The Bombardment Of Antwerp



There was something typically British in the way those Englishmen
went about the defense of Antwerp. In the streets and barracks, and
more especially at the Hotel St. Antoine, British Staff Headquarters,
where I stayed until its doors were closed, I saw them at close range
during that week of horror. Once when I was eating with a company
of marines near their temporary barracks, they gave me the
password to the trenches, and, although I only got out as far as the
inner line of forts on that day, it gave me an opportunity to observe
the work of the men under long-range firing. At the St. Antoine, ten or
a dozen officers were quartered; others clanked in and out for hurried
conferences in the corridors or disappeared into the smoking-room,
whose heavy doors with the sign, "Reservee pour la Gouvernement
Anglaise," hid Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the English
Admiralty, and his portmanteau of war maps.

Here was Belgium's last stronghold on the verge of downfall: the
outer line of forts had already fallen; Forts Wavre, St. Catherine,
Waelham, and Lierre were already prey to the Krupp mortars; the
German hosts were swarming across the River Nethe, six miles to
the city's south, and the cowering populace in their flight made the
streets terrible to look upon.

Yet at the St. Antoine there was no particular flurry--so far, at least,
as the officers were concerned. At night they worked over their war
maps; in the daytime they went out to the forts. They would get up in
the morning, an hour or two earlier than the average business man, have