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VI
THREE UNKNOWN HEROES
1
THE Belgian government
published last year a Reply to the German White Book of 10 May
1915.
This reply gives peremptory
and categorical denials to all the allegations in the White Book on the subject
of francs-tireurs, of
attacks by civilians and of the Belgian women's cruelty to the German
prisoners and wounded. It contains a body of authentic and overwhelming
evidence upon the massacres at Andenne, Dinant, Louvain and Aerschot which
enables history here and now to pronounce its verdict with even greater
certainty than the most scrupulous jury of a criminal court.
Among the most frightful
incidents reported in these accounts by eye-witnesses, I would linger to-day
upon only two of those which marked the sack of Aerschot; not that they are
more odious or cruel than the others -- on the contrary, beside the unprovoked
murders and wholesale executions at Andenne, Dinant and Louvain, which are of
unsurpassable horror, they seem almost kindly -- but I select them for the very
reason that they display more clearly than in its most violent excesses what we
may call the normal mentality of the German army and the abominable things
which it did when it believed itself to be acting with justice, moderation and
humanity. I select them above all because they show us the admirable and
touching state of mind, as displayed amidst a terrible ordeal, of a little
Belgian city, the most innocent of all the victims of this war, and offer for
our contemplation instances of simple and heroic self-sacrifice which have
escaped notice and which it is well to bring to light, for they are as
beautiful as the most splendid examples in the fairest pages of Plutarch.
2
Aerschot is a humble and happy
little town in Flemish Brabant, one of those modest unknown clusters of
habitations which, like Dinant, for ever to be regretted and buried in the
past, nobody used to visit, because they contained no buildings of note, but
which retained and represented all the more, in the depths of their silence and
their placid isolation, Flemish life in its most special, intimate, intense,
traditional, suave and peaceable aspect. In these half-rustic little cities we
find hardly any industries, at most a malt-kiln or two, a corn-mill, an
oil-works, a chicory-factory. Their life is almost agricultural; and the
well-to-do inhabitants live on the produce or the rents of their fields, their
meadows and their woods. The houses in the church-square are substantial-looking,
more or less cubical in shape and painted virgin white; their carriage-gates
are adorned with glittering brasses. All through the week the square is almost
deserted and wakens into life only on market-days and on Sunday mornings, at
the hour of high mass. In a word, it is a picture of tranquillity, of placid
waiting for meals and repose, of drowsy, easy existence and perhaps of
happiness, if happiness consists in being happy in a half-slumber free of
remote ambitions, exaggerated passions or over-eager dreams.
It was here, in this
peaceful sojourn of immemorial restfulness, which not even the war had hitherto
disturbed below the surface, that, on the 19th of August, 1914, at nine o'clock
in the morning, after the retreat of the last Belgian soldiers, the square was
suddenly invaded by a dense and endless stream of German troops. The
burgomaster's son, a lad of fifteen, hurried to close the Venetian shutters of
his father's house and was wounded in the leg by one of the bullets which the
victors fired at random through the windows.
At ten o'clock, the German
officer in command sent for the burgomaster, M. Tielemans, to appear at the
Town-hall. He was received with insults, hustled and abused for a Schweinhund, or pig-dog, a species of
animal which appears to be indigenous to Germany.
Next, Colonel Stenger,
commanding the 8th infantry brigade, and his two aides-de-camp took up their
quarters in the burgomaster's house in the church-square and, I may add in
passing, forthwith broke open all the drawers in their rooms, after which they
went to the balcony and watched the march-past of their troops.
At four o'clock in the
afternoon, obsessed by the delusion of francs-tireurs,
some soldiers, seized with panic, began to fire shots in the streets. The
colonel, standing on the balcony, was hit by a German bullet and fell. One of
the aides-de-camp rushed downstairs shouting:
"The colonel is dead! I
want the burgomaster!"
M. Tielemans felt that his
time was come:
"This is a serious
matter for me," he said to his wife.
She squeezed his hand and
urged him to keep courage. The burgomaster was arrested and ill-treated by the
soldiers. In vain his wife remarked to the captain that her husband and son
could not have fired, since they possessed no weapons.
"That makes no difference,"
replied the bully in uniform; "he's responsible. Also," he added,
"I want your son."
This son was the boy of
fifteen who had been wounded in the leg. As he had a difficulty in walking,
because of his wound, he was brutally jostled before his mother's eyes and
escorted with kicks to the Town-hall, there to join his father.
Meanwhile this same captain,
persisting in his contention that his men had been fired upon, compelled Madame
Tielemans to go through the house with him, from cellar to attic. He was obliged
to observe that all the rooms were empty and all the windows closed. Throughout
this inspection, he threatened the poor woman with his revolver. Her daughter
placed herself between her mother and their sinister visitor, who did not
understand. When they returned to the hall downstairs, the mother asked him:
"What is to become of
us?" Coldly, he replied:
"You will be shot; so
will your daughter and your servants."
The pillage and the
methodical setting on fire of the town now began. All the houses on the
right-hand side of the square were in flames. From time to time, the soldiers
apostrophized the women, shouting:
"You're going to be
shot, you're going to be shot!"
"At that moment,"
says Madame Tielemans, in her sworn deposition, "the soldiers were leaving
our house, their arms filled with bottles of wine. They opened the windows and
removed all the contents of our rooms. I turned away so as not to behold the
pillage. By the lurid light of the burning houses, my eyes fell upon my
husband, my son and my brother-in-law, accompanied by some other gentlemen who
were being led to execution. Never shall I forget the sight nor the look on the
face of my husband seeking his house for the last time and asking himself what
had befallen his wife and daughter, while I, lest I should sap his courage,
could not call out, 'I am here!' "
The hours passed. The women
were driven out of the town and led like a herd of cattle, along a road strewn
with corpses, to a distant meadow, where they were penned until morning. The men
were arrested and their hands tied behind their backs with copper wire so
cruelly tightened as to draw blood. They were gathered into groups and made to
lie down so that their heads touched the ground and they were unable to make
any movement. The night was spent in this way, with the town burning and the
pillage and orgy continuing.
Between five and six in the
morning, the military authorities decided that the executions should begin and
that one of the largest groups of prisoners, composed of about a hundred
civilians, should be present at the death of the burgomaster, his son and his
brother. An officer informed the burgomaster that his hour had come. On hearing
these words, a citizen of Aerschot, Claes van Nuffel by name, went up to the
officer, begged him to spare the chief magistrate's life and offered to die in
his stead. He added that he was the burgomaster's political adversary, but that
he considered that, at this moment, M. Tielemans was essential to the town.
"No," replied the officer, harshly, "we must have the burgomaster."
M. Tielemans stood up,
thanked M. van Nuffel and said that he would die with an easy mind, as he had
spent his existence doing all the good in his power, and that he would not beg
for mercy. He entreated, however, that the lives of his fellow-citizens and of
his son, a boy of fifteen and his mother's last consolation, might be spared.
The officer grinned and made no reply. The burgomaster's brother next asked
for mercy, not for himself but for his brother and his nephew. His request fell
on deaf ears. The lad then got up and took his place between his father and his
uncle. Six soldiers took aim at ten yards' distance; the officer lowered his
sword; and, as the widow of the heroic burgomaster says, "the best man in
this world had ceased to exist."
3
I will now quote from the
evidence of M. Gustave Nys, an eye-witness of the horrible drama which nearly
numbered him among its victims:
"The other civilians
were thereupon placed in rows of three. The third in each row was to leave it
and fall out behind the dead bodies, in order to be shot. All the civilians had
their hands tied behind their backs. My brother and I stood next to each other:
I was number two; my brother Omer, twenty years of age, was number three. I asked the officer, 'May I change
places with my brother? It makes no difference to you who falls under your
bullets; but it does to my mother, who is a widow, for my brother has finished
his studies and is more useful to her than I am.' Once again he refused to
listen to my prayer. 'Fall out, number three!' My brother and I embraced; and
he joined the others. There were thirty of them, drawn up in line. Then a
horrible scene took place: the German soldiers, walking slowly along the row,
killed three at each discharge of their rifles, waiting between the volleys for
the officer's word of command."
4
Incidents such as these
would pass unperceived if one did not take the trouble to seek them out and to
collect them piously amid the huge mass of tragedies which for more than four
years upset and ravaged the unhappy country tortured by its invaders. Had they
occurred in the history of Greece or Rome, they would have found a place among
the great deeds that honour our earth and deserve to live for ever in the
memory of man. It is our duty to make them known for a moment and to engrave in
our recollection the names of those who were their heroes. Thus set down,
simply and plainly, as befits historic truth, in depositions sworn under oath
before a nameless registrar who has stripped them of any literary or
sentimental embellishment, they give at first but a very faint idea of the
intensity of the tragedy and the value of the sacrifice. There is here no
question of a glorious death faced amid the excitement of the fighting, on a vast
field of battle. Nor are we considering an indefinite or overhanging menace, or
an uncertain, remote and perhaps avoidable danger. We have to do with an
obscure, solitary, horrible and imminent death in a ditch; and the six
rifle-barrels are there, aimed almost point-blank, ready, upon a sign of the
officer who accepts your offer, to change you, in a second, into a heap of
bleeding flesh and to send you to the unknown, terrible region which man dreads
all the more when he is still full of strength and life. There is not a
moment's interval nor a gleam of hope between question and answer, between
existence with all its joys and death with all its horrors. There is no
encouragement, no word or gesture of stimulation or support, no reward; in an
instant, all is given in exchange for nothing; it is sheer self-sacrifice
standing naked and so pure that we are surprised that not even Germans were
conquered by its beauty.
There was but one manner in
which they could have extricated themselves without dishonour and that was to
pardon the two victims; or else, supposing the thing which was not, which never
is the case, that a death was absolutely necessary, there was a second
solution, which was to accept the offer and to kill the martyr whom they ought
to have worshipped on their knees. In this way they would only have acted as
the worst of savages. But they discovered a third, which doubtless, before
them, the Carthaginians alone would have invented and adopted. For that matter,
they exceeded the fiercest savagery and equalled the abominable Punic morality
in another case which brings to mind that of Regulus and which will be the
third instance of heroism that I intend to recall.
5
A few days after the events
which I have narrated, on the 23rd of August, 1914, Dinant became the scene of
wholesale massacres which involved exactly six hundred and six victims,
including eleven children under five years old, twenty-eight of ages between
ten and fifteen and seventy-one women.
Nothing can give an idea of
the horror and infamy of these massacres, which form one of the most
disgraceful and terrible pages in the long and monstrous history of Teuton
shame. But it is not my purpose to speak of this for the moment. There would be
too much to tell. I wish to-day only to separate from the mass an episode in
which the hero of Dinant-la-Wallone is worthy of a place beside his two
brethren of Aerschot in Flanders.
Just outside Dinant, near
the famous Roche à Bayard, the legendary glory of the fair and smiling little
township, the Germans occupied the right bank of the Meuse and were beginning
to build a bridge of boats. The French, hidden in the bushes and the windings
of the left bank, were firing on the engineers. Their fire was not very
well-sustained; and the Germans, without the least justification, drew the
conclusion that it was due to francs-tireurs,
who, for that matter, throughout this Belgian campaign, never existed
except in their imagination. At that moment, eighty hostages, taken from among
the inhabitants of Dinant, were collected and kept in sight at the foot of the
rock. The German officer sent one of them, M. Bourdon, a clerk attached to the
law-courts, to the left bank, to inform the enemy that, if the firing
continued, all the hostages would be instantly shot. M. Bourdon crossed the
Meuse, fulfilled his mission and pluckily returned to reconstitute himself a
prisoner. He assured the officer that he had convinced himself that there were
no francs-tireurs and that only
French soldiers of the regular army were taking part in the defence of the
other bank. A few more bullets fell; and the officer caused the eighty hostages
to be shot, beginning, that he might be punished as he deserved for his heroic
faithfulness to his pledged word, with the poor clerk, his wife, his daughter and
his two sons, one of whom was a mere child of fifteen.
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