It was so
wherever I went. It isn't as if he were wrong at some one detail. He is
wrong all over the place, all over Belgium. It's all different from the
way he says it is. I know his fellow-countrymen who are there now will
bear me out in this.
Let me show one place. I took his book with me and used it on Nieuport.
That's a perfectly fair test, because Nieuport is like a couple of
hundred other towns.
"Nieuport," says Herr Baedeker, "a small and quiet place on the Yser."
It is one of the noisiest places I have ever been in. There was a day
and a half in May when shells dropped into the streets and houses, every
minute. Every day at least a few screaming three-inch shells fall on the
village. Aeroplanes buzz overhead, shrapnel pings in the sky. Rifle
bullets sing like excited telegraph wires. If Baedeker found Nieuport
a quiet place, he was brought up in a boiler factory.
[Illustration: Baedeker, the distinguished German writer, states that
this Fifteenth Century Gothic church in Nieuport has "a modern timber
roof." We looked for it.]
His very next phrase puzzled me--"with 3500 inhabitants," he says.
And I didn't see one. There were dead people in the ruins of the houses.
The soldiers used to unearth them from time to time. I remember that the
poet speaks of "the poor inhabitant below," when he is writing of a body
in a grave. It must be in that sense that Baedeker specifies those 3500
inhabitants.
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