Eyewitness: Antwerp Occupied

Fleeing Before the Enemy Arrives

From: A Woman's Experiences in the Great War by Louise Mack

The last steamer had gone from the Port. The last of the fleeing inhabitants had departed by the Breda Gate. All that was left now was the empty city, waiting for the entrance of the Germans. Empty were the streets. Empty were the boats, crowded desolately on the Scheldt. Empty were those hundreds of deserted motor cars, heaped in great weird, pathetic piles down at the water's edge, as useless as though they were perambulators because there were no chauffeurs to drive them. Empty was the air of sound except for the howling of dogs that ran about in terror, crying miserably for their owners who had been obliged to desert them. Through the emptiness of the air, when the dogs were not howling, resounded only a terrible, ferocious silence, that seemed to call up mocking memories of the noise the shells had been making incessantly, ever since two nights ago. . . 

The whole city was mine. I seemed to be the only living being left. I passed hundreds of tall, white, stately houses, all shattered and locked and silent and deserted. I went through one wide, deadly street after another. I looked up and down the great paralyzed quays. I stared through the yellow avenues of trees. I heard my own footsteps echoing, echoing. The ghosts of five hundred thousand people floated before my vision. For weeks, for months, I had seen these five hundred thousand people laughing and talking in these very streets. And yesterday, and the day before, I had seen them fleeing for their lives out of the city-anywhere, anywhere, out of the reach of the shells and the Germans.

The German Army Begins Arriving

It is now half-past one, and I am back at the hotel.

At least, my watch says it is half-past one.

But all the many great gold-faced clocks in Antwerp have stopped the day before, and their hands point mockingly to a dozen different times.

One knows that only some ghastly happening could have terrified them into such wild mistakes.

Heart-breaking it is, as well as appalling, to see those distracted timepieces, and their ignorance of the fatal hour.

Half-past one!

And the clocks point pathetically to eleven, or eight, or five.

Inside the great dim restaurant a pretence of lunch is going on between the little handful of people left.

Everybody sits at one table, the chauffeur, Henri, the refugees from Lierre, their maidservant, Jeanette, the proprietor, and his old sister, and his two little grandchildren, and their father, the porter, and a couple of very ugly old Belgians, who seem to belong to nobody in particular, and have sprung from nobody knows where.

We have some stewed meat with potatoes, a rough, ill-cooked dish.

This is the first bad meal I have had in Antwerp.

But what seems extraordinary to me, is that there should be any meal at all!

As we sit round the table in the darkness of that lurid noontide, the dead city outside looks in through the broken windows, and there comes over us all a tension so great that nobody can utter a word.

We are all thinking the same thing.

We are thinking with our dull, addled, clouded brains that the Germans will be here at any minute.

And then suddenly the waiter cries out in a loud voice from across the restaurant:

"LES ALLEMANDS!"

We all spring to our feet. We stand for a moment petrified.

Through the great uncurtained windows of the hotel we see one grey figure, and then another, walking along the side-path up the Avenue de Commerce.

"They have come!" says everyone.

After a moment's hesitation M. Claude, the proprietor, and his old sister, move out into the street, and mechanically I, and all the others follow as if afraid to be left alone within. 

A Statement of Who Is in Charge

Here they come, a long grey line of foot-soldiers and mounted men, all with pink roses or carnations in their grey tunics.  Gendarmes in giant bearskins, chasseurs in uniforms of green and yellow, carabineers with their shiny leather hats, grenadiers, infantry of the line, guides, lancers, sappers and miners with picks and spades, engineers with pontoon-wagons, machine-guns drawn by dogs, ambulances with huge Red Cross flags fluttering above them, and cars, cars, cars, all the dear old familiar American makes among them, contributed to form a mighty river flowing towards Antwerp.