Berlin Diary (63 page)

My broadcast, which I’m to make from Cologne at four thirty a.m., if I get there, gives a résumé of what we saw today. Here is a more or less chronological account:

We were off shortly after dawn from Aachen (Aixla-Chapelle) across the Dutch province of Limburg to Maastricht. Little evidence that the Dutch did much fighting here. The houses whole, the windows unshattered. An occasional Dutch pillbox showed signs of having been hit by machine-gun fire, but nothing heavier. Apparently the Dutch made no attempt to slow up the Germans by blowing up the road to Maastricht. One bridge over a creek had been damaged. That was all.

We crossed over the Maas (Meuse) at Maastricht. The river is broad here and was a natural line of defence, though the Dutch did not take much advantage of it. They had done a half-hearted job of blowing up the bridges. Blown up one out of seven or eight spans on the two bridges I saw. The Germans evidently had substitute spans, made of steel frames, waiting in the
rear, and within a few hours of bringing them up had the bridges good as new. German supply columns were thundering over both bridges when we arrived.

7.30 a.m
.—Arrived at the Albert Canal. With its steep banks, thirty feet high, which the Belgians had cemented to make it impossible to climb them, it was a good defence line, especially against tanks. Only the Belgians had not blown up the bridge. I asked a German officer why.

“We were too quick for them,” he said. Apparently what happened here, and at most of the other important bridges over the Albert Canal, all leading to Liége, was that German parachutists rushed the bridges from behind, wiped out the defending machine-gun crews, even overpowered the pillboxes also defending the bridges, and cut the wires leading to the explosive charges in the bridges before the Belgians could set them off. This particular bridge over the canal was protected by a bunker at the Belgian end of the bridge itself, and by two other bunkers lying a hundred yards to the right and left of the bridge. The bunker at the bridgehead must have been taken in the same mysterious way that Fort Eben-Emael was taken at Liège—by parachutists with some newfangled weapon.

The German officer warned us not to go inside the bunker, as mines were still lying about, but a couple of us ventured in. I saw at once that there had been a
fire
inside the bunker. From that I concluded—though with several reservations—that the parachutists who took the pillbox from behind must have had a fire-pistol of some kind and shot their flames inside the pillbox. Near by I noticed freshly dug graves over which Belgian steel helmets were posed on sticks. Probably the crew of the pillbox.

Speed played a role too, with its resultant surprise. The motorized Germans had crossed the Dutch border twenty miles away at five a.m. and were over this canal into Belgium (past Maastricht, which should have been strongly defended but wasn’t) at ten a.m.—five hours.

You were immediately struck by the difference between Holland and Belgium. As soon as we crossed into Belgium, we started running into blocks of pulverized houses along the road. Obviously the Belgians were of a different metal from the Dutch. At the outset they fought like lions. From house to house.

7.45. Tongres
.—Here for the first time we suddenly came across real devastation. A good part of the town through which we drove was smashed to pieces. Stuka dive-bombers and artillery, an officer explained. The railroad station was a shambles; obviously hit by Stukas. The railroad tracks all around torn and twisted; cars and locomotives derailed. One could—or could one?—imagine the consternation of the inhabitants. When they had gone to bed that Thursday night (May 9), Belgium had been at peace with the world, including Germany. At dawn on Friday the German bombers were levelling the station and town—the houses in which they had gone to bed so peacefully—to a charred mass of ruins. The town itself was absolutely deserted. Two or three hungry dogs nosed sadly about the ruins, apparently searching for water, food, and their masters.

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.