8.10. St. Trond.—This town is some twelve miles to the west of Tongres. As we felt our way slowly through the debris in the streets, I scrawled a few rough notes: “houses smashed… shambles… bitter faces Belgian civilians… they just starting to return… women sobbing… their menfolk?… where?… here houses destroyed at random… Stukas careless?… on purpose?… war of roads… the German army on wheels… Germans simply went up the roads… with tanks, planes, artillery, anti-tank stuff, everything… all morning, roads massed with supplies, troops going up… curious, not a single Allied plane yet… and these endless columns of troops, guns, supplies, stretching all the way from the German border… what a target!… Refugees streaming back along the roads in the dust and heat… tears your heart out….”
The refugees trudged up the road, old women lugging a baby or two in their old arms, the mothers lugging the family belongings. The lucky ones had theirs balanced on bicycles. The really lucky few on carts. Their faces—dazed, horrified, the lines frozen in sorrow and suffering, but dignified. What a human being can’t take! And survive and go on!—In a few hours they would go picking through the charred heaps of what the day before yesterday or so had been their homes.
8.30. Tirlemont.—A German officer remarks here: “It took us five days to get to Tirlemont.” We have come about a hundred kilometres from Aachen—twenty kilometres a day. Not bad. I notice that in all that distance I have not seen one bomb crater in the road. I deduce that while German Stukas put the Belgian railroad out of action, they were careful not to blow up the roads or their bridges. Apparently the German command decided in advance not to try to use the Belgian railways; only the roads. Their army was built to go on gasoline-motored vehicles.
We came to a terrific hole in the road, just as it crossed a creek at the entrance to the town. A pit thirty yards in diameter and twenty-five feet deep. The officer explained the French blew this one up.
“French dynamite experts,” he said. “At places they have done a beautiful job. But they did not stop our tanks. The tanks went round through the factory you see at the left, piercing the factory walls as if they were made of tissue paper, crossed the creek a couple of hundred yards upstream, and pursued the enemy. We lost little time,” he added, “even though you have to admit the French did a good job of it here.” His admiration for the French dynamiters was terrific.
Much evidence of street fighting here in Tirlemont. Houses pockmarked with machine-gun bullets; many levelled to the ground by Stukas and artillery.
9.15. Louvain.—This ancient university city, burnt by the Germans in a burst of fury in 1914, is now again—to a considerable extent—destroyed. That’s the first impression and somehow it hits me between the eyes. Block upon block upon block of houses an utter shambles. Still smouldering. For the town was only taken two or three days ago.
We drive through the ruins to the university, to the university library. It too was burned by the Germans in 1914, and rebuilt (rebooked too?) by donations from hundreds of American institutions of learning.
“What happened to the library?” I ask the local commandant, an elderly, pouch-faced colonel who is certainly not an unsympathisch fellow.
“We shall be there in a minute. You will see,” he says. He is silent for a moment. Maybe he notices my impatience. He adds: “There was a sharp battle here in the town itself. Heavy street fighting. Town changed hands several times. We would come in and they would drive us out. There was bound to be damage, mein Herr.”
It has been destroyed then, I conclude. In a minute we are there, driving up the square in front of the library, which is broken by rows of trenches. We climb out of our cars and look….
The great library building is completely gutted. The ruins still smoulder. Some of the girders that held the roof remain. The Tudor-like façade, blackened by smoke, holds out proudly, though a German soldier runs up to me as I approach and warns not to get too close, as the walls may cave in at any moment. We go in close, anyway.
I’m fascinated by the inscriptions on the stones. I note a few down on a scrap of paper: THE FINCH SCHOOL; UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER; PHILLIPS ACADEMY, ANDOVER; UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS; AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY WOMEN; PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA IN PENNSYLVANIA. And so on. They and many others of the kind donated the money to rebuild this library. I look for the famous inscription about which there was so much silly controversy (it doesn’t sound quite so silly today) between some of the American donors and the Belgian authorities about the time I first arrived in Europe in 1925 when the building was being completed. I can’t find it. I try to remember its exact wording and can’t. But I think it ran something like this: “Destroyed by German fury; rebuilt by American generosity.”
“And the books?” I ask my commandant, who strikes me more and more like a decent fellow. “Burnt,” he says, “all of them, probably.”
A Nazi worker with a gnarled, dishonest face, whose yellow arm-band proclaims his belonging to the Organisation Todt, which goes in after the German army and clears up the debris, comes up to me, and offers: “The British did it. Set it afire before they left. Typical, ain’t it?”
I do not say anything, but later when I have the colonel alone, I put it to him. He eyes me and shrugs his shoulders and says: “Mein Herr, there was a battle in this town, as I told you. Heavy fighting in the streets. Artillery and bombs. You see how much has been destroyed. I do not know myself that one building was destroyed differently from the next. Whether the library went like the others or in another way.”
Before we left Berlin a certain officer in the German army had come down to the Wilhelmplatz to tell us: “Gentlemen, we have just had word. From Louvain. The British have plundered that fine old town. Plundered it in the most shameful manner.”
We spend the morning in Louvain, looking over the ruins, snooping into some of the buildings that still stand, talking with the first returning inhabitants and with priests and nuns, some of whom have lived out the three-day battle huddling in the cellar of a near-by convent and monastery. We do not see or hear one shred of evidence that the British plundered the town. Nor—it is only fair to say—do any of the regular army officers suggest it.
When we enter the town at nine fifteen a.m., the battered streets are deserted. Not a civilian about; only a few troops and Arbeitsdienst men in Czech uniforms (are there not enough German uniforms to go around?) or Organisation Todt men in nondescript working clothes and yellow arm-bands.
Forty-one thousand people lived in Louvain until the morning Hitler moved west. A week later, when the Nazi army poured into the town, not a one of them was there. How many civilians were killed we could not find out. Probably very few. Perhaps none. What happened was that the population, gripped by fear of the Nazi hordes and remembering no doubt how the last time the Germans came, in 1914, two hundred of the leading citizens, held as hostages, had been shot in reprisal for alleged sniping, fled the city before the Germans arrived.
When we leave, about noon, we see the first ones straggling back. Look at their faces. Dazed. So… horror-stricken. So… bitter and resentful. And yet—so dignified! I see it—dignity masking suffering is, in a way, on the human face at such moments, a noble and even a beautiful thing. Our super-sophisticates like Aldous Huxley need to see more of this—in the flesh, amongst the ruins.
Our commandant takes us to the Cathedral and the City Hall. Except for a broken window or two, they are untouched. They must have escaped the burning of the town in 1914, for they are not new edifices. A German officer remarks to me: “The Stukas have one advantage over ordinary bombers.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“They’re more accurate. See how the Rathaus and Cathedral here have been spared. Ordinary bombers attacking the town probably would have hit them, too. Not our Stukas. They hit their targets.”
We file into the City Hall. In a long mediaeval hall, probably the reception room, for it’s in the front, we see immediately that this has been
a British headquarters. On a large table made of unpainted wood: maps, note pads, whisky bottles, beer bottles, cans of biscuits with their quaint English labels. They bear evidence that the British were but lately here.
A corridor leads off to smaller, inner rooms where various British officers seem to have installed themselves. On their desks, more maps, French-English dictionaries. On one I notice an artillery manual. The floor in one room is bloodstained. The commandant ventures the information that two wounded Belgians bled to death there. In each room under the sweeping Renaissance paintings on the walls, dishevelled mattresses on which the British slept. Most of them bloodstained, as if in the last days they were used not to sleep on, but to die on.
When we leave the City Hall, filing out through the large reception room I notice that a great bronze plaque standing against the back wall has been tampered with, and one half ripped away and removed.
“How about it?” I ask an officer.
He puffs out something about the honour of the German armed forces, and that this plaque commemorated the martyrs of Louvain—the two hundred civilians who were shot as hostages by the German army in 1914, and that, as the whole world knew, those two hundred leading citizens had only been shot as a result of the Belgians’ sniping at German soldiers,22 and that the plaque said something about the barbarity of the German soldiers, and that there was the honour of the German army to uphold, and that as a consequence the half of the plaque which told of the “heroic martyrs and the barbaric Germans” had been removed, but that the other half, commemorating the heroic deeds of the Belgian army in 1914 in defence of the land, had been left because the Germans had nothing against that—just the opposite.
In the shambles of the square by the railroad station a massive monument in stone around which Germans and British fought this time for three days still stands. It also commemorates the good burghers who were shot in 1914. It even lists their names. So far the Germans have not dynamited it.
We pause on the square for breath. Refugees, fear on their faces still, and shock, begin to trickle in, picking their way over the ruins. They are silent, bitter, proud. Though it breaks your heart to do it, we stop a few and try to question them. Some of our number want to get to the bottom of the German charge that the British set fire to the Louvain library in the belief that the Germans would be blamed and American opinion thus further inflamed against the Nazis. But eyeing the German officers with us, they grow sly, act shy, and tell us nothing. They saw nothing, they all insist. They were not in the town during the fighting. They had fled to the hills.
“How could I see anything?” one old man protests, glaring bitterly at the Germans. A Belgian priest is just as cagey. “I was in the cellar of the monastery,” he says. “I prayed for my flock.” A German nun tells how she and fifty-six children huddled in the cellar of the convent for three days. She does remember that the bombs started falling Friday morning, the 10th. That there was no warning. The bombs were not expected. Belgium was not in the war. Belgium had done nothing to anybody…. She pauses and notices the German officers eyeing her.
“You’re German, aren’t you?” one of them says.
“Ja.” Then she puts in hurriedly, in a frightened voice: “Of course, as a German, I was glad when it was all over and the German troops arrived.”
The commandant, encouraged, wants to take us out to the convent to speak to more German nuns, but we figure it is only for propaganda, and urge the officers of our party to push on. We set out for Brussels.
About noon we are speeding along a dusty road towards Brussels when someone sights Steenockerzeel and the mediaeval-like old castle where Otto von Habsburg and his mother, Zita, former Empress of Austria-Hungary, have been living. We stop to take a look. It has been bombed.
Otto’s castle is an ancient edifice, ugly with its numerous towers and conglomerate outline. Around it is a muddy moat. As we approach we see that a part of the roof has been blown off, and one wall looks shaky. Windows broken. Evidently there has been concussion from a high explosive. Coming closer we see two huge bomb craters, actually forming a part of the moat and enlarging it. The house obviously still stands only because both bombs, and they must have been five-hundred-pounders at least, fell in the moat, and the water and mud deadened the explosive force. The moat being but sixty feet from the castle, the bombs were certainly well aimed. Evidently the work of Stukas.
But why bomb Otto von Habsburg’s castle? I ask an officer. He can’t figure it out. Finally he suggests: “It was undoubtedly used by the British as headquarters. It would therefore be a fair military target.” Later when we have gone through the castle from bottom to top, we find no evidence that the British have been there.
The castle, we soon notice, once we are inside, has been plundered, though not very well. There is evidence that the occupants left in great haste. In the upstairs bedrooms women’s clothes are lying on the floor, on chairs, on beds, as if those who were there could not make up their minds what dress to take, and did not have the time nor the luggage space to take very much. All the closets are filled with dresses and robes, hanging neatly from hangers. In one room, occupied by a man, books, sweaters, suits, golf-sticks, victrola records, and notebooks are scattered about. In the salon downstairs, a large room furnished in horrible bourgeois taste, books and notebooks and china lie in disorder on a large table. An enormous book on bugs had evidently been well thumbed through by someone, perhaps Otto. In what I take to be his study upstairs, I notice a book in French entitled: The Coming War. I look over his books. There are some very good ones in French, German, English. Obviously he had an excellent taste in books. Many, of course, are his university textbooks, on politics, economics, etc.
We rummage for a half-hour through the rooms. They are poorly furnished for the most part. The bathrooms very primitive. I remember the splendour I’ve seen in the Hofburg in Vienna, where the Habsburgs ruled so long. A far cry to this. Some of our party are loading up with souvenirs, swords, ancient pistols, various knick-knacks. I pick up a page of English composition which Otto evidently did when he was boning up on his English prior to his recent visit to America. Feel like a robber. A German officer hands me Otto’s student cap. Sheepishly I take it. Someone discovers some of Zita’s personal calling cards and hands me one. It says: “L’Impératrice d’Autriche et Reine de Hongrie.” I pocket it, plunderer that I am. A sad, hungry, bewildered dog wanders around the litter in the rooms and follows us out to our car. We leave the castle to him. No human being is about.
From Steenockerzeel to Brussels the roads are jammed with German army trucks and motorized guns speeding westward, on the right side; on the left side an unbroken column of tired refugees returning in the heat and the dust to their destroyed towns. An appetite for a good hearty lunch in Brussels had been growing in me. This sight takes it away.
2 p.m., Brussels.—Brussels has been spared—the one lone city in Belgium that has not been in whole or in part laid waste. Hitler threatened to bomb or destroy it on the ground that the Belgians were moving troops through it and that it was no longer an open city. Perhaps its rapid fall saved it.
Here and there, as you drive through the town, you see a demolished house where a stray German bomb fell (just to terrorize the people?). And all the bridges over the canal in the middle of the city—and there must have been a dozen of them—were blown up by the British….
It’s a warm late-spring day, and the streets are thronged with the local inhabitants. The same bitter, but proud faces we have seen in the other towns. The German officer in charge of our four cars stops to ask a passer-by the way to a restaurant where we are booked to eat. The gentleman, a professorial-looking fellow with a beard and a wide-brimmed black hat, gives directions. He is coolly polite. The officer thanks him with a salute. The professor tips his hat stiffly.
Soon we are in the centre of town, in front of the East Station, and speeding, the claxon shrieking ruthlessly and needlessly, down the street to the square in fron
t of the Hotel Metropole. How many days and nights I’ve walked this street in the time of peace… observed the good burghers of Brussels, the painted whores, the streets full of good things you never saw in Germany, oranges, bananas, butter, coffee, meat; the movie fronts with posters of the latest from Hollywood and Paris, the café terraces, always jammed on the square.
We eat at the Taverne Royale, which I often frequented when in Brussels. I’m a little embarrassed showing up there with German officers. Fortunately the head waiter and his staff do not recognize me—or act as if they didn’t. The restaurant, like the Hotel Metropole, has been taken over by the army, though during the meal two or three civilians stray in and are served—as exceptions, I suppose. We eat well. The Germans from the Foreign Office and the Propaganda Ministry and the officers, especially. Food like this has not been available in Berlin for years.
Some of our party buy out the restaurant’s stock of American tobacco in a few minutes. I take three packages of Luckies myself. I cannot resist after a year of smoking “rope” in Germany. I will save them for breakfast; one a day, after. Most buy by the carton, which relieves my conscience. We pay in marks at the absurd rate of ten francs to one mark. After lunch most of the party go out to plunder with their paper marks, now worth a great deal. They buy shoes, shirts, raincoats, women’s stockings, everything. One Italian buys coffee, tea, two gallons of cooking oil, besides shoes and clothes.
F. and I go off to find a shop I used to patronize here; not to buy, but to talk. The wife of the patron is tending it. She half remembers me. She is dazed, frightened—but brave. She does not yet realize what has happened. She says: “It came so suddenly. I can’t get it straight yet. First the German attack. Then the government fled. We didn’t know what was happening. Then Friday [today is the following Monday], about eight in the evening, the Germans marched in.” She admits the German soldiers are behaving “correctly.”
Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941 Page 31
