Berlin Diary (64 page)

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 front 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.”

“Where’s your husband?” I ask.

“I don’t know. He was mobilized. He went to the front. I’ve heard nothing. I only keep hoping he is alive.”

A couple of German soldiers sauntered in and bought half a dozen packages of American cigarettes each. In Germany the most they would have been allowed to buy would have been ten bad German cigarettes. When they had gone, she said:

“I keep the store open. But for how long? Our stocks came from England and America. And my child. Where the milk? I’ve got canned milk for about two months. But after that—”

She paused. Finally she got it out:

“In the end, how will it be? I mean, do you think Belgium will ever be like before—independent, and with our King?”

“Well, of course, if the Allies win, it will be like the last time….” We gave the obvious reply.

“If? …But why do they retreat so fast? With the British and the French, we had more than a million men in Belgium. And they didn’t hold out as long as the few Belgians in 1914. I don’t understand it.”

We didn’t either, and we left. Back at the restaurant where our cars were waiting, some of our party were returning, their arms laden with booty. Many were not back yet, so F. and I wandered over to the Rathausplatz. Above the City Hall the Swastika floated in the afternoon sun. Otherwise, except for the German troops clustered about, the square looked the same. We spotted the offices of an American bank. We went inside and asked for the manager. Previously at luncheon we had asked the Germans to take us to the American Embassy, but they had refused. The American Embassy
staff fled with the Belgian government, they told us. I protested that at least a secretary of Embassy would have been left in charge. No, they claimed, only a porter was left. This was manifestly an untruth, but F. and I gave it up. It was too far to walk in the short time we had.

The two managers of the bank—one had arrived from New York two days before Belgium was invaded—seemed glad to see us. Our Ambassador Cudahy and his entire staff had remained in Brussels, they told us. But they had been unable to communicate with the outside world. So far as they knew, all Americans were safe. Some, along with a party of Jewish refugees, had tried to get out a couple of nights before the Germans entered. But twenty miles outside the capital the Germans had bombed the railroad bridge, and the train had had to stop. There was some panic, especially among the Jews, which is understandable. The Jews and five or six Americans had decided to go on towards the coast on foot. The rest, including one of the managers, had returned to Brussels. No one knew what had happened to those who pushed on to the coast.

Stray items about Brussels: Street-cars running, but no private motor traffic permitted. Germans had seized most of the private cars. No telephone service permitted. Movies closed; their posters still advertising French and American films. The army had forbidden the population to listen to foreign broadcasts. Signs were up everywhere, with an appeal of the burgomaster, written in French and Flemish, asking the population to remain calm and dignified in regard to the German troops. American offices had a notice written on the stationery of the American Embassy, stating: “This is American property under the protection of the U. S. Government.”

Left Brussels in the late afternoon, our cars filled with the loot almost everyone had bought. We returned to Aachen about nine thirty p.m. I had some luck. I’ve arranged with RRG in Berlin to broadcast from Cologne at four thirty a.m. this night.

I’ve just finished the piece. Had to get the censors from the Propaganda Ministry and the High Command out of bed to read it. Though I’ve had little sleep for some time, I do not feel sleepy or tired. I hired a car and a chauffeur to drive me to Cologne—about forty miles. He insists on starting now—one a.m. Says the troops on the road will slow us up, maybe too the British bombers. So far they’ve not been over tonight, though it’s almost full moon.

May 21, 6.15 a.m
.—Broadcast went off all right. No English bombers. Had difficulty in finding the broadcasting studio in the black-out. Finally a fat blonde, standing on a doorstep with a soldier, gave us directions in Cologne that worked. Snatched a half-hour’s sleep at the studio, and dozed for the hour and a half that it took us to drive back to Aachen. Dozed almost all the way, that is. It was a beautiful dawn and I finally woke up to feel it. Down to breakfast now and we’re off to the front at six thirty a.m. No time to take my clothes off, but did snatch a shave.

Footnote to May 20
.—Returning from Brussels to Aachen, we ran across a batch of British prisoners. It was somewhere in the Dutch province of Limburg, a suburb, I think, of Maastricht. They were herded together in the brick-paved yard of a disused factory. We stopped and went over and talked to them. They were a sad sight. Prisoners always are, especially right after a battle. Some obviously shell-shocked, some
wounded, all dead tired. But what impressed me most about them was their physique. They were hollow-chested and skinny and round-shouldered. About a third of them had bad eyes and wore glasses. Typical, I concluded, of the youth that England neglected so criminally in the twenty-two post-war years when Germany, despite its defeat and the inflation and six million unemployed, was raising its youth in the open air and the sun. I asked the boys where they were from and what they did at home. About half of them were from offices in Liverpool; the rest from London offices. Their military training had begun nine months before, they said, when the war started. But it had not, as you could see, made up for the bad diet, the lack of fresh air and sun and physical training, of the post-war years. Thirty yards away German infantry were marching up the road towards the front. I could not help comparing them with these British lads. The Germans, bronzed, clean-cut physically, healthy-looking as lions, chests developed and all. It was part of the unequal fight.