BOOKS.

THE HARRYING OF BELGIUM"

MR. ALEXANDER POWELL'S Fighting in Flanders is unques- tionably one of the most memorable books of first-hand description dealing with the war which have yet appeared. Mr. Powell is an American, and he went to Belgium with an open mind. When he left Antwerp after the German occupa- tion he was as pro-Belgian, he tells us, as though he had been born under the Belgian flag. We must give the reason of his conversion in his own language :— " I had seen a country, one of the loveliest and most peaceable • Fighting in Flanders. By E. Alexander Powell. London W. Heinemann. [3a. ed. net.] in Europe, invaded by a ruthless and brutal soldiery; I had seem its towns and cities blackened by fire and broken by shell ; I bad seen its churches and its historic monuments destroyed ; I had seen its highways crowded with hunted, homeless fugitives ; I had seen its fertile fields strewn with the corpses of what had once been the manhood of the nation; I had seen its women left husbandless and its children left fatherless ; I bad seen what was once a Garden of the Lord turned into a land of desolation ; and I had seen its people—a people whom I, like the rest of the world. had always thought of as pleasure-loving, inefficient, easy-going —I bad seen this people, I say, aroused, resourceful, unafraid, and fighting, fighting, fighting. Do you wonder that they captured my imagination, that they won my admiration ? I am pro- Belgian ; I admit it frankly. I should be ashamed to be any- thing else."

We could quote from Mr. Powell's pages many amusing and exciting war incidents, told with great skill and, we doubt not, with complete sincerity. Our object, however, is not to search for good " copy," but to try to give the reason why serious readers should study this book. When first people

heard of the harrying of Belgium there was a universal

feeling of horror here and in America. That horror has now to a great extent worn off, and many people, because a few of the wilder stories have been proved to be unverifiable, are- beginning to wonder whether the whole thing was not much

exaggerated, or whether, after all, these infamies are not inseparable from war, and must be borne as part of the awful price which Germany is making the world pay for refusing to submit in silent humility to her yoke. The true answer, of course, is that, though war is a stern and terrible thing, there is no sort of necessity why it should be waged with the scientific, deliberate, and intentional brutality with which the Germans have waged it in Belgium. It is not too much to say that war has not been waged in this awful style for over two hundred years and more. Napoleon was brutal and ruthless, but be never gave a country up to military execution after the manner of the Germans in Belgium. Occasionally, no doubt, he tried to strike terror by severity, but we can remember nothing like the cold-blooded slaughtering of hostages which has taken place in Belgium. The shooting of hostages and the punishing of men whole- sale, not for deeds they have themselves committed, but for deeds committed or alleged to have been committed by other men, is one of the things for which the Germans will have to answer at the Great Assize of History. It is a breach of the fundamental idea of justice. Equally monstrous and inhuman is the deliberate over-punishment of some particular town or district in order to terrorize other towns and districts.

We have always recognized that there is necessarily great difficulty in making a Government responsible for the brutalities of individual soldiers. Tired and hungry men, especially when they are also overwrought by the strain of battle, very easily yield to drink, and when drunk readily do mad things. No

doubt in a civilized army it ought to be the first duty of the officers to keep the men from liquor and to maintain discipline,

but this cannot always be accomplished. Therefore we have never laid any stress upon individual outrages, for no matter

how terrible they are in themselves there is always the need of differentiating them from ordinary crimes. There are bad men in all armies as in all cities and countries. It is quite another matter in cases where the soldiers are acting under orders, such as in the indiscriminate burning of towns and the seizing of the inhabitants, first holding them as prisoners and then shooting them either as hostages or in order to " make an example." In such cases the excuse of drunkenness and excitement does not hold. The action taken is a piece of deliberate policy. But here, of course, evidence

is required. It is to be found in German Proclamations, and in the defence officially put forward by the Germans. They have

told us that they were obliged to commit harsh acts in order to protect their Army from destruction by civilian risings and in order to cow the people into submission. They dared not leave mutinous Belgian districts behind them. They dared not leave unpunished any attacks upon soldiers by civilians, lest those attacks should grow serious and endanger the German communications. In a word, they dared not risk a rising in their rear.

Mr. Powell's book is important because it shows us clearly what real value there is in the German apologies for what we have described elsewhere, and must describe again here, as "the gospel of hell." One of the things which made most impression upon Mr. Powell was the awful punishment dealt out b.

the Germans to Aerschot. It will be remembered that Aerschot was given up to military execution because the son of the Burgo- master had shot the German Chief of the Staff. The German version, which Mr. Powell had from the German Commander -himself, was to the effect that the Burgomaster asked some of the officers to dinner; that this act of murderous treachery was committed by the Burgomaster's son, a boy of fifteen ; and that directly the murder had been committed the towns- people, as if by a prearranged signal, opened fire from their windows. " The execution of the Burgomaster, his son, and several score of the leading townsmen, the giving over of the women to a lust-mad soldiery, the sacking of the houses, and the final burning of the town, was the punishment which would always be meted out to towns whose inhabitants .attacked German soldiers." The Belgians' version of the .occurrence is somewhat different. They admit that the Germans entered the town peaceably enough, and that the Chief of Staff and other officers accepted the hospitality of the Burgomaster. They also admit that while they were at -dinner the Burgomaster's son entered the room and shot the Chief of Staff with a revolver. But they allege that the boy killed the Chief of Staff in defence of his sister's honour•. It is asserted that towards the end of the meal the German officer, "inflamed with wine, informed the Burgomaster that lie intended to pass the night with his young and beautiful daughter, whereupon the girl's brother quietly slipped from the room and, returning a moment later, put a sudden end to the German's career with an automatic." Mr. Powell adds that he does not know which is the true version, and that perhaps no one will ever know, for, as lie grimly remarks, " the Germans did not leave many eyewitnesses to tell the story of what happened." Mr. Powell, however, has done his best to piece together the stories told by those who survived that night of horror. He tells us the facts that are known, and leaves us to draw our own conclusions :-

" We know that scores of the townspeople were shot down in cold blood and that, when the firing squads could not do the work of slaughter fast enough, the victims were lined up and a machine-gun was turned upon them. We know that young girls -were dragged from their homes and stripped naked and violated -by soldiers—many soldiers—in the public square in the presence of officers. We know that both men and women were unspeak- ably mutilated, that children were bayoneted, that dwellings were ransacked and looted, and that finally, as though to destroy the evidences of their horrid work, soldiers went from house to house with torches, methodically setting fire to them."

From Aerschot Mr. Powell passed to Louvain, where what seems to have struck him most was the deliberate looting and destruction of the houses. This destruction he describes, and adds : "This is not from hearsay, remember ; I saw it with any own eyes. And the amazing feature of it all was that among the Germans there seemed to be no feeling of regret no sense of shame. Officers in immaculate uniforms strolled about among the ruins, chatting and laughing and smoking." Just as in the case of Aerschot, there are two versions of the circumstances which led up to the destruction of Louvain. The Germans say they were fired at from the windows. The Belgians, on the contrary, say that the Germans fell into a panic, fired upon each other by mistake, and then, partly in fear and partly in rage at their own folly, visited the German losses on the wretched town. We need not, however, go more deeply into the sack of Louvain, for that fact, at any rate, is

beyond question.

Circumstances later on brought Mr. Powell into social intercourse with the German Commander and the German Army. With commendable courage, Mr. Powell told the General what he had seen and what was hia opinion of it:—

" The general began by asserting that the accounts of atrocities perpetrated by German troops on Belgian non-combatants were lies. 'Look at these officers about you,' he said They are gentlemen like yourself. Look at the soldiers marching past in the road out there. Most of them are the fathers of families. Surely you do not believe that they would do the unspeakable things they have been accused of ? '= Three days ago, General,' said I, 4 I was in Aerschot. The whole town is now but a ghastly, blackened ruin.'—' When we entered Aerschot,' was the reply, 'the son of the burgomaster came into the room where our officers were dining and assassinated the Chief of Staff. What followed was retribution. The townspeople got only what they deserved.'—' But why wreak your vengeance on women and children?' I asked.- ` None have been killed,' the general asserted positively.— I'm sorry to contradict you, General,' I asserted with equal positiveness, ' but. I have myself seen their bodies. So has Mr. Gibson, the secretary of the American Legation in Brussels, who was present during the destruction of Louvain.'—' Of

course,' replied General von Boehn, 'there is always cling,er of women and children being killed during street fighting if they insist on coming into the streets. It is unfortunate, but it is war.'

But how about a woman's body I saw with the hands and feet cut off ? How about the white-haired man and his son whom I helped to bury outside of Sempst, who had been killed merely because a retreating Belgian soldier had shot a German soldier outside their house? There were twenty-two bayonet wounds in the old man's face. I counted them. How about the little girl, two years old, who was shot while in her mother's arms by a uhlan and whcse funeral I attended at Heyst-op-den-Berg ? How about the old man near Vilvorde who was hung by his hands from the rafters of his home and roasted to death by a bonfire being built under him ? ' The general seemed taken aback by the exactness of my information. Such things are horrible if true,' he said. ' Of course, our soldiers, like soldiers in all armies, sometimes get out of hand and do things which we would never tolerate if we knew it. At Louvain, for example, I sentenced two soldiers to twelve years' penal servitude each for assaulting a woman.'"

In the end the German General asked him to tell, at any rate, the American people the German side of the atrocity business. Upon this Mr. Powell grimly mentions that be has quoted the words of General von Bcehn as nearly verbatim as he could remember, and adds : " I have no comments to make." -

We wish we had room to quote in full Mr. Powell's vivid description of the German Amy on the march, and of its splendid mechanical efficiency, but we must take from. it one incident. He tells us that only once did he himself see a soldier ilI•treated by an officer. A sentry failed to salute an officer with sufficient promptness. -Upcn this the officer lashed hint again and again across the face with a riding-whip. Though welts rose at every blow, the soldier stood rigidly at attention and never quivered. Mr. Powell, in pointing out that it was

not a pleasant thing to witness, adds that bad it been a

British or American soldier there would have been an officer's funeral the next day. He might have said the same of the French, or the Russians, or of course of the Belgians. In

spite of Russian autocracy, such brutalities practised on men by their• officers are unthinkable in the case of Russia.

Very curious and interesting are the accounts of the siege of Antwerp and the splendid devotion—there is no other word for it—of the Belgian Army. Mr. Powell also gives a striking account of Mr. Winston Churchill's arrival, and of the behaviour of our raw Naval Reserve. In spite of their want of training, his description shows that they acted with true courage and steadfastness in very trying circumstances. As an epilogue to our notice we will quote the last words of Mr. Powell's fascinating book. It is thus he sums up the German Army :—

" The army which captured Antwerp was, first, last and all the time, a fighting army. There was not a Landstnrm or a Landwehr regiment in it. The men were as pink-cheeked as athletes; they marched with the buoyancy of men in perfect health. And yet the human element was lacking ; there was none of the pomp and panoply commonly associated with man ; these men in grey were merely wheels and cogs and bolts and screws in a great machine —the word which has been used so often of the German army, yet must be repeated, because there is no other—whose only purpose is death. As that great fighting machine swung past, remorseless as a trip-hammer, efficient as a steam-roller, I could not but marvel how the gallant, chivalrous, and heroic but ill- prepared little army of Belgium had held it back so long."