Part 23

Another home which I had the privilege of entering, that of Commandant Boultheel, had been more fortunate, for it stood as yet untouched by disaster. Here in an atmosphere of warm charm, a serene and gracious hostess dispensed hospitality to her friends. Pewter and old china on the walls and a great fire of logs dispelled the depression of the outside world. Around the table were men of war and men of the world, who represented the finest qualities of the French. Among them was a valiant Préfet du Nord, who had spent ten months as hostage in a German prison, using his time to study English and reread Horace. In fact, I felt, as I had on the train, that the further I got from Paris the nearer I came to the heart of France.

A glimpse of "cave life" I had in the pharmacie maintained by the Sisters of the Sacré Coeur in the basement of the Hôtel de Ville, where it had been temporarily installed by the city, its own quarters being untenable. This was a large space lighted by electricity and crowded with bottles and jars, bundles of herbs and bandages, and made cheerful by the bright faces of the sisters. In another portion of the cellar they sleep, living entirely underground.

Families are large in Dunkirk, and children troop unconcernedly to and fro between home and school. To them the nightly flight to the casemate is no longer a wild adventure.

BUSINESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES

The business part of the town has not the sad aspect of the residence streets, for it is full of life. The decrepit shops, half boarded up, many of them resembling a face with a bandage over one eye, are doing a lively business. With the demands of a large floating population of two armies, Dunkirk is not suffering commercially. Department stores, book shops, shoe stores, provision shops of all kinds, make the most of a short day. Oranges, figs, dates, nuts, and conserved food of all kinds are much in evidence, also warm clothing, blankets, boots, and novels. The restaurant of the Hôtel Chapeau Rouge was filled with French and English officers, and an excellent meal was served much as it would be in Paris. At 4:30 everything is closed. Lights are extinguished, windows and doors are sealed with their householders behind them, unless the latter are among those who seek the comparative safety of the suburbs at nightfall. For though the entire surrounding country is subject to bombardment, the town is the centre of attack. In the twilight of the unlighted streets scarce a footfall is heard. Only the occasional rumble of a heavy cannon shakes the air. Behind the wall of darkness pulses a full life undismayed by the terrors of the approaching night or the possibilities of the tomorrow.

A STAG AT BAY

In the heart of the forest I once saw a stag leading his herd to the shelter of a rock in the rush of an oncoming storm. Having urged them into crouching positions around him, he turned and with a simple gesture lifted his head to the storm. There was that in his attitude which compelled reverence. One mentally saluted, though one might think "poor, silly beast, in what way could he mitigate the lash of the tempest?" But instinctively he had obeyed the highest for which he had been created, the protection of the weak. And his calm presence caught away all panic from those around him. Often while in Dunkirk this scene came back to me, recalled by the simple matter-of-courseness with which these brave men and equally brave women stayed on because it was the place for them to be.

At the Military Hospital of Rosendael, with the exception of the intrepid surgeon and the almoner, it is the women who hold the position. Originally the city hospital, it was taken over by the army at the beginning of the war. An immense building with modern equipment and a capacity for 700 patients, it has been necessary of late to evacuate many of the sections because of the increasing frequency of the bombardments. The hospital has been struck many times and one ward completely destroyed. As it happened there were no soldiers in that section, it being used as a maternity hospital for the city. Several women and little children were killed and also the sister in charge, Sister St. Etienne, so dear to her co-workers that she is never spoken of without tears. She had just finished her rounds for the night when the alarm came. Her one thought was to save her ward from panic. A bomb crashing through the roof hurled a beam across the sister, killing her instantly and wrecking the entire wing.

"FOR ALL AMERICAN WOMEN"

In spite of this tragedy and of recurring attacks, the other sisters and the head nurse, Mlle. Guyot, have held their posts with quiet heroism and have never lost an hour's duty. The patients now are mostly convalescent, because fresh cases are no longer brought there.

The supplies of shirts, pajamas, and bandages sent from America were gratefully commented upon by Mlle. Guyot, and I was touched by similar expressions from the men. One poor aviator, terribly burned, but recovering, put up a bandaged hand and saluted me "for all American women." Another poilu wove for me a table mat of red, white, and blue cord. All were fervent in their good wishes.

Everywhere warmth and order prevailed, from the wards where the bandaged soldiers sat about with their pipes and their knitting to the big bakery where the fragrant brown bread is baked and to the kitchens with their caldrons of broth and crisp roasts of meat.

Dry, well ventilated "abris" or bomb shelters have been built in connection with each section of the hospital. The surgeon, who sleeps in a cellar near the centre, is the first to assist his patients to shelter in case of an alarm. There, underground, long games of cards are played on the brink of the unknown. This is not callousness, but is done with deliberate intent by the clever surgeon, (a refugee from Lille,) knowing that by this means his men may be saved a nervous strain which might prove fatal.

Mlle. Guyot, who has been at the hospital since the beginning of the war, knows as well as any one what the city has endured. It was she who said to me:

"I shall never forget that Dunkirk has borne the weight of the war from the first day; that she has seen the exodus of the Belgian population, to whom she has given refuge as well as to the people of the Department du Nord; that she has known the passing of innumerable armies going and coming from the Yser; that in October, 1914, she began to be bombarded, having at the same time to fulfill the immense duty of bringing in and caring for the wounded from that immortal battlefield; and through it all I have seen Dunkirk living and working and saving with a smile!"

The military position of Dunkirk is sometimes confusing because it has been alternately on the French and English fronts. The English are now retiring, but sentinels of three nationalities still guard the city gates; English Tommy and French poilu stand with their arms across each other's shoulders, the Belgian stands apart.

On the sands of Malo, which is but a prolongation of Dunkirk, with a sweeping beach toward the North Sea, strange men from Tonquin were digging trenches--dark men branded by the sun and the mark of the East, with warm dabs of color on their high cheekbones, and small opaque eyes under rising brows. The uniform of the French Colonial is often a medley. He looks as though he had begun "dressing up" like children in the attic, and as though his mind had fallen short of his expectations. Out on those bleak sands his touches of rich blue, crimson, and green had almost the fervor of stained glass set against the dark and sinister sea. To the north the Belgian coast cut the background with a livid streak of sand.

In spite of the moving figures, the loneliness was as of the ends of the earth. The silence was accentuated rather than broken by the purr of the cannon and the mewing of a stray gull slapped sidewise by the wind. But it is thus that I like to think of Dunkirk--scourged by the wind, blotted out by the storm, knowing that for the time being her stout hearts are safe.

As the sea has been the life of Dunkirk in the past, so it will be its resurrection. The city cannot be struck a deathblow from the land side as has many another less favorably situated. But what a unique protégé for some god-mothering American city to help re-establish through her sympathy and aid!

Is it any wonder that France has just included in the arms of Dunkirk the following legend in addition to the one gained by the naval battle of 1793: "Ville heroique, sert d'exemple à toute la nation"?

Brutal Treatment of Italian Prisoners

Sworn statements from British soldiers returned from German prison camps and hospitals received by Reuter's Agency (the Associated Press of Great Britain) indicate that systematic brutality is practiced there upon Italian prisoners. Lance Corporal Horace Hills, 7th Suffolk Regiment, made the following statement under oath:

Five or six thousand Italians came in. They had traveled three or four days, and had had nothing at all to eat. After they arrived soup was brought in, and, as they were starving, they rushed at it. The Germans then dashed forward and stabbed them with their swords and bayonets, and killed and wounded a lot. Seven or eight Italians were dying every day in the camp of starvation. They had no parcels. I saw an Englishmen give an Italian bread, and the Italian went down on his knees and kissed his hands.

Private J. F. Jackson, King's Liverpool Regiment, swore:

One Italian told me they had been fifteen days on the journey and had only three meals all the time. Our hospital lager was separated from the camp by barbed wire; we took some bread and threw it over the wire to the Italians; they all began to grab for it, but a lot of Germans rushed up and drew their bayonets and flourished them in the air in a threatening manner, and kicked and threw the Italians about, and got the bread for themselves.

At Friedrichsfeld the treatment of the Italians was equally barbarous, the sentries shooting them for trying to get food from the British. Equally revolting stories come from Ohrdrup, Nammelburgh, Stendal, Soltau, Limburg, and Hamburg.

Germany's Attempt to Divide Belgium

Official Summary of Recent Political Events in Flanders, Issued by the Belgian Foreign Office

_Germany's plan to divide Belgium by organizing a small group of "activists" to establish a so-called Council of Flanders for the purpose of separating the Flemish from the Walloon Provinces, was described in the April issue of CURRENT HISTORY MAGAZINE, pp. 91-96, along with the fearless opposition which the attempt created. The following summary of the case, with a fuller array of dates and details, has since been prepared by the Belgian Foreign Office at St. Adresse, France, the seat of King Albert's Government in exile:_

The semi-official Wolff Agency in Berlin announced on Jan. 20, 1918, that the so-called Council of Flanders had proclaimed the autonomy of Flanders Dec. 22, 1917. Soon after that action, which had passed unnoticed and had left Belgian opinion indifferent and scornful, Herr von Walraff, German Secretary of the Interior, had judged the time opportune for a trip to Belgium, (Jan. 1, 1918.) The "council," after getting into close relations with him, had taken up the decree which the Landtag had intrusted to him on the 4th of February preceding, and had declared that it would submit itself to a popular referendum.

At length a commission of executive officials was created; it included heads for the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, Public Works, Arts and Sciences, Justice, Finance, Labor, National Defense, Posts and Telegraph, and the Navy. The German telegraphic agencies sent out this news in all directions to spread the idea that Flanders was showing an intention of detaching itself from Belgium, and to give the impression of a spontaneous popular movement for political separation.

The thought that inspired this intrigue dates back to a period almost two years earlier. On April 5, 1916, the German Chancellor, in defining the war aims of Germany before the Reichstag, had outlined the imperial policy of establishing a protectorate over the Flemings. Later there were found in Belgium some obscure and discredited citizens who, betraying their sacred duty, placed themselves in the pay of the enemy and consented to make themselves the agents and accomplices of the invaders.

GERMAN ACT OF SEPARATION

On Feb. 4, 1917, an assembly composed of 200 Belgians speaking the Flemish language met and voted for the creation of a "Council of Flanders." On March 3 this body sent a deputation to Berlin, and the Chancellor announced to it that "the policy tending toward the administrative separation would be pursued with all the vigor possible during the occupation," and that "during the negotiations and after the conclusion of peace the empire would not cease to watch over the development of the Flemish race." The German decrees dividing Belgium into two administrative regions followed close upon these declarations, (March 21, 1917.)

At the end of 1917 the German authorities believed that the moment had come to consummate the enterprise by completing the administrative separation with a political separation. Thus the end would be attained: Belgium would be dismembered; one part of the country would fall under vassalage to Germany, and, in case there were no annexation, would become in a way a sphere of influence for the empire.

The intrigues of the "Council of Flanders" are merely a comedy intended to mask this policy. The policy rests upon a clever juggling with the question of languages. Under cover of the principle of free self-determination of peoples, it seeks to internationalize an internal problem in the hope of dislocating the Belgian nationality. Perhaps it also aims at the creation of a fictitious Government which shall furnish the German Government with the means for opening fallacious peace negotiations to deceive the world and weaken the cohesion of the Allies. Many German newspapers have allowed these aims to appear, and some have boldly unveiled them.

ALL BELGIUM PROTESTS

But the strong protests of Flemish communities and of the entire Belgian Nation have foiled these plans, and the news coming from the occupied region enables us to determine with precision the character of the rôle played by the "Council of Flanders." At the same time it attests the determination of the Belgian people to repel all foreign interference and to maintain its unity unshaken.

What is this "Council of Flanders"? It has no representative character. It was created by a private assembly which had no mandate from the people. It now pretends to seek popular sanction through an election. This is only a subterfuge. There has been no election. There has been no consultation of the people. The promoters have limited themselves to assembling groups of adherents in theatres or restaurants, and causing gatherings composed of their proselytes, with an admixture of the curious and the idle, to vote on lists of candidates previously arranged in the private offices of those who are directing the work.

The Deputies and Senators, in a protest to the Chancellor, thus denounced the pretense of an election that was organized in Brussels:

A meeting was called at a day's notice in an exhibition hall. Everybody entered who wished to, Belgians or strangers, men, women, and children. There were in all 600 or 700 persons. It was these unknown persons, come together by chance, without control or guarantee, that in a few moments, as an interlude in a speech, proclaimed the election of twenty-two Deputies to the "Council of Flanders" and fifty-two Provincial Councilors, Such was the expression--without the knowledge of the people--of the will of the Municipality of Brussels, which has 200,000 electors and almost 1,000,000 inhabitants.

PROTESTS OF CITY COUNCILS

Foreign occupation has not wholly destroyed legitimate and regular representation in Belgium. The Provincial Councils and the City Councils are still functioning. The administrative framework of the country survives. The municipal organization, so solidly rooted, has not ceased to exercise power. The Provincial and Municipal Councilors, like the Deputies and Senators, most of whom remain in the country, have been elected by universal, direct, and secret suffrage. They alone in the occupied territory are competent to express the true national opinion, and that opinion is strikingly voiced in the protest of the Flemish and Walloon members of Parliament, in that of the Common Councils of the capital and the large cities of Antwerp and Ghent, whose example has been followed by an increasing number of prominent citizens and local Governments of smaller towns in Flanders.

It has been demonstrated that the "Council of Flanders" is pursuing an enterprise of usurpation, that it is a tool of the invader, and that its members are in reality only agents of the German authorities. They went to Berlin a year ago to ask for administrative separation. Herr von Walraff met them at Brussels at the beginning of 1918 to arrange for political separation. When Tack and Borms were arrested by the Belgian police on the order of Belgian Magistrates it was the German functionaries who, by force, compelled their release, and they came out of prison by the side of the German officer who had liberated them. It was the Kommandantur of Antwerp that ordered the communal administration, disregarding its resistance, to authorize the "activist" demonstration of Feb. 3, and to have this protected by the police, in violation of orders of the Burgomaster that had been in force nearly four years. It was the German military headquarters, too, that forbade all demonstrations of other groups and commandeered the hall of the Chamber of Commerce, placing it at the disposition of the organizers of a demonstration judged by the Burgomaster to be one to wound public sentiment and endanger the public peace.[1]

[Footnote 1: Later the City Councils were forbidden by German authority to debate political questions, such as the autonomy of Flanders.]

At length Governor General von Falkenhausen stamped the "Council of Flanders" with the seal of German investiture, deciding by a decree of Jan. 18, 1918, (published Feb. 10,) that the appointment of the "council's" delegates was subject to his ratification, and that these delegates were called to collaborate with him in his legislative labors.

Thus one has the right to conclude that the whole organism of the "Council of Flanders" is only a foreign tool to serve the enemy in his designs of division and oppression. The delegates of the council cannot pretend to any independence, since the decree of Jan. 18 reduces them to the rôle of functionaries of German authority, named by that authority and expected to contribute, by their advice, to its political work.

THE DELEGATES OSTRACIZED

The Belgian people, without distinction of language, party, or condition, have, by impressive demonstrations, repudiated the faithless citizens who, joining hands with the enemy, have arrogated to themselves the right to speak in the name of the Flemings. The Flemings were the first to condemn the crime. To the protests of the Deputies and Senators and of the City Councils have been added those of the leading intellectual and political societies of Flanders. The Flemish Academy raised its voice to "affirm its fidelity to the Belgian Fatherland and its King." The Belgian Labor Party proclaimed that "not one of the 800 labor groups composing it, and not one of its authorized leaders, had been led astray or corrupted by the activist-separatist movement, either in Flanders or in Wallonia."

In the streets of Antwerp, of Malines, of Brussels, spontaneous uprisings which the German troops could not suppress voiced the scorn and anger of the crowds.

Crowning this expression of the popular will and giving it the sanction of law, the Brussels Court of Appeals, acting upon the protest of the Deputies and Senators, at a plenary sitting of all its united chambers, [Feb. 7, 1918,] ordered a hearing which ended in the arrest of delegates of the "Council of Flanders" on a charge of conspiracy against the form of the State, interference with public functions, and wicked attacks against the constitutional authority of the King, the rights of the chambers, and the laws of the nation. When the German authorities, protecting the guilty ones and acting in the guise of vengeance, caused the arrest of the Presidents of the Court, who had come in the august garb of justice to do their duty, the Court of Cassation, by a decree of Feb. 11, decided unanimously to suspend its sittings; the Courts of Appeals in Ghent and Liége, with all the courts of first instance and the courts of commerce, followed its example. The civic heroism of a whole people is summed up in that impressive gesture. There is no more eloquent page in history.

This nation can remain free. It stoically endures the presence and domination of the enemy in its territory. The foreign occupation that has lasted three and a half years has not broken its spirit or its will to resistance. The Flemish, like the Walloon communities, victims of the most frightful brutalities, subjected to a system of forced labor, decimated by deportations, have remained immovably faithful to King and country. The moral unity of the nation has continued intact.

FLEMISH QUESTION NOT NEW

The Flemish question does not imperil this unity. It dates much further back than the war and has often been a subject of lively debate. It is a question of interior policy which the nation alone must solve, after the war, independently, under its own free constitutional powers. Belgium has had the same Constitution since 1831, and has not dreamed of altering its principles, unless we except the proclamation of universal manhood suffrage in 1893. In eighty-three years of peace and prosperity there was not a single political party that cast doubt upon the validity of the fundamental charter--an eloquent proof of its plastic vitality and perfect harmony with the deepest needs of the nation's collective existence.

Equality before the law, (Article 6,) individual liberty, (Articles 7, 8, 9, 10,) liberty of religious faith, (Articles 14 and 15,) freedom in education, (Article 17,) freedom of the press, (Article 18,) the right of assembly, (Article 19,) liberty of association, (Article 20,) freedom as to language, (Article 21)--these are the essential axioms on which the nation's public life is based.[2]

[Footnote 2: Article 21 of the Constitution reads thus: "Employment of the languages used in Belgium is optional. It can be regulated only by law and solely for acts of public authority and for judicial proceedings."]