Puslapio vaizdai
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"made friends" lightly. They did not have the reserve and arrogance of the English, the spiritual pride of the Germans. Some of them have German blood, some French, some Dutch. Part of the race is gay and volatile, many are heavy and inarticulate; it is a mixed race of which any iron-clad generalization is false. But I have seen many thousands of them under crisis, seen them hungry, dying, men from every class and every region; and the mass impression is that they are affectionate, easy to blend with, open-handed, trusting, immature.

This kindly, haphazard, unformed folk were suddenly lifted to a national selfsacrifice. By one act of defiance Albert made Belgium a nation. It had been a mixed race of many tongues, selling itself little by little, all unconsciously, to the German bondage. I saw the marks of this spiritual invasion on the inner life of the Belgians-marks of a destruction more thorough than the shelling of a city. The ruins of Termonde are only the outward and visible sign of what Germany has attempted on Belgium for perhaps two generations.

Wherever I turned in Belgium, I found traces of this clever, silent German invasion. My Flemish driver, when we were surrounded by Uhlans, suddenly broke into voluble German, expressing his abject friendliness for them. At a hotel in Ghent the proprietor, believing me to be a neutral, told me he was a German with German sympathies. He had been living in Ghent for many years, making his money out of the town, but looking forward to this day of his own people. In Melle an officer pointed out to me the house of their German spy. I talked with the man. At a café in Ghent, while the enemy was still distant, the proprietor entertained the Belgians, and took their money, announcing to all, as he announced to me, that he was a Swiss. Now that the Germans have taken possession, he has bloomed out into a full-blooded German, and with pride daily presides over his café filled with German officers. Nightly back of our Pervyse line some spy signaled to

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netted into an ever-encroaching system of commerce, carrying with it a habit of thought and a mouthful of guttural phrases. Let no one underestimate that power of language. If the idiom has passed into one, it has brought with it molds of thought, leanings of sympathy. Who that can even stumble through the "Marchons! Marchons!" of the "Marseillaise" but is a sharer for a moment in the rush of glory that every now and again has made France the light of the world? So, when the German phrase rings out, "Was wir haben bleibt Deutsch" ("What we are now holding by force of arms shall remain forever German"), there is an an

swering thrill in the heart of every Antwerp clerk who for years has been leaking Belgian government gossip into German ears in return for a piece of money. Secret sin was eating away Belgium's vitality-the sin of being bought by German money, bought in little ways, for small bits of service, amiable passages destroying nationality. By one act of full sacrifice Albert has cleared his people from a poison that might have sapped them in a few more years without the firing of one

gun.

That sacrifice to which they are called is an utter one, of which they have experienced only the prelude. I have seen this

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Belgian soldiers of the first army in the early days of the war in temporary shelter

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Side of a bedroom taken out by a shell in the heavy Nieuport bombardment

growing sadness of Belgium almost from the beginning. I have seen thirty thousand refugees, the inhabitants of Alost, come shuffling down the road past me. They came by families, the father with a bag of clothes and bread, the mother with a baby in arms, and one, two, or three children trotting along. Aged women were walking, Sisters of Charity, religious brothers. A cartful of stricken old women lay patiently at full length while the wagon bumped on. They were so nearly drowned by suffering that one more wave made little difference. All that was sad and helpless was dragged that morning into the daylight. All that had been decently cared for in quiet rooms was of a sudden tumbled out upon the pavement and jolted along in farm-wagons past sixteen miles of curious eyes. But even with the sick and the very old there was no lamentation. In this procession of the dispossessed that passed us on the country road there was no one crying, no one angry.

When the handful of British were sent to the rescue of Antwerp, we went up the line with them. There was joy on the Antwerp road that day. Little cottages

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fluttered flags at lintel and window. The sidewalks were thronged with peasants, who believed they were now to be saved. We rode in glory from Ghent to the outer works of Antwerp. Every village on all the line turned out its full population to cheer us ecstatically. A bitter month had passed, and now salvation had come. It is seldom in a lifetime one is present at a perfect piece of irony like that of those shouting Flemish peasants.

As Antwerp was falling, a letter was given to me by a friend. It was written by Aloysius Coen of the artillery, Fort St. Catherine Wavre, Antwerp. He died in the bombardment, thirty-four years old. He wrote:

Dear wife and children:

At the moment I am writing you this the enemy is before us, and the moment has come for us to do our duty for our country. When you will have received this I shall have changed the temporary life for the eternal life. As I loved you all dearly, my last breath will be directed toward you and my darling children, and with a last smile as a farewell from my beloved family am I undertaking the eternal journey.

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the road to another country. Grieved and embittered, they served under new leaders of another race. Those tired soldiers were like spirited children who had been playing an exciting game which they thought would be applauded. And suddenly the best turned out the worst.

Sing, Belgians; sing, though our wounds are bleeding,

writes the poet of Flanders; but the song is no earthly song. It is the voice of a lost cause that cries out of the trampled dust as it prepares to make its flight beyond the place of betrayal.

pathos of the Belgian army is like the pathos of an orphan-asylum: it is unconscious.

They are very lonely, the loneliest men I have known. Back of the fighting Frenchman, you sense the gardens and fields of France, the strong, victorious national will. In a year, in two years, having made his peace with honor, he will return to a happiness richer than any that France has known in fifty years. And the Englishman carries with him to the stresses of the first line an unbroken calm which he has inherited from a thousand years of his island peace. His little moment of pain and death cannot trouble that consciousness of the eternal process in which his people have been permitted to play a continuing part. For him the present turmoil is only a ripple on the vast sea of his racial history. Back of the Tommy is his Devonshire village, still secure. His mother and his wife are wait

For the Belgian soldiers no longer sang, or made merry in the evening. A young Brussels corporal in our party suddenly broke into sobbing when he heard the chorus of "Tipperary" float over the channel from a transport of untried British lads. The Belgians are a race of children whose feelings have been hurt. The ing for him, unmolested, as when he left

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