E-text prepared by A. Langley
Fighting In Flanders
By E. Alexander Powell
Special Correspondent of The New York World
With The Belgian Forces In The Field
Author of "The Last Frontier"
"Gentlemen Ravers,"
"The End of the Trail,"
"The Road to Glory," etc.
With Illustrations from Photographs
By Mr. Donald Thompson
| To My Friends The Belgians "I have eaten your bread and salt; I have drunk your water and wine; The deaths you died I have sat beside And the lives that you led were mine." RUDYARD KIPLING. |
Contents
Foreword
Nothing is more unwise, on general principles, than to attempt to write about a war before that war is finished and before history has given it the justice of perspective. The campaign which began with the flight of the Belgian Government from Brussels and which culminated in the fall of Antwerp formed, however, a separate and distinct phase of the Greatest of Wars, and I feel that I should write of that campaign while its events are still sharp and clear in my memory and before the impressions it produced have begun to fade. I hope that those in search of a detailed or technical account of the campaign in Flanders will not read this book, because they are certain to be disappointed. It contains nothing about strategy or tactics and few military lessons can be drawn from it. It is merely the story, in simple words, of what I, a professional onlooker, who was accorded rather exceptional facilities for observation, saw in Belgium during that nation's hour of trial.
An American, I went to Belgiu