The Red Glutton: With the German Army at the FrontCobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
History
The Red Glutton: With the German Army at the Front
Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Western Front; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
Perhaps there were no horses left in the stalls--thanks to either
Belgian foragers or to German--or, if there were horses, no driver
would risk his hide on the open road among the German pack trains and
rear guards. At length we did find a tall, red-haired Walloon who said
he would go anywhere on earth, and provide a team for the going, if we
paid the price he asked. We paid it in advance, in case anything should
happen on the way, and he took us in a venerable open carriage behind
two crow-bait skeletons that had once, in a happier day when hay was
cheaper, been horses.
We drove slowly, taking the middle of the wide Brussels road. On our
right, traveling in the same direction, crawled an unending line of
German baggage wagons and pontoon trucks. On our left, going the
opposite way, was another line, also unending, made up of refugee
villagers, returning afoot to the towns beyond Louvain from which they
had fled four days earlier. They were footsore and they limped; they
were of all ages and most miserable-looking. And, one and all, they
were as tongueless as so many ghosts. Thus we traveled; and at the end
of the first hour came to the tiny town of Leefdael.
At Leefdael there must have been fighting, for some of the houses were
gutted by shells. At least two had been burned; and a big tin sign at
a railroad crossing had become a tin colander where flying lead had
sieved it. In a beet patch beside one of the houses was a mound of
fresh earth the length of a long man, with a cross of sticks at the
head of it. A Belgian soldier's cap was perched on the upright and a
scrap of paper was made fast to the cross arm; and two peasants stood
there apparently reading what was written on the paper. Later such
sights as these were to become almost the commonest incidents of our
countryside campaignings; but now we looked with all our eyes.
Except that the roadside ditches were littered with beer bottles and
scraps of paper, and the road itself rutted by cannon wheels, we saw
little enough after leaving Leefdael to suggest that an army had come
this way until we were in the outskirts of Brussels. In a tree-edged,
grass-plotted boulevard at the edge of the Bois, toward Tervueren,
cavalry had halted. The turf was scarred with hoofprints and strewed
with hay; and there was a row of small trenches in which the Germans
had built their fires to do their cooking. The sod, which had been
removed to make these trenches, was piled in neat little terraces,
ready to be put back; and care plainly had been taken by the troopers
to avoid damaging the bark on the trunks of the ash and elm trees.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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