The War Illustrated 24th October 1914

The Heroic Episode at Antwerp

 

 

The Belgian army's defense of Antwerp was a desperate gesture of heroism by a little nation dying in immortal fame with the hope of a glorious resurrection.

The double line of armored forts, designed thirty years ago by General Brialmont, had become worse than useless. With the surprising development in power of the new siege artillery, Antwerp had ceased to exist as a fortress. A line of earthworks in an open field would have been a safer defensive position.

When the modern French forts at Maubeuge fell, the doom of the old works at Antwerp, with their feebler guns, was plainly seen to be inevitable. The Belgian soldiers knew it. Some of them had fought at Liege until the German howitzers arrived. Others had retired at the last moment for escape from the swift, shattering downfall of Namur. They knew their defense was hopeless.

But their courage was of that flaming, passionate sort that puts things again and yet again to mortal hazard. Antwerp, their beloved Antwerp, with its atmosphere of romance, its treasures of native art, its multitude of free, independent townspeople, with its far-stretched lines of forts, built in the old days to shelter the whole army, could not be tamely surrendered as a matter of sound strategy. The Belgian would not play for safety. Cost what it might - even the destruction of the entire military forces of the nation - Antwerp should be held as long as possible, for honor's sake.

Magnificently did the Belgian troops act on this high resolution. Standing by the grave of their power as an independent people, they jumped in, rifle in hand, and used the grave as a fighting trench. After withdrawing into Antwerp on August 17th, they continually sallied out against the enemy's forces, and threatened the lines of communication between France and Germany. Four German army corps had to move about Belgium, on the defensive, at times when their help in France might have turned the tide of battle. By holding back these German reinforcements and keeping them in fierce conflict for over seven weeks, the Belgian army in Antwerp helped to win the victories to the south - on the Marne, on the Aisne, and at Arras.

At last, surprised, alarmed, disconcerted by the spirit and daring of the Belgian force, the German Military Staff resolved to bring their siege artillery from Maubeuge to Antwerp. In the second week in September there was heavy fighting south of the Belgian river port. The German and Austrian engineers were preparing the concrete emplacements for their two hundred big howitzers.

By September 28th the concrete had settled and hardened, and the artillery was brought up from Brussels. The following day the bombardment opened. The two southernmost forts, Waelem and Wavre Sainte Catheline, were attacked by the concentrated fire of the enormous howitzers, some of which threw picric shells weighing each a ton. The Belgian gunners were utterly powerless. Their old 4 in. and 6 in. Krupp guns were useless.

The hostile howitzers could not be seen. They fired high into the air, and the shells shattered down from the sky. It was impossible to calculate in which positions the artillery was concealed that fired them. This is the supreme advantage which mobile, attacking siege ordnance has gained through the invention of smokeless powder. It remains invisible, and movable if discovered by aerial reconnaissance, while the fort it is attacking is a plain, fixed, easy mark. With the new range-finding instruments, and the concentration of the fire of a hundred howitzers against the small numbers of guns in each fort. the destruction of any old fashioned armored and concrete fortress is very rapid.

It was somewhat too rapid in the first bombardment of Antwerp. One of the forts of the outer line quickly exploded and burst into high flame. A brigade of German infantry. entrenched just beyond the range of the Belgian guns, rose and ran forward to capture the ruined fort, and hold the gap in the fortressed line against the defending troops. But when they reached the fort, guns, Maxims, rifles, live electric-wire entanglements, caught them in a trap. The supposed explosion had been produced by pouring petrol on some lighted straw brought into the fort for the purpose. One-third of the German brigade fell round the slopes, the rest fled, with the shrapnel and Maxim fire sweeping them in their retreat.

This, however, was the only success that the Belgian gunners in the forts obtained. They could not reach the hostile artillery, and though they lighted more straw, and pretended to be lying all dead amid the wreck of their guns; the German troops would not advance again. In the meantime Fort Waelhem was really destroyed. This happened on Wednesday, September 30th, and en the following day two neighboring forts were silenced.

The terrible howitzer shells bent and smashed the steel cupolas, tore away. the armored concrete in masses as large as ordinary houses, exploded the magazines and knocked over the armament, The gunners who lived through the first inconceivable explosion had to fly at once from death in many forms - poisonous fumes, concussion, flying fragments of steel, falling masses of concrete, overturning guns. Like a solitary battleship foundering under the gunfire of a great fleet, the single forts fell one by one against the immense siege artillery designed for use by a million men against the fortifications of Paris.

But what the Germans won by their overpowering machinery of war they lost again in flesh and blood. For on October first their infantry tried to rush the trenches the Belgians hastily made between their silenced forts, and were hurled back with heavy losses.

Then the lighter German howitzers moved forward and searched the Belgian trenches with continual. shrapnel, night and day. till the Antwerp army was compelled to withdraw across the Nethe closer to the doomed city.

The new position was admirable. The well-made earthworks stretching along the flooded river, were stronger defenses than the old armored forts, under the flew conditions of artillery warfare with smokeless powder and aerial fire control. But two hundred great movable guns were needed to maintain the artillery duel. Of these great guns the defenders of Antwerp did not possess one. They had only light field artillery and the small Krupp guns fixed in the remaining forts.

By Saturday October 3rd, Antwerp was a city of dour despair, of hopeless courage. The machinery of attack had proved overwhelming .There was not much difference in. numbers between the defending and assaulting armies; but the differences in the heavy gun-power was enormous. It was like four hundred riflemen on a big lumber raft trying to beat off four hundred men on a modern cruiser.

Great was the joy: on Saturday evening, when the first part of the British Naval Brigade arrived in the falling city.

It was wildly hoped that the few big guns our men were. Bringing with them would alter the position of affairs. But so desperate was the situation in the trenches by the river that the British reinforcements of 8000 Marines and sailors seem in some cases, to have had no time to get their naval guns into action.

They had hurriedly to relieve some of the Belgian troops in the shrapnel-swept earthworks. Our men went into the trenches and occupied them until Tuesday morning, October 6th, seeing never an enemy to attack and having nothing to do but passively endure the terrific artillery fire from the great German guns far in the distance. And on Tuesday the German gunners pushed against the position to the right of the British trenches and held the Belgians with shrapnel, while the German infantry pierced the line.

 

A Bridge of Dead Bodies

 

Even in these terrible circumstances the Belgians lost none of their courage. Before the German troops could cross the river, their pontoons were destroyed by the defenders; and rebuilt and again destroyed. Then 3000 Germans tried to swim the Nethe. In the end, they walked from bank to bank, over the most horrible bridge man ever used - over the dead bodies of their comrades, piled above the sunken pontoons until they rose from the water.

On the ground thus terribly won, between the Nethe and the inner line of Antwerp forts, the Germans planted so many of their lighter howitzers, and gave notice to bombard the city. For their guns could now reach over the inner forts to the suburbs and center of the great old Belgian river port. What followed in Antwerp itself was not warfare, but the terrorization of half a million non-combatant townspeople. At midnight on Wednesday, October 7th, the first screaming shell fell around the houses and exploded;

Some of the suburbs burst into flame, as incendiary bombs rocketed across the smoky darkness. By the river an immense store of petrol was set alight to prevent the conqueror from using it. The. flames of the oil, the flames of the bombarded houses, the flash and thunder of the exploding shells aimed beautiful, romantic Antwerp into a scene of infernal splendor. In vague, vast, dim crowds the stricken; hopeless, helpless people fled at night by river and road into Holland - a sudden, tragic exodus of half a million men, women, and children, many of them refugees from the. burnt and ruined villages and towns of Belgium who had come to Antwerp for safety.

Such was the wild, confused, heartbreaking civilian aspect of the downfall of Belgium's last and greatest stronghold. But from the. purely military point Of view, the fall of the famous city was in a way a triumph for Belgian arms rather than a disaster. For, with the exception of 18000 Belgian soldiers, chiefly volunteers, and some 2000 British troops who crossed into Holland - many of them intentionally directed, or rather misdirected thither by a German spy, who will never again render a traitor service to his masters - and were interned by the Dutch; the Belgian army and British brigades fought their way to the coast, losing neither guns nor armored trains.

On Thursday night, October 8th, when the Germans were trying to cut the line of retreat, the defenders of Antwerp marched out towards Ostend, leaving some of their forts on the eastern side still firing bravely.

The Belgians defense or Antwerp was a glorious close to the campaign for civilization which they opened two months before at Liege. At Antwerp the Belgians rose to their greatest height of heroism.

 

Saved France From a Stab in the Back

 

Even as they had helped France mightily at Liege, so did they help her at Antwerp. They diverted against themselves, by their. audacity of menace, the great siege train which the Germans would have liked to have shifted from Maubeuge to the Verdun-Toul fortressed line in Eastern France. In the. middle of this fortressed line; at Saint Mihiel, the Germans had made a gap. With two hundred heavy howitzers sent through Metz, they might have so widened the gap as to have poured ah army against the rear of the Allied front on the Aisne.

The Belgians at Antwerp prevented this stab in the back of their friends; Never can Britain and France repay Belgium. Eternal glory Is hers and the passionate admiration of every soul that prizes the highest things in civilization.