From the Trenches: Louvain to the Aisne, the First Record of an Eye-WitnessYoung, Geoffrey Winthrop
History
From the Trenches: Louvain to the Aisne, the First Record of an Eye-Witness
Young, Geoffrey Winthrop
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
Fine fellows these little Belgians; intelligent and quick to respond.
Rather weary now and strained, for many of them have been already long
in the field. Day and night they have been fighting at odds of ten
to one. They are men who think, and they fight the better for it. A
desperately exhausting fight it is. Dispersed in parties over their
immense front, they have to rush and concentrate the moment that one
of the small squadrons of German cavalry, infinitely scattered, is
signalled. Some, thus, have been in three separate engagements on one
day, in different places. But they are as stout-hearted as ever. Tell
them what the world thinks of their heroism, and they smile with half
humorous pleasure. Tell them what we guess of the nearness of their
allies, and they crowd round with an unselfconscious delight that is
not for themselves but for their nation and their cause.
As we pass among them, in their "rest" moments, it is easy to make them
cluster, laughing like a crowd of alert boys; but in the fighting line
they are tense as wires, with a concentrated sternness that the Germans
are learning to respect.
"I have sabred two this morning," a powerful, brown-faced lad, a
cavalryman, who had just finished bandaging a German dragoon with a
broken back, said to me drowsily to-day. This was in a cottage at
Haelen.
Haelen, the wrecked village, where the Belgians have proved their
heroism in the field, has to-day been the scene of renewed attacks
and unshaken resistance. The Germans, who lost 2,000 out of 5,000 in
the two days' fighting, had to fall back upon the base of their army
corps at Kermpt; but they have been pressing, pressing forward again in
overwhelming numbers.
The fields outside the village are a terrible sight: littered with dead
men and horses, broken guns, twisted lances. In one trench alone twelve
hundred Germans were being buried, and the harrow was passed over the
brown scar as soon as it was filled in. Cottages burned and black with
shell fire, with dead cattle in the sheds. There were furrows where
the shell had ploughed; and trampled heaps in the crops and among the
bloodstained roots, where the charging horses had been mown down in
masses.
Among the fragments of leather and helmets were a number of scraps of
letters and postcards, carried by the soldiers in case of death, and
a German collection of sacred songs for the campaign. These things are
better left as they lie, and it is unwise, in running between rival
armies, to risk carrying "mementoes" of battle. One very touching
letter, however, that I found here, was carried home by a friend, and
as my translation has already appeared, it may be reproduced:
"Sweetheart,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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