




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 carried us safely through mine fields and between
lanes of British torpedo boats and torpedo boat destroyers.  We
landed on the Continent at Flushing.  Thence we headed for The
Hague, Holland, the neutral gateway of northern Europe, where we
found the American Minister, Dr. Henry van <DW18>, and his first
secretary, Marshall Langhorne, shouldering the work of the American
Legation in its chameleonesque capacity as bank, post-office,
detective bureau, bureau of information, charity organization, and one
might even say temporary home for the stranded travelers of every
rank and nation.

Antwerp, the temporary capital of Belgium, was at this time invested,
but not yet besieged, by the German army.  On the south the city was
already cut off by several regiments of the Ninth and Tenth German
Army Corps under General von Boehn.  The River Scheldt and the
Dutch border formed a wall on the north and west.  It was to Antwerp,
therefore, that we determined to go.  After listening to the usual flood
of warnings against entering the fighting zone, and drinking our fill of
stories of atrocity and hate which every refugee brought across the
border into Holland, we took a couple of reefs in our baggage, and,
hoisting our knapsacks, set our course for the temporary Belgian
capital.  By rail we traveled south across the level fields and lush
green meadows of Holland, over bridges ready to be dynamited in
case of invasion, and through training camps of the 450,000 Dutch
soldiers then mobilized along the border.  At a little town called
Eschen the train stopped because the Belgians had torn up the
tracks.

Seated on the cross-piece of a joggling two-wheeled ox cart, moving
at the rate of not more than four miles an hour, with a dumb
specimen for a driver