[The following takes place during the German advance into the Western nations in the early days of World War II.]]
They passed through small villages and medium-sized towns, from Holland into Belgium, that had been destroyed. At 7:45 A.M., he wrote:
Real devastation… The town is destroyed. Smashed to pieces. Stuka dive bombers and artillery, the officer explained. Railroad station in shambles. Cars and locomotives derailed. Town deserted. Hungry dogs poke through the rubble.
8:10: houses smashed, shambles, bitter faces Belgian civilians… they just started to return… women sobbing… their men folk? Where?... Here houses destroyed at random… Stukas careless?... on purpose?... war or roads… the G. [German] army on wheels… germans [sic] just went up the roads… with tanks, planes, artillery, anti-tank stuff, everything… all morning roads massed supplies, troops going up, curious. Not a single allied plane yet… And those endless columns of troops, guns, supplies, stretching all the way from the German border… what a target!... Refugees streaming back along the roads… Tears your heart out to see them… I stopped looking at them after a while… Hollow feeling in my stomach. Then remembered I was a reporter. Remembered, as a man, I must see it all and register it in my heart and mind…
The refugees trudged up the road, old women lugging a baby or two in their old arms, the mothers lugging the family belongings. Lucky ones had theirs balanced on bicycles; luckiest had a car. Their faces – dazed, horrified, lined with sorrow, but full of dignity. Dignity and courage still.
At 9:15 A.M. they reached the town of Louvain in Belgium. For several days in August 1914, the Germans had sacked the town, destroying a library and a church, and setting ablaze other buildings that they had already looted. Now, as Shirer and the others entered the town with a contingent of German officials, they could see it had been destroyed again.
Source:
Wick, Steve. “Riding in Staff Cars.” The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 165. Print.
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