar : 
 Immediately after it walked Lord Kitchener, 
 his expression set, his brow furrowed, his fea- 
 tures a little harder and a little older than they 
 appear in pictures of him which are so popular 
 in America. Tic was one of several honorary 
 pallbearers, among whom Admiral Lord 
 Charles Beresford was conspicuous for his
 
 160 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 handsome, bigoted face. The Archbishop of 
 Canterbury came next, and after him, having 
 entered the cathedral almost unnoticed, the 
 King of England and Emperor of India. 
 
 He wore a service-cap and army-boots on 
 which spurs glimmered. His overcoat was 
 that of an officer on active duty, and about its 
 left sleeve passed a crepe band. His bearded 
 face was grave. Word was passed that Queen 
 Alexandra and the Princess Victoria had come 
 privately to the cathedral, but few saw them. 
 For the moment all eyes were on the King, who 
 stepped to his seat in an ancient, high-backed, 
 oaken chair by the steps to the south transept, 
 close to the cleared central square beneath the 
 dome where, high above the heads of the con- 
 gregation and surrounded by flickering can- 
 delabra, the coffin now rested, just over the 
 grave of Nelson, on the catafalque used at the 
 funeral of Wellington, sixty years ago. 
 
 The members of the funeral-party took their 
 several stations round about — Admiral Sir E. 
 H. Seymour, Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood, 
 representatives of foreign royalty, leaders of
 
 AT THE GRAVE 161 
 
 the Government and the Opposition, French 
 soldiers and bearded Russians, a Serbian min- 
 ister aglow with medals, Indian officers, depu- 
 tations from the War Office and Admiralty, 
 the diplomatic corps — they were grouped about 
 the catafalque. Motionless they sat beneath 
 the coffin. 
 
 It was such a little coffin. There seemed 
 something incongruous in its littleness amid 
 this panoply of which it was the center. A 
 little wooden box wherein was held what re- 
 mained of a long service and what remained of 
 an ancient order of things far older, an ancient 
 order that included so many services, so many 
 conquests and defeats, so many acquisitions of 
 empire, fights by sea and land, night marches 
 and pitched battles, so many countless thou- 
 sands of sacrificed lives since English history 
 began. 
 
 The funeral-service was, of course, that of 
 the Church of England, but much abbreviated 
 here, because parts of it had been previously 
 celebrated in France and at Lord Roberts' 
 Ascot home: the war, beside-, left public men
 
 1 62 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 small leisure even for the burial of their dead. 
 The prescribed opening sentences were chanted 
 to the music composed by Dr. Croft; the mag- 
 nificent cathedral choir, perhaps the world's 
 best, chanted Barnby's setting of the Twenty- 
 third Psalm; Dean Inge of St. Paul's read the 
 Lesson (I Cor. xv, 50) and, at the request of 
 Lord Roberts' family, there followed, over the 
 body of this man of battles, the hymn begin- 
 ning: 
 
 Peace, perfect peace. 
 
 Then the Bishop of London, himself a chap- 
 lain at the front, read the prayers. There was 
 a movement among the mourners. The King 
 rose and came forward from one side, Lord 
 Kitchener from the other, and, to the light of 
 the flickering candles, while the Dean pro- 
 nounced the committal-sentences, the coffin, re- 
 moved from the Wellington catafalque, was 
 lowered for a few feet of its descent into a 
 grave that yawned near the chancel. 
 
 The eyes of the monarch and his general met 
 across that grave. The choir found voice — 
 "For all Thy saints who from their labors rest"
 
 AT THE GRAVE 163 
 
 — and, while the world-war hung in the balance 
 a few hundred miles away amid the storm- 
 whipped trenches of northern France, here, in 
 the Empire's capital, amid her soldier dead, 
 there rose to the old dome those familiar 
 words : 
 
 And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, 
 Steals on the ear that distant triumph-song, 
 And hearts are brave again, and arms are strong — 
 
 Alleluia ! 
 
 The Archbishop of Canterbury pronounced 
 the benediction. Wearing his gorgeous tabard 
 of red and gold, the Garter King-at-Arms came 
 to the choir-steps and, facing the great nave, 
 followed an ancient custom: "proclaimed the 
 styles and titles" of the dead. The congrega- 
 tion stood. Again Chopin's "Marche Funebre" 
 wailed through the cathedral, and, as it ceased, 
 from somewhere in that mighty pile there came 
 a great blast of trumpets : the trumpeters of 
 the Royal Artillery rang out the "Last Post." 
 
 They went away, all the dignitaries, all the 
 mourners: royalty, military, statesmen, diplo- 
 mats. For hours out in the sleet, a huge
 
 1 64 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 crowd of people that these mourners governed 
 had been waiting, and now, from two o'clock 
 until five, that crowd filed beside the lowered 
 coffin — thousands of men, women and children. 
 They too looked at the little box under its 
 Union Jack and guarded by its sentries — 
 looked, and went their way. Save for the at- 
 tendants, the cathedral was empty, the famous 
 dead deserted. Darkness fell on nave and 
 chancel, and in that darkness the burial of Lord 
 Roberts was completed, and "Bobs" was laid to 
 rest with Nelson and with Wellington. 
 
 Did that burial mark an epoch? When this 
 war began, we were told that it was a war to 
 end war; but already there are other signs in 
 the heavens. Meanwhile, two things are cer- 
 tain: First of them, the charity that comes 
 with every sense of loss has bred in England 
 new strength of purpose to right, whatever else 
 she does, the wrongs of Belgium who bled for 
 her. And next, and perhaps philosophically as 
 important, the old sort of war is over; in its 
 place has appeared a new trade whereat old 
 fingers are useless; modern methods have in-
 
 AT THE GRAVE 165 
 
 creased the horrors of battle and robbed the 
 dying soldier of his glory — Frederick Sleigh, 
 Lord Roberts, represented a past order; when 
 he was buried in St. Paul's, a mighty tradition 
 was buried with him.
 
 VII 
 
 THE IRON RAIN AT SCARBOROUGH 
 
 Even after the death of Lord Roberts, Eng- 
 land had still something to learn of what the 
 war meant to Belgium. The island's resolu- 
 tion to right the wrongs of her little sister- 
 state was taken, was even established : the will- 
 ingness of the people was stirred, was even 
 splendidly at work. The British Empire, fight- 
 ing for its life, and the British populace, scan- 
 ning casualty-lists that day by day grew 
 until there remained scarce one English family 
 without some member dead, wounded, prisoner 
 or missing — both had made space among their 
 sufferings for a working-out of their debt and 
 duty to that Kingdom and its people across the 
 shallow North Sea. But the immediate ap- 
 preciation of what Belgium and the Belgians 
 endured was still to be brought home to Eng- 
 land and Englishmen. 
 
 166
 
 IRON RAIN AT SCARBOROUGH 167 
 
 When it did come, the example was far short 
 of all that it exemplified. To those of us who 
 saw it with eyes that had seen Antwerp, it 
 was little. To those who, watching its brief 
 panic and noting its speedily repaired destruc- 
 tion, could remember the legions of the starv- 
 ing and the leagues of desolation throughout 
 the Belgian countryside, this attack seemed a 
 trifle. But for the mass of the people of Eng- 
 land, and for the Government upon which their 
 public opinion reacted, it served. Germany 
 has done an unspeakable wrong to Belgium; 
 she did Belgium a mighty service — she even 
 did a mighty service toward the strengthening 
 of the English arms — when, in the morning of 
 December 16, 19 14, she bombarded Scarbor- 
 ough, Whitby and the Ilartlepools. 
 
 It is of the raid on Scarborough and Whitby 
 that I chance to have a personal knowledge, be- 
 causc my house in England stands close to the 
 clifT-edge along the shore, about four-and-a- 
 half miles in a direct line from the former town 
 and ten miles from the latter. Whitby I went 
 to within a day of its visitation; a part of
 
 1 68 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 the bombardment of Scarborough I watched 
 through binoculars from my workroom win- 
 dows as you, opera-glass in hand, may watch a 
 mimic battle on the stage from a comfortable 
 seat in the New York Hippodrome. 
 
 The Germans' own comments upon their raid 
 are worth at least a partial quoting. The Ber- 
 lin wireless-station sent out the following re- 
 port: 
 
 Dec. 17, 6:20 a. m. 
 - It is officially reported this morning that our high 
 sea forces approached the East coast of England early 
 on Wednesday morning and bombarded the fortified 
 towns of Scarborough and Hartlepool. 
 
 According to English reports received here, more 
 than 20 persons were killed and 80 wounded. In 
 Hartlepool considerable damage has been done, one of 
 the gas-reservoirs being on fire. 
 
 The bombardment of the fortress at West Hartle- 
 pool commenced between 8 and 9 a. m. 
 
 Two churches were damaged in Scarborough, and 
 several roofs fell in. The weather was misty at the 
 time of the bombardment. 
 
 From Hull it is reported that the authorities at 
 Scarborough received information at an early hour of 
 a proposed attack on the coast. 
 
 It is reported that two German cruisers fiercely bom-
 
 IRON RAIN AT SCARBOROUGH 169 
 
 barded Whitby and destroyed the signal station build- 
 ing. 
 
 As for the German newspaper-press, its 
 statements had about the same measure of 
 exactitude. Two samples will serve: "Once 
 more," said the Berliner Tagcblatt, "our naval 
 forces have shelled English fortified places." — 
 "This time," declared the Berliner Neuesten 
 Nachrichten, "it is not merely a daring cruiser- 
 raid, or the mere throwing of a bomb, but a 
 regular bombardment of fortified places; it is 
 further proof of the gallantry of our navy." 
 
 I am told in America that the Prussian press- 
 bureau, in its reports intended for American 
 consumption, has persisted in this attitude: 
 continues to assert that Scarborough, Whitby 
 and the Hartlepools were "fortified towns." 
 About Hartlepool I know nothing; but I do 
 know that, last December, Scarborough and 
 Whitby were no more fortified than are Asbury 
 Tark and Cape May. 
 
 Scarborough is a closely-built town that 
 climbs from the water-front of two small bays,
 
 170 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 shut in by cliffs, up a steep hill' for about a mile 
 and a half inland — so closely built, indeed, that, 
 in the old part of the town nearest the sea, the 
 tall, thin houses lean over one another along 
 dark and narrow passageways and winding 
 streets that are often merely flights of desper- 
 ate stairs. Scarborough has no factories; it 
 is one of the few towns of its size in Yorkshire 
 upon which the blight of English industrialism 
 has not descended. Since Sheridan laid in it 
 the scene of one of his undeservedly forgotten 
 comedies, it has remained a popular bathing- 
 resort in summer, because of its splendid beach, 
 and, until the morning of the attack, had been 
 through some years becoming an almost equally 
 popular health-resort, because of its bracing 
 air, for invalids in wintertime. This popular- 
 ity has made it rich without the aid of blacken- 
 ing chimneys or roaring looms. From June 
 until September, its shifting population mounts 
 high into the hundred-thousands; from Sep- 
 tember until January its annual visitors are 
 many and loyal ; throughout the year, its house- 
 holders, increased by a large number of wealthy
 
 IRON RAIN AT SCARBOROUGH 171 
 
 men retired here with their families from active 
 business, remain at about forty-five thousand. 
 Much of it is beautiful. There are pleasure- 
 grounds about the lake a quarter-mile from the 
 sea-front to the north, and handsome gardens 
 along the cliff-tops to the south of it. The 
 center of the town is cut by a deep valley con- 
 verted into a pretty park where the trees run 
 almost to the ocean, and there are driveways up 
 Oliver's Mount, the hill five hundred feet high, 
 at the back. The new town is as modern as 
 this morning's newspaper, with such depart- 
 ment-stores as the Rowntrees', which it would 
 be difficult to equal in any town of twice this 
 size in America; with theaters in which even 
 the best of English players do not scorn to ap- 
 pear, and with a score of boarding-schools that 
 are famous throughout the country. The old 
 town, descending to the beach with all the cau- 
 tion of a new mountaineer descending an Al- 
 pine slope, is, on the other hand, delightfully 
 mediaeval and boasts, intact, a house that Rich- 
 ard ITT. once, for a short time, made his home. 
 The Foreshore, of course, is the typical fore-
 
 172 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 shore of an English seaside-resort, lined with 
 shops and large hotels. Finally, dividing the 
 two bays, cutting the town into "Northside" 
 and "Southside," and surrounded by a drive 
 and breakwater which were constructed at 
 enormous cost, and against which the broken 
 waves are said to leap higher than they do al- 
 most anywhere else in the world, rises the 
 Gibraltar-like Castle-Hill that bears upon its 
 top the* remnants of that castle from which 
 Piers Gaveston went out to die; against which 
 Cavalier and Roundhead forces were in turn 
 precipitated; in which Fox, the Quaker, was 
 held prisoner, and near which the gentlest of 
 the Bronte sisters lies buried: a low wall, a 
 grass-grown and deserted court and three sides 
 of the Norman keep, a blackened ruin since that 
 day when Bonny Prince Charley marched on 
 Prestonpans. 
 
 Scarborough was not fortified. I know this 
 of my own personal knowledge ; I know it from 
 personal investigation both immediately before 
 and immediately after the bombardment. On 
 the Foreshore, at the foot of the Valley, there
 
 IRON RAIN AT SCARBOROUGH 173 
 
 had been piled a few bags filled with sand 
 behind perhaps fifty yards of barbed-wire en- 
 tanglements and in front of a couple of 
 trenches. One night, shortly before the ap- 
 pearance of the German cruisers, I thought 
 that I should like to see how these were 
 manned: with a companion, I walked among 
 and through the whole of them, and, save for a 
 pair of lovers strayed from the park in the 
 Valley, I did not meet a soul. Now, these 
 childish "protections" were quite as undefended 
 during the bombardment as they were on the 
 night of my visit : there was, indeed, no means 
 of defending them. There is, it is true, a bar- 
 racks on Peasholme Road ; but the barracks is 
 a place of itself; it is not in the town, or, for 
 that matter, very near it; the barracks is not a 
 fort; it is not even an artillery-barracks; and, 
 although the carefully calculated fire of the 
 Germans showed that they had the neighbor- 
 hood exactly mapped, they never once fired in 
 the barracks' direction. In all Scarborough 
 there was only a single piece of cannon, and 
 that was a spiked relic of an almost forgotten
 
 174 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 war, which stood as a curiosity in a park in the 
 heart of the town and could not be operated if 
 anybody wanted to operate it. On the morn- 
 ing of the raid, the population consisted solely 
 of the civilian inhabitants, a number of guests 
 — mostly invalids or valetudinarians — and sev- 
 eral hundred girls and boys, pupils at the board- 
 ing-schools. Scarborough, I repeat, was abso- 
 lutely unfortified, and the Germans, showing 
 by their fire that they knew all about the town, 
 showed also that they knew this. 
 
 Nor could the wildest imagination seriously 
 believe Whitby to be a fortified town. All the 
 world knows that it is no more than a pretty 
 fishing-village, flanked by a small group of 
 summer-hotels and curious jet-shops. On the 
 cliff that here juts into the North Sea — that 
 cliff off which, last Autumn, the hospital-ship 
 Rohilla, with its company of surgeons and 
 Red Cross nurses, broke in pieces and lay for 
 three days while survivors braved the over- 
 washing waves — stands a small coast-guard 
 station — a little shack to shelter a couple of 
 watchers — and the remains of St. Hilda's
 
 I HE "I'OUTIKK VTloNJi "I >< VK1IOROI ',11 
 
 "A blackened ruin »ince lha) 'lay when Bonny I'm irley 
 
 marched on Prestonpoi
 
 IRON RAIN AT SCARBOROUGH 175 
 
 Abbey, one of the finest ruins in England, 
 where, on the lips of the swine-herd Caedmon, 
 the poetry of England began. Against this 
 formidable city, the operations of two German 
 warships — one battle-cruiser and one ordinary 
 cruiser — were directed, and between a hundred 
 and a hundred and fifty shots were fired. 
 Harmless people were killed, houses were de- 
 molished : the ancient abbey did not escape. 
 
 There had been a fortnight of gray days, 
 days of chill and rain and damp stagnation. A 
 circular wall of mist shut Scarborough from 
 all the world. The wall crossed Filey-road on 
 the south, Forge Valley on the west, and 
 Cloughton on the north ; on the east it rose out 
 of the sea. 
 
 After a war-spoilt season, the town lay 
 morosely on its hill. The big hotels no more 
 than stirred in their winter sleep; the shops 
 barely breathed. Recruits came, were swal- 
 lowed by the barracks, went away; out at 
 Cloughton, Police Constable Chisholm would 
 occasionally report some harmless neutral as a 
 German spy; soldiers would appear from the
 
 176 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 barracks, fade through the fog and, a little 
 later, be said to die — out there; but in Scar- 
 borough nothing vital happened: events stood 
 still. 
 
 Sometime between seven and eight o'clock 
 on the dull morning of the sixteenth of Decem- 
 ber, three black boats nosed through the fog. 
 They stood in for Scarborough and came 
 quietly to rest before it. 
 
 Nobody paid any attention to them. The 
 men in the street-repair gang thought the boats 
 were English. The man in the ocean-front 
 room of the big hotel yawned, thanked heaven 
 that he did not have to get up, and snored again. 
 The pupils at the girls' schools and boys' 
 schools were called to prayers and breakfast. 
 
 But there must have been some change in the 
 weather, because, quite suddenly, a thunder- 
 storm rattled over the city. There was a good 
 deal of lightning, and it came from the sea. 
 
 Of course it was a thunderstorm. For sev- 
 eral minutes everybody was sure of that. 
 Thunderstorms are not uncommon along the 
 English East Coast in December. Besides —
 
 IRON RAIN AT SCARBOROUGH 177 
 
 there: you could see two bolts strike the out- 
 lying wall of the ruined Castle ; they did it con- 
 siderable damage. Only the street-repair gang 
 had a different opinion: they thought that com- 
 rades were throwing rocks at them — for two 
 minutes they thought that. 
 
 No longer. At the end of two minutes, 
 Scarborough stopped, for half an hour, all 
 thinking. 
 
 A circle of the street, ten feet in diameter, 
 rose up and engulfed the repair-gang. The 
 room next that occupied by the gentleman in 
 the ocean-front apartment exploded and 
 vanished. Tiles and chimney-pots pelted the 
 business-men on their ways to shop and office, 
 and the glass from hundreds of windows 
 crashed over their heads. Breakfast at the 
 young ladies' seminaries and boys' academies 
 ended as sections of the schoolhouse roof 
 smashed into the streets. 
 
 It was precisely thus that the bombardment 
 of Scarborough began. Save for a couple of 
 breathing-spaces, precisely thus it for thirty 
 minutes continued.
 
 178 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 I am not trying to tell you the news of it; 
 you have that already — although the sapient 
 censorship did its best to stop the local papers 
 from telling the citizens just how much their 
 fellow-townsmen and neighbors had suffered. 
 I am trying to tell you only how Scarborough 
 felt about the bombardment. It felt exactly 
 as you would feel if, as you read these lines, 
 the book blew up, burnt your face and killed a 
 woman across the street. 
 
 For half an hour. During that period — and 
 it seemed half a year — the black boats that had 
 come from the sea spat fire and flung six-inch 
 and twelve-inch shells over all the city : the old 
 town had heard nothing like it since its castle 
 was twice beleaguered during the Cromwellian 
 wars ; England had perhaps known nothing like 
 it since the Dutch fleet swept the Channel ; had 
 certainly known nothing like it since, in plain 
 sight of the spot whence those shots now came, 
 John Paul Jones and the Bon Homme Richard 
 made prizes of the Serapis and the Countess of 
 Scarborough. 
 
 Out my way, which is "Cloughton way," one
 
 IRON RAIN AT SCARBOROUGH 179 
 
 could have it all for the looking : my one handi- 
 cap was that I was slow to begin my observa- 
 tions. Being a sadly uncivilized American, 
 and therefore still accustomed to the musketry- 
 rattle of steam-heat, the roar of the wind in the 
 chimneys of my house had provided me with the 
 certainty of a bombardment every night that I 
 passed at home for the two months past. So I 
 heard this morning's real cannonade and 
 heeded it not. 
 
 Binns, the housekeeper, came up. She is the 
 traditional English housekeeper, whose like 
 you seldom see in England, or anywhere else 
 for that matter, save on the American stage. 
 Her voice was even, her manner politely stolid. 
 Save that the hour was slightly after eight 
 o'clock, she might have been announcing the 
 call of any one of my neighbors. 
 
 "I think they are bombarding Scarborough, 
 sir," she said. 
 
 "Bombarding Scarborough?" I repeated. — 
 T had been working late the night before and 
 was only half awake. "Who are?" 
 
 "Well, sir" — she was all politeness! — "I
 
 180 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 expect it would be the Germans, wouldn't 
 it?" 
 
 "Nonsense, Binns !" said I. 
 
 "Very good, sir. Quite so, sir." 
 
 She turned to go. 
 
 That wind in the chimney was uncommon 
 loud this morning. I asked : 
 
 "What makes you think there's a bombard- 
 ment ?" 
 
 "Jacques, the postman, has just been with the 
 letters, sir. He saw the flashes from the guns 
 as he reached the garden-gate." 
 
 "Jacques," said I — our postman is really for- 
 tunate enough to possess that Shakespearean 
 surname, and audacious enough to pronounce 
 it as if it were the plural of "Jake" — "Jacques 
 has brought that news a dozen times before." 
 
 Nevertheless, I went into my workroom to 
 look. 
 
 A light morning mist was rising like a thea 
 ter-curtain from the long sweep of shore. 
 The skies were still gray, but the entire south- 
 ern stretch of coast, all the way past Filey 
 Brigg to the white front of Flamborough Head,
 
 IRON RAIN AT SCARBOROUGH 181 
 
 could be made out. There, in the middle-dis- 
 tance lay Scarborough, running back from its 
 pleasant bays, between which rose the minia- 
 ture Gibraltar surmountd by the Castle's ruin- 
 ous keep — and there, close in to shore, lay two 
 dark cruisers, at first apparently as harmless as 
 any fishing-craft. 
 
 "English boats," I thought. "English cruis- 
 ers were thick along the coast all yesterday." 
 
 A little spurt of pale smoke came out of one 
 of them. 
 
 "Target-practice," I assured myself. 
 
 But even as I did so, I asked the question: 
 
 "Target-practice toward the shore?" 
 
 I ran for my glasses. I had scarcely got the 
 focus before there came another spurt of smoke 
 — now plainly touched with fire. 
 
 Another. Then another. 
 
 I followed the direction of one shot inland. 
 It must have been an explosive-shell. I saw a 
 white puff rise. Binns was right; the always 
 expected, yet always unbelievable, had hap- 
 pened : the Germans were bombarding Scarbor- 
 ough.
 
 182 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 I watched for several minutes, horrified, fas- 
 cinated, curiously incredulous. Then, realiz- 
 ing that, from this point, one shot must be 
 precisely like its fellows, I ordered a horse out 
 of the stable and got into town faster, I am 
 sure, than I had ever gone before. 
 
 What was happening in Scarborough the 
 newspapers have long «since told. From one 
 end of it to the other, the shells were falling. 
 Westborough, as the central portion of the 
 chief business street is called, was full of dart- 
 ing bits of iron; men and women had dropped 
 by the curb ; to north and south, the entire city 
 was being lashed with a whip of iron thongs. 
 
 One shot fell near the little building in which 
 the coast-guards find shelter during those 
 stormy nights when they keep watch for smug- 
 glers and whence they start to rescue ships in 
 distress: the life-savers fled just in time to save 
 their own lives — the next shell wrecked the 
 house. Another passed directly through the 
 round, white lighthouse on the quay, and its 
 successor plowed a great hole in a field close 
 by the wireless-station, two miles back. Then
 
 IRON RAIN AT SCARBOROUGH 183 
 
 came a crash in the Crescent, in the midst of 
 the residence-district: the front wall of a house 
 crumbled away, and the entire interior was a 
 mass of kindling. Portions of roofing danced 
 through the air; chimney-pots flew about like 
 so many kites. The shots swung toward St. 
 Nicholas Parade and smashed dwellings there; 
 they ripped away two stories from a house in 
 Lonsdale Road. From Castle Hill a shell 
 picked up the ancient iron beacon — which, cen- 
 turies ago, called all the countryside to arms 
 — and flung it into the Castle dykes. A veri- 
 table cave, nine feet in diameter, was blown in 
 a field near Stepney Road. Later, men found 
 large pieces of shrapnel near Cayton, one of 
 the Scarborough municipal pumping-stations, 
 three miles south, and picked up more at East 
 Ayton, a village five miles inland. 
 
 The workhouse was struck: one inmate was 
 wounded, and a pensioner in the old men's ward 
 was half buried in debris as he knelt in fright- 
 ened prayer. A conical piece of metal burst 
 into the Roman Catholic church <>f St. Columba 
 and left a gaping aperture in the wall. In
 
 1 84 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 the parish-church, the Archdeacon was cele- 
 brating Holy Communion when one of the ear- 
 liest shells struck the roof. 
 
 The celebrant paused. 
 
 "It appears," he said to the kneeling congre- 
 gation, "that we are being bombarded; but I 
 think that we shall be as safe here as any- 
 where." — And he went on with the service. 
 
 A few minutes later a shell broke over the 
 Municipal School. Several early pupils, ar- 
 rived from the country-districts by train, 
 rushed to the surrounding houses for safety. 
 
 A few of the fashionable boarding-schools 
 were hit, and at one of them — Queen Mar- 
 garet's, perhaps the best-known — there oc- 
 curred something that has not yet, I believe, 
 become "news." When the bombardment be- 
 gan, the governesses and tutors at nearly all 
 the other schools took their pupils to the cel- 
 lars. Not so at Queen Margaret's. The au- 
 thorities of that institution ordered their 
 charges — all young girls — to run for their 
 lives, and, themselves setting the pace, charged 
 a mile or more through city streets and along
 
 German Shells in England 
 
 "The shots ripped away two stories from a house in Lonsdali 
 
 Road.'
 
 IRON RAIN AT SCARBOROUGH 185 
 
 country lanes while shells burst on every- side, 
 kicked up the dust behind them and rattled 
 over their heads. 
 
 A young girl living near us — her parents 
 were at their London house — had a younger 
 sister at this school and felt responsible for her 
 safety. At the start of the bombardment, she 
 determined to motor to her sister's rescue. 
 The servants tried to dissuade her, the police 
 to turn her back: both failed. She reached the 
 school safely and found the street-door open. 
 
 There was no response to her repeated ring- 
 ing of the bell ; but at last a neighbor thrust a 
 frightened head from a window. 
 
 "There's nobody in the school," he said. 
 "They've all run away. I think I heard them 
 call out that they were going to try to run to 
 Seamer." 
 
 To Seamer, the nearest village south of Scar- 
 borough, the girl sped in her motor-car. 
 There she was told that "such of the pupils as 
 got there" had run on to the railway-station a 
 mile or more away. At the si at inn the word 
 was that the fugitive pupils had been hustled
 
 1 86 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 into a passing train for London. The little 
 motorist returned to the village and began a 
 house-to-house canvass: she found her sister 
 the involuntary guest of a kindly cottager. 
 
 The English censor, so tender of our emo- 
 tions, has permitted the publication of the usual 
 stories of miraculous escapes, and most of the 
 correspondents have fully availed themselves 
 of his lenience. Doubtless you have already 
 read of the tenant of Gresham House, on the 
 North Cliff, who, through his binoculars, was 
 watching the men on the German decks when 
 one of their shots scalped his residence. 
 Doubtless, too, you have heard of the shelled 
 bookshop wherein the only injured volume was 
 that entitled "Imperial Germany." There was 
 one man who told how he had run cellarward 
 without stopping for his coat and returned, an 
 hour later, to find it torn to shreds in his 
 smashed cupboard — a narrative presumably 
 based on the assumption that it was the coat, 
 and not the cupboard, which had been fore- 
 doomed.
 
 IRON RAIX AT SCARBOROUGH 187 
 
 These incidents composed the lighter side of 
 the raid, and it is as well that there was a 
 lighter side, for all the other sides are dark 
 enough and to spare. 
 
 Of them, too, when the censorship was per- 
 force relaxed, you have been told. You know 
 by this time the tragedies of that iron rain from 
 the sea. You know how one man was dress- 
 ing in his bedroom when a shell burst there 
 and killed him; how two servants were blown 
 to pieces in a kitchen; how a wife, having 
 rushed to her husband's side, was struck and 
 slaughtered, while her husband remained un- 
 harmed; how a woman and two children were 
 crushed in the ruins of one house ; how another 
 woman ran to close the windows of her shop 
 and met a shell that crashed through them; 
 how four persons were killed in one house in 
 Wykeman Street; and how others were picked 
 up dead on the pavements. 
 
 As suddenly as it had begun, the firing 
 ceased. A streak of light appeared in the sky 
 to the southeast. Before it the mist of battle
 
 1 88 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 retreated, and, like creatures of that mist, the 
 black-nosed boats disappeared. The bombard- 
 ment was over. 
 
 Instantly, under heavens rapidly brightening 
 to the clearest blue, the entire appearance of 
 the town changed. Policemen came from no- 
 where — nurses, too. A rapidly devised, but 
 thoroughly efficient, order manifested itself; 
 the crowds that swarmed into the streets 
 (chiefly in search of shell-mementoes, wherein 
 there was an active bull market) were being 
 quietly marshaled; companies of sweepers 
 were brushing up the debris (and making a tidy 
 penny out of the sale of the bits of shell) ; to- 
 ward the hospitals, through many a street, 
 were moving little processions of Boy Scouts 
 bearing stretchers on which lay figures swathed 
 in bloody bandages, the faces ashen, the eyes 
 glazed. . . . You would have thought that the 
 remedy for the effects of bombardment was a 
 part of the daily routine of British municipal 
 authority. 
 
 I walked for some hours through the town 
 that I had known during four years of its pros-
 
 IRON RAIN AT SCARBOROUGH 189 
 
 perity. Tottering chimneys, tiles trembling on 
 roof -edges, rows upon rows of splintered win- 
 dows, roofs open to the sky, brick walls crushed 
 to powder, house-fronts stripped away, and the 
 interiors of bedrooms bare to the sight as if 
 they were stage scenes or rooms in the burning 
 palace of Priam as /Eneas last saw it: these 
 things were not wrought by wind in the chim- 
 ney; they were no suggestion to my brain from 
 the brain of Jacques the postman. Nor was 
 this a fancy, this slow-stepping procession with 
 a stretcher in its midst, and on the stretcher a 
 woman dying. . . . 
 
 I tramped about amid the crunching glass 
 and crackling slates. I stood before a house 
 where iron railings had been uprooted, twisted 
 and embedded in the woodwork. Small pieces 
 of iron rails, neatly severed, were scattered with 
 bits of uprooted asphalt. I saw all the horrors 
 and all the grotesque deviltries of the cannon- 
 ade. 
 
 And I saw something else: either that day or 
 the next, I saw some of the unexploded and 
 unbroken projectiles that had been used by the
 
 190 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 Germans. They were six-inch, and a few 
 twelve-inch, shrapnel and penetrating shells. 
 The shrapnel, stuffed with bits of jagged waste 
 metal, were cones quite an inch in thickness; 
 they bore, around and across, numerous cuts or 
 indentations so that, in bursting, the missile 
 would divide itself into squares of about three- 
 quarters of an inch in size. The others were 
 smaller missiles, and yet it was one of these 
 that, striking the seafront wall of the Grand 
 Hotel, cut through the bricks as if they had 
 been so much paper. 
 
 Panic, of course, there had been while those 
 shells were falling, all stories to the contrary 
 notwithstanding: there is no town in the world 
 in which there would not be more or less panic 
 in similar circumstances. A portion of the 
 exodus of the more timid I had encountered on 
 my hurried way into town: the packed trains, 
 roads crowded with motors and luggage-laden 
 carriages, byways full of folk afoot. Here was 
 a fat man panting under the weight of two suit- 
 cases : his own small one bumping from his left 
 hand, his wife's large one from his right.
 
 IRON RAIX AT SCARBOROUGH 191 
 
 There rolled a double-seated landau with a lit- 
 tle chap of twenty as its only passenger, and 
 opposite him a veritable hill of luggage : hand- 
 bag and kit-bag, suit-case and jewel-case, trunk, 
 satchel and hat-box. There were children 
 astride of donkeys once rented to excursionists 
 for five minutes' ride on the South Sands; 
 wives still in the aprons that they had been 
 wearing in the kitchen when the first shell ex- 
 ploded; collarless husbands in smoking-jackets 
 and carpet-slippers; even a few late-rising 
 children, bare-footed and wrapped in blankets. 
 The highways were well populated that morn- 
 ing, and the railway-station was jammed with 
 a clamoring crowd. In a small way, they were 
 beginning to understand the Belgians. 
 
 And yet, even this flight of these English 
 folk was orderly. Short of duration it was, 
 too, and I soon found that nearly everybody ac- 
 cepted the situation with a calm that was amaz- 
 ing to my American consciousness. It was an 
 hysterical woman of uncertain age that, talking 
 to herself (but with an eye to possible listeners) 
 looked at one scene of ruin and remarked: "I
 
 192 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 don't like this war; it's a detestable war. I 
 don't like it at all." And it was little better, 
 though he wore male garments, that I saw turn 
 away from a passing stretcher to a smashed 
 chemist's shop and groan: "Do you know, I 
 believe those Germans were deliberately trying 
 to destroy property — deliberately trying to de- 
 stroy property, by Jove !" 
 
 These were clearly sightseers from other- 
 where. They began to come in from York and 
 Huddersfield, from Leeds and even from Man- 
 chester, as soon as it was certain that the raid 
 was over, and they kept on arriving and look- 
 ing and departing for several days. Above all, 
 they said, they wanted to know "how it hap- 
 pened," and they seemed to think that the way 
 to come by that knowledge was to pry among 
 the splintered ruins. One of them I heard give 
 voice to a theory that, some days after my re- 
 turn to America, I saw repeated here. It first 
 came to my ears in Scarborough on a day some- 
 where about the eighteenth of December ; on a 
 day about the twenty-third of January I saw it 
 printed as part of an European letter in the
 
 IRON RAIN AT SCARBOROUGH 193 
 
 Chicago Herald. I give it in the words of the 
 latter: 
 
 "The English Navy, through the interven- 
 tion of nature, narrowly escaped a tremendous 
 disaster following the raid on Scarborough, 
 Whitby and Hartlepool. The coast attack 
 was a marine bait. 
 
 "A number of German submarines accom- 
 panied the Kaiser's cruisers. They took posi- 
 tion, submerged, along the line of retreat 
 planned by the German ships. The expecta- 
 tion was that the British ships would pursue, 
 and then the submarines would get to work. 
 Pursuit started, but an impenetrable fog set- 
 tled down, saving a number of British ships 
 from almost certain destruction." 
 
 That is a plausible statement. It has only 
 one flaw: from 8:30 a. m. until sunset, the six- 
 teenth of last December at Scarborough, and 
 out upon the North Sea, was innocent of all 
 fog; it was a bright day and cloudless; the 
 night was clear and starlit. 
 
 Already I have twice mentioned the censor. 
 It is impossible to write anything of England
 
 194 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 in wartime without mentioning him frequently. 
 I used sometimes to console myself for his re- 
 strictions by trying to imagine what it is that, 
 if the English censor suppresses the truth, the 
 German censor utters. Free, however, of both 
 officials for the present, I feel that I would be 
 doing an injustice to the former if I said 
 nothing of his attempted siege of Scarbor- 
 ough. 
 
 I was not aware of it until the evening of the 
 sixteenth. By some means or other, the Lon- 
 don Chronicle had got a message to me during 
 the afternoon, saying that, in addition to the 
 news which would be sent it by a member of 
 its staff dispatched to the bombarded city, it 
 would like a thousand words from me describ- 
 ing the appearance of Scarborough after the 
 attack. I went into the postoffice, where the 
 government-owned telegraph is housed, at 
 about six o'clock in the evening — nine and a 
 half hours after the last shell of the Germans' 
 five hundred had fallen. Remembering the 
 habits of my newspaper-days, a decade ago, I 
 asked the telegraph-clerk :
 
 IRON RAIX AT SCARBOROUGH 195 
 
 "How soon can you handle a thousand 
 words?" 
 
 The clerk looked bewildered. 
 
 "Would to-morrow do?" 
 
 As gently as I could, I explained to him that, 
 odd as it might appear, I was not trying to tele- 
 graph my thousand words to a monthly maga- 
 zine, but to a daily paper. 
 
 'Then I am afraid that we can't help you, 
 sir," he said; "news-material is not to be given 
 preference, and we have only just begun to 
 handle messages handed in at noon." 
 
 Thinking that the Scarborough Mercury 
 might have a private wire to London, I went to 
 the office of that local newspaper. There the 
 managing-editor sat with his arms outspread 
 on his desk and his head in his hands, all about 
 him neat piles of manuscript, each bearing the 
 evidences of careful editing and each weighted 
 with a bit of metal. 
 
 "A private wire?" he repeated in answer to 
 my question. He did not raise his despondent 
 head. "No, we haven't a private wire; the 
 Government would not permit it."
 
 196 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 "You don't seem well," I began. "Is there 
 anything the matter?" 
 
 He waved a feeble hand toward those piles 
 of manuscript. 
 
 "Everything is the matter," he moaned. 
 "Here's this town bombarded — the first real 
 German attack on English soil since the war 
 began. A hundred and fifty thousand pounds' 
 worth of damage done. Whole houses de- 
 stroyed. People killed. Hospitals full of 
 wounded. Population in panic. Everybody 
 crazy to get the lists of the hurt. My God, 
 man, it's the one thing that's happened in Scar- 
 borough since Cromwell stormed the Castle; 
 and do you know what's the only news the 
 Censor will let me print? It's this: 'A Ger- 
 man ship fired a few shells into Scarborough 
 to-day; the situation is developing!' " 
 
 Only the arrival of wounded fugitives from 
 the East Coast at King's Cross spread the news 
 in London and forced the censorship to let the 
 Scarborough papers print the truth at 9:30 
 p. M. For my part, I sent my manuscript by 
 post : so heavily had the few telegraphed details
 
 IRON RAIN AT SCARBOROUGH 197 
 
 been cut that my version was welcomed in Lon- 
 don forty-eight hours after the event. 
 
 Meanwhile, my news had ceased to be news: 
 Scarborough, if it had not already recovered, 
 was at least again upon its feet and in the ring. 
 It made me recall the old proverb of "A Scar- 
 borough Warning" — that is to say, "A word 
 and a blow, but the blow first." The town 
 which can make such a phrase current through 
 the centuries has proven itself able to accept 
 that phrase when made a reality and used 
 against it. Scarborough and Whitby, unforti- 
 fied, defenseless, had been attacked in defiance 
 of all the laws of war; but Scarborough and 
 Whitby — and, through them, all England — had 
 learned completely Belgium's lesson and Great 
 Britain's need.
 
 VIII 
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 
 
 When the war began, the English Government 
 said that it recognized its duty to the Govern- 
 ment of Belgium ; shortly after the war began, 
 the English people came to a whole-hearted 
 realization of their duty to the Belgian people. 
 By that time there were three hundred thou- 
 sand Belgians in England. One might almost 
 say that another nation had been set down 
 among the English — a nation of different cus- 
 toms, different creed and different speech: 
 three hundred thousand penniless men crippled 
 by age, wounds or disease; destitute women, 
 whose husbands had died across the sea, whose 
 sons, brothers, lovers, were lost to them; chil- 
 dren, mostly orphaned and all with none to feed 
 them. These composed the problem that Eng- 
 land had to solve. 
 
 She set to work to solve it beautifully, and 
 
 198
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 199 
 
 though the influx seemed never to lessen, her 
 courageous charity but grew with the increase 
 of its burdens. We hear a great deal, and 
 much in justice, of the rigidity of the English 
 character and its inability to adapt itself to the 
 characteristics of other nations: that rigidity 
 became flexibility. We hear a great deal, with 
 less reason, of English coldness: if that ever 
 existed, this new heat of generosity has melted 
 it completely away. Apart from all question 
 of the origin of the dreadful war, apart from 
 all question of the rights and wrongs of the 
 armed controversy, the people of England, in 
 their welcome to the Belgian non-combatant 
 refugees, in their unselfish and self-sacrificing 
 care of them, have done and are doing some- 
 thing that must forever command the respect 
 of the whole world. 
 
 This is no place to catalogue, still less to de- 
 scribe, the hundred-and-one clubs, guilds, so- 
 cieties, funds, foundations, the legion of every 
 sort of organization, immediately formed and 
 systematically maintained for the purposes of 
 assistance to the Belgian refugees: the titles
 
 200 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 and work of those organizations have all, long 
 ago, been given and explained in the American 
 press. Nor shall I attempt to show how money 
 was easily raised and wisely expended — raised 
 by the organizations, the newspapers, the 
 churches, schools, cities, towns and villages ; by 
 scores of individuals; by personal solicitation, 
 advertisements, circular, sermon, lecture, ba- 
 zaar, countryside concert, metropolitan dance, 
 quiet self-denial; by the school-boys' half-pen- 
 nies, the poor man's gladly offered tithe, the rich 
 man's check. All that I wish to make clear is 
 that, without stopping to argue that native needs 
 had closer claims — giving, in point of fact, more 
 to native needs than it ever gave before — the 
 whole of England contributed and continued 
 contributing to the Belgians. In his "Frederick 
 the Great," Carlyle, by one of his masterly 
 figures of speech, shows us the unpaid Prussian 
 army standing at review with its pockets turned 
 inside-out: England, with those three hundred 
 thousand dispossessed Belgians on her shores, 
 herself voluntarily emptied her pockets for 
 them.
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 201 
 
 Money was the least of it. The rich con- 
 verted their houses into Belgian hostels, as the 
 refuges for Belgian civilians were popularly 
 called; the poor worked without pay for the 
 Belgians' needs. I know a girl who has an 
 "Hon." before her name, who, now that her 
 father has converted his countryplace into a 
 Belgian hostel, sweeps its floors. There is a 
 Master of the Supreme Court who scrubs the 
 steps of a Belgian hostel at Ealing. The wife 
 of one of the Cloughton-folk whose title is 
 among the oldest in England spent an entire 
 day, when her baby was scarcely a month old, 
 stopping every passing motor-car and selling 
 to the driver of each nosegays for the local Bel- 
 gian relief fund. In the same village, the 
 daughter of a cottager, a girl for two years 
 bedridden, dressed dolls and sold them for the 
 same purpose. I know an out-of-work gar- 
 dener who gave a third of his small savings, 
 and a workman earning only twenty shillings a 
 week who gave a half-crown to the Belgian 
 fund on every Saturday night. These in- 
 stances are a few out of my own experience;
 
 202 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 there is nobody in England that could not add 
 to them and multiply them. 
 
 Somebody with more wit than sentiment has 
 said that when Englishmen fly to arms, English 
 women fly to their knitting-needles, and a 
 friend of mine in the army tells me that the 
 British soldier in the French trenches heartily 
 welcomes the "cholera-belts" that the English 
 women knit for him by the hundred, because he 
 finds those belts so useful for cleaning his rifle. 
 Both of these statements are true; but neither, 
 it seems to me, lessens the value of the English 
 women's knitting. Certainly, the mere belief 
 that they are helping helps the legion of women 
 who must needs otherwise become nervous 
 wrecks from idly brooding on the dangers that 
 their menfolk are enduring; certainly the knit- 
 ted socks, wristlets and "Balaclava-caps" are 
 sadly required and gladly used for the purposes 
 for which they are intended ; and certainly, the 
 full half of this knitting, going as it does to the 
 Belgian refugees, finds a ready gratitude 
 among the destitute who have been driven from
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 203 
 
 their homes with no clothes save those which 
 they were wearing when they ran away. 
 
 Women take their knitting to the theater: 
 you can see the needles flashing in pit and stalls, 
 in the gallery and boxes. Women take their 
 knitting out to dinner : I have seen it in the res- 
 taurant of the Carlton; more times than not, 
 when I have dined in an Englishman's house 
 since the war began, we men, upon our return 
 to the drawing-room, found our hostess and all 
 her women-guests engaged in this work for the 
 Belgian Relief foundation. It is going on in 
 every part of the island, this work, and in every 
 class of society; in my own village I have seen 
 the cottager in her kitchen knitting socks for 
 the Belgians and the daughters of a baron in 
 their library knitting mufflers for the Belgians. 
 The cook in the hospital-kitchen knitted be- 
 tween meals for them, and a Belgian convales- 
 cent, a broad-faced Fleming, smilingly thanked 
 her, in appropriate gestures, for looking after 
 his stomach and his feet. Crossing on the 
 
 I ranconia, when I returned home, was Kather-
 
 204 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 ine Goodson, the pianist, on her way to start 
 her annual American tour: she was so busy 
 knitting that she had scarcely time to practice; 
 her husband, Arthur Hinton, the composer, had 
 to take her knitting from her in order to hurry 
 her into the customs-shed when the vessel 
 docked at New York. 
 
 Men and boys, unable otherwise to help, or 
 helping this way among other ways, have taken 
 up the needle : at one of England's best known 
 public schools the most manly of the boys, the 
 leaders in athletics, organized knitting-classes 
 and sent the products of their leisure to Belgian 
 refugees. An acquaintance of mine asked his 
 son what he wanted for a Christmas present, 
 and received the reply: "Wool, to knit for my 
 Belgians, and boodle to buy more wool with." 
 Once, when the women had left the table in a 
 large London house, and the men turned to 
 their cigars and port, one of the men produced 
 a pair of needles and some yarn. 
 
 "You gentlemen will pardon me," he said, 
 unsmiling. "I've given up tobacco and taken
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 205 
 
 to this. It may help the Belgians, and it keeps 
 me occupied." 
 
 That man was a Judge more feared by crim- 
 inals than any other judge upon the English 
 bench. 
 
 The Boy Scouts came in for considerable 
 criticism before the war, but have been both 
 useful and willing in their service to refugees 
 — though sometimes a little more the latter than 
 the former. At a refugees' hostel near Lon- 
 don, one was always kept on duty at the door to 
 prevent the entrance of the inquisitive and to 
 block the possible prying of German spies, who 
 have been known to seek at these hostels such 
 information concerning the Belgian army's 
 losses and temper as can be picked up there. 
 Asked how he discriminated, the little door- 
 keeper replied: 
 
 "If a visitor comes arsking for a Belgian an' 
 carn't tell wot 'is business is, I s'y the Belgian's 
 not at 'ome. If the person keeps a'comin' back, 
 I sends up word to the Belgian an' arsks does 
 *e want to see 'im."
 
 206 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 "But suppose the visitor speaks French? 
 You don't speak French, do you?" 
 
 "No," was the scornful rejoinder; "I don't 
 speak none of them foreign languages, I don't. 
 But if the visitor talks somethink I carn't un- 
 derstand, I know 'e must be a Belgian an' so I 
 shows 'im right in." 
 
 This kindly concern for the refugees and in- 
 valids was not without its amusing phases. I 
 remember being at the house of a country doc- 
 tor when there came a long-awaited telegram 
 asking how many convalescing Belgian soldiers 
 he could next day house in his improvised hos- 
 pital. The doctor had long wanted this chance 
 to help, but, when it came, he lost his head com- 
 pletely. 
 
 "I suppose I had better just answer: 'Yes, 
 fifteen,' " he suggested. 
 
 I pointed out that the telegram of inquiry 
 must be one of many, and that unless he made it 
 fuller and signed it, the medical officer to whom 
 his answer was addressed would not under- 
 stand it.
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 207 
 
 "You write it," said the doctor, "and hand it 
 in as you pass the post-office. Here's a shil- 
 ling to pay for it." 
 
 "It doesn't have to be paid for," I said. 
 "It's an O.H.S. message."— That is, "On His 
 Majesty's Service." 
 
 That evening the doctor was busy, and with 
 large results. Next day, to meet the train that 
 bore the patients, and to convey them to the hos- 
 pital, he had two motor-cars and three stretch- 
 ers. He himself appeared in full Red Cross 
 uniform; he had a trio of his local Red Cross 
 women-nurses, in cap and apron, beside- him, 
 and behind, drawn up in ordered' ranks about 
 their stretchers, the twenty men of the village 
 who composed its Red Cross ambulance- 
 corps. 
 
 Out of the train stepped the fifteen patients. 
 They were, as the telegram of inquiry had said, 
 convalescent, and, except for four who took ad- 
 vantage of the motor-cars, they all walked to 
 the hospital. 
 
 Of the stories that I heard from Belgian
 
 208 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 refugees in England I have already published 
 some elsewhere; more, I dare say, have been 
 previously recorded by other hands. Only a 
 few I shall here repeat. 
 
 I think I am correct in saying that one of the 
 first, if indeed not quite the first, parties of 
 war-driven Belgians to land in England was 
 that party of Belgian soldiers who were 
 brought to Folkestone by the French steamer 
 he Nord well along in August. There were 
 eighty of these soldiers, all military cyclists, the 
 sole survivors of a command two hundred and 
 forty strong that had been reduced to its pres- 
 ent proportions by the fighting about Namur. 
 These survivors, every one of whom marvel- 
 ously had his bicycle with him, had somehow 
 managed to escape into French territory and 
 had so made their way to Dunkirk. They were 
 given a meal at Folkestone and were then sent 
 on to Thorncliffe Camp for a short rest before 
 returning to the front — all except one or two 
 poor fellows who, rather badly wounded, were 
 separated from their companions and shipped to 
 hospitals.
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 209 
 
 Save for the fact that they were then a nov- 
 elty, there was nothing remarkable about these 
 passengers of Le Nord. What, however, was 
 chiefly to be noted in their talk was what, later, 
 I came to find in. the talk of all the Belgian sol- 
 diers that I met with : a calm toleration for the 
 German fighting-man and a hot hatred for the 
 Prussian war-machine. 
 
 Indeed, among all the wounded Belgian sol- 
 diers that I talked with, either in Belgium or 
 England, I had to search long before coming 
 upon any sign of personal bitterness against 
 the rank and file of the Germans considered as 
 individuals. These Belgian military-men — 
 officers and privates, but especially the latter — 
 had, nearly every one of them, the soundest 
 sort of philosophy: that philosophy which 
 comes from practical experience of the subject 
 philosophized about. It was a former cafe- 
 waiter in Brussels, one of the defenders of Na- 
 mur, who put the case clearest to me: 
 
 "In a conquered town," said he, "these Ger- 
 man soldiers go mad, and that is terrible. But 
 first some one had to send them forth to con-
 
 210 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 quer and go mad, and that is more terrible 
 Still." 
 
 The Belgian hates Prussian militarism for 
 what it has done to Belgium and the Belgians; 
 but he knows that his remedy lies in collective 
 resistance and not in individual reprisal. 
 
 To this the only exception that I discovered, 
 I came across close to my own home — in the 
 ward of Lord Airedale's hospital at Cober Hill, 
 Cloughton. There, among the first batch of 
 Belgian wounded to arrive, was one young man 
 that scarcely ever spoke, even to his comrades. 
 He was very young of body, but his face was 
 old. All night, the nurses said, he lay awake, 
 staring at the ceiling; all day he stood by a win- 
 dow looking out across the blue North Sea. 
 
 "You see that man ?" said one of his fellows. 
 "He wants to get well quick and fight again. 
 He wants to kill Germans with his own two 
 hands, and to die killing them. He lived at 
 Rotselaer, and there, his wife having died, he 
 left his little son, a boy six years old. That 
 little boy a German soldier killed for him." 
 
 My informant's voice was loud enough for
 
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 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 211 
 
 the father to hear; but he gave no token of 
 heeding: he kept his eyes to the window, look- 
 ing out across the blue North Sea. 
 
 Mostlyj I found, the war had come as so 
 much of a surprise to these Belgians that they 
 had not ceased thinking of Germany as Bel- 
 gium's protective elder brother before German 
 shells were blowing Belgian heads off. "So 
 quickly," sighed a soldier that I talked with in 
 one hospital — a piece of shrapnel had torn his 
 leg — "it all came so quickly! I was a clerk in 
 Antwerp, and we were given but one hour's 
 warning. Think of it: one hour in which to 
 say good-by, perhaps forever, to one's wife and 
 little children! We expected no war; but like 
 that the Germans came upon us. I was at 
 work in the shop; four hours later I was fight- 
 ing at Liege." 
 
 Other sorts of stories one came across, and 
 is glad to be able to set down here. To the 
 military hospital at Lincoln, which is but a few 
 hours' ride from Scarborough, there was 
 brought a thrice-wounded Belgian soldier. 
 He was more anxious to know of his parents'
 
 212 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 welfare than to tell them of his own condition. 
 Therefore, since he had the strength to write 
 only a few lines, the note that he addressed to 
 them contained merely a word concerning his 
 whereabouts and his hurts, and was otherwise 
 devoted entirely to inquiries. The one chance 
 in a thousand happened : somebody able to get 
 through the first German lines took that note 
 and others with him, handed it to somebody 
 else, who could enter Liege, where our soldier's 
 father and mother lived, and so it reached its 
 destination. 
 
 The old couple were penniless ; leagues of an- 
 gry sea and miles of devastated country occu- 
 pied by an enemy's soldiery, lay between them 
 and Lincoln. Their age would have made the 
 journey dangerous in times of peace; in these 
 times it threatened starvation by the wayside 
 and death by rope or rifle, should suspicion be 
 aroused in any of the thousands of invaders 
 among whose camps the route lay. Neverthe- 
 less, that father and mother, thinking only of 
 their son wounded in a foreign land, resolved 
 to go to him.
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 213 
 
 They borrowed a wheelbarrow from one 
 neighbor and rilled it with potatoes borrowed 
 from another friend. The old man pushed the 
 barrow before him, his wife trudging at his 
 side. In their peasants' costumes, they every- 
 where posed as persons returning to their 
 home, which was always in the village next 
 ahead. A series of miracles protected them: 
 the potatoes were not seized; the travelers were 
 not once suspected; fellow Belgians fed them; 
 they slept in ditches and in fields; they even 
 crossed, unmolested, the frontier. Their one 
 guide was now their son's note, hidden in the 
 old woman's stocking; but fortune remained 
 kindly: a man with a heart paid their passage 
 to England, and they found their son recover- 
 ing in the Lincoln hospital. 
 
 To a hospital that I frequently visited a limp- 
 ing Tommy was sent. The nurses had been 
 doing a little harmless hero-worshiping before 
 the Belgian soldiers, who were the only other 
 patients; now the Belgians, all men that had 
 suffered severe wounds in the heaviest fighting 
 of the war's early days, clustered about the
 
 214 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 newcomer. The one English-speaking Belgian 
 began, on behalf of his fellows, an eager inter- 
 rogation : they all wanted to hear the English- 
 man's accounts of battle. 
 
 " 'Ow was it ?" asked the self-appointed in- 
 terpreter. 
 
 " 'Ow was wot?" Tommy sullenly coun- 
 tered. 
 
 "The battle." 
 
 "Wot battle?" 
 
 The interpreter was disconcerted, but not 
 permanently so. 
 
 "De battle where you was 'it," he explained. 
 
 "My wound ain't nothink," said Tommy with 
 a darkly conscious modesty. 
 
 "Butyouarehurted?" 
 
 "Course I am." 
 
 "In foot?" 
 
 "Yes: carn't you see I'm limpin'?" 
 
 "Schwapnel?" 
 
 "Wot?" 
 
 "Schwapnel. Was wot 'it you foot schwap- 
 nel?" 
 
 "No."
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 215 
 
 "No ? Den maybe a r-r-rifle-bullet ?" 
 
 "No, nor it wasn't no lydite bomb, nor no 
 forty-two-centimeter shell, neither." 
 
 "And not schwapnel?" persisted the inter- 
 preter. 
 
 The Tommy suddenly shook his fist under the 
 Belgian soldier's nose. 
 
 "Now, don't you try an' 'ave your little joke 
 with me," he thundered. "I knows your sort 
 o' merry jester, I does ; an' I won't take no non- 
 sense from 'im !" 
 
 With that he turned and stalked out of the 
 room with as much dignity as his foot would 
 allow, leaving an amazed company behind him. 
 Amazed, but admiring, too: they had always 
 heard how Englishmen scorned to talk of their 
 battle-scars, and here was a noble example. 
 
 They were not disillusioned until they 
 learned the whole truth : the man was a Terri- 
 torial; he had never been outside of England; 
 he had tripped over a tent-post and sprained his 
 ankle. 
 
 I remember, too, a wounded soldier in a Red 
 Cross hospital in which my wife was working
 
 216 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 in December, who had said good-by to his wife 
 in August and had heard nothing from her or 
 of her since. All that he knew was that the 
 village in which he left her was afterwards 
 burned to the ground, and that many of. its 
 women perished with it. One day he came to 
 his nurse with a bit of shaking newspaper in 
 his trembling hand. 
 
 That bit of paper he had torn from a copy 
 of the London 'Daily Sketch. It contained a 
 photograph, taken on a refugee-ship, of a 
 group of Belgian refugees. There was 
 nothing in the accompanying text to tell where 
 the photograph had been taken, or whither the 
 boat on which it was taken had been bound; 
 but one face in the foreground was especially 
 clear : the face of a young woman. 
 
 "Look, look!" gasped the soldier, while frank 
 tears ran down his cheeks. "It is she ! It is 
 my wife. She does not know that I live; but, 
 somewhere she is alive." 
 
 We counted that man tucky, for in a nearby 
 cot lay a comrade whose first news of his wife 
 since the third of August reached him three
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 217 
 
 months later and told him that a German shell 
 had maimed her for life on October eighth. 
 
 After the arrival of Le Nord, Belgian sol- 
 diers were brought to England almost daily. 
 "I never knew there were so many soldiers in 
 Belgium," one tired little nurse said to me ; and 
 it really seemed at times as if every ranker in 
 the Belgian army had been wounded and every 
 wounded ranker brought to England. 
 
 The civilian refugees, however, never be- 
 came a commonplace; one might as well talk 
 of being bored by the sight of torture. Day 
 after day they came, and day after day Eng- 
 land, desperately pressed as she was by her 
 own cares, found food and clothes and shelter 
 for them. Each boatload brought its own ap- 
 peal ; it would be easy to fill three volumes such 
 as this one with their stories, and every story 
 a separate pull upon the heartstrings; but the 
 story of the arrival of a single boatload must 
 serve. 
 
 Nr.bndy, I think, can ever forget it who saw 
 the arrival at Tilbury of the first contingent of 
 civilian refugees from Antwerp and its sur-
 
 218 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 rounding villages. The British Government 
 had chartered the Great Eastern Railway Com- 
 pany's boat, Copenhagen, to bring a thousand 
 and, in the twilight of that autumnal evening, 
 a little company stood in the dreary landing- 
 shed, waiting the arrival of the steamer. 
 There was a representative of the Local Gov- 
 ernment Board; there was Commander Coyst, 
 of the railway. Behind waited the special train 
 for the Liverpool-street Station, where Sir 
 Arthur Downes and Inspector Oxley, also of 
 the Local Government Board, would — with a 
 committee of women, a staff of physicians and 
 nurses, and a troop of Boy Scouts to carry the 
 babies and such small belongings as the 
 refugees might bring with them — meet the 
 nation's guests and feed and house them 
 in the Board's converted asylums at Edmon- 
 ton. 
 
 Five o'clock struck, but the Copenhagen had 
 not yet appeared. Five-thirty, and one of the 
 clearer sighted picked her out from the craft 
 in the river. Everybody went down the gang- 
 way to the landing-stage. At six o'clock the
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 219 
 
 Copcnliagoi was ready to disembark her 
 freight of fugitives. 
 
 Instead of the expected thousand, there were 
 only two hundred and seventy in this first con- 
 signment; but no man could look on that little 
 company and remain unmoved. They were, 
 for the most part, of the poorest peasantry: 
 some citizens of Malines, more cottagers from 
 Compenhout, Hever, Bucken, Rotselaer and 
 Jette. They had left behind them in ruins all 
 that they had ever known of the comforts, even 
 all that they had of the necessities, of life; 
 there was not one that had not lost everything 
 he held most dear. Childless gaffers, widowed 
 women, orphaned children, they crowded to the 
 rail, a ship-load of tragedies. In nearly every 
 case, the man upon whom rested the burden of 
 their subsistence had been swallowed up in the 
 war. In many instances there were old fathers 
 who had lost their daughters, mothers who had 
 lost their children — none knowing where or 
 how — in the awful turmoil of that last Stam- 
 pede from burning towns and along shell- 
 bespattered highways. With hands and faces
 
 220 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 travel-stained and tear-stained, their clothes 
 torn and ragged, many barefoot, more hatless, 
 their paltry rescued belongings wrapped in 
 grotesque bundles of towels or newspapers, 
 table-cloths or sheets, the eyes of each had that 
 intensity of expression which comes only from 
 looking long on horror; and yet now, with a 
 new light painfully struggling in them, they 
 bent their gaze on this river-shore in the land 
 that offered them — rest. Some one among 
 them proposed a "cheer for England" : I think 
 the pathos of those broken voices responding 
 to that proposal is without equal in history. 
 
 They came ashore, one old man kneeling and 
 kissing the friendly soil. The waiting party of 
 Englishmen, with the boisterousness that hides 
 an Englishman's tender emotions, fairly looted 
 the station-buffet for them. Within half an 
 hour, the train was bearing them to Liverpool 
 Street. 
 
 Two priests came with that party: Pere 
 Butaye and Pere van Heybuck, members of the 
 Redemptionist Order. Perhaps the investi- 
 gators that find no final proof of "atrocities by
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 221 
 
 German soldiers" in Belgium would care to 
 hear what these priests had to say : 
 
 "We speak either from our own knowledge, 
 or from the stories told us by the closely cross- 
 examined parishioners and refugees in our 
 care. We have the necessary names, dates 
 and addresses, and are prepared to vouch for 
 them. 
 
 "Near Bucken a woman was bayoneted. 
 When the Belgian troops had retreated from 
 that place, the Germans, entering it, buried 
 alive several Belgian wounded who refused to 
 tell in what direction the Belgian troops had 
 gone. The people of Bucken managed to 
 rescue some of these wounded, who are still 
 alive to testify to what was done to them. 
 
 "Near Malines, Germans found a Belgian 
 boy wandering in the fields. He is believed to 
 have been looking for the body of his dead 
 father. Those soldiers found death for him : 
 they tied him fast to two dead bodies, and thus 
 he remained until some friends discovered and 
 loosed him, sixty hours afterward. 
 
 "The entire milk-supply was commandeered
 
 222 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 by the Germans at Jette. It was more than 
 they needed, but they refused to give any to the 
 children. What they could not use, they 
 wasted. 
 
 "A priest in a village near Louvain gathered 
 all the women and children, and all the men 
 and boys unfit for military service, into his 
 church and his own house. Then he went to 
 the invading Germans and told their command- 
 ing officer what he had done. He gave his 
 word that no militant act would be committed 
 by these people in his care. The officer's reply 
 was a grim joke. He ordered ten men brought 
 from the sacristy to be shot. When the men 
 came out, they were told to run at their best 
 speed, and as they ran, the soldiers and officers 
 shot over their heads into the air. One of the 
 women left in the church died from fright. 
 
 "In Malines a civilian feared for his wife 
 and newly-born child. He refused to surren- 
 der the revolver that was his only weapon. 
 Instead, he barricaded himself in his house and, 
 when the German soldiers attacked it, he shot 
 some of them. The enemy forced an entry.
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 223 
 
 They killed him: he had resisted them. But 
 that was not the extent of what they did. 
 Having killed the man that opposed them, they 
 rushed upstairs to where the unoffending wife 
 lay. Her too they killed. The baby they flung 
 to its death out of a window." 
 
 Does all that sound incredible? The priests 
 said it. I have merely set it down. 
 
 Some testimony, of course, you may doubt 
 if you care to. This, for instance. It came 
 from lips that, for my part, I do not care to 
 doubt — from a Belgian nun, the nurse of two 
 injured Belgian ladies, a mother and a daugh- 
 ter: 
 
 'There was a girl I knew in Vise, a good 
 girl. Prussian soldiers attacked her. For 
 what they did, if there are words, I do not know 
 them. Seventeen, she was. If you could go 
 to Maastricht, you would learn for yourself. 
 She is in hospital there, that girl." 
 
 One wondered how much drink and blood- 
 lust had to do with these things, and how much 
 the close daily acquaintance of horror and the 
 constant expectation of death.
 
 224 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 "It is not the soldiers," one old man from 
 Compenhout explained : "it is the wine that does 
 it. They do not seem to understand wine ; they 
 drink too much of it. Oh, it is impossible to 
 conceive how much wine they drink, those 
 Prussians — officers and men, monsieur! You 
 would not believe. Naturally, they become 
 drunk. After their day's work — that is what 
 they call it: their day's work — they become 
 drunk. Drunk, one of them shoots a citizen, 
 insults a girl, or strikes his companion who, 
 also drunk, retaliates. Damage so done must 
 be blamed on somebody, and the drunken men, 
 ashamed, will not put the blame upon them- 
 selves, where it belongs. So they blame the 
 people of the village, and that starts the mas- 
 sacre. It is very simple, really." 
 
 As for the alleged provocations to massacre, 
 when Belgian citizens say that they did not 
 offer resistance to the invaders, I am inclined 
 at once to believe them, and this for the reason 
 that, in the few cases in which they did offer 
 armed resistance, I have found them ready to 
 admit it. Herve and Battice, in the neighbor-
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 225 
 
 hood of Philippeville, offer casese in point: 
 "Yes, we fought," a cripple chuckled. "We 
 were old men and little boys; they would not 
 have us in the army; but we protected our 
 homes: we fought — name of a name, how we 
 fought! We killed many a gray-coat before 
 they conquered. And then? Oh, then they 
 made fifty of us bury the Germans we had 
 killed. It took us four days," the man proudly 
 added. 
 
 "And they did not hurt any of you?" 
 "Naturally, they killed us — all but me and a 
 comrade. When their dead were buried, they 
 made us dig one great trench. We knew what 
 that trench was intended for. They made 
 forty-eight of us sit on its edge, and shot them. 
 My friend and I, they made us push in the 
 bodies that had not fallen in and then fill up the 
 trench. They marched us off as prisoners. I 
 hid in a field one night and got away." 
 
 In one of the carriages of the special-train 
 to Liverpool-street, sit a husband and wife, 
 peasants whose house had been battered from 
 over their heads. The man's face is haggard;
 
 226 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 his eyes are dazed ; his hands, folded in his lap, 
 tremble. The woman's cheeks are red and 
 bloated from tears; she clutches a baby to her 
 breast. The members of the relief-committee 
 question them, but the man is too stunned to 
 speak, and it is long before the woman can find 
 words. 
 
 "We had two children," she says at last: 
 "this baby and a girl four years old. We all 
 ran away together. There was a river to cross 
 in the night, and many trying to cross it. Our 
 boat was so crowded that the water came in. 
 We thought we were all together, but when we 
 reached land, my little girl was missing. It 
 was impossible even to return and look for 
 her". . . 
 
 When the train had been met at its London 
 station, when the refugees were being led to the 
 conveyances awaiting them, and when the 
 crowd was slowly melting away, somebody 
 noticed that one refugee had been momentarily 
 forgotten. 
 
 This was an old woman who sat wearily 
 against the wall. Her coarse clothes were 
 mud-spattered. Under the edges of the shawl
 
 Dl ED 
 
 J lie- treasure with which the must begin life anew at eighty
 
 BELGIUM IN ENGLAND 227 
 
 that covered her head, the hair crept, gray and 
 scant. She hid her face in hands hardened 
 by years of patient toil, but between her ringers 
 one caught a glimpse of thin cheeks covered 
 with a mesh of tiny wrinkles. 
 
 "Are you alone?" one asked her. 
 
 She did not speak. Her hands still to her 
 face, she nodded. 
 
 "Have you no relatives?" 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "Nor friends?" 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "They are all lost or — dead?" 
 
 Again she nodded. 
 
 "No home ? Your home is lost too ?" 
 
 Her home was lost too. 
 
 "And no money?" 
 
 She lowered her hands. She fumbled in the 
 'depths of her skirt. She drew out a knotted 
 handkerchief and unknotted it. There lay her 
 entire capital, the guarded treasure with which 
 she must begin life anew at eighty years: three 
 francs, fifty centimes. 
 
 Seventy cents.
 
 IX 
 
 "hands across the sea" 
 
 To-day, in what, a few months since, was a 
 prosperous and peaceful country, a nation 
 stands on the bread-line. 
 
 Belgium is starving. She is starving, in 
 spite of all that England, herself staggering 
 under the heaviest native burden in her history, 
 can nobly do for her. She is starving in spite 
 of such help as France, herself in a death- 
 struggle with an invading army, is marvelously 
 rendering. She is starving in spite of those 
 endeavors which Germany, now that the first 
 madness of battle has passed, is making to re- 
 pair something of that ruin which she has her- 
 self inflicted. These nations are at war; their 
 most is hopelessly inadequate. Belgium is 
 starving. 
 
 There is no man that, having known Bel- 
 gium up to the fatal August of 19 14 and then 
 
 228
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 229 
 
 returned to it three months later, would, if he 
 had not read the newspapers, believe it to be 
 the same peaceful country that he had loved. 
 Even the printed and the spoken word are im- 
 potent to picture the present desolation. 
 Whole cities are empty, whole towns destroyed, 
 whole villages mere piles of shattered- stone 
 and mortar, whole districts of farmland 
 stripped and trampled bare. Such factories 
 as are not in ashes are closed for lack of raw 
 material and market. The crops have van- 
 ished, and there is no seed to renew them. 
 
 What this means to the people — the home- 
 less, scattered and dispossessed women, chil- 
 dren, cripples and old men — it is easier for you 
 to imagine than for me to tell. Those arc the 
 sufferers: the old men and cripples, the women 
 and little children. Thousands of families are 
 broken up, their members tramping separately 
 the highways and byways, ignorant of one an- 
 other's whereabouts or fate. They sleep, un- 
 protected, beside the roads. They comb the 
 ash-heaps; they scrape the dirty bits of tin that 
 once were filled with condensed milk. Seven
 
 230 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 millions are in want; one million four hundred 
 thousand — and that number mounts daily — are 
 absolutely without food of their own providing. 
 Thirty thousand babies have been born in Bel- 
 gium since August last. And now winter has 
 come, and disease is at hand, to complete the 
 destruction of a country that War, bending all 
 the ingenuity of modern Science to- its uses, 
 has poured forth a fabulous fortune to devas- 
 tate. 
 
 This is what, until last summer, was "Smil- 
 ing Belgium." 
 
 England's work for these innocent sufferers, 
 the preceding chapter has already, however 
 inadequately, described. What France is do- 
 ing the newspapers have carefully chronicled. 
 By the terms of diplomatic agreements made 
 since the war began, Belgium is France's ward 
 and England's. By the terms of the Hague 
 Convention, made when the war was still only 
 a thing for alarmists to dream about, she is the 
 care of all the world. But by the place that 
 the United States of America has stubbornly 
 and splendidly maintained in the face of all
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 231 
 
 threats, and of every temptation toward en- 
 tangling and war-involving foreign alliances — 
 by the reputation that we have grandly achieved 
 as the champion of distress, the protector of the 
 weak and the savior of the perishing in what- 
 ever portion of the globe — Belgium is ours to 
 feed and house and clothe until that day when 
 she can once more feed, house and clothe her- 
 self. 
 
 I have tried to indicate what England has 
 done for Belgium — not what the Government 
 has done for the Government of Belgium, but 
 what the English people have done for the 
 Belgian people — and I have given, perhaps, too 
 much space to it ; but my endeavor was to show 
 the awakening and extent of the English 
 people's sense of their duty to the people of 
 Belgium, in order that I might forestall the 
 possible criticism of Americans that the duty 
 was not theirs, but Englishmen's. If I have 
 at all succeeded, I have shown thai England, 
 engaged in a war in which she maintains Bel- 
 gium's claims against Germany, can do no more 
 than she LS doing, and that what she is doing,
 
 2^2 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 though much, is not enough to prevent an ap- 
 palling disaster. What is true of England is 
 true of France, whose very territory is invaded ; 
 and my only reason for not enlarging upon the 
 aid rendered by France is that my personal 
 knowledge of it is far less than my personal 
 knowledge of the aid rendered by England. 
 The willingness to help among the German 
 people is made impotent by the position of the 
 Germany army. None of the neutral nations, 
 save our own, is strong enough to serve the 
 present need. 
 
 When I came to the writing of this chapter, 
 one peculiar difficulty was presented. I was 
 keenly aware of the agony that reigns in Bel- 
 gium where Albert, King of the Belgians, used 
 to reign. I was keenly aware of the duty that 
 lies upon every man acquainted with that agony 
 to bring home the truth about it by every means 
 
 in his power to every eye and ear that he can 
 reach. And then there came the question: 
 
 "Is it possible that, somewhere in America, 
 
 there is somebody cynical enough to complain : 
 
 T have been tricked into reading this book by
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 233 
 
 the belief that, sitting at my ease, I should be 
 pleasantly thrilled by pictures of battle, vicari- 
 ously and safely excited by the shedding of 
 blood — and now it turns out that the author has 
 been trying to get some money out of me to feed 
 a lot of people that never did anything for 
 me?'" 
 
 I do not believe that there is such a man any- 
 where in the world. I doubt if such a voice 
 has yet been heard in England or France — yes, 
 or in Germany. I cannot think that it will 
 remain for an American to raise it. Neverthe- 
 less, if any reader does feel aggrieved because 
 I am now making a special plea for a charity 
 that France, England and Germany endorse, 
 then I hope that that reader will never read 
 another book of mine. 
 
 Again, it has been said to me that all attempts 
 toward Belgian relief must expect opposition 
 from German sympathizers in America: that I 
 flatly question. More: I appeal directly to the 
 German-born residents of America. Their rel- 
 atives at home are in a country that is at war 
 and cannot repair the damage which this war
 
 234 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 has done in Belgium; by contributing to the 
 Belgian-relief funds, German-born Americans 
 in America can help to do what the vast major- 
 ity of their relatives abroad would do if they 
 could. 
 
 It is not my purpose to propitiate German 
 sympathizers by suppressing facts that make 
 for a hatred of Prussian militarism, nor is it 
 my purpose to publish impossible stories of al- 
 leged German atrocities in order to wring 
 sympathy for Belgium from persons that 
 would, without the publication of such stories, 
 stand aloof. It is my confident belief that the 
 authenticated facts are sufficient. 
 
 There have been, for example, a good many 
 narratives about Belgian children who ap- 
 peared in England mutilated: their hands 
 lopped off by German soldiers. A child with 
 its hands roughly amputated, and the wounds 
 uncared for, would bleed to death. Some ac- 
 quaintances of a friend of mine in Yorkshire 
 advertised that they would pay twenty pounds 
 for every child brought them whom German 
 soldiers had thus maimed — they would do this
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 235 
 
 and engage to provide for the children for life : 
 the advertisement ran for several days in sev- 
 eral papers, but brought no response. At last 
 I came upon the following plausible explana- 
 tion: a little Belgian lad, separated from his 
 parents, had been brought to England in 
 August by a kind-hearted Englishman, who 
 found him wandering near the French frontier; 
 both his hands had been cut off, and the stumps 
 were still unhealed: he spoke only Flemish, 
 which his guardian did not speak; he conveyed 
 by some sort of signs the perfectly true infor- 
 mation that he had suffered maltreatment by 
 the invaders; but his benefactors, concluding 
 that these sufferings were the amputations of 
 his hands, erred, because, when an interpreter 
 was at last found in England, the boy said that 
 he had lost his hands in an accident with a 
 mowing-machine before the Germans had 
 reached his village. 
 
 On the other hand, according to a dispatch 
 published in the New York World — and pub- 
 lished, it was plain to see, with that paper's 
 usual caution when presenting something that,
 
 236 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 while undeniably "news" is contrary to all pre- 
 viously received evidence — was a statement to 
 the effect that the British Government, after 
 careful investigation, had found no final proof 
 of "atrocities by German soldiers" in Belgium : 
 "The report added that many Belgians had suf- 
 fered severe hardships, but they should be 
 charged up against the exigencies of war." If 
 that dispatch correctly quotes an English gov- 
 ernmental report, then my reply is the reply 
 that will be made by any impartial observer 
 whose investigation of the Belgians' stories 
 has not been hampered by duties to his own 
 nation in the throes of battle. If by "outrages" 
 it means attacks on women, my reply is that 
 even the testimony of loose women should not 
 be too lightly neglected ; that the conventionally- 
 bred women who have been attacked suppress 
 their evidence out of a sense of shame; and 
 that the physical evidences found upon silent 
 women in hospitals, and the accounts of inno- 
 cent girls concerning details that they could 
 not have invented, remain above contravention.
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 237 
 
 But the undisputed data are sufficient to make 
 plain the duty of every man, woman and child, 
 of every nationality and creed, who is possessed 
 of an ounce of charity: the invasion of a neu- 
 tral country; the wiping out of its villages; the 
 decimation, for whatever reason and by 
 whatever means, of its population ; the placing 
 of seven millions of its non-combatant citizens 
 on an international bread-line — these things are 
 not theories; they are facts. "The exigencies 
 of war"? Yes, "the exigencies of war." 
 What then ? 
 
 Nor is it my purpose to belittle the beneficent 
 achievements of American endeavor in those 
 paths of battle which lie outside of Belgium. 
 Our country has already done much through- 
 out the entire theater of war. In the wake of 
 every army, it has done wonders, not only in 
 relieving suffering and distress, but in widen- 
 ing vastly love for American goodness of heart 
 and respect for American efficiency, among 
 Austrians and Germans, English, Belgians and 
 French. The instance of the American Hos-
 
 238 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 pital in Paris is perhaps the most familiar. Its 
 work is not ineptly shown in a single incident 
 that is now recalled to me. 
 
 There is an American I know who, after his 
 first big success on the New York Stock Ex- 
 change, was wise enough to leave the market. 
 He went to London and lived there for twenty 
 years. For a great part of that time he was 
 continued as a member of the house-committee 
 of a certain well-known club, on which com- 
 mittee a prominent English army-officer also 
 served. The American liked the Englishman; 
 but the Englishman steadily and triumphantly 
 opposed every plan that, in committee, the 
 American suggested : my acquaintance was full 
 of plans for the club's improvement; but the 
 Englishman, one after another, put an end to 
 them. 
 
 When the war broke out, the American could 
 not obtain active service at the front, but his 
 sympathies were with the Allies, and he man- 
 aged to obtain an important post in the officers' 
 pay-department, with an office in the rue de la 
 Paix, Paris. To that bureau came daily a
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 239 
 
 typed list of such English officers as had, dur- 
 ing the past twenty-four hours, been admitted 
 to the American Hospital. To scan this was 
 generally the duty of one of the American's 
 clerks, but one day my acquaintance, in hand- 
 ing the list to that clerk, saw that there was 
 only one name upon it, and so read the name. 
 It was the name of the English officer who was 
 his fellow-member of the London club's house- 
 committee. A visit followed immediately. 
 
 The Englishman lay in bed. One of his legs 
 had been amputated; the other was severely 
 injured. 
 
 "Well," said he, "this puts the top on !" 
 
 "What does?" asked the American. 
 
 "Your coming here to see me." 
 
 "But why shouldn't I?" 
 
 The Englishman gathered his strength. 
 
 "Man alive," said he, "don't you know that I 
 always used to dislike you and your confounded 
 American hustle and resourcefulness? That 
 is why I opposed everything you proposed in the 
 club. There was nothing you suggested that 
 didn't go against the grain of all my traditions
 
 240 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 and sensibilities. Now, see what has happened 
 to me. I was hit over there at the front — both 
 legs smashed. I was too weak to whisper, but 
 I heard one stretcher-gang discuss my case and 
 pass on because they said I was going to die 
 anyhow. Then another squad came up and 
 took me to one of the dead-houses — which is 
 what we call the French field-hospitals. There 
 a young French surgeon, a mere boy, didn't cut 
 my leg off: he hacked it off — no anaesthetics, 
 mind you, and all the nurses busy elsewhere. 
 When he wanted to begin on the other leg and 
 said I should die if he didn't amputate it too, 
 the pain had given me back my voice, and I told 
 him I preferred to die, and I meant it : I'd had 
 quite enough. I should have died, if a little 
 American hadn't found me and brought me 
 here to the American Hospital in Paris. Here 
 a real surgeon saved my remaining leg, and 
 here real nurses saved my life — Americans, 
 doctor and all of them. Here I saw a real hos- 
 pital, doing real work, and all brought about 
 and performed by just that American hustle 
 and resourcefulness that I had opposed in you
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 241 
 
 and in our club for years and years. I've seen 
 a bit of what that sort of thing can do, and 
 when I get well, so long as I live, if anybody 
 complains of American methods to me, I shall 
 do my best to knock him down." 
 
 One is, then, far from saying that Americans 
 have not accomplished a great deal. Neverthe- 
 less, one does not hesitate to say that we must 
 do more, must do it now, and must do it in 
 Belgium and for the Belgians. 
 
 Why should Americans "mix in" ; aren't we 
 a peaceful people ? We are — so were the Bel- 
 gians! — and because w r e are, we have "mixed 
 in" to relieve conditions, and must continue 
 mixing. Why should one take charity abroad ? 
 Because charity is needed abroad. With the 
 man who says that "charity begins at home," 
 it generally stops there, too — when, indeed, it 
 ever arrives there at all. Few of us are mad 
 about Foreign Missions; but I have rarely 
 known a churchgoer who said "I think Home 
 Missions ought to come first, and T don't believe 
 in Foreign Missions until we've attended to our 
 home duties' 1 — I have rarely known such a man
 
 242 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 to be a conspicuous giver when there was a col- 
 lection for Home Missions. Nor is the present 
 a case for the spreading of any religion, or any- 
 ideal, ethical or national : it is a case of life and 
 death. 
 
 There are hard times in America? I know 
 it. — There are soup-kitchens in a score of 
 cities? I know it. — There is a nightly bread- 
 line on lower Broadway, and an afternoon 
 breadline at the Knickerbocker ? I know it. — 
 There are five hundred thousand persons out 
 of work in New York alone? I know it. — 
 But do you know that there are seven million 
 persons destitute in Belgium? 
 
 Charity has no nationality and knows none. 
 It is not a product of justice; it is justice. To 
 stand with folded hands and watch another na- 
 tion starve: that is not neutrality; it is the last 
 refinement of enmity. The duty of America, 
 we have been told, is to be neutral; then the duty 
 of America is charity. 
 
 Than our relief-work in Belgium there has 
 seldom been — for my part, I think there has 
 never been — a more wonderful example of how
 
 itudy of l Group of Refugees, b> Gafton 
 lum ■ t in Amei 
 
 On iii.- Bread Link
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 243 
 
 we Americans can combine generosity, speed 
 and efficiency. Somebody truthfully declared 
 that the greatest activity in the world to-day is 
 the business of war. But for the carrying on 
 of this particular war, preparations had been 
 making for two decades. Certainly the second 
 greatest activity in the world to-day is the 
 business of helping the dispossessed Belgian 
 non-combatants — and the need of that came 
 upon an America absolutely unexpectant. 
 
 Yet to Belgium from American sources there 
 have already gone 39,550 tons of supplies, mak- 
 ing a total value of about $2,373,000. At this 
 writing, there are about 51,390 tons at sea, 
 valued at $3,083,400. Loading there are 10,5 1 o 
 tons representing an expenditure of over $500,- 
 000. This makes a total of $5,956,400 and to 
 carry it eighteen steamers have been employed. 
 There was the Macsapcqua, the first of them all, 
 starting on her initial voyage on November 
 fourth, under a charter by the Rockefeller 
 Foundation, which furnished her cargo; she 
 readied Rotterdam on the [8th, delivered her 
 
 Supplies, returned and, with 3,5-7 more tons
 
 244 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 valued at $227,131, furnished by the Belgian 
 Relief Fund, was back in Rotterdam on the 
 1 8th of January. The Foundation also sent out 
 the Neches, from New York on December 12th, 
 and the Ferrona, from Philadelphia, on Decem- 
 ber 23rd, and supplied their 13,000 tons of pro- 
 visions. It lent the Agamemnon, which arrived 
 at Rotterdam on Christmas Day with a $206,- 
 000 cargo of 25,300 tons — 260 given by the 
 Committee of Mercy and 25,040, to the value of 
 $183,064, by the Belgian Relief Fund. The 
 New England Committee, at Boston, also co- 
 operating with that Fund, sent out the Har- 
 palyce, 8,470 tons, raised $150,000 for its 
 cargo and sent $30,000 to the Belgian Relief 
 Fund in New York. Eighteen steamers em- 
 ployed and twenty-one more under charter : the 
 greatest relief-fleet that ever sailed the seas. 
 The Northwestern Miller carried on a cam- 
 paign that brought great supplies of flour from 
 every large milling center; the Philadelphia 
 newspapers raised funds by full-page adver- 
 tisements, photographs and special articles; 
 newspapers in every other big city, and in many
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 245 
 
 smaller ones, helped in the same way. Com- 
 mittees were formed and went to work through- 
 out the country. There are upon the rolls of 
 the Belgian Relief Fund alone the names of 
 more than 20,000 contributors — individuals 
 and groups representing close upon 100,000 
 men, women and children — from every State 
 and territory in the Union and from Cuba and 
 Hawaii. In its files are the ill-spelled letters of 
 the illiterate, the typed communications of the 
 millionaire. 
 
 Already there has begun a movement for 
 The Restoration of Belgian Homes and 
 Households." "This work," writes Dr. van 
 Dyke, "while the same in spirit and ultimate 
 purpose, is quite distinct in form from that 
 which is being done by the American Commis- 
 sion for Relief in Belgium, which has in view 
 the rcvictualmcnt of the whole civil population 
 of that country, whose food supply has been 
 either exhausted or carried away by the Ger- 
 man army. We mean our title to cover what- 
 ever needs to be done to enable -a poor family to 
 get back to its home and to live in it. If the
 
 246 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 house has a hole knocked in it, we will help them 
 to mend it. If a peasant's cow has been stolen 
 or killed, we will try to get him another one. 
 If he needs seed to sow in his vegetable garden 
 for next year, we will provide it for him. In 
 short, we will try to do what we can to put the 
 family in a state to go on with their life again." 
 I have mentioned the Rockefeller Founda- 
 tion. Through it practically all the details of 
 receiving and forwarding by steamer were 
 handled for the Relief Fund. That Foundation 
 bore the expenses of ocean-transportation, has 
 itself shipped to Belgium 19,957,333 pounds of 
 flour, rice, beans and bacon, peas, salt, lentils 
 and coffee, and, exclusive of the cost of hand- 
 ling and transportation, has contributed to the 
 relief of Belgium some $1,100,000. It has 
 spent in Belgian relief-work, or partly directed 
 the expenditure, of $1,500,000 in cash. Now it 
 is planning to provide a colony of a hundred 
 thousand Belgian refugees with raw materials 
 and machinery for the manufacture of clothes : 
 "those articles of clothing of which there is the 
 most desperate need." But it still stands ready
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 243 
 
 to help the other branches of relief-work with" 
 which it at first allied itself simply to organize 
 the shipping-facilities and from which it has 
 withdrawn only because its work in this direc- 
 tion has now been satisfactorily accomplished. 
 The Commission for Relief in Belgium, at 71, 
 Broadway, and the Belgian Relief Committee, 
 at 10, Bridge Street, New York, are thus the 
 chief organizations of Belgian relief in the 
 United States. Take the case of the latter. 
 In the first four months of its existence, ending 
 January 5th, it organized scores of branches 
 and formed a system that perfected the co- 
 operation of scores more of independent bodies ; 
 it became a collecting-agency, tapping every 
 district in the United States; it became a buy- 
 ing-agency, purchasing the best supplies at the 
 lowest figure; it secured through the Rocke- 
 feller Foundation steamers for carrying its 
 cargoes, and through the American ministers 
 at London and Brussels, and the Commission 
 and the Comite Central de Secours et d' Ali- 
 mentation of Belgium, efficient distribution of 
 supplies. It had collected, during this quarter
 
 248 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 year, in cash $776,475.85, in food about $700,- 
 000 worth and in clothing about $35,000 worth 
 — a total of $1,511,375.58. By its careful 
 systematizing, by the powerful influences 
 placed at its disposal and by the self-sacrifice 
 of its staff, it has prevented all waste, duplica- 
 tion and overlapping; is able to make its pur- 
 chases with its ringer on the pulse of the market 
 and its eye on constant maritime and cable 
 advices regarding steamer-availability and the 
 requirements of the hour when cargoes are due 
 to arrive at the distribution-centers. The fact 
 that the cost of express and freight shipments 
 to New York, and all ocean transportation has 
 been handled for it without cost by the Rocke- 
 feller Foundation or by the Commission, makes 
 it possible for each contributor to know that 
 ninety-nine cents out of every dollar he gives 
 it will buy ninety-nine cents' worth of pure 
 food at the lowest price and put that ninety- 
 nine cents' worth of pure food into the mouths 
 of the starving. 
 
 To-day I walked down to the Maritime 
 Building on Bridge Street, where, in a room on
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 249 
 
 the first floor, are now this Fund's headquar- 
 ters. You must know the place. As office- 
 buildings go in New York, where they seem to 
 rise in a night, this office-building is already old 
 and white with briny traditions. Its windows 
 bear the names of many a shipping-company: 
 the Cunard, the Holland-American, the Rus- 
 sian-American, the Norwegian-American. 
 The ground-glass panels of its many doors dis- 
 play the names of foreign firms ; you can almost 
 smell the odors of faraway ports, you do hear 
 the echoes of strange tongues along its halls. 
 Now, in at least that one part of it, pretty 
 American typists clatter at their machines, 
 American charity-workers pore, upon small pay 
 and through long hours, over appeals and sub- 
 scriptions, ledgers, invoices, bills-of-lading, 
 manifests, and sit at the ends of lines that not 
 only extend across the seas, but form a web 
 one strand or another of which passes close to 
 every city, village and farmhouse in the United 
 States. American financiers put aside enor- 
 mous operations to come here and help; Ameri- 
 can men and women of narrow means send here
 
 250 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 a little of their little; Belgian refugees appear 
 to seek reunion with their lost relatives and any 
 work that can be procured for them ; and from 
 here goes out the food-supply of Belgium. 
 
 Whoso does not want to contribute to the 
 Belgian Relief Fund should avoid visiting its 
 offices immediately after the arrival at New 
 York of any of the boats bearing Belgian 
 refugees. Those refugees are few in number, 
 and this for the excellent reason that only a 
 small number can get to America; but such as 
 do come here, bear Belgium's strongest appeal 
 in their own eyes. 
 
 The first group consisted of a father and 
 mother, their baby and the father's sister. 
 Their approach was timid, their condition piti- 
 able. The aunt had been in America before; 
 she spoke French, but was so nervous that she 
 could scarcely find words to tell her story. The 
 family had fled from Antwerp during the bom- 
 bardment. The father had been a licensed 
 chauffeur; now he wanted any kind of work 
 that could be given him. 
 
 Next came a father, mother, baby and grand-
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 251 
 
 father, all fit models for symbolical figures of 
 Despair. The younger man had been a pilot, 
 but there was no chance for him to get such 
 work here. For a time it seemed that he must 
 be given odd jobs and his dependents placed in 
 an institution. The family was steeling itself 
 for that one sacrifice more — the sacrifice of 
 separation — when an Englishman resident in 
 Xew York agreed to give the three adults work 
 about his own house, the father as choreman, 
 the mother as seamstress and the grandfather 
 as gardener. 
 
 There is no need to run through the cata- 
 logue. They are willing to do anything, these 
 Belgians — anxious to do honest work — that 
 will keep them from starvation. Tobacconists 
 have become bakers; blacksmiths shovel snow. 
 They want work — nothing more do they ask of 
 the Belgian priests that act as the bureau's in- 
 terpreters and that these refugees regard in 
 astonishment for an ecclesiastic clad, not in the 
 flapping soutane of the Belgian prelate at home, 
 but in the coat and trousers of the American 
 priest. Shoemakers, chemists, diamond-cut-
 
 252 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 ters have come to the Belgian-relief offices 
 and have gone away as butlers and valets. 
 Women teachers and saleswomen have turned 
 into domestic-servants. There has been 
 scarcely a case of one man, among all the men 
 that presented themselves, who was fit for 
 military service. 
 
 What I have written about the Belgian Relief 
 Fund could be paralleled by a description of the 
 work of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, 
 since the two organizations cooperate; but I 
 think I have said enough to show myself far 
 from underestimating the generosity toward 
 Belgium already magnificently manifested in 
 America. My point is, however, that this 
 generosity must continue until the Belgian 
 fields have been replanted and their crops 
 gathered in. Without that we shall have done 
 nothing but prolong a misery ending in whole- 
 sale death. 
 
 It may be true that the duty of healing Bel- 
 gium's wounds lies, in the first instance, at the 
 door of Germany, who caused them ; but, since 
 Germany cannot heal those wounds, can we
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 253 
 
 Americans justify ourselves in permitting them 
 to remain unstanched? It may be true that, 
 failing Germany, the duty devolves upon fight- 
 ing-Belgium's allies; but, since France and 
 England can do no more than they have already 
 nobly done and are doing, can we justify our- 
 selves in a failure to save the non-combatant 
 Belgians ? It is indeed true that the other neu- 
 tral nations are helping as far as they are able, 
 and that thousands of Americans have helped 
 and continue their aid; but so long as these ef- 
 forts are insufficient, can the rest of America 
 rest content? There is suffering among the 
 non-combatants of each of the larger warring 
 countries, and that suffering has its claims 
 which must not go unsatisfied; but in each of 
 those larger warring countries vast districts 
 remain, and will remain, not directly affected 
 by military operations, and of these each will 
 help its neighbors in its own country, whereas 
 there is no portion of Belgium that has not been 
 stricken. There is a wast German population 
 in the United States that will help sufferers in 
 
 Germany, whereas the Belgians represent but a
 
 254 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 tiny fraction of our population and for that 
 very reason have a claim upon our population 
 as a whole. 
 
 The United States is the only one of all the 
 world's great powers that is not either at war or 
 on war's brink. "Of all the foremost nations 
 of the world," as Sir Gilbert Parker has put it, 
 "the United States is the only one that can save 
 Belgium from starvation if she will. She was 
 the only nation the Germans would allow a 
 foothold for humanity's sake and for Christ's 
 sake in Belgium. Such an opportunity, such 
 responsibility, no nation ever had in the history 
 of the world. There is enough food wasted in 
 the average American household in one day to 
 keep a Belgian for a fortnight. . . . They want 
 in Belgium 300,000 tons of food a month. The 
 American Relief Commission is asking for 
 8,000 tons a month, one quarter of the normal 
 requirements, one half a soldier's rations for 
 each Belgian. The American Commission 
 needs $5,000,000 a month until next harvest. 
 . . . Probably there are 18,000,000 homes (in 
 America). How many will deny themselves a
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 255 
 
 meal for Belgium ?" England can do no more ; 
 France can do no more; Germany can do no 
 more; the little countries cannot do enough. 
 Whatever the causes or the origin of the desola- 
 tion, it is the duty of America, who can, to feed 
 the desolate. 
 
 Perhaps you think that my observations of 
 Belgium's condition are those of a prejudiced 
 observer. I have, throughout this book, been 
 careful in selecting my material. Of what I 
 saw, I told only a little; of what I heard, I re- 
 peated only such stories as seemed to me either 
 to be in themselves easily credible or to come 
 from persons whose word could not be doubted. 
 Another visitor to Belgium since its devasta- 
 tion, Mr. Arnold Bennett, has written: "Many 
 districts are nothing but grave-yards. There 
 is no seed to sow. There are no implements. 
 There is no money. There is no credit. There 
 is no transport. . . . Every home in Belgium 
 wants help." But Mr. Bennett is an English- 
 man. Let me now briefly refer to some ob- 
 servers who must be unprejudiced. 
 
 Dr. P. H. Williams is a New Yorker. At
 
 256 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 the suggestion of the Rockefeller Foundation, 
 he volunteered his services to direct, at Liege, 
 the operations of the American Commission for 
 Relief in Belgium, whose headquarters are at 
 71, Broadway, New York. This is what he 
 says: 
 
 "The impressions I take away from Liege 
 are of wonder that a people can suffer so much 
 in silence, and of admiration for the bravery 
 which enables them to do it. These Belgians — 
 all the suffering Belgians — never complain, but 
 they never laugh. This stoicism would mis- 
 lead even trained observers. 
 
 "Yet, in the province of Liege alone nearly 
 30,000 out of a population of 900,000 are abso- 
 lutely destitute and entirely dependent upon the 
 commission for food to keep them alive. In 
 the principal towns, Liege, Verviers, and Spa, 
 distress is most acute because the iron mills, 
 gun-works, rubber-tire factories, zinc-mines 
 and other industries are closed. Practically the 
 only exception is found in the coal-mines, which 
 are being worked three days a week to obtain 
 fuel to keep the people from freezing. During 
 
 :
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 257 
 
 the month I was in Liege, it snowed or rained 
 every day, and when I left, the province was 
 covered with a thick blanket of snow. 
 
 "A little girl at Liege who had been lucky 
 enough to get a warm petticoat among the 
 Christmas presents distributed by the Commis- 
 sion, wrote to the American child who sent it : 
 'Our dear cure is dead. Our Burgomaster, 
 who was a doctor and gave all his time to the 
 poor, has been shot. My father was shot, and 
 I am now living with nuns, eating bread sent 
 from America.' " 
 
 Dr. Williams continues: "At Louvain and 
 other places Belgian communal authorities are 
 laying out boulevards and other municipal im- 
 provements planned long ago, simply to provide 
 work for the people. They can keep this work 
 going only three days of a week, and in payment 
 men are given paper bonds, which are not nego- 
 tiable outside the community in which they live, 
 although with them they can buy their rations 
 of bread and soup. 
 
 "In smaller towns which have been destroyed 
 men are being employed under the same system
 
 258 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 to pile up bricks which still litter the streets and 
 tell of bombardments the world has almost for- 
 gotten. All these operations are in the hands 
 of Relief Committees. 
 
 "In the country districts of Liege Province, 
 farmers are tilling the soil, but they have no 
 horses, and they are being compelled to sell 
 their cattle for slaughter, as cattle fodder has 
 been requisitioned for the cavalry. . . . The 
 supply of milk is rapidly disappearing. 
 
 "At least 30,000 people line up once a day for 
 bread and soup at twelve canteens established 
 by the Commission in Liege. You see no able- 
 bodied young men; there are only old women, 
 children and cripples. The distribution starts 
 at 8:30 o'clock in the morning and is not 
 finished at the principal stations until eleven. 
 The women place their half-pound loaves in 
 net bags, and old men wrap theirs in bandanna 
 handkerchiefs. . . . Then they go to another 
 canteen to get their allowance of soup. 
 
 "Rich and poor all have to send for bread, 
 and all get the same supply. 'Rich' is a term of 
 irony, but I use it comparatively to distinguish
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 259 
 
 the distressed from the destitute. Think of 
 steel-magnates, university professors, and well- 
 to-do women, accustomed to living luxuriously 
 on investments which now bring in no income, 
 being obliged to stand in a bread-line ! Within 
 a few months there will be no distinctions to 
 make, because practically every person in Bel- 
 gium will be dependent on the canteens. Every 
 one's private means will have disappeared. 
 Before the Commission got into operation, 
 scores of small towns had no bread at all. . . . 
 
 "Belgian physicians are doing splendid work 
 both in relieving distress and in attending 
 prisoners and wounded. ... So far as I 
 know not one morsel of the food so generously 
 supplied to Belgium is being taken by the Ger- 
 mans. It is only fair to say the Germans have 
 given us every assistance, not only in the dis- 
 tribution of relief supplies, but in clearing the 
 canals of broken bridges, so that our barges can 
 reach towns and villages whose people would 
 otherwise starve." 
 
 Another American observer is our Minister 
 to 1 [olland, Dr. vail Dyke. ( )i what he saw in
 
 260 IN A MOMENT OF. TIME 
 
 the Belgian refugee-camps in Holland he wrote 
 in a letter : 
 
 "I visited carefully the refugee camps at 
 Rosendaal and Bergen Op Zoom, small towns 
 which have entertained from fifty to eighty 
 thousand Belgian refugees. In other still 
 smaller villages along the Dutch frontier, the 
 proportion of refugees to inhabitants was even 
 larger. In one place of about 5,000 population 
 there were 30,000 refugees who arrived within 
 twenty-four hours; most of these, however, 
 went on to Rotterdam, Amsterdam, or The 
 Hague. At Rosendaal and Bergen Op Zoom 
 there still remain about 25,000 refugees in each 
 place. The condition of these people is most 
 pitiable. For the most part they are without 
 money. They arrived in great haste, and in a 
 terrified condition, pouring into the country in 
 crowded trains, and in such carts and wagons 
 as they could find, and trudging on foot along 
 the roads. The majority, of course, are women 
 and children, and there are many tiny babies, 
 some born during the flight. There are all
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 261 
 
 sorts of sicknesses among the fugitives, but 
 there is, as yet, no epidemic. . . . The people 
 of Holland have risen magnificently to bear the 
 weight of the great burden which has been 
 thrown upon them. Many private houses in 
 every city and town have been thrown open to 
 receive fugitives, and large public refuges have 
 been provided. . . . 
 
 "I motored through to Antwerp, and made 
 an examination of that city, and of the small 
 cities lying between there and Brussels. My 
 object was to determine how far it would be 
 safe for the refugees to go back at once to Bel- 
 gium. 
 
 "So far as the attitude of the military 
 authorities is concerned, I believe there is no 
 danger whatever for non-combatants in return- 
 ing. Antwerp itself is not so much injured as 
 to render it uninhabitable for the greater part 
 of the population. A very large majority of 
 the houses are standing and uninjured, espe- 
 cially in the poorer quarters of the city. The 
 only serious problems connected with the return
 
 262 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 of the refugees to Antwerp are the water sup- 
 ply, the question of employment, and the ques- 
 tion of food. 
 
 'Tn regard to the smaller cities in the neigh- 
 borhood, the case is entirely different. For 
 example, the towns Waelhem, Mechelen, Duffel 
 and Lier are reduced practically to ruins, and 
 are certainly not in a condition to receive back i 
 more than one-third of their ordinary popula- 
 tion. There is, moreover, a smell of decay in 
 the air which may, at any time, breed a pesti- 
 lence. The resumption of the ordinary indus- 
 tries of these places is absolutely out of the 
 question, as the factories and workshops .are 
 all knocked to pieces. To send people back to 
 their homes when those homes no longer exist, 
 I believe to be cruel. There are, I suppose, ten 
 or a dozen other small towns in Belgium which 
 are practically in the same condition as those 
 I visited, desolate and uninhabitable, half of 
 their houses wrecked; a great many scattered 
 and isolated farmhouses which have been prac- 
 tically destroyed; and a considerable portion of 
 the land under cultivation has been laid waste,
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 263 
 
 either by military operations or by inundation 
 for defense." 
 
 I cannot put the case better than it was put 
 by the New York Nation: "Nobody even pre- 
 tends that the tale of woe is exaggerated. We 
 say nothing about causes ; we say nothing about 
 guilt; what we are speaking of is the fearful 
 desolation and ruin, the heart-rending distress, 
 the unspeakable agony of thousands of non- 
 combatants who, a few short weeks ago, were 
 dwellers in quiet and happy homes, and who are 
 now wanderers on the face of the earth — 
 fatherless, perhaps, or widowed; homeless and 
 forlorn and almost hopeless, surely. Concern- 
 ing their state, there is unfortunately no room 
 for doubt or controversy ; with cities and towns 
 and villages given to the flames, and the whole 
 countryside ravaged by the countless hosts of 
 the invaders, no voice, can be lifted up to say 
 that the thing is not fully as appalling as it is 
 imagined. No, the trouble is all the other way. 
 Imagination is all too feeble to body forth the 
 truth. The mere extent of the misery defies 
 realization; the individual horrors of the scene
 
 264 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 are too infinitely varied to permit of any at- 
 tempt to grasp them." 
 
 Nor is the end yet. A short time since, in 
 conversation with the King of the Belgians, one 
 said that final victory could not long fly the 
 Allies' arms. 
 
 "Yes," replied the King sadly, "there is no 
 doubt that victory will come to our armies ; but, 
 even so, what is to become of my poor people ?" 
 
 I heard, at York, this subject discussed by 
 one of the men best qualified to discuss it : Dr. 
 Charles Sarolea, now Belgian consul at Edin- 
 burgh. 
 
 "Germany," he said, "has committed more 
 vandalism and destruction during a few months 
 in Belgium than all the European nations who 
 fought there for five hundred years, and now 
 the worst is to come, because, when the Ger- 
 mans are driven back, they will do their utmost 
 to make their final stand in Belgium, and we 
 shall have to bombard Belgian cities in order 
 to drive the Germans out. This is the greatest 
 tragedy of the war, that a country which 
 originally had no connection with the quarrels
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 265 
 
 of the Great Powers has suffered first, has 
 suffered most and will suffer longest. I shall 
 never forget the melancholy procession of 
 refugees from Malines to Antwerp which ac- 
 companied the retreating Belgian army. The 
 phenomenon of the whole nation fleeing was 
 absolutely unique in history. And the fate of 
 those Belgian people who remained is even 
 more appalling than that of the panic-stricken 
 wanderers, because Belgium is threatened with 
 the most ghastly famine of modern times. 
 Starvation has begun. What will happen when 
 the Germans are driven back into Belgium, and 
 two million soldiers have to live on the coun- 
 try?" 
 
 That is an old phrase, "Hands Across the 
 Sea." It has been often laughed at, often 
 abused. Perhaps it is a little sentimental. 
 Vet we Americans have more than once made it 
 real, practical, helpful. We have begun to 
 make it real and practical and helpful in the 
 cause of the non-combatant Belgians; but un- 
 it-— we keep on — unless, excellent as our relief- 
 work has been, self-sacrificing as it has been —
 
 266 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 we continue it, day by day, and month in and 
 month out, until next harvest-time, Belgium, 
 now a country of the destitute, will have become 
 a country of the dead. This is not a moment 
 for postponement. What you can, you must 
 give not to-morrow, but to-day — to-day, now, 
 before it is too late. We have seen that there 
 are thousands in America who have given; -how 
 many millions are there who have not ? Those 
 who have given must continue to give, must 
 urge others to give, each all that he can spare. 
 In New York City alone. For every person 
 in New York City that has failed to contribute 
 there is across the sea, "a Belgian woman, 
 child, infant, old man, invalid — now — to-day — 
 homeless, helpless and in direct need." Death 
 keeps the books and strikes the balance: for 
 every decrease of twenty-five dollars, he will 
 snuff out an innocent life. 
 
 To keep this balance on the debit side will be 
 no easy task. It will cost America $2,500,000. 
 a month to feed each starving Belgian only ten 
 ounces of bread a day — and that means a total 
 gift of a hundred-million pounds of flour every
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 267 
 
 four weeks. It is toward the purchase of that 
 vast total that I make my appeal to you. For 
 these ten ounces of bread a day to each starving 
 non-combatant Belgian I confidently ask the 
 help of the American public. I ask you to send 
 what money you can to the Belgian Relief 
 Fund. When you send it, you know that it 
 will be spent in America for American ma- 
 terials, that American labor will load the sup- 
 plies, that American ships will carry them, that 
 they will be received by American agents and 
 distributed by American consuls. You know 
 this, and you know that ninety-nine cents of 
 your dollar will, in the shape of pure food, 
 bought at the lowest price, go directly to the 
 people that you want to help. 
 
 And supposing that the needed help is given 
 — supposing that the people of the United 
 States win for themselves the high glory of 
 saving all Belgium — what then? What is to 
 happen when this war has ended? 
 
 Ilerr Basserman is leader of the National 
 Liberals in the German Reichstag. The Ber- 
 lin VorwartS quotes him as saying: "We shall
 
 268 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 hold fast for all time the countries which have 
 been fertilized by German blood." Undoubt- 
 edly, should the war end before April, Germany 
 would make demands which might lead to a 
 suspicion that her invasion of neutral Belgium 
 was not so much a "military necessity" as an 
 endeavor to establish claims to a coastal coun- 
 try originally unconcerned in the conflict; men 
 would think that the whole purpose of Ger- 
 many's entrance into the war, however cleverly 
 concealed at the time of its conception, was the 
 capture of Belgium's sea-front. But Belgium 
 and the Belgians are resolved upon maintaining 
 their nationality. 
 
 I have been asked why, if they are in such 
 desperate straits at home, the Belgians do not 
 all come here. There are a dozen good 
 answers, but the best is this : they can't. The 
 chief duty of America to Belgium lies, at pres- 
 ent, in Belgium. There the vast bulk of the 
 work must go forward. Said the New York 
 Evening Sim a little while since : "There is to 
 be a Belgium, populated with folk of Belgian 
 descent, after this war. It will mean a loss
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 269 
 
 to us, to every nation that would otherwise 
 eagerly welcome the influx of some of the most 
 desirable human material in the world. And 
 to the refugees themselves repatriation can but 
 wait on many a bitter day of sorely tried hopes, 
 empty hearts and painful separations. Mow 
 infinitely more comfortable for them to resign 
 the unrestful promptings of mere sentiment, 
 and turn their hands to taking up life and ac- 
 complishing their own well-being wherever 
 they find these boons! Yet losers though we 
 are through the possible failure to gain a heavy 
 national reenforcement of sound, intelligent, 
 thoroughbred human material, ... we cannot 
 but respect the stubborn purpose in this people. 
 Even ... at the depth of their abasement, 
 they arc tense with the resolve to rise as a na- 
 tion again . . . and to reap, on some future 
 autumn day, their own fields. The purpose 
 may be visionary, or those holding it may know 
 their own secret strength to accomplish through 
 what the}- endure; in any case the unfortunates 
 mmand the thorough respect <»f those who in 
 less tried countries are succoring them."
 
 270 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 For my own part, I do not believe that this 
 purpose is only visionary ; for my part, I believe 
 that, evil as present circumstances are, Belgium 
 and its people will rise to a new strength and a 
 new glory out of their ashes. The little coun- 
 try is a land of ruin. Beautiful churches and 
 historic monuments have crumbled away, which 
 no hand of man can ever restore. Families 
 have been separated which none can reunite. 
 Lives have been lost and wrongs done, which 
 nothing can revive or repair. These things 
 are beyond money. On the other hand, whole 
 towns must be rebuilt; vast industries and 
 countless businesses must be recreated; great 
 stretches of once arable land must be reculti- 
 vated; an entire civilization must be made 
 anew — and these things will indeed be done. 
 While yet the masonry of the past is warm from 
 the fire that razed it, while yet the earth is 
 damp with blood and wet with tears, Belgians 
 will begin to erect the buildings and plow the 
 fields of that Belgium of the future which will 
 be greater than any Belgium of the times that 
 are gone. A century — two centuries — may be
 
 "HANDS ACROSS THE SEA" 271 
 
 needed to complete this titan task, but, begun 
 at once, the task will be completed; Belgium's 
 greatest hour is knocking at the door of her 
 darkest distress and, through whatever diffi- 
 culties, the Belgians will meet it and make the 
 utmost of all it offers. Belgium, crucified and 
 buried, shall rise again. 
 
 We have the chance so to do that, in the hour 
 of her resurrection, Belgium may say: 
 "America made this resurrection possible; from 
 the door of our tomb, it was the people of 
 America that rolled away the stone." It is the 
 opportunity, it is the duty, of the American 
 people to care for these helpless ones against 
 that near hour when they shall be able to begin 
 to help, as they are so eager to help, themselves. 
 Now they starve, an entire nation, and only we 
 can save them. Wherever lies the guilt of 
 bringing Belgium to her present condition, so 
 long as we can restore her and do not, the guilt 
 of leaving to death her old men, her widowed 
 women and her little children will lie with us. 
 
 It IS useless for us to ask ourselves Cain's 
 quest i' 'ii :
 
 272 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 "Am I my brother's keeper?" 
 Duty, if you wish so to call it — God, if you 
 will — has but one answer: 
 "Yes." 
 
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