




THE LOG OF A NONCOMBATANT

by Horace Green

Staff Correspondent of the New York Evening Post
Special Correspondent of the Boston Journal

1915




Preface

In the following pages the ego is thickly spread.  Their publication is
the result of persuasion from many sources that, before returning to
the war zone, I should put into connected form my personal
experiences as correspondent during the first year of the War of
Nations.  A few of these adventures were mentioned in news letters
from the Continent, where I limited myself so far as possible to
descriptions of armies at war and peoples in time of stress; but the
greater part of them were merely jotted down from time to time for my
own benefit in "The Log of a Noncombatant."



Contents

I.    From Broadway To Ghent
II.   The Second Bombardment Of Termonde
III.  Captive
IV.   A Clog Dance On The Scheldt
V.    The Bombardment Of Antwerp
VI.   The Surrender Of Antwerp
VII.  Spying On Spies
VIII. The Sorrow Of The People

Appendix: Atrocities




The Log Of A Noncombatant

Chapter I

From Broadway To Ghent



When the war broke out in August, 1914, I was at work in the City
Room of the "New York Evening Post." One morning, during the first
week of activities, the copy boy handed me a telegram which was
signed "Luther, Boston," and contained the rather cryptic message:
--"How about this fight?"

It was some moments before I could recall the time, more than two
years before, when I had last seen the writer, Willard B.  Luther,
Boston lawyer, devotee of some, and critic of many kinds of sport.

We had been sitting on that previous occasion--a crowd of college
fellows, including Luther and myself--in a certain room in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from the University in that
neighborhood where Luther had attended the Law School and the
rest of us, on our respective graduation days, had received valuable
pieces of parchment with the presidential signature attached.  The
conversation had already run through the question of Votes for
Women, progressive politics, and prize-fights, and before the card
game began it had settled on the last-named, chiefly because of my
own vainglorious description of adventures at Reno, Nevada, at the
time of the Jeffries-Johnson battle for the heavyweight championship
of the world.  I remember telling with some gusto of my first
newspaper interview--one with "Bob" Fitzsimmons, then the Old
Man of the ring, and "Gentleman" Jim Corbett, who was Jeffries'
trainer at Reno.

"I had always wanted to see that performance," said Luther, "and
would have gone in a flash if I could have got any one to make the
trip with me.  But remember this fact: whenever the next big fight is
held I'm going with you." Later in the evening we shook hands on the
proposition.

At the time that Luther's telegram came I was planning to start for the
Continent as Staff Correspondent of the "New York Evening Post"
and Special Correspondent of the "Boston Journal." Remembering
that Cambridge agreement I immediately wired:--

"Yes.  This fight will do."

So that is how it came to pass that Luther and myself boarded the
Campania together, landed in Liverpool, cast about for ways and
means of getting into the scrimmage, and for the first month and a
half of my four months of wandering on the Continent were brother
conspirators, until the duties of partnership called my friend home and
left me without a companion in adventure.

In London we absorbed to some extent a heavy British fog and to a
greater extent British public opinion.  We marveled at the exterior calm
of a nation plunged in the greatest of wars, yet fighting, so it seemed
at the time, with its top hat on and its smile still undisturbed.  Across
the English Channel three days later the Dutch steam packet
Princess Juliana