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Updated: June 17, 2025
Time after time their Red Cross cars have been used to conceal machine-guns, their flags have floated over batteries, and they have actually used stretchers to bring up ammunition to the trenches. Whilst I was at Furnes two German spies were working with an ambulance, in khaki uniforms, bringing in the wounded.
Round about Furnes there was a fog in the war zone. In the early dawn until the morning had passed, and then again as the dusk fell and the mists crept along the canals and floated over the flat fields, men groped about it like ghosts, with ghostly guns. Shells came hurtling out of the veil of the mist and burst in places which seemed hidden behind cotton-wool.
I came to feel I would rather get "pinked" in Pervyse than retire to Furnes, seven miles back of the trenches. Pervyse seemed home, because we belonged there with necessary work to do. Then, too, there was a certain regularity in the German gun-fire. If they started shelling from the Château de Vicoigne, they were likely to continue shelling from that point.
Here in Furnes his personality was touched with a kind of sanctity because his kingship of the last piece of Belgian soil symbolized all the ruin and desolation of his poor country and all the heroism of its resistance against an overpowering enemy and all the sorrows of those scattered people who still gave him loyalty.
Louis restored Tournai, and a portion of West Flanders beyond the Yser including Furnes and Ypres, but Artois, Walloon Flanders, the south of Hainault and of Luxemburg remained French. From the point of view of the Netherlands, the treaties of Rastadt and of Baden were merely the ratification, by the emperor and by the Holy Roman Empire, of the clauses of the treaty of Utrecht.
Being very hungry, I accepted the invitation, and afterwards, over a cup of coffee and cigarettes, I obtained through an interpreter some very interesting information. The night being now well advanced, I bade the Chief adieu, and striking out across the dunes I made for Furnes. The effect of the star-shells sent up by the Germans was very wonderful.
My companion was quite right in saying that the Grande Place of Furnes by moonlight is worth seeing. It certainly is. The exquisite fifteenth-century buildings which face upon the square have, by some miracle, remained almost undamaged. There were no lights, of course, and the only person in sight was a sentry, on whose bayonet and steel helmet the moonbeams played fitfully.
Mere boys of sixteen come in sometimes mortally wounded, and there are a good many cases of wounded women. You see, no one is safe; and, oh, my dear, have you ever seen a town that has been thoroughly shelled? At Furnes we have a good many shells dropping in, but no real bombardment yet. After Antwerp I don't seem to care about these visitors.
It was the house of God, but it was filled with the cruelty of life, and those statues seemed to mock at men's faith. In Furnes the news of the danger seemed to have been scented by the people. They had packed a few things into bundles and made ready to leave their homes.
In particular, excursions may be pleasantly made from Furnes whose principal inn, the Noble Rose, is again a quaint relic of the sixteenth century to the two delightful little market-towns of Dixmude and Nieuport-Ville: I write, as always, of what was recently, and of what I have seen myself; to-day they are probably heaps of smoking ruin, and sanguinary altars to German "kultur."
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