
 
 <«
 
 BELGIUM'S 
 AGONY
 
 Translation and Introduftion by 
 M. T. H. SADLER. The three 
 poems in the book, which are 
 given untranslated, have not be- 
 fore been published in book form.
 
 EMILE VERHAEREN 
 
 BELGIUM'S 
 
 AGONY 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 1915
 
 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 
 
 CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. 
 
 TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION . 
 LA BELGISUE SANGLANTE 
 I. DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 
 II. THE MARK OF THE TEUTON . 
 CEUX DE LIEGE 
 
 III. BELGIAN PRIDE . 
 
 IV. ALBERT THE WELL-BELOVED . 
 V. THE LITTLE VILLAGES OF FLANDERS 
 
 VI. PERVYSE .... 
 VII. DIXMUDE, NIEUPORT, YPRES 
 
 GUILLAUME II . . . 
 
 VIII. GERMANY UNCIVILIZABLE 
 IX. GERMANY AND ART 
 
 X. GERMANY THE INQUISITOR . 
 XI. GERMANY THE ASIATIC 
 XII. CONCLUSION 
 
 P/1 
 
 vV3 
 
 7 ) 
 
 PAGE 
 
 vii 
 
 3 
 9 
 
 I? 
 
 37 
 
 41 
 48 
 
 56 
 
 73 
 
 83 
 89 
 
 97 
 
 104 
 
 III 
 119
 
 INTRODUCTION ' 
 I 
 
 A FEW weeks after the outbreak of war 
 the newspapers, in an obscure para- 
 graph, stated that German artillery had bom- 
 barded the Flemish village of Saint-Amand, 
 near Antwerp. Nearly simultaneously, but in 
 numerous and prominent columns, they de- 
 scribed the wanton and ruthless destru6tion 
 of the ancient university city of Louvain. 
 Thirdly, on August 24, began the great 
 British retreat from the line Mons-Conde, the 
 retreat to south-westward that experts hold 
 to rank among the finest military achieve- 
 ments of history. 
 
 And between these three happenings there 
 is a conneding link other than the tremend- 
 ous struggle of which they form a part, a 
 link to which subsequent events and, most 
 of all, this little book have given a melancholy 
 and tragic interest. 
 
 ' For permission to use again such portions of this 
 introdudtion as appeared originally in Poetry and Drama, 
 I am indebted to the kindness of the editor. — M.T.H.S. 
 
 vii
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 At Saint-Amand Emile Verhaeren was 
 born. At Louvain he was educated. And 
 not more than fifteen miles south-west of 
 Mons, in the full path of the retreating British 
 army and the pursuing German hordes, lay 
 (who can say what is now its fate i*) the little 
 country farm in which he used, every year, 
 to spend the spring and autumn. 
 
 There are few men living who have loved 
 and served their country so nobly as Verhaeren 
 has loved and honoured Belgium. His be- 
 loved Flanders, whose every feature he has 
 made famous wherever the French language 
 is read or spoken, lies now bleeding and 
 stricken. Shall the man who has sung his 
 country's beauty in time of prosperity, and 
 who now shares her misery, fail to sing her 
 glory in her hour of triumphant agony ? This 
 passionate and moving book is the answer to 
 that question. May it, as a comment on the 
 greatest war of history by the greatest poet 
 of the time, be treasured and applauded alike 
 by this generation and posterity. The few 
 pages that follow are the tribute of one who, 
 from admiring Verhaeren as a poet, has had 
 the privilege to come to love him as a man, 
 
 viii
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 II 
 
 Saint-Amand lies near the mouth of the 
 Scheldt in the fertile plain of Flanders, and 
 the poet has indeed assimilated to himself 
 this land of wide horizons, of great gulfs of 
 sky. Its breadth and distance have become 
 part of him, and from a childhood full of 
 wonder at the powers and moods of nature, 
 he has grown to a manhood strengthened by 
 that finest of all beliefs, the belief in the 
 limitless possibilities of mankind. 
 
 It is barely possible to overrate the influ- 
 ence of the poet's child-memories on his 
 mature work and ultimate philosophy. He 
 spent his youth in a country where, year 
 in year out, is played in all its force the 
 elemental drama of nature. The moods of 
 every season became ingrained in him, and 
 in his poems to-day the world may experience 
 the same thrill, the same awe that the boy 
 Verhaeren felt at the joy and sorrow of that 
 Flemish plain. 
 
 As a child he would lie in bed and listen 
 while the great tempests from the North Sea 
 came roaring over the fields and huddled 
 villages, beating their music into his brain, 
 
 ix
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 filling his blood with their blind and splendid 
 strength. As a man, forty years later, he 
 writes of " Vents de Temp^tes " : 
 
 Un poing d'efFroi tord les villages ; 
 Les hauts clochers, dans les lointains, 
 Envoient I'echo de leurs tocsins 
 Bondir de plage en plage. 
 
 As a child, the morning after one of these 
 gales, he would run out into the sullen, un- 
 easy daylight and watch the racing clouds, 
 the sudden glint of sunshine, the weary trees 
 still writhing after their buffeting of the night, 
 and hear, far to the southward, the mutter of 
 the distant storm vanished beyond the edge 
 of that sad, tormented plain. As a man he 
 writes of the far-flung clamour of the winds 
 "qui se querellent, de loin en loin, a I'infini" ; 
 of the haunted menace of November : 
 
 Voici les vents, les saints, les morts 
 
 Et la procession profonde 
 
 Des arbres fous ct des branchages tords 
 
 Qui voyagent de I'un a I'autre bout du monde. 
 
 Voici les grand'routes comma des croix 
 A I'infini parmi les plaincs, 
 Les grand'routes et puis leurs croix lointaines, 
 A I'infini sur les vallons et dans les bois ! 
 
 {Les Vignei de ma Murail/e.) 
 X
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 As a child, again, he would walk the empty- 
 streets of some little gabled town, while the 
 quiet rain filled the air with its whispers, 
 dripping from eaves and ledges, making little 
 pools among the cobble-stones. He would 
 rove the plain in springtime feeling the burst- 
 ing life in hedgerow and plough-land. He 
 would lie among the sand-dunes in the summer 
 sun and bathe in the royal waters of the 
 Scheldt. And all these moods of nature he 
 has sung as no one else has sung them, with 
 the fierce delight of intimate worship : 
 
 Longue, comme les fils sans fin, la longue pluie 
 
 Interminablement, a travers le jour gris, 
 
 Ligne les carreaux verts avec ses long fils gris, 
 
 Infiniment, la pluie 
 
 La longue pluie. 
 
 La pluie. 
 
 {Les Villages Illusoires.) 
 
 Or again : 
 
 Au long des cours, des impasses et des venelles 
 Des vieux quartiers retraits, 
 
 La pluie 
 Semble a jamais 
 Chez elle. 
 
 (Les Villes a Pignons.) 
 
 T-he majority of the poems dealing with 
 
 xi
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Verhaeren's native land, and it is they, at such 
 a time and in such a book as this, demand 
 chief mention, are contained in the five books 
 of the series Toute la Flandre. The first 
 poem in the first book of the series {Les Ten- 
 dresses Premieres) is almost an epitome of the 
 whole. It is a rhythmic autobiography, be- 
 ginning : 
 
 . . . les souvenirs chauffent mon sang 
 Et penetrent raes moelles . . . 
 
 Je me souviens du village pres de I'Escaut, 
 D'ou Ton voyait les grands bateaux 
 
 Passer, ainsi qu'un rcve empanache de vent 
 Et merveilleux de voiles, 
 
 Le soir en cortege sous les etoiles. 
 
 The subsequent verses describe the garden, 
 the neighbouring factory (belonging to his 
 uncle), his parents and relations, his animals; 
 and the poem culminates in a song of praise 
 and love for Flanders. Fierce pride in his 
 country permeates these five books ; and 
 every summer, before the war, he would visit 
 this beloved land communing with the mighty 
 ghosts of her past history, moving among the 
 peasant men and women, or with the grim, 
 silent fishermen watching the grey sea rolling 
 
 xii
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 tirelessly against the desolation of " La Guir- 
 lande des Dunes." 
 
 This series of books comprises those poems 
 of Verhaeren which were formerly most be- 
 loved by his countrymen and least admired 
 by foreigners. That they glorify Flanders 
 was reason enough for their fame among the 
 Flemish, and also for their comparative negled: 
 by the French. Whether Belgium's heroism 
 will cause them to be more widely read the 
 future will show, but there are, between their 
 author and the Frenchman at least, psycho- 
 logical differences too deep ever to be entirely 
 bridged. 
 
 Verhaeren has never been one of the many 
 gods of literary France, because only when he 
 is entirely philosophic is he really in sympathy 
 with French ideals. He is too tempestuous, 
 too illogical — with the unheeding illogicality 
 of nature — to appeal to the Gallic sense. The 
 French, neither in literature nor painting, 
 have yet grappled successfully with Nature. 
 Corot could not refrain from obvious lyricism, 
 from becoming a slave to twilight. Only 
 Cezanne, and perhaps Courbet, seem to have 
 felt the stark basis of landscape, and the former 
 
 xiii
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 was thwarted by lack of skill in externalising 
 his impressions, while the latter never threw 
 off entirely the fetters of conventional com- 
 position. In poetry the names of Hugo 
 and Francis Jammes suggest themselves. Of 
 Hugo I shall speak in a minute, while Jammes, 
 for all his charm, can never seriously be pitted 
 against Verhaeren as a poet of nature. The 
 Fleming is nearer the English, and one can- 
 not help feeling the similarity between Ver- 
 haeren's love of wind and sunshine and the 
 pantheism of Wordsworth or the painting of 
 Constable. Indeed, Constable seems to sug- 
 gest an apt example. Consider one of those 
 wonderful cloud-studies of his — a windy sky 
 piled high with great white clouds, and at the 
 bottom of the pidure a mere strip of sun- 
 flecked field. Then read Verhaeren's poem 
 " Les Beaux Nuages" : 
 
 Avec ton ciel dc nacre et d'ambre 
 Tu rchausses les champs, Ics pr<5s et les villages, 
 O mois des beaux nuages 
 Septembre! 
 « • * * * 
 
 L'air vibre; et I'on entend la cadence des ailes 
 Passer, en vols nombreux, sur les blanches maisons; 
 
 xiv
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Et pr^s du bois, h\-bas, Ics cueilleuses d'airellcs 
 Vers leur rouge recolte inclinent leur chanson. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Et Septembre, la-haut, 
 Avec son ciel de nacre et d'or voyage, 
 Et suspend sur les pres, les champs et les hameaux, 
 Les blocs etincelants de ses plus beaux nuages. 
 
 (Les Plaines.) 
 
 A further comparison between this and, say, 
 Baudelaire's prose poem " Les Nuages " will 
 reveal an essential difference of attitude. Simi- 
 larly Verhaeren sees in autumn either the 
 fragrant memories of a glowing summer or 
 the menace of wind and frost ; that is to say 
 the idea of continuity, of a future pregnant 
 with possibility, never leaves him. Verlaine, 
 Merrill, Moreas, or any other paysagiste of 
 French symbolist generation, will sing of the 
 plaintive beauty of decay, rejoicing in the 
 quiet music of the dying year, taking an 
 isolated, sensuous delight in nature's melan- 
 choly, but giving no thought to the place of 
 autumn in the endless cycle of seasons, feeling 
 no sorrow that another summer has faded into 
 mist.^ And so it seems that those people who 
 
 ^ This distinftion between Verhaeren and the French 
 Symboiistes holds good in other spheres than that of land- 
 
 XV b
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 blame Verhaeren for rhetoric and grandilo- 
 quence (and they are not only Frenchmen) 
 make the mistake of judging him by " sym- 
 boliste " standards. There is no denying that 
 to pass, for instance, from Rette's " Grand 
 vent" [Campagne Premiere) to any of Ver- 
 haeren's poems on wind, is to pass out from 
 the study of the philosopher on to a storm- 
 swept moor. The Frenchman sees in the 
 wind a disturber of nature, an angry intruder 
 bringing war from distant lands, not Nature's 
 own anger, following her gentleness, as the 
 righteous anger of a man succeeds his friend- 
 ship. 
 
 The critic, then, who approaches from this 
 point of view, is forced to fall back on Vi6lor 
 Hugo for his parallel, and Hugo to the 
 " symboliste " is anathema. Hugo is indeed 
 always outside nature. Even giving him the 
 credit that is his due — and this, at present, is 
 rarely done — one cannot but feel that he sees 
 
 scape. The ultra-subjeftivity of the latter's love-poems, 
 which celebrate one night of passion, one hour even, 
 leave unexpressed the vital importance of sex to sex in 
 the continuance of the race, are devoid entirely of that 
 natural desire of male for female which gives Verhaeren's 
 frankness the purity of wind and rain. 
 
 xvi
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 in Nature a pageant, like any other mighty 
 spedacle, and that he tells of her triumphant 
 colouring as a looker-on would describe the 
 uniforms and martial music of a procession.^ 
 Verhaeren feels himself a child of the wind 
 and rain and sunshine ; their moods are his 
 moods, and as Wordsworth endowed his 
 mountains with motive and idea, so the 
 Flemish poet feels Nature has reasons for her 
 anger or delight. 
 
 The rhetorician loses the power to be 
 simple. The pageant-seeker can see no beauty 
 in quiet colouring. But Verhaeren has met 
 neither of these fates. His poetry can be 
 
 ^ Tancrede de Visan in his V Attitude du Lyrisme con- 
 temporain gives a skilful study of Verhaeren, which shows 
 more sympathy than is usually found in French criticism. 
 Of the poet's connexion with symbolisme M. de Visan 
 says : " Verhaeren stands as the leader of the former of 
 the two great movements springing from Vidlor Hugo, 
 which ended, one in the lyricism _/7"ow within, the lyricism 
 of immanence, and the other, personified in Moreas, in 
 the poetry of classicism." He says further, when com- 
 paring Hugo and Verhaeren, that while the former some- 
 times loses himself in mere repetition of sounding words, 
 the latter never allows eloquence or moral exhortation 
 to swing his poetry over the boundaries of force into the 
 gulf of bathos. 
 
 xvii
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 more tempestuous, and also more profoundly 
 calm, than that of any other modern writer. 
 He can be tender as only great strength is 
 tender. There is always dignity in his passion, 
 even when there is most fire. Above all, he 
 has reached the point when passion has be- 
 come enduring. 
 
 Some considerations of the love-poems shall 
 close this brief homage to a noble poet. They 
 are contained in three books — Les Heures 
 Claires J Les Heures d' Apres-midi^ and Les 
 Heures du Soir, and when I read them I feel 
 that perhaps these three books are the greatest 
 he has written. " A celle qui vit \ mes c6tes " 
 he dedicates these tremendous poems of love. 
 He is the ideal lover, the man who has passed 
 from the bewildered awakening of passion, 
 through the triumph of conquest, to the quiet 
 devotion and confidence that lasts for ever. 
 He writes none of the forlorn and plaintive 
 music of the self-pitying, hopeless swain. He 
 fights his battle in silence, wins the woman he 
 wants, and then with all thankfulness and all 
 humility sings his love for her : 
 
 J'etais si lourd, j'etais si las, 
 J'ctais si vieux de mcfiance, 
 
 xviii
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 J'etais si lourd, j'ctais si las 
 
 Du vain chemin de tous mes pas, 
 
 Je meritais si peu la merveilleuse joie 
 
 De voir tea pieds illuminer ma voie, 
 
 Que j'en reste tremblant encore, et presque en pleurs 
 
 Et humble a tout jamais en face du bonheur. 
 
 L'amour, oh ! qu'il soit la clairvoyance 
 Unique et I'unique raison du coeur, 
 A nous, dont le plus fol bonheur 
 Est d'etre fous de confiance. 
 
 {Les Heures Claires^ 
 
 In Les Heures d'Apres - midi sounds a 
 gentler note, a note of greater peace, after 
 fifteen years' love and confidence. The mys- 
 tery has partly gone, but no disillusionment 
 has come in its place : 
 
 Je ne vois plus ta bouche et tes grands yeux 
 
 Luire, comme un matin de fete, 
 
 Ni, lentement, se reposer ta tete 
 Dans le jardin massif et noir de tes cheveux. 
 
 Tes mains cheres qui demeurent si douces 
 Ne viennent plus comme autrefois 
 Avec de la lumiere au bout des doigts 
 
 Me caresser le front, comme une aube les mousses. 
 
 XIX
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Mais, neanmoins, mon coeur ferme et fervent te dit : 
 Que m'importent les deuils mornes et engourdis, 
 
 Puisque je sais que rien au monde 
 
 Ne troublera jamais notre etre exalte 
 
 Et que notre ame est trop profonde 
 Pour que I'amour depende encore de la beaute. 
 
 Finally, the poems of Les Heures du Soir — 
 perhaps the most beautiful book of the three 
 — show us the poet, a little weary after a life 
 of crowded effort, now lingering in the garden 
 among the flowers, now watching the flames 
 on winter evenings, but with a heart still on 
 fire with passionate memories. 
 
 Mets ta chaise pres de la mienne 
 Et tends les mains vers Ic foyer 
 Pour que je voie entre tes doigts 
 La flamme ancienne 
 Flamboyer ; 
 Et regarde le feu 
 Tranquillement, avec tes yeux 
 Qui n'ont peur d'aucune lumiere 
 Pour qu'ils me soient encor plus francs 
 Quand un rayon rapide et fulgurant 
 Jusques au fond de toi les frappe et les cclaire. 
 ***** 
 
 Comme je t'aime alors, ma claire bien-aimee, 
 Dans ta chair accueillantc et pamce, 
 Qui m'entoure a son tour et me fond dans sa joie ! 
 Tout me devient plus cher, et ta bouche et tes bras 
 Et tes seins bienveillants ofi mon pauvre front las 
 
 XX
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Apres I'instant de plaisir fou que tu m'oftroics 
 Tranquillement, pros de ton coeur reposera. 
 
 There is one more short poem that I should 
 like to quote in full, before leaving the poet 
 in, what seemed, the gathering twilight of his 
 perfed: love-story : 
 
 Avec mes vieilles mains de ton front rapprochees 
 J'ecarte tes cheveux et je baise, ce soir, 
 Pendant ton bref sommeil au bord de I'atre noir 
 La ferveur de tes yeux sous tes longs cils cachee. 
 
 Oh! la bonne tendresse en cette fin de jour ! 
 Mes yeux suivent les ans dont I'existence est faite 
 Et tout a coup ta vie y parait si parfaite 
 Qu'un emouvant respedl attendrit mon amour. 
 
 Et comme au temps ou tu m'etais la fiancee, 
 L'ardeur me vient encor de tomber a genoux 
 Et de toucher la place ou bat ton cceur si doux 
 Avec les doigts aussi chastes que mes pensees. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Before the war Belgium was a synthesis of 
 Europe. She contained every asped of civili- 
 zation : rolling farmlands, quiet, cloistered 
 monasteries, thunderous railway stations, 
 belching factories. Equally and terribly is 
 she now the symbol of the German fury. 
 Alike in her heroism and her agony does she 
 
 xxi
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 stand for the strength and suffering of the 
 Allied cause. 
 
 It is fitting then that Verhaeren also, in 
 whom is the essence of every art, should at 
 this time come forward and portray his mar- 
 tyred country. To the reader his superb 
 poetry is exhausting. It sweeps him away 
 with the turbulence of its power, it awes 
 him with its majesty, it soothes him with its 
 tenderness. Like life it must be lived, because 
 it is life. Verhaeren, more than any poet, is 
 the prophet of "art for life's sake," for no 
 man has loved life more than he has loved 
 it, no man has wrenched from existence more 
 variegated masses of joy and sorrow. 
 
 He has stood on the hill top in the carnival 
 of wind and sunshine, he has seen hunger, 
 dirt and misery ; he has known peace and 
 love. Now, in his old age, has come to him 
 the supreme and terrible experience of war. 
 No man can wish for a better life than this, 
 if it be granted to him, finally, his battles 
 done, to sit by the fire with his soul at rest, 
 while the storm weeps at the windows. 
 
 M. T. H. SADLER. 
 
 xxii
 
 LA BELGI^E SANGLANTE 
 
 B
 
 LA BELGI^E SANGLANTE 
 
 7~\EPUIS bientot trente ans 
 / y ^e par F entente libre en un effort con- 
 stant 
 
 S'etait comme augmentee 
 Vhumanite. 
 La guerre 
 
 Semhlait aux hommes de ce temps 
 N'etre plus guere 
 ^'un vieux charnier cache ^ par les fleurs^ sous 
 la terre. 
 
 V Occident etait fier de penser sous les cieux 
 
 D'apres un ordre harmonieux 
 Pareil au large accord des etoiles tranquilles 
 Et de voir jour a jour les plus belles idees 
 
 S'elucider 
 Grace au verbe de ceux qui parlaient dans les 
 villes. 
 
 lis affirmaient que desormais 
 Vhomme a Vhomme s'opposerait 
 Encor^ mais dans la paix ; 
 
 3
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 ^ue pareil a la seve enflant Varbre et Vecorce 
 Le droit elargirait Fappareil de la force ; 
 ^ue la justice etait une arme et un besoin; 
 ^jiil fallait croire en son cerveau plus quen 
 
 son poing ; 
 ^'une realite plus haute et plus sereine 
 Aurait servi de champ a toute vie humaine 
 ^e deja s'annonfait P imminent avenir 
 Oic les efforts rivaux devaient enfin s'unir 
 Toutcomme au long desfils desmachinesnouvelles^ 
 Deux courants opposes font tout a coup jaillir 
 Grace a leur conflit meme, une unique etincelle. 
 
 Ainsi s^exaltaient-ils par les beaux soirs d'ete, 
 — Leurs gestes soutenant leurs paroles d'apo- 
 
 tres — 
 lis se prouvaient fiers d^eux-memes et Jiers des 
 
 autres 
 Et comme heureux de leur temerite. 
 Et r Europe par dessus bois^fleuves, montagnes 
 Leur envoy ait le cri de son assentiment^ 
 Et ce cri repete troublait etrangement^ 
 Au long du Rhin arme, les peuples d'Allemagne. 
 
 Pour euxy helas^ V entente humaine etait sans 
 
 charmes 
 Et nul reve ne leur semblait vaste et puissant 
 
 4
 
 LA BELGIQUE SANGLANTE 
 
 ^e si les armes 
 Rouges de sang 
 Ne couvraient de leur bruit^ tous les bruits de 
 la terre. 
 
 La haine organisee habitait leurs cerveaux^ 
 lis travaillaient dans leurs usines militaires^ 
 Toujours a quelque meurtre effrayant et nou- 
 
 veau. 
 lis etaient nets et prompts et durs^ et le silence 
 Couvrait V ceuvre de mort de leur intelligence. 
 En pleine paix, quand Vhomme a Vhomme est 
 
 indulgent^ 
 Us epiaient partout les chases et les gens: 
 ^and Us savaient^ Us se taisaient et atten- 
 
 daient. 
 Leurs maitres a penser savamment bavardaient^ 
 Mettant leur dogmatisme a la solde des crimes; 
 De laps en laps, quelquapre et cruelle maxime 
 Devenait a leurs yeux la neuve verite^ 
 Si bien quils s'exerfaient a la ferocite 
 Au nom d'une future et sinistre sagesse. 
 lis tuaient la vie ample et V immense ferveur 
 Et Vessor libre et clair des volontes fkondes 
 Et telle etait leur mecanique et sombre ardeur 
 ^'ils paraissaient vouloir paralyser le monde. 
 
 5
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 lis le traitaient selon leur hi; 
 Us le pillaient et le brulaient avec la rage 
 Slui remplace pour eux V elan et le courage. 
 Maisons belles^ monuments clairs, nobles beffrois^ 
 Villes par la science et le t^mps consacrees. 
 France foulee aux pieds et Belgique ev entree. 
 Dites, quel deuil vous accablait en ces longs jours 
 Oil rincendie errait a travers vos contrees 
 Et bondissait de tour en tour I 
 
 Tandis que vouSj vous vous battiez avec fierte 
 Pour ceux de vos berceaux^ et pour ce.ux de vos 
 
 tombes^ 
 Eux ne songeaient qua rassembler des heca- 
 
 tombes 
 Pour deployer leur cruaute^ 
 
 En des hameaux perdus et des bourgs solitaires. 
 Oil passait le galop effreni des uhlans 
 On a trouve plante^ dans la gorge des meres 
 De longs couteaux couverts et de lait et de sang ; 
 Desvieillards mis en rang au long d'une chaussee 
 Ployerent les genoux pour recevoir la mort 
 Au bord de fosses queux-memes avaient creusees ; 
 Des filles de seize ans dont Vdme et dont le corps 
 Etaient vierges et clairs subirent les morsures 
 
 6
 
 LA BELGIQUE SANGLANTE 
 
 Et le.s baisers sanglants et ivres des soldats^ 
 Et quand leur pauvre chair rCetait plus que 
 
 bless ures 
 On leur tranchait les seins avec des coutelas. 
 
 Par tout, dufond des bourgs vers les villes voisines 
 Les gens fuyaient avec des yeux epouvantes 
 De voir comme une mer immense de ruines 
 Crouler sur le pays quils avaient du quitter. 
 Derriere eux s' exalt ait le tocsin fou des cloches, 
 Et quand ils rencontraient quelque teuton frappe 
 Par une balle adroit e, an bord d 'un chemin proche, 
 Souvent ils decouvraient, dans le creux de ses 
 
 poches, 
 Avec des colliers d'or et des satins fripes. 
 Deux petits pieds d^ enfant atrocement coupes. 
 
 Oh! quel triste soleil fut le temoin, en Flandre, 
 Et des hameaux en feu, et des villes en cendre 
 Et de la longue horreur, et des crimes soudains 
 Dont avait faim et soif le sadisme Germain.
 
 CHAPTER I 
 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 
 
 THE Emperor William II has sworn 
 many oaths. He swore that he would 
 enter in triumph, now Paris, now Nancy, 
 now Calais, now Warsaw. These oaths, which 
 were in their way magnificent, he has not kept. 
 
 But he swore another oath in his letter to 
 Albert I, King of the Belgians. He swore to 
 lay waste the land of Belgium. And this oath, 
 the oath of a criminal, is the only one he has 
 not broken. 
 
 Before the war Belgium was a peaceful 
 country, industrious, wealthy. She had been 
 moulded gradually by the kindly hand of 
 time. Twice in history her art had dominated 
 Europe. First, in the fifteenth century, blazed 
 far and wide the genius of Hubert and Jan 
 van Eyck,of Memling, of Roger de la Pasture. 
 These men with their school, G6rard David, 
 Patinir, Henri Bles, Quentin Metzys, were 
 the great gothic school of northern European 
 
 9
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 art. On the banks of the Rhine they found 
 pupils. Two old painters, Wilhelm and 
 Stefan Lochner, who of themselves painted 
 with naive timidity, acquired under the teach- 
 ing of the Flemings, strong design, powerful 
 colour, and above all vitality. Equally France 
 came under the influence of the Flemish 
 group. The schools of Avignon and Moulins 
 owed to them their glory. Italy sent her 
 artists to pay them tribute. The greatest of 
 them, Antonello da Messina, forgot the tra- 
 ditions of his own land to follow those of 
 I Flanders. Spain was, as it were, a mere 
 ! dependency of Flemish art, which art also 
 dominated the east. 
 
 The second period of Belgian supremacy in 
 art was in the seventeenth century. Then 
 Rubens, Van Dyck, Brouwer, Teniers, Jor- 
 daens, Cornelius de Vos, reconquered for 
 Antwerp the world-domination which the 
 painters of Bruges had lost. To this group 
 France owes Largilliere, Sebastian Bourdon, 
 Watteau, Pater, Lancret, Fragonard. England 
 owes them Dobson and Lely, and, in part. 
 Constable. 
 
 Further, since the fifteenth century, the 
 
 lO
 
 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 
 
 high-loom weavers spread over the whole 
 continent a new art. The tapestries of Brussels 
 are the finest in the world, and to them is 
 owed the early glory of the Gobelins. 
 
 In this same period of famous painters, 
 Belgium had her noble architeds. The stones 
 of her cathedrals atTournai, Brussels, Antwerp, 
 Malines, Ghent, Bruges, Mons, and Liege, 
 were laid one on another to the topmost 
 pinnacles of their towers, so that the memory 
 of their Flemish and Walloon builders might 
 be carried to the clouds and there abide for 
 ever. Wonderful town-halls rose side by side 
 with the churches ; stately cloth or meat 
 markets faced the great houses of the burgo- 
 masters and aldermen. The rumour of these 
 towns grew and spread, and they became the 
 wonder of the world. 
 
 Along a great river, the Scheldt, which 
 winds its way among the provinces of Flanders, 
 wealth and trade spread from town to town, 
 and one of the greatest ports of Europe, alike 
 in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ant- 
 werp, came into being on Belgian territory, 
 though on the very threshold of both Holland 
 and Germany. 
 
 1 1
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 Another great river, the Meuse, flows 
 through a distridt of beautiful, well-moulded 
 valleys, among which tireless industry yielded 
 coal and metals. From the banks of the 
 Meuse came the stones which crown the lofty 
 gables of the great houses, the transepts of 
 the cathedrals. The Meuse is the river of 
 Walloon industry, and the Scheldt is that of 
 industrial Flanders. 
 
 These two races of Belgium, one Latin, the 
 other Germanic, so wonderfully disposed over 
 the country and controlled by their respeftive 
 rivers, are hard-working, tenacious, and mod- 
 est. They also have each their patience — the 
 Flemish taciturn, the Walloon genial and 
 ^ humorous. They have won for their country 
 not only comfort but wealth. Standing in 
 I order after England, Germany, and France, 
 but before Italy, Austria, and Russia, Belgium 
 holds the fourth place among the commercial 
 nations of Europe. Her prosperity, unique 
 among the small nations of to-day, is proof 
 positive of the gifts of her people. 
 
 But there is still another side of her to be 
 considered. Thirty years ago Belgium, until 
 1880 endowed only with material wealth, 
 
 12
 
 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 
 
 produced a school of writers, whose brilliance 
 was not long in winning a place among the 
 intelledual forces of Europe. The spirit of 
 the whole world was influenced and made 
 nobler by Maeterlinck. He, like Carlyle and 
 Emerson, has moulded the thought of his 
 age, and trained its understanding and feeling 
 after his own manner. Poems there were, some 
 delicate and frail like those of Charles van 
 Lerberghe, others vivid and intricately 
 wrought, like those of Albert Giraud. 
 
 Lemonnier, Eckhoud, Krains, Glesener, 
 Delattre, showed themselves observers and 
 thinkers either powerfully realistic or romantic. 
 Spaak, Crommelynck, Delterne, Van Offel, 
 strove to found a school of original and 
 personal drama. In every department of art, 
 alike in painting and literature, new life showed 
 itself. Charles de Coster, the father of Belgian 
 literature and author of its first masterpiece : 
 TylUelenspiegel, saw his pioneer work carried 
 on by numerous young disciples. They in 
 their turn wrote books that found places 
 beside his in well-chosen libraries. They also 
 found beauty in the storehouses of past life 
 and heroism ; but many of them, belonging 
 
 13
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 as they do to the modern age, have explored 
 the soul of the modern world, and have 
 written, if not with more emotion than de 
 Coster, at least with greater reality and truer 
 proportion. 
 
 If ever, then, a community has shown itself 
 worthy in loftiness and independence of life 
 to make a part of European civilization, that 
 community is the Belgian nation. She pos- 
 sessed, if I may use the metaphor, a more 
 complete armoury of weapons, material, in- 
 telledual and moral, that any other nation of 
 her size. She had won the respedl and ad- 
 miration, not only of the smaller neutral states, 
 but of the great sovereign nations of the world. 
 And those sovereign nations had gone further ; 
 they had sworn together to protedl her. She 
 had shown herself worthy of their protedtion, 
 and never more so than on the day when one 
 of her pledged protedtors seized her treacher- 
 ously by the throat and sought to strangle 
 her. 
 
 There lies the deepest shame of Germany. 
 She chose that little nation most deserving of 
 life and growth to suffer for the German
 
 DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI 
 
 opinion of the labour and existence of the 
 non-German world. More than that, though 
 infinitely stronger than Belgium — stronger 
 by how many million men ? — Germany did 
 not even attack her face to face. She schemed 
 and lied and even flattered. To within two 
 hours of a cruel ultimatum she was breathing 
 forth the purity of her intentions. She could 
 have dared to offer open battle, but she 
 preferred a treacherous ambuscade. And by 
 this deed she has created against herself in the 
 hearts of Belgians a hatred so passionate and 
 so universal, that it will go down from gen- 
 eration to generation to a depth that no man 
 can foretell. So far as any human sentiment 
 can be, this hatred will be eternal. It will 
 become a part of the education of our primary 
 schools, it will be a tradition in our families, 
 an instind in our homes. It will be for us a 
 hallowed reserve of rage and vigour. We 
 shall feel, all of us, as did a peasant with whom 
 I had a brief but wonderful conversation, not 
 long ago, in a coast-village between Coxyde 
 and Dunkirk. He said : " My wish is that 
 when I am dying I may use the last reserve 
 of my strength, which I shall have stored up 
 
 15
 
 BELGIU MS AGONY 
 
 inside me, to utter one more curse, one more 
 word of hatred against the Germans." I 
 remarked that such feelings were far from 
 Christian. He replied: "So much the worse!" 
 
 i6
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE MARK OF THE TEUTON 
 
 YOU also may say, " To hate is unchristian 
 and wrong." I agree with you. But must 
 we not add that to hate is necessary.? There 
 must be hatred in battle. The fighter who 
 does not hate will fight feebly and be beaten. 
 Besides which, for us Belgians the instindl 
 of national self-preservation lays hatred upon 
 us henceforth as a duty. Only by love or by 
 hatred do nations achieve great things, and 
 our freedom is a great thing. But the Germans 
 have given us no choice of mood, no choice 
 between hatred and love in our fight against 
 them. 
 
 If ever oppression has been systematically 
 brutal, it is theirs. They have waged no real 
 war against us, they have been ravishers, 
 thieves, pillagers, and assassins. Courageous 
 enough in the adual battle, after each fight 
 they have behaved like cruel cowards. Drunk 
 
 17 c
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 with our wine they became the merest bandits. 
 They pradlised upon us, among many other 
 vices, that particular perversion which, as has 
 been proved more than once by legal trial, is 
 rife in the German barracks and officers' clubs. 
 
 Our Belgian women, our girls, our children, 
 became the playthings of German lust. Some 
 of the varieties of debauch were of such 
 complicated vileness as to be almost incredible. 
 The extremes of horror to which these warriors 
 can go have benefited them to this extent, 
 namely, that the world's imagination will 
 never wholly credit the perverted ingenuity 
 they displayed in brutalizing Belgium. 
 
 Now that reports alike trustworthy and 
 careful have been published, general opinion 
 is bestirring itself and examining seriously 
 the charges brought. Already shame is apparent 
 in Germany itself. 
 
 When I first came to England, in the 
 autumn of 19 14, every story of atrocities was 
 susped. People said : " That 's all very well, 
 but show us the man who has had his hands 
 cut off, or the woman with the mangled 
 breasts." And as it was unfortunately impos- 
 sible to comply with this request, because the 
 
 18
 
 THE MARK OF THE TEUTON 
 
 man who had lost his hands, and the woman 
 who had been mutilated had involuntarily 
 died of their wounds, the sceptics concluded 
 that the Germans were at least real soldiers 
 and not murderers. " When we see, we will 
 believe," was their attitude. Alas, such proof 
 could only have been given by digging in the 
 earth and opening up the graves of the vidims. 
 To paint a complete picture of the German 
 savagery in Belgium is, of course, impossible. 
 Too many fads have escaped observation. 
 Even those witnesses whose evidence can be 
 checked are too numerous all to be quoted. It 
 was principally at the beginning of the war, in 
 the provinces of Liege, Namur, Luxembourg, 
 and Brabant, that the Teuton hordes were at 
 their most barbarous. More recently, either 
 because they were so commanded or because 
 they were glutted with cruelty, they have kept 
 down their evil instinds. Their fury lasted 
 two or three months. Perhaps the deliberate 
 purpose of giving free rein to the army's rage 
 was to annihilate the conquered race. Flanders 
 was less violently and less persistently tortured 
 than La Wallonie. The latter, by her very 
 existence, was judged guilty. She was to blame 
 
 19
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 for not belonging to the Germanic race. She 
 was not, as Flanders was, a distri6l where 
 ultimately there was chance of the German 
 domination being accepted. The invaders knew 
 that in her they would find an implacable 
 enemy. 
 
 They have therefore not been satisfied with 
 the devastation caused by their armies ; they 
 have now deliberately created a famine in 
 southern Belgium. Now, in the full twentieth 
 century and in Europe, there are cries of a 
 people dying of hunger. Help pours in from 
 all sides. America is splendid. But how far 
 will these gifts go to satisfy the hunger of 
 whole provinces.? It is an unvarying rule that 
 conquered territories must be provisioned by 
 their conquerors. But the Germans recognize 
 no duties in warfare. They are glad that those 
 whom they have not been able to slaughter 
 should die a death even more horrible. The 
 fury against us felt by the German officers 
 dates from the very day of the war's beginning. 
 We barred their road to France. The a6t had 
 no meaning, no honesty to them. True to 
 their traditions, they sought to buy us off^. 
 Calling our government, as it were, into the 
 
 20
 
 THE MARK OF THE TEUTON 
 
 room behind the shop, they asked, " For how 
 much ? " And waited for the answer they 
 expefted, " For thirty pieces of silver." 
 
 But the answer was given by Liege, and 
 Liege infuriated them. They lost thousands 
 of men ; by no means were they able to force 
 the instant passage which was so essential to 
 them. Behind our defence France was mob- 
 ilizing. For England and for Russia we gained 
 a precious respite. 
 
 The world jumped immediately to the 
 conclusion that the fate of the war was already 
 settling against Germany. Even this first 
 check, given by a tiny nation in the cause of 
 honour, was regarded as the death blow. 
 Certainly there was talk of peace. Three 
 separate times did Germany approach us with 
 proposals. The first occasion was in August. 
 M. Davignon, Belgian Minister of Foreign 
 Affairs, received through our minister at The 
 Hague a long telegram which contained the 
 following sentence: "The German govern- 
 ment is ready to take any steps in order to 
 have Belgium on her side in her war with 
 France." Belgium's reply was prompt and 
 definite : 
 
 21
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 "True to her international duties, Belgium 
 can only repeat her answer to the ultimatum 
 of August 2nd. And this especially as, since 
 that time her territory has been violated, a 
 terrible war has been carried into her lands, 
 and the guarantors of her integrity have 
 promptly and loyally responded to her 
 appeal for help." 
 
 Germany's second attempt was through 
 political channels in Belgium, but it failed as 
 ignominiously as the first. 
 
 The third of the peace proposals was made 
 by M. Eyschen, a politician of Luxembourg, 
 who toured the neutral states, persuading them 
 to issue a joint appeal for peace between us 
 and Germany. Such a scheme could not have 
 any result. Belgium, first of all, met it with 
 a point-blank refusal. It could not be en- 
 couraging to M. Eyschen to read in a Belgian 
 newspaper : 
 
 " If our government had wished it, we 
 could have entered into negotiations with 
 Germany. But our government did not 
 so wish, and it will greet with the same 
 refusal every ambassador or agent of the 
 sovereign who, having invaded, devastated 
 
 22
 
 THE MARK OF THE TEUTON 
 
 and shed the blood of Belgium, having 
 mocked her through a bribed and corrupted 
 press, has dared, three times in succession, 
 to offer his vidlim a peace without honour." 
 So, after violating our neutrality, Germany 
 behaved as though positions were reversed. 
 It was she, the great nation, that made advances 
 to the little nation she had despoiled and out- 
 raged. She must have mistaken our power 
 of resistance to decide thus rapidly to swallow 
 her pride. In any case she a6ted with such 
 chara6leristic delicacy and tad: as to embarrass 
 even her friends. Not for a moment did she 
 suspe6t that a people who, in order to remain 
 faithful to their honour, had not hesitated to 
 undergo infinite sufferings and misery, would 
 reject as an insult any talk of compromise or 
 friendship. The Diredtor of the Deutsche 
 Bank, who was sent as emissary on the occasion 
 of the second appeal, actually expostulated : 
 "The Herr Baron von der Goltz is, after all, 
 not a villain. He has no evil designs on 
 Brussels. It would be so easy to talk 
 matters over, and make some amicable ar- 
 rangement. ..." 
 
 Oh, the subtlety, the perception, the tadt of 
 
 23
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 the German diplomats ! With what elephant's 
 feet do they pick their way about the great 
 garden of human emotions ! 
 
 I have also heard that they said : 
 
 " The Belgians should have accepted our 
 peace propositions, even if it was only 
 because they at least proved that we were 
 sorry for the wrong we had done." 
 I do not know what blockhead uttered this 
 argument, but his childish brain does not 
 seem to have realized that Germany, stained 
 with her crimes, will have very little right 
 to plead repentance when she is deservedly 
 chastised by the master-hand of the allies. 
 Germany has vented her rage, not only on 
 human beings, but also on inanimate obje6ts. 
 Wood, stone, thatch, metal-work, anything that 
 could be used for shelter or refuge, bore the 
 brunt of her fury. Her soldiers carried special 
 naphtha grenades, special packets of pitch to 
 fit them for arson as well as for rifle shooting. 
 Deliberate burnings took place all over. In 
 the province of Luxembourg alone : 
 
 Neufchateau shows 21 houses burnt; 
 Etalle,30; Houdemont, 64; at Rulles half 
 the houses have been destroyed by fire ; the 
 
 24
 
 THE MARK OF THE TEUTON 
 
 village of Ausart is entirely consumed ; at 
 Tintigny only 8 houses remain. Jamoigne 
 is half destroyed ; also Les Bulles. At Noyen 
 42 houses destroyed ; Rossignol is entirely 
 destroyed ; Mussy la ville has 20 houses 
 burnt; Bertrix, 15 ; at Bleid a great part of 
 the village ; at Signeulx a great part of the 
 village; at Ethe five-sixths of the village 
 have been burnt. Bellefontaine has 6 houses- 
 burnt ; Mussin, half the village ; at Baranzy 
 only 4 houses remain; at Maissin only 36 
 out of 100; at Villance, 9. At Anlay 26 
 houses have been burnt. 
 So runs the report. The figures are minima. 
 By a computation necessarily incomplete, the 
 number of houses destroyed by fire exceeds 
 3,000. In every case, let it be noted, the 
 houses were destroyed, not by the inevitable 
 processes of warfare, but by deliberate and 
 systematic incendiarism. 
 
 In Flanders and Brabant, Termonde, Ma- 
 lines, Alost, Aerschot, Dixmude, Nieuport, 
 Ypres, Louvain are now mere ruins. They 
 have been bombarded and rebombarded. The 
 Belgian army had only to inflidl the slighest 
 check on the Germans, for the latter to shower 
 
 25
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 their shells once more either on Termonde, 
 Malines, or Alost. The adion suggests the 
 punishment inflided by some sinister school- 
 master. Always it was methodical, for every- 
 thing is rigidly disciplined in Germany, even 
 madness. 
 
 And these innumerable blazing towns shone 
 like great torches on the doing of other deeds 
 of crime. First, there were wholesale exe- 
 cutions : 
 
 At Dinant 700 civilians were slaughtered; 
 at Andennes every official, and nearly all the 
 prominent citizens. La Wallonie ran blood 
 in her every village and her every town. In 
 the province of Luxembourg alone, where 
 so many houses were destroyed, the tale of 
 murdered folk runs as follows : At Neuf- 
 chateau, 1 8 were shot ; at Vance, i ; at Etalle, 
 30; at Houdemont, 1 1 ; at Tintigny, 157 ; 
 at Bertrix, 2 ; at Ethe, 300 (while in all 
 530 persons have disappeared). AtLatour 
 only 17 men survive; at St. Leger 1 1 were 
 shot; at Maissin, 10 men, i woman and a 
 girl were shot, and 1 men and 1 young 
 girls wounded. At Villance 2 men were 
 shot, and i girl wounded; at Anlay 52 men 
 
 26
 
 THE MARK OF THE TEUTON 
 
 and women were shot ; at Claireuse 2 men 
 
 were shot and 2 hung. 
 
 After wholesale murder came wholesale de- 
 portation. Every man strong enough to work, 
 gardeners, wood-cutters, miners, peasants, 
 were sent off to work in Germany. The in- 
 vaders succeeded thus in reviving the ancient 
 custom of slavery. Terrible was the treat- 
 ment these poor men received. The whip is 
 a German national institution. The German 
 eagle might be depidled holding it in his claws, 
 as the American eagle grasps the lightning. 
 
 Stolen goods in piles were carried off over 
 the Rhine — pictures, furniture, mirrors, pianos. 
 Captain de Gerlache — the same who conduced 
 the Belgian Antar6tic expedition — has de- 
 scribed in the Norwegian paper " Morgen 
 Bladet," the sights he saw. His statements 
 are supported by photographs taken by him- 
 self. At Malines the station was blocked with 
 700 pianos taken from the pillaged houses of 
 the town. One of his friends, an important 
 official, returning home, finds his house has 
 been sacked. He asks to see the German 
 governor. His neighbours have assured him 
 that a party of German soldiers came pur- 
 
 27
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 posely to ransack his home. " They were 
 peasants," puts in the governor. "They were 
 your officers," replies the vi6lim. The gov- 
 ernor consents to follow the Belgian official 
 to the station. There they discover the stolen 
 goods. They have gone to swell the vast 
 pile of belongings filched from neighbouring 
 houses. 
 
 This story is typical. I could tell a hundred 
 others. 
 
 Burning houses, stolen possessions, human 
 beings driven into captivity, are a mere back- 
 ground for the better setting of the horrors 
 which take the front of the stage. And this 
 foreground is devoted entirely to the torture 
 of old men, of women, and of children. 
 Germany, for all her customary heavy clumsi- 
 ness, developed, of a sudden, an amazing in- 
 genuity. Cruelty stimulates her. A kind of 
 horrible lyricism seizes her. She wallows in 
 frightfulness. 
 
 German military usage — and the word is 
 not used lightly — demands that an old man 
 should walk in front of the soldiers, when 
 they are going under fire. If, instead of this, 
 the old man is judged likely to be of more 
 
 28
 
 THE MARK OF THE TEUTON 
 
 value as a hostage, German military usage 
 deems it good to kill his sons before his eyes 
 and to maltreat him to the utmost limit of 
 exhaustion. If, again, a considerable number 
 of old men are made prisoners, German milit- 
 ary usage lays down that they shall be placed 
 in a single line, forced to dig their own graves 
 just behind the place at which they are ordered 
 to stand, and then that they shall be shot in 
 such a way that the bodies fall, of themselves, 
 Into the holes made. If, finally, the old man 
 is a priest or a monk, German military usage 
 recommends that he be first flogged and then 
 hung. 
 
 In the case of women, German military 
 usage inevitably orders rape or violation as a 
 preliminary. Husband, brother, and child 
 having been done to death, the wife, the sister, 
 or the mother is given a spade and told to 
 bury her dead. Pregnant women unfailingly 
 receive the bayonet thrust in the womb. A 
 woman engaged to be married is forcibly 
 made one with her fiance^ bound tightly with 
 cords and set in a pile of trusses of straw. A 
 match is struck on a boot-sole, the straw 
 crackles and blazes, and the young people end 
 
 29
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 their embrace in death. For women who are 
 not pledged to marry, the German soldiers 
 have another form of procedure. The follow- 
 ing anecdote, proved and vouched for by the 
 French Minister of war, may serve as example. 
 The story has been related by Jean Bernard 
 in the *' Independance " for 2 January 191 5. 
 The scene is a country-house near Antwerp. 
 A merchant of the city has chosen to remain 
 in his home, with his two daughters, aged 
 respedively twenty and seventeen years. Both 
 are beautiful, with that placidly joyful beauty 
 that has distinguished Flemish women from 
 the time of Rubens onwards. After the fall 
 of Antwerp, the Germans spread about the 
 neighbourhood and several officers quarter 
 themselves on the merchant, who has had the 
 rash courage to stay on in his country house. 
 Being a man of means he receives them with 
 all the hospitality possible. The most com- 
 fortable bedrooms are given up to them ; for 
 the first evening an abundant dinner is pre- 
 pared. Five German officers sit down to this 
 meal, at which there is every promise of 
 plentiful wine as well as food. Unfortunately, 
 however, drunkenness cannot be pleaded in 
 
 30
 
 THE MARK OF THE TEUTON 
 
 their defence. Before the feast begins at all, 
 the German captain, the oldest and senior 
 officer of the five, orders the owner of the 
 house to be thrust into his own cellar, and 
 the door guarded by two sentinels with loaded 
 rifles and instrudlions to shoot, if necessary. 
 
 This precaution having been taken, the 
 two girls are commanded by the revellers to 
 undress. They protest, resist, implore. All 
 in vain. As answer to their prayers the captain 
 orders some of his men to strip them naked 
 and hold them during the meal before the 
 leering eyes of the diners. At last, sated with 
 eating and pleasingly drunk, the savages, 
 before the amused eyes of common soldiers, 
 themselves reeling with drink, take the two 
 poor children for their amusement. You will 
 forgive me for not reproducing here the fur- 
 ther details quoted by the Minister of War. 
 It is enough to say that when, the following 
 morning, the merchant was set free from his 
 prison, his daughters had been handed over 
 to the tender mercies of the common soldiery. 
 One had gone raving mad ; the other has since 
 killed herself in shame and grief. 
 
 German military usage has methods also of 
 
 31
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 dealing with children. They have little hands 
 that are delightfully easy to cut off. Their 
 feet are barely attached to their legs at all. A 
 little blood-spilling and the thing is done. 
 But there are refinements. M. le Senateur 
 Henry Lafontaine — Nobel prizeman and 
 famed for moderation and pacificism — has 
 testified in a public meeting that children's 
 nostrils and children's ears have been burnt 
 with the flaring stumps of lighted cigars. 
 
 The babe in the cradle is, of course, an 
 ideal vi6lim. He can be tortured and will 
 tell no tales. I know well that one habit of 
 German military usage is to deny proven fadls 
 and attribute the crimes immediately to the 
 other side. But this method becomes daily 
 less pradicable. Too many horrors have been 
 committed. The loathing roused is too deep 
 and too universal. Too many mouths are 
 crying aloud for vengeance. Their noise over- 
 bears and drowns the muttering of lies. It 
 has become necessary for Germany to admit 
 the least tinge of shame, the least suspicion 
 of dishonour. So, German military usage now 
 protests that a few examples had to be made, 
 because the civil population fired on the 
 
 32
 
 THE MARK OF THE TEUTON 
 
 soldiery. It is unexplained in what way little 
 children, young girls, or even old men could 
 have assaulted the officers. As for the able- 
 bodied men, they had handed over all their 
 arms to the authorities of their communes ; 
 even sporting guns had been given up. One 
 is forced to conclude that the shots, if any 
 were fired, came from the Belgian or French 
 armies in fair fight, or perhaps from the 
 Germans themselves. M. Emile Van der 
 Velde, Minister of State, has recently read 
 aloud in public in London a letter from a 
 German officer, who admits that at Huy a 
 quarrel broke out among his own men and a 
 shot was fired which killed a German soldier. 
 Of course, the result was a massacre of the 
 native civilians. What happened at Huy, 
 concluded M. Van der Velde, happened at 
 Louvain and at many places besides. 
 
 But why trouble to meet even this charge .? 
 What repressive measures can possibly justify 
 the orgy of savagery and hate in which the 
 invaders of Belgium wallowed .'' It is in the 
 German charader that reasons for such bar- 
 barity must be sought. Like some evil de- 
 formity of the brain, unfit for the light of day, 
 
 33 D
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 does that charader now appear to Europe. The 
 empire of William II has hired as mercenaries 
 all the old curses of the world. " From plague, 
 pestilence and famine, good Lord deliver us." 
 Like our ancestors, we Belgians can utter that 
 prayer to heaven. But to us the words mean 
 one thing and one alone — Germany. 
 
 34
 
 CEUX DE LIEGE
 
 CEUX DE LIEGE 
 
 7~\UT la guerre mart elk et sacrilege 
 / y Broyer notre pays de combats en combats 
 Jamais sous le soleil^ une dme rioubliera 
 Ceux qui sont morts^ pour le monde, la bas 
 A Liege 
 
 Ainsi quune montagne 
 ^i marcherait et laisserait tomber par chocs 
 Ses blocSy 
 Sur les villes et les campagnes 
 S'avanfait la pesante et firoce Allemagne. 
 
 Ce fut un tragique moment 
 Les gens fuyaient vers Vinconnu, eperdument; 
 
 Seuls ceux de Liege resisf^rent 
 
 A ce sinistre ecroulement 
 D'hommes et d'armes sur la terre. 
 
 S'ils agirent ainsi, 
 Cest quils savaient qu'entre leurs mains etaient 
 rem is 
 
 37
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 Le sort 
 Et d' Athene s et de Rome, et de la France claire^ 
 
 Et quil fallait que leurs efforts 
 Apres s'etre acharnes se douhlassent encor 
 
 En des efforts ■plus sanguinaires. 
 
 Peu importait 
 
 ^i'en ces temps s ombres, 
 Contre Vinnomhrahle empire quils affrontaient 
 
 lis ne fussent quun petit nombre; 
 
 A chaque heure du jour 
 Defendant et leur ville, et ses forts tour a tour 
 lis livraient cent combats farmi les inter- 
 
 valles ; 
 lis tuaient en courant, et ne se lassaient pas 
 D'ensanglanter le sol a chacun de leurs pas 
 
 Et d'etre prompts sous les raffales 
 Des balles. 
 Mime lorsque la nuit, dans le del sulfureux, 
 Un Zeppelin rodeur passait au-dessus d'eux 
 Les designant aux coups par sa brusque lumiere, 
 Nul ne reculait,fut-ce d''un pas, en arriere; 
 Mais tous lis bondissaient d'un si farouche elan 
 
 En avant, 
 ^e la place quils occupaient demeurait vide 
 ^and y frappait la mort rapide. 
 
 38
 
 CEUX DE LIEGE 
 
 A Vattaque^ sur les glacis ^ 
 ^andy rang par rang sepresentaient les ennemis 
 Sous r eclair courbe et reguUer des mitrailleuses, 
 Un tir serre qui tout a coup se dilatait 
 
 Immensement les rejetaient 
 
 Et rang par rang les abattait 
 
 Sur la terre silencieuse. 
 
 Chaudfontaine et Lon(in et Boncelle et Barchon 
 Retentissaient du bruit d'acier de leurs cou- 
 
 poleSy 
 lis assumaientla nuitjejour^ sur leurs epaules 
 La charge et la tonnerre et Veffroi des canons. 
 A nos troupes couchees 
 Dans les tranchees, 
 Des gamines et des gamins 
 Distribuaient le pain 
 Et rapportaient la biere 
 Avec la bonne humeiir indomptee et guer- 
 riere. 
 On y parlait d' exploits, accomplis simplement; 
 Et comme, a tel moment, 
 Le plus jeune des regiments 
 Put, a tel point Jureur, carnage, et foudroyment 
 
 ^e jamais troupe de guerre 
 Ne fut plus ferme et plus terrible sur la terre. 
 
 39
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 La ville entiere s'exaltait 
 
 De vivre sous la foudre; 
 Uheroisme s'y respirait 
 
 Comme la poudre ; 
 Le ca^ur humain s'y composait 
 
 D'une neuve substance^ 
 Et le prodige y grandissait 
 
 Chaque existance. 
 'Tout jj mouva'it dans Vordre intense et sur- 
 humain. 
 
 vouSy les hommes de demain, 
 Dut la guerre mortelle et sacrilege 
 Nous avoir krash dans un dernier combat^ 
 Jamais^ sous le soleil^ une dme n'oubliera 
 Ceux qui sont marts pour le monde^ Ih bas, 
 A Liege. 
 
 40
 
 CHAPTER III 
 BELGIAN PRIDE 
 
 IT is the duty of Belgians to-day, however 
 terrible their misfortunes have been, not 
 to sink to mere complaining nor to dwell on 
 their misery, but to prove themselves worthy 
 of their soldiers, who have been, one and all, 
 heroes. 
 
 The lamentations of women driven from 
 their homes, forced to tread the highways of 
 famine, flight, and exile, their children clinging 
 to their skirts, are justified and truly pitiable. 
 But it is not fitting that men, especially men 
 who can think and a6l, should echo these 
 cries, already somewhat over-prolonged. 
 
 In times before the war, those of us who 
 dreamed of a greater Belgium had no visions 
 of territorial expansion in Europe, nor of a 
 colonial empire in Africa. What we pidlured 
 was a rebirth of Belgium, a rebirth essentially 
 of the mind and spirit. We pidured certainly 
 
 41
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 an ever-growing adivlty of trade and industry, 
 but our desire was even more for a greater 
 modernity and vitality of thought. We sought 
 for Belgium the power of influence rather 
 than of conquest. 
 
 And now we see the influence of Belgium 
 stronger than it has ever been. It is true that 
 for the moment our factories are silent, ap- 
 parently deprived of the panting breath which 
 is their life. But no one really thinks them 
 dead. As soon as the war is over they will 
 spring to life again, the wonderful monsters 
 that they were before. The weight of dust and 
 ashes that now covers them will be a light 
 burden to their thousands of tentacles, when 
 once again they spring, in their twisted energy, 
 to the light of day. 
 
 As ever, we Belgians shall be young and 
 keen. Until to-day our nation has known no 
 danger. We were too sure of the morrow. We 
 lived like rich people who had no knowledge 
 of want. War, we thought, was the business 
 of others. 
 
 But war has come upon us, fierce and 
 terrible, when least we expedled it. Like a 
 great mountain, crashing downward, the em- 
 
 42
 
 BELGIAN PRIDE 
 
 pire of William Hohenzollern has overwhelmed 
 us. We were alone ; we were few. We were 
 attacked with treachery and lies. Into the old 
 forts of Liege we threw ourselves in desperate 
 haste. We had, as it were, to invent courage 
 and resource for ourselves ; we had to manu- 
 facture a tragic spirit of resistance. All that 
 we did in a day, an hour, a moment. And in 
 that moment we won the admiration of the 
 world. 
 
 Oh, what unforgettable impromptus were 
 that courage and that glory ! Some of us, 
 seeing the little bands of men leaving for the 
 frontier, could not but doubt. " They will be 
 but fodder for cannon. We have no army, no 
 generals, no fortresses." 
 
 And four days later a name, unknown a few 
 hours ago, was in every mouth. The boys in 
 the streets dressed up as General Leman. 
 Girls sold his portrait in every town. The 
 personality of a true General had stamped 
 itself upon the mind of everyone. Nor was 
 this all. The same little bands of soldiers, 
 whom we had pitied as destined only to feed 
 the hostile cannon, came to Brussels, their 
 hands full of Prussian sabres, at once timid 
 
 43
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 and triumphant, still unconvinced of the great 
 part they had just played. The women kissed 
 them ; the men carried them in triumph. 
 
 One of them, when a "Taube" hovered 
 threateningly over Brussels, thrust into the 
 air a Prussian eagle, torn from some German 
 helmet, and, with a laugh of mocking rage, 
 taunted the aviator to come down and fetch 
 it. Splendid moments, alive with all the fever 
 of pride ! The weather was brilliant, the very 
 air seemed golden. One breathed in heroism 
 with the sunlight. 
 
 These early triumphs of Liege, and those 
 that followed at Haelen and the Yser, have 
 won for Belgium the eternal honour, respedl 
 and admiration of all. For three months we 
 have held the vast German armies in our 
 country ; the armies that allotted to us three 
 days. With the most convincing arguments 
 of all we have challenged the dogma of their 
 invincibility. We have caused them their 
 first losses. Like moving blocks, the men 
 thrust elbow to elbow against each other, 
 they advanced towards the glacis of our 
 forts. Before giving the adlual assault, to- 
 gether they shouted — "Kaiser!" "Kaiser!" 
 
 44
 
 BELGIAN PRIDE 
 
 And the Belgian guns answered them. They 
 fell, row upon row, like dominoes. Some- 
 times the swift flashlight of a cruising airship 
 lit up their agony. A great murmuring groan 
 spread along the lines, died away and gave 
 place to the silence of death. 
 
 The force of our resistance gave time to 
 France and to England to arm themselves, 
 to perfed: their organization, but it is not 
 for us to harp on this. More important still 
 is what lies behind. 
 
 Our handful of soldiers at Liege and at 
 Haelen represented, unconsciously of course, 
 a great past of cultured civilization. If the 
 French-speaking race is the incarnation of 
 both Greece and Rome, we can assert that 
 these soldiers of ours defended and upheld 
 their inherited traditions, at the moment 
 when they were most seriously threatened. 
 That is why this simple adl of courage is so 
 great. We need not dread comparing their 
 exploit to the deeds at Thermopylae. At 
 Liege, as in Sparta, a handful of men saved 
 the world. 
 
 With the memory of this supreme service 
 rendered to Western civilization in our 
 
 45
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 minds, we should have no feeling but pride. 
 Tears dishonour us. Let us rather be thank- 
 ful that Belgium, of all the countries, was 
 chosen to do this wonderful deed, was 
 privileged to be the first and the most 
 vital rampart of modern civilization against 
 savagery and brutal aggression, and that her 
 name in future will be joined to those few 
 small nations whose fame is immortal. Let 
 us further rejoice that in these tremendous 
 days our people have lived with an intensity 
 that makes all our past existence as a nation 
 seem valueless in comparison. It seems that 
 before this sudden baptism of fire we were 
 hardly a nation at all. We frittered away our 
 strength in petty squabbles; we argued over 
 words instead of fads ; we blamed each other 
 for being Walloon or Flemish ; we busied 
 ourselves as lawyers, business men, officials, 
 instead of striving before all to be proud and 
 free citizens of one State. Danger rather 
 than safety has been our cure. We have 
 discovered ourselves. So strong is the union, 
 so tenacious the bonds of a common resist- 
 ance that now bind us together, that to many 
 minds Belgium dates only from yesterday, 
 
 46
 
 BELGIAN PRIDE 
 
 and has never felt herself so real, so living 
 as when, deprived of her land, she has, as 
 rallying point for her national consciousness, 
 only her King. 
 
 47
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 ALBERT THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 THOSE who knew him before he came 
 to the throne, though they believed firmly 
 in him, yet wondered a little how he would 
 develop. He comes of a royal stock that have 
 always reached a late maturity. Leopold I 
 won his reputation as European arbitrator at 
 the age of fifty ; Leopold II was at first kept 
 in check by his famous ministers, Rogier and 
 Fr^re-Orban, and he had to throw off their 
 tutelage before he could stand out as the man 
 who, by bringing Western civilization into 
 Africa, gave the world, as it were, the gift of 
 a new continent. Alike, the first and second 
 kings of Belgium started their public careers 
 with diflidence and hesitation. 
 
 What awakening was in store for their suc- 
 cessor.-' As Crown Prince, Albert gave his 
 attention to social and military questions. He 
 talked sparingly, but no one who had the
 
 ALBERT THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 privilege of speaking with him could fail to 
 notice the thoroughness with which he had 
 studied and learnt. As King, he would cer- 
 tainly have carried through vigorous reforms, 
 both economic and democratic. Indeed, he 
 was plainly heading towards striking changes 
 when suddenly the war broke upon us. 
 
 I shall never forget that fourth of August, 
 nineteen hundred and fourteen. I saw the 
 King go into the Parliament House and I saw 
 him coming out. He had taken counsel with 
 the representatives of his people, on the eve of 
 his and their blood-stained Easter Day. 
 
 And indeed it was, for us Belgians, nothing 
 short of an Easter morning. It was our re- 
 surredion. War was upon us. Everywhere 
 was fear and anguish. On our frontier a 
 torrent of men and munitions threatened the 
 old defences of Liege. We were a handful 
 against a multitude, and could have no hope 
 of vidory ; only in resisting as best we might 
 lay our chance of glory. We did our duty, 
 and in the simple doing of it we were born 
 again. Pride, determination, courage, self- 
 denial, all the qualities which had lain hidden 
 under our riches and our prosperity, sprang 
 
 49 E
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 suddenly to light. In a few weeks the little 
 Belgian people became a great nation. 
 
 The word "motherland" had been for most 
 of us a mere catchword for official harangues 
 and popular songs. We were very far from 
 being Chauvinist. Indeed, a large number of 
 our best citizens adually regretted that they be- 
 longed to so tiny a country. Some would have 
 preferred to be French, others English, others 
 even — those whom we called Flamingants — 
 German. To-day all such regrets and longings 
 have vanished. We are all Belgians and ask 
 nothing better; Belgians, fiercely almost, and 
 until death. For our country is now our 
 religion. 
 
 And our King is the symbol of this resur- 
 rection of Belgium. Alone, of all the kings 
 and emperors concerned in this war, he has 
 been one with his soldiers, sharing their 
 danger and their glory. He has lived in the 
 trenches, eating and smoking as his simple 
 troopers eat and smoke ; he has shown a quiet 
 courage, a resistance, and a strength at once 
 vigorous and profound. Among his generals 
 and his officers he has more than once shown 
 the qualities of a far-sighted and forceful tac- 
 
 50
 
 ALBERT THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 tician ; his suggestions have been adopted and 
 have proved successful. The darker and more 
 cruel was the outlook, the more reliable and 
 decisive has he shown himself to be. The 
 war might have been made solely that Albert 
 could come to a consciousness of himself, that 
 he might leave behind him his hesitation and 
 his reserve, and take his place, not after but by 
 the side of his noble predecessors. Leopold I 
 was a diplomat; Leopold II was a colonizer 
 and a business man ; Albert has shown him- 
 self a soldier. 
 
 He is as triumphantly a soldier as the 
 German Emperor is not. From the outset of 
 the war this has been clearly evident. Their 
 very proclamations were different. William II, 
 with his mystic rhetoric and parade of literary 
 grandiloquence, strives to impose himself by 
 wonder and not by sharing in the fight. 
 Albert's words are few and sincere. He 
 speaks in order himself to take a gun and 
 hasten to meet the enemy. From him come 
 no appeals to heaven ; he goes neither as 
 God's ambassador nor the favourite of the 
 Virgin Mary. He puts a simple trust in 
 Providence and, for the rest, relies on his 
 
 51
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 own courage and on the strength of his 
 arm. 
 
 For him no basking in the gaudy flattery 
 of a court. For him no schemes of triumphal 
 entries; he is no Lohengrin at the royal 
 yacht's prow. Sparing of words, he strikes 
 no useless attitudes. He even prefers going 
 on foot to horseback. 
 
 In manner he is gentle, diffident. He wel- 
 comes you with a cheery handshake. Con- 
 versation begins slowly, but once the banalities 
 and embarrassments of the first words are left 
 behind, it thrives and develops. The King is 
 informed on all subjects. He is no poet, but 
 he will recall a verse here and there remem- 
 bered in his reading. The Belgian artistic re- 
 naissance of recent years has found him a warm 
 and enthusiastic supporter. He understands 
 and helps. He is the first of our kings to 
 make mention of art in a speech from the 
 throne. 
 
 Albert I is beloved by the mass of his 
 people as a "beau gars." No King-cripple will 
 ever be popular in Belgium. Our sovereign 
 must be able to wield a sword in both hands. 
 Albert is massive and healthily large. He is 
 
 52
 
 ALBERT THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 the incarnation of the Flemish and Walloon 
 idea of beauty, which is never separated from 
 strength. His people know that, at need, 
 their King would be a stalwart boon-companion 
 at the Kermesses. No nation is more attached 
 to the idea of equality than the Belgians. The 
 pomp and arrogance of the Germans are in- 
 tolerable to us. Only to see in Brussels a 
 German officer pass by, especially to see the 
 solemn prancing of the goose-step, is sufficient 
 to realize that the popular commonsense of 
 the Bruxellois condemn such sights as the 
 posturing of folly itself Albert is a soldier 
 without parade or mannerism. His simplicity 
 is exa6tly the quality that commands the great- 
 est love and veneration. No one can impose 
 admiration on the Belgians ; they give it to 
 whom they will. 
 
 In the achievement of his popularity, rapid 
 from the beginning and by now strikingly 
 established, the King has been throughout 
 helped by his wife. She understood immedi- 
 ately the actions, the words, the virtues that 
 her position demanded. Her weapons were 
 shyness, gentleness, and tadl. She was be- 
 
 53
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 loved of artists as well as of the common 
 people. She is herself a musician, but her 
 interest and love for art embraced also litera- 
 ture and painting. She surrounded herself 
 with carefully chosen pictures and statues, 
 whose creators were among her friends. In 
 the royal palace at Brussels she had furnished 
 three or four of the salons after her own taste. 
 The gilding, the pillars, the lustres, the official 
 candelabra were all swept away. The walls 
 were decorated in plain colours, and on them 
 with penetrating taste she hung a few pictures 
 by young Belgian artists. These pidlures she 
 would defend against attacks, and those who 
 were fortunate enough to be able to talk frankly 
 with her knew that she was interested in any 
 genuine artistic novelty. She asked nothing 
 better than to be convinced by fresh ideas. 
 
 This war has shown to the world the extent 
 to which she, more than anyone else, helped 
 the King. She was at his side during those 
 tragic days when Antwerp was besieged ; and 
 later, while tremendous battles were thundering 
 along the Flemish coast, she stayed faithfully 
 by the side of the man who is at once her 
 husband and her friend. In appearance she is 
 
 54
 
 ALBERT THE WELL-BELOVED 
 
 slight, almost fragile, but how eager and fear- 
 less is the spirit that animates her frail body ! 
 
 One hour before she was leaving Brussels 
 for Antwerp, it was my privilege to pay her 
 a visit. Her palace, into which, three days 
 later, the enemy was to enter in triumph, was 
 half turned into a hospital. She expressed 
 the determination to pay one last visit to the 
 wounded soldiers. She was calm, imperturb- 
 able; no word of complaint or even sadness 
 passed her lips. And after this final visitation 
 she went out in all the strength of faith to 
 meet the unknown. 
 
 The future should indeed smile on such a 
 Queen and on such a King. Gloomy German 
 historians in vain deny the nobility of their 
 adions and their thoughts ; for the admiration 
 and affedion of their united people will go 
 with them down the ages. On their side they 
 have youth, strength of purpose, suffering, 
 unconquerable courage of soul. In themselves 
 they are splendid. They have already their 
 page of history, they will soon have their 
 chapter of legend. 
 
 55
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE LITTLE VILLAGES OF 
 FLANDERS 
 
 ENGLAND is a vast meadow, sprinkled 
 here and there with spaces of tillage. 
 Flanders is like a chess-board, the various 
 squares of which are covered with rye, wheat, 
 oats, flax and clover. From scattered farms, 
 little red-roofed, white-gabled buildings, with 
 their green doors and shutters, their clean, 
 warm stables, comes the cheerful noise of 
 flails threshing the wheat, of wheels ginning 
 the flax. 
 
 Life is a simple and peaceful thing in these 
 villages. The church is, as it were, the palace 
 of God. Many coloured statues of the saints, 
 gold, silken banners are lavished on its beau- 
 tifying. The organ plays daily for those who 
 wish to hear. On great festivals the altars 
 are loaded with silver candlesticks, the finest 
 vestments adorn the shoulders of the priests, 
 
 56
 
 THE VILLAGES OF FLANDERS 
 
 the best voices of the distrid thunder the 
 Christmas hymn or the Easter alleluia. A 
 quiet reverence rules over all. Every cere- 
 mony has its beauty, and their joyful dignity 
 affeds the life of the tiniest hamlet. 
 
 The beauty of Flanders is the mellow 
 beauty of many centuries. Everywhere may 
 be found firmly established traditions or his- 
 torical masterpieces. In every little church a 
 pi6lure, either Gothic or Renaissance, recalls 
 the age of Van Eyck or of Rubens. The 
 subject may be the coronation of a fair 
 Virgin, or the ascent to heaven, surrounded 
 by angels, of a splendid Christ. The saints 
 are represented, garlanded with roses. The 
 Holy Families are Flemish families, living 
 quietly prosperous lives in cool white rooms, 
 with their bird in its cage or their parrot on 
 its perch. 
 
 Such is the decorative side of the Flemish 
 village. In adual plan it consists probably of 
 a single principal street, in which live the 
 lawyer, the dodtor and the brewer ; and a few 
 smaller roads which branch off from the main 
 street as from the trunk of a tree. Wherever 
 such a side-road joins the main street, a statue 
 
 57
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 of the Virgin Mother of Jesus stands in a 
 niche of the wall, and it is the constant care 
 of the ladies of the village, the wives of the 
 lawyer, the dodor and the brewer, to keep 
 each shrine in Spring well-adorned with fresh 
 flowers. 
 
 Once a week the market is held in the 
 square or round about the church. The 
 farmers come to sell their milk and butter ; 
 their boys bring in young pigs, and some- 
 times sheep ; the vendors of cloth display 
 their little stocks. The business done is 
 small enough, no doubt, and its basis narrow, 
 but the markets at least create a certain weekly 
 excitement and keenness of rivalry. 
 
 But at the Kermesses this excitement and 
 keenness becomes a kind of madness. In 
 every cabaret is the sound of music. Dancing- 
 halls open on every side. Harsh and violent 
 orchestras — a cornet, a violin, a clarionet, a 
 trumpet — flog into swirling motion a hundred 
 sturdy couples. Quadrilles follow polkas or 
 waltzes, and the dancers stamp with their 
 heels so violently that often the tiles of the 
 floor are split in two. Drunkenness and 
 anger play their part at these times of wild 
 
 58
 
 THE VILLAGES OF FLANDERS 
 
 pleasure. Knives flash out in quarrel, and 
 often bloody work is done. The farm-lads 
 fighting for wenches' favours; the lovers 
 quarrelling, the old men, feverish with drink, 
 present, almost unchanged, the violent orgies 
 painted so long ago by Brouwer and Crsesbeke. 
 
 Such is, or rather such was, before the 
 Germans came, the life of the little villages 
 of Flanders, Brabant, Hainault and Liege. 
 But anyone who might see these districts 
 now would find it hard to believe in such 
 a past. 
 
 The newspapers keep the world informed 
 of the fate of the towns; but they do not 
 trouble themselves about the tiny villages, 
 hidden away in the heart of the country. I 
 know secret corners in the Ardennes, in la 
 Hesbaye, in la Famenne, in le Borinage, in 
 Flanders, in Brabant, where the peasants are 
 literally starving to death. In time of peace 
 they live, these poor folks, on the produce 
 of their little farms. They kill their pig, 
 cure it and eat it slowly, week by week, 
 throughout the winter. They have their 
 little store of potatoes in their cellar and 
 their twenty sacks of corn in their barn. For 
 
 59
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 years and years they have always lived thus. 
 Their whole world is their little house, tucked 
 away, over there in the distant country. It 
 represents all their treasure, all their liveli- 
 hood. They toil all the summer so that 
 bread and meat shall not be wanting in the 
 hard times of winter. They are, as it were, 
 a Providence to themselves. They hope and 
 are confident. They cannot conceive any law, 
 divine or human, depriving them of what 
 they have reaped and garnered, of the living 
 they have amassed, lawfully and by their own 
 toil, for their wives and children. 
 
 When the war began little groups of 
 Uhlans began appearing in the villages. They 
 would stop and ask a few questions and then 
 go on somewhere else. At present they be- 
 haved mildly enough. Well aware of the 
 danger of ambushes, they were gentle and 
 genial. They seemed to regard the people 
 almost as their friends. Fear bred in them 
 excellent manners. 
 
 But later on, when whole regiments passed 
 the way that hitherto only scattered Uhlans 
 had trod, the true German arrogance made 
 its terrible appearance. There was looting 
 
 60
 
 THE VILLAGES OF FLANDERS 
 
 and worse ; there was massacre. Conciliatory 
 fear gave way to savagery. The world knows 
 now how much blood must be shed, how 
 many ruins must be piled one on another, 
 before German anger can be assuaged. 
 
 And now that the fires have smouldered 
 out, now that the little villages are once more 
 left lonely, and those of their inhabitants who 
 have escaped flame and sword are left there to 
 exist as best they may, it is for us to think 
 for a moment of the sinister silence of those 
 abandoned lives, lingering on in the little 
 towns and, more tragic still, lost in the depths 
 of the countryside. 
 
 Here, in the fog of London, I sit and pidure 
 to myself the agony of one of those little 
 villages of Campine or of the Ardennes, over 
 there, hidden among the valleys or lost in the 
 marshes. Every one of those sources of live- 
 lihood of the poor peasants, which I have 
 described, has been requisitioned or frankly 
 stolen. Their few poor cows have been killed. 
 Their sow, who once like some prolific savage 
 beast dawdled among the manure and filth of 
 the farmyard with her squealing turbulent 
 litter, has been snatched away these three 
 
 6i
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 months. In payment was given a ticket, a 
 ticket of exchange valid in a distant land. But 
 this is not all. Their sacks of corn have been 
 brought from their barns, their turnips have 
 been taken away from the pits in which they 
 were kept. Their straw and hay have become 
 the property of the invading cavalry, who, no 
 sooner had they taken what they needed, 
 hastened away. The farmsteads are stripped 
 bare ; only their inhabitants remain, deprived 
 of everything. Even their bed-coverings, their 
 poor mattresses, their bedsteads have been 
 seized. And they remain, with no possessions 
 in the world but the four walls of their cottage 
 and the tiles of their roof. 
 
 How are they to live henceforth.? They 
 have never learnt to seek a livelihood elsewhere 
 or otherhow than in their homes and on their 
 farms. The towns are far away, and even the 
 roads to them are often strange. While finally, 
 did they but know it, little help can come to 
 them out of the towns, themselves looted and 
 even sacked, and their shops and houses 
 deserted and shuttered. 
 
 At least for the towns there is hope. In 
 them remains such authority as still survives. 
 
 62
 
 THE VILLAGES OF FLANDERS 
 
 Some organization is slowly emerging. Neigh- 
 bouring communes help each other. Such 
 provisions as are sent in from abroad come to 
 the towns. Whenever there Is concerted effort 
 there is some chance of being heard and helped. 
 Even in the litde towns men will receive some 
 succour, will hearten each other. Perhaps a 
 stump of railway line still conneds them with 
 the world. At least, carts pass through their 
 streets. Some energetic citizen contrives to 
 form a tiny store of precious food, and its 
 existence sends a gleam of hope through even 
 the darkest gloom. At least everything is not 
 dead and desolate. 
 
 But the villages. They have no initiative. 
 To them no help comes. Their cry is solitary, 
 and dies away unechoed. The cottages are 
 scattered about the country, barely in com- 
 munication with one another. They are to me 
 like little islands of starvation and distress 
 looming faintly through the mist. 
 
 Should not those of us, who have a real 
 pity for the unprecedented disasters which 
 have overtaken Belgium, bear in mind es- 
 pecially the despair of the peasant ? His silence 
 covers the greatest misery of all ; for, despite 
 
 63
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 his desolation, he does not complain. And yet 
 he has given his three or four sons to his 
 country, and they are far away from him, in 
 the midst of the horrors, but where, and 
 whether dead or alive, he does not know. 
 
 This Christmas night I can see him, sitting 
 as usual before the hearth, but this year a 
 hearth that is cold and black. Because his arms 
 are forbidden to toil, it is his thought which 
 blunders to and fro, seeking hope in his 
 disaster. This toil-worn, silent man, who was 
 a hero at the moment when his country needed 
 heroism, is faced now with an inevitable death, 
 here in his house, here in the house in which 
 his father lived before him. He is utterly 
 lonely, utterly helpless. Lost in the distant 
 plains, he feels himself lost in the utter distance 
 of the world. 
 
 O — is human pity so narrow, so hampered, 
 that it cannot reach its hand over there into 
 Flanders or La Wallonie, and bring some 
 succour to that silent, uncomplaining man, 
 who, to-morrow, perhaps, may be no more.? 
 
 64
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 PERVYSE 
 
 I LEFT England by the Folkestone cross- 
 channel steamer to Boulogne, where a 
 motor-car was awaiting me. We started at 
 once. Our speed rapidly became very great, 
 and we flew past ammunition waggons and 
 hospital carriages without any checking of our 
 course. Whenever we met other motor-cars, 
 we heard the same sharp, violent clatter that is 
 caused by two trains that cross each other at 
 high speed. Already we had lost thought of 
 our own safety. 
 
 For the moment there is no administrative 
 frontier between France and Belgium. The 
 Customs officers have turned soldiers. The 
 Douane is no more. Only the sign-post re- 
 mains. But all the same the way is constantly 
 barred and controlled. Two waggons drawn 
 up, one on each side of the road, and piled 
 about with objedts of every kind, leave only a 
 
 65 F
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 very narrow passage free between them. This 
 passage is guarded by soldiery. We are chal- 
 lenged, and shout the password into the wind. 
 The car is off again on its headlong career. 
 
 Adinkerke first and then Furnes. The little 
 town is full of troops. They are lodged in 
 the churches of S. Nicholas and S. Walburga. 
 Along the walls are beds of straw. Above 
 each bed, built into the walls themselves, rise 
 tombstones, great slabs on which one can just 
 decipher, blurred by time, the names of men 
 and women long dead. Alike their many 
 virtues, their titles, and even their dates, are 
 fading into illegibility and oblivion. 
 
 But little thought of the gruesome chance 
 that has set their beds upon graves troubles 
 the soldiers who now sprawl on the straw in 
 the golden sunlight. They eat and are merry. 
 The statue of S. Nicholas stands below the 
 throne ; a cartridge belt is slung over his 
 pastoral staff. 
 
 The little town of Furnes throbs with move- 
 ment. All day long motor-cars flash through 
 her streets. Her former silence has utterly 
 vanished. In the main square little perambu- 
 lating stall-shops dispense a poor but precious 
 
 66
 
 PERVYSE 
 
 tobacco. Each morsel is weighed with the 
 utmost care. It is raining now, and the rain 
 makes the tobacco heavy with damp. The 
 good man therefore gives to every soldier client 
 a pinch of overweight. 
 
 " The bad weather, you see," he says, " and 
 also I am a good patriot, and I love soldiers." 
 
 And now the road to Pervyse stretches in 
 front of us, bordered with trees either lopped 
 off short, or twisted as in agony. Huge pits 
 yawn in the meadows on either side. Perhaps 
 there are twenty shells at the bottom, all of 
 which have failed to explode. A gunner tells 
 me that when a shell falls, the cattle lumber 
 away in terror. But in a few moments, urged 
 by their insatiable curiosity, they draw timidly 
 near once more, and peer into the hole the 
 shells have made. The ground is soft, and 
 from time to time a cow falls in on the top of 
 the shells. It struggles madly to get out of 
 the pit, and the soldiers near by are always 
 afraid that, trampling on the pile of powder and 
 bullets, its hoofs will awake the slumbering 
 anger of the unexploded shells. 
 
 Here and there, in mid-field or near a 
 tree, is a rough cross. A kepi, a handful of 
 
 67
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 faded flowers, mark these graves of noble men. 
 Further on there are dead horses lying. 
 
 It is on entering Pervyse that we get the 
 first sight of real horror. The main street is 
 like a great museum of prehistoric fauna. The 
 house-roofs, denuded of tiles and the joists 
 left naked, have tilted forward on to the side 
 walks, so that they hang in mid air like giant 
 vertebrae. Behind them the ruins of walls 
 and gables suggest huge skeletons shattered 
 and broken. 
 
 Through the windows one can see the poor 
 furniture of poor households. The beds have 
 been ripped open, the stoves upset, so that 
 they lie with their feet in the air. Perhaps 
 the Christ from the chimney corner has been 
 hurled to the ground, while St. John and 
 the Virgin have remained unscathed by the 
 falling shells. I saw one littleFirstCommunion 
 wreath torn to pieces by bullets, so that its 
 white rose petals lay scattered among the soot 
 and the fallen plaster. 
 
 One house only of the whole village of 
 Pervy^se has been spared. Its owner has seen 
 no reason for going away. He is a man of 
 middle age. As he watches us pass without 
 
 68
 
 PERVYSE 
 
 saying a word, he holds In his hands an 
 enormous broom. For it was Saturday, and 
 this man, amidst the total ruin of his village, 
 was pundlually cleaning his window and the 
 pavement before his door, because the follow- 
 ing day was Sunday. Could there be a better 
 example of the proverbial Flemish cleanliness, 
 even in times of war and universal disaster ? 
 
 We take our way towards Nieuport, passing 
 by Coxyde. In this country of dunes, where 
 the sand swept before the wind tingles in our 
 faces, the Arabs and the Senegalese have 
 pitched their encampment. Were it not for 
 the bitter cold they might think themselves 
 in their own desert. On the summit of one 
 little hill a mounted sentinel stands out in 
 profile. Amazing the impression of this tro- 
 pical silhouette against the stormy and cloud- 
 laden northern sky. Indeed, a piece of Africa 
 welded on to a piece of Flanders. 
 
 On all sides the cannon is thundering. Five 
 yards away is a French battery. Methodically 
 the charge is slipped into the gun, and time 
 after time those near are deafened with the 
 noise of the shot that follows. Urged by pride 
 and admiration, the spedator draws nearer to 
 
 69
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 look. The desire seizes him to expose him- 
 self suddenly, without reason, high up on a 
 mound near by, in full view of the enemy. 
 The desire for danger becomes a passion as 
 strong as that of love. One is intoxicated with 
 the smell of powder and the sense of peril. 
 One is ashamed not to be able, like the others, 
 forthwith to risk one's life. I believe that 
 heroism is learnt in a flash or never learnt at 
 all. 
 
 We now approach the trenches themselves. 
 They lie across a road near a station, barring 
 the way. Bending ourselves double, we crawl 
 into the kind of dungeons in which our soldiers 
 sleep, eat and smoke away the time. Under 
 a sort of pent-house is the gun. A lighted 
 match flickers on the gleaming copper. The 
 soldiers are in excellent spirits ; as we shake 
 hands with them they laugh. Their clumsy 
 jokes fall on the Germans like clods of earth. 
 For two days now this trench has been left in 
 peace. The enemy is bombarding alternately 
 Dixmude and Nieuport. It seems that whim 
 alone decides the diredion of his fire. Since 
 his disaster at the Yser, there is no sign of 
 ordered plan in his eflForts. He makes a noise, 
 
 70
 
 PERVYSE 
 
 seemingly with no objed; beyond maintaining 
 terror. 
 
 We take our way back by Ramscapelle. 
 Everywhere the same scenes of desolation that 
 we saw at Pervyse. The streets are littered 
 with debris of glass and tiles. Mattresses, 
 blankets, even table-cloths, curtains, and sheets, 
 are stuffed into the window sashes. 
 
 Suddenly, from a cellar, we hear the cry of 
 a cat. We grope our way down towards the 
 sound, but the animal, lean and wretched, flees 
 at our approach. 
 
 The shells have played strange havoc at 
 Ramscapelle. Shots have forced their way into 
 the houses, and out again, where one would 
 least exped. Their fantastic course can be fol- 
 lowed. One door is so riddled with bullets, that 
 it seems a veritable colander. As at Pervyse, 
 the church roof has collapsed, and the tower is 
 a great skeleton of stone, through which, in 
 the falling evening, I can see the stars. 
 
 All this was the terrible side of the battle 
 front in Flanders, but my soul was indeed 
 exalted by the calm courage of the soldiers, 
 and the endurance of the population. 
 
 One mourns, of course, to see ruins piled 
 
 71
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 one on another with such hate and fury; but 
 the sorrow is soon passed. Even the humblest 
 peasants seem to treasure in their hearts a 
 sombre reserve of energy. They go about 
 their work methodically, as though the war was 
 only an evil dream, and that the real import- 
 ance lay in the waking. 
 
 From the ashes of these towns and villages 
 a new and splendid life will arise. The library 
 of Louvain will be rebuilt, the church of St. 
 Pierre, the Market Hall of Ypres, the towers 
 of Dixmude and Nieuport, and each stone will 
 be set in its place with mortar as hard and as 
 solid as is the hatred which now we feel for 
 Germany. 
 
 Those who have died at Ypres, at Dixmude, 
 and at Nieuport, will be for ever glorious in 
 our history. Their tombs will be sacred. The 
 smallest village of the Flemish coast will have 
 in its little cemetery a kind of underground 
 school, from which children may learn the 
 traditions of a race as unchanging as water, 
 and as tenacious as fire. 
 
 72
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 DIXMUDE, NIEUPORT, YPRES 
 
 ONLY from afar could I see them, these 
 little towns of my beloved Flanders, 
 Dixmude, Nieuport, Ypres, as in the wind 
 and rain of last autumn I made my way toward 
 the allied front. From England, through 
 Boulogne, Calais, Gravelines, Dunkirk, I tra- 
 velled to reach that tiny corner of land which 
 was all that remained of my native country. 
 With an emotion compounded of joy, grief, 
 determination, and pride, was my heart stirred 
 as I saw that little strip of Flemish coast. I 
 wept and laughed in one moment; never 
 before had I felt so keenly the nearness of my 
 race. I longed, if only for a moment, to evoke 
 within myself the spirit of all my ancestors, 
 so that I might love Flanders with a hundred 
 hearts instead of one. This desire to increase 
 my personality became positively a suffering, 
 until during a few moments of silence I felt 
 myself exalted, comforted, almost sublime. 
 
 73
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 When first I saw the shells they were falling 
 on Nieuport Bains. As they struck the ground, 
 a dense column of black smoke bellied upwards 
 and outwards. At night they flashed about 
 the sky like lightning. It was at once horrible 
 and beautiful. 
 
 Nieuport Bains is merely a row of modern 
 houses, pretty enough in their way, built 
 along a breakwater of stone and brick. Nieu- 
 port town, however, is a place of silence and 
 loveliness ; a place of little houses, their 
 windows shyly curtained; where now and 
 again, as a step passes along the street, a hand 
 pushes the curtains aside, discreetly curious. 
 The pavements are uneven, their stones framed 
 in grass or moss. The old church in the 
 charming little square is surrounded with great 
 trees which throw their solid circular shadows 
 on the ground. Finally, right on the edge of 
 the town, the huge Templar's tower rears its 
 enormous head above the countryside. It is 
 like a great monolith, or even some fragment 
 of an Egyptian temple. I know of no stranger 
 or more unexpeded sight than this square 
 colossus which towers over the roads and 
 fields of Flanders, like a monument of all the 
 
 74
 
 DIXMUDE, NIEUPORT, YPRES 
 
 grandeur and nobility of the heroic past. It 
 stands for strength and endurance, as though 
 by its example it would raise the present to 
 the level of the times gone by. Firm in the 
 accomplishment of this tremendous mission, 
 it defies all attacks. In vain have the German 
 guns thundered against it. They have failed 
 to throw it down because the ideal for which 
 it stands shall outlast, in its nobility, the 
 machine-made terror of their rage. 
 
 The jewel of Dixmude, besides the great 
 square dominated by an old and splendid 
 church, is the Beguinage, a tiny cloistered 
 thing where one lives as at the end of the 
 earth. Indescribable is the air of isolation in 
 this place. The old alms-women, not more 
 than three or four in the morning, perhaps 
 five or six in the afternoon, move slowly across 
 the paths of the central enclosure, each one at 
 her appointed and unvarying hour. Their 
 white caps accentuate the gentleness of their 
 faces like a peaceful halo. Behind the little 
 windows other tired and aged women busy 
 themselves with the work of their tiny house- 
 holds. In the summer they take the air, sitting 
 at their doorways. In winter they sit, seemingly 
 
 75
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 without moving, in their chairs before their 
 little fires, their only companion an ancient 
 book of prayers. They have their treasure and 
 their happiness in the regular monotony of 
 their lives. A stretch of white wall, a crucifix 
 above the mirror, a statuette of some saint 
 upon the mantelshelf, a few straw-seated chairs, 
 each with its rush mat in front of it, these 
 make up the modest idea of cleanliness and 
 comfort proper to the place. Surely, if the 
 Blessed Virgin came back to earth, it is in 
 some such place as this that She would choose 
 to dwell, some such community as this of 
 quiet and holy thoughts, in which to pass Her 
 life now that Her Son is dead. . . . 
 
 Ypres has a past quite different from that 
 of Nieuport or Dixmude, a past of war and 
 magnificence. Her main square, next to that 
 of Brussels, is the most beautiful in the world. 
 Her Town Hall, her Cathedral, her Market 
 Hall, combine all the splendours. The Town 
 Hall and Cathedral are assuredly beautiful, 
 but the Market Hall is more than that, for it 
 is unique. Its severity,its length, the symmetry 
 of its lines, its roofs like great wings feathered 
 with slates, its soaring and massive walls, 
 
 76
 
 DIXMUDE, NIEUPORT, YPRES 
 
 suggest a giant triumphal arch. It is so large 
 that in times of peril the whole town could 
 gather there for shelter. Inside, an artist (but 
 for his modesty his name should now be one 
 of glory), has spent a lifetime over twenty 
 frescoes, each one alive with the spirit of the 
 town's history. His name is Delbeck. In no 
 didionary of the celebrities of his time is there 
 mention either of his birth or his death. He 
 lived his humble life, passing year after year 
 inside a famous building, with no ambition 
 except to avoid dishonouring by his art the 
 great walls that had been entrusted to his care. 
 And he achieved his wish, for, so far from 
 dishonouring the walls, he has made them 
 more precious and more tragic by his graciously 
 coloured pidures of famous citizens, of noble 
 counts, of grave and learned judges. 
 
 The Market Hall of Ypres has always been 
 a communal building. In the middle ages it 
 was the business centre of the cloth makers, 
 the weavers, the fullers. It has seen popular 
 revolts and rioting. It has known agony and 
 passion, joy and pride. For centuries it has 
 stood there, the wonder of Ypres. 
 
 Unlike Bruges, Ypres has never decked 
 
 77
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 herself out as a museum. Bruges, in the same 
 way as Nuremberg, is a trap for tourists. She 
 eredts modern reprodudions of old buildings, 
 so that the unwary visitor may take them for 
 real antiquities. At Ypres there is no deceit. 
 The town makes no archaeological toilette to 
 tempt the innocent stranger. The present 
 grows out of the past, and the marks of the 
 graftingare left unconcealed. In that is honesty 
 and loyalty. 
 
 Such were, before the war, these three beau- 
 tiful little towns of Flanders by the sea. They 
 were a calm and glorious trinity. To say the 
 name of one of them immediately brought to 
 the mind those of the other two. The sea 
 loved them. She swept towards them with 
 a murmur of waves; the tremendous booming 
 song of her equinodial winds was their lullaby. 
 Their towers gazed out over the sandhills to 
 where the great ships were passing by in the 
 open sea. They dominated a fertile land rescued 
 long ago by our Flemish ancestors from the 
 very waves themselves. Fine roads, bordered 
 with willows, lead from Ypres to Dixmude, 
 from Dixmude to Nieuport. The three towns 
 asked only to live at peace in the sunshine. 
 
 78
 
 DIXMUDE, NIEUPORT, YPRES 
 
 But they have been chosen to endure the noise 
 and the terror of great guns. 
 
 To-day they are heaps of ruins. Photo- 
 graphs taken during the many bombardments 
 show the Market Hall of Ypres in flames. 
 Between the slates a curl of smoke, then 
 the ragged tongues of flame, and the whole 
 building is a blaze. The belfry still stands, 
 a kind of Hercules presiding at the funeral 
 pyre. But before long it also will totter and 
 remain only a huge stone skeleton, never 
 more to hold the great clock, which was its 
 soul. 
 
 At Dixmude, in the principal church, a 
 masterpiece of Jordaens stood over the altar. 
 It showed the Adoration of the Magi. In the 
 background of the pi6lure, humbly bowed, ap- 
 peared the good St. Joseph. Flemish peasants, 
 mockingly irreverent, taunt his humility, while 
 in the foreground is displayed all the splendour 
 of the Orient. Strikingly typical of the Flemish 
 spirit, at once mystic and sensual, is the blend 
 of buffoonery and reverence in one picture. 
 Who knows whether the painting still exists } 
 It has succumbed, perhaps, to the German 
 shells. Or is it now on its way to Berlin, where 
 
 79
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 a place is prepared for it on the walls of the 
 Kaiser Friedrich Museum ? 
 
 Ypres, Nieuport, and Dixmude should be 
 able to claim a right to special consideration 
 among the towns of Belgium, when the time 
 of reconstru6lion arrives. They have been 
 grievously proved ; their torture has been the 
 cruellest. They were undefended ; it seems 
 incredible that they should have been sought 
 out by fate, in their distant corner of Flanders, 
 to meet a fiery martyrdom. 
 
 Far more than Ghent or Bruges or Antwerp, 
 they had remained purely Flemish. Each had 
 its dialedl, clear and sonorous, expressive of 
 the Flemish soul in a way that the toneless 
 and official culture of a great town's dialed 
 can never be. War has dragged them brutally 
 from the silence that they loved. They ask no 
 better than to go back thither, into a silence 
 that is not the dead abandonment of a German 
 domination, but the gentle silence of the real 
 Flanders that has lain upon them through the 
 ages. 
 
 80
 
 GUILLAUME II
 
 L 
 
 GUILLAUME II 
 
 ES soirs de fete^ en des banquets^ 
 II s'evoquait 
 A la lueur de candelabres ; 
 Son buste charge d^or dans For etincelait 
 Et son verbe emphatique et farouche jonglait 
 Ou bien avec son casque ou bien avec son sabre. 
 
 II sivissait, pareil a laquilon, 
 De Vun a V autre bout de son empire enorme; 
 
 11 paradait de large en long^ 
 CoiffS, sangle^ botte du front jusqu'aux talons. 
 Pourtant^ bien quil le decorat des cent galons 
 
 De ses cent uniformes^ 
 Son bras gauche rest ait obstiniment difforme. 
 
 II etait V Empereur estropie, 
 
 Dont les gestes font pi tie 
 Des qu'il parle des ailes grandes 
 
 De Vaigle allemande; 
 II etait r Empereur J mais demeurait celui 
 
 ^^assihgent les grands reves 
 
 83
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 Et qui ne parvient pas a soulever le glaive 
 A deux mains ^ devant lui. 
 
 Son mysticisme dur^ violent et rapace 
 
 Prenait la foudre a Dieu pour en frapper 
 
 Ve space; 
 Vhypocrisie armait son esprit puritain ; 
 II ordonnait et deplorait la tragedie 
 Du massacre iclairi far le rouge incendie; 
 Pendant quil brulait Reims^ il pleurait sur 
 
 Louvain; 
 Son orgueilj comme un bloc^ se carrait sur la terre 
 Et le seul fr on cement de son sourcil hautain 
 Lui paraissait devoir angoisser le mystere 
 Et mater le destin. 
 
 "De la Flandre jusquen Crimee 
 Retentissait le pas scande de ses armies ; 
 II leur apparaissait debout dans son manteau^ 
 Leur imposant de triompher coute que coute; 
 Mais des qu'il pretendait et les guider 
 Et seul les commander^ 
 Aussitot la deroute 
 Poussait au long des routes 
 La f kite oblique et la frayeur de ses drapeaux. 
 
 84
 
 GUILLAUME II 
 
 Ses regiments ? — // les dressait a coups de botte ; 
 La schlague f — // la disait dprement patriate; 
 Un morne automatisme animait seul Vessor 
 Des bataillons compass qu'il jetait vers la mort. 
 Dites^ pour broyer a la fois France et Belgique^ 
 DiteSy depuis quels temps 
 
 Preparait-il ses peuples allemands 
 
 A sa guerre pedagogique? 
 
 Hier a Jerusalem^ et demain a ^anger^ 
 Et plus tard a Bagdad^ et puis unjour en Chine, 
 Le monde itait pour lui comme un tremplin leger 
 Ou s'exer^aient son pied, sa jambe et son echine. 
 
 Au Nordy les soirs d'ete, il se croyait pareil 
 Aux paladins casques des legendes insignes. 
 ParfoiSy il s'affublait en Lohengrin vermeil 
 Et son yacht y sur la mer, voguait, blanc comme 
 un cygne, 
 
 11 s' employ ait partout, fantasque et affaire 
 Et ne se doutait pas, en son ame etourdie, 
 ^e de tout ce qui est simple, noble et sacre 
 II etait la coupable et morne parodie. 
 
 Son fils, sec etfluet, etait plus fol encor : 
 
 Bien quil meldt Dieu sait quels vices de caserne 
 
 85
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 Avec un gout etrange et sombre pour la mort^ 
 
 On le disait striSi et moderne. 
 Sa lourde joie etait de nitre pas mane hot 
 Et de pouvoir, mime a deux poings^ mater le trot 
 
 De ses caracolants chevaux 
 ^and il se pavanait aux cotes de son pere; 
 Certains deja le preferaient secretement 
 
 Et Vavouaient dans le mystere. 
 Pourtant^ 
 Bien qu'ils fussent Pun de F autre le chdtiment, 
 Fils et pere se renvoyaient^ puhliquement^ 
 
 La gloire 
 Et d'etre Vun pour V autre un soleil dans Vhis- 
 
 toire^ 
 Et de se completer par leur rayonnement. 
 
 Mais leur peine a tous deux etait certe injinie, 
 ^and ils fouillaient en vain leur cerveau et 
 
 leur cceur 
 Dans Vespoir d''y trouver au moins quelque lueur 
 
 De ginie; 
 Us ne se disaient rien^ car tous deux comprena- 
 
 ient; 
 UEmpereur, tout h coup^ rageait et fulminait^ 
 Et dans un geste large il jet ait son delire 
 Comme mesure h son empire; 
 86
 
 GUILLAUME II 
 
 Use voulait grand quand meme^ des aujourd'hui; 
 Son peuple et ses soldats s affoleraient en lui; 
 Us former aient ensemble une force effrenee^ 
 S'imposant par le crime a la terre etonnee; 
 La cruaute, Feffroi, la rage et lafureur 
 Peuvent^ elles aussi^ atteindre a la grandeur ; 
 On ne salt quoi de formidable et d'dpre eclate 
 Dans les destins de la science scelerate 
 ^e r Allemagne emploie a prodiguer la mort; 
 Nouveaux sont pour F Europe et la vie et le sort. 
 Plus n'est besoin d'honneur^ de vertu ni de gloire 
 Puisque le calcul dur et la trahison noire 
 
 Abattent mieux encor 
 Sur runivers dompte, les poings de la vi^loire. 
 
 D'ailleurs n'est-ilpointyluiJ'Empereuret leRoi 
 ^i serre entre ses mains et modele le droit 
 ^jiaccepteront^ demain^ vingt peuples militaires 
 N^a-t-il point ses canons^ dont les feux solitaires 
 Brisent un fort et ses coupoles d'un seul coup? 
 Commen^ant par Paris ^ finissant par Moscou^ 
 Avec sa garde blanche il fera ses entrees 
 Sous les port es aux cent fie urons 
 
 Des capitales atterrees. 
 Et ses fifres et ses tambours et ses clairons 
 Annonceront 
 
 87
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 ^ue monte et que s'ipand sous le del d' Alle- 
 magne, 
 
 Pour la terreur du monde^ un ■plus grand Charle- 
 magne. 
 
 Helasl depuis le temps que ce reve s'en vini 
 Battre son front sonore et vain, 
 A-t-il senti avec quel rire 
 V accueillirent 
 Ceux qui vraiment creaient et fondaient les 
 empires ? 
 
 88
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 GERMANY UNCIVILIZABLE 
 
 LIFE is not a means, but an end. With- 
 out this convidion a man can have no 
 real existence in this world, for from it springs 
 his chief duty, to make life a perfe6l thing, a 
 masterpiece ; to despise and hate those seek 
 to soil it by their adls or by their thoughts. 
 
 In this ideal Germany has no part. She 
 has her culture, but she has no civilization. 
 The pride and freedom of the true social 
 spirit is founded on intelligence but not on 
 knowledge. The German professor is a 
 walking library, an accumulation of fads, 
 catalogued and annotated. Order and discip- 
 line are for him the sum of virtue. Under 
 their pressure he becomes slowly servile and 
 dependent. The habit of classifying know- 
 ledge tends to make him ready to submit 
 himself to social classification. The world to 
 him is a ladder; one either climbs a rung 
 
 89
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 higher or descends a rung lower. Thoughts 
 fall into sealed compartments. His German 
 mind becomes gradually materialized, con- 
 gealed, and he remains a single rigid square 
 in an unchanging social draught-board. 
 
 It is no new saying that the German never 
 invents, but merely works upon the dis- 
 coveries of others. And the reason for this is 
 that in order to originate a man must have the 
 capacity for rebellion. This the German cannot 
 have, because he is the type that submits. 
 
 No sooner has a new discovery been made 
 than he seizes upon it, examines it, tests it 
 from every side, and succeeds usually in 
 increasing its power and its importance. 
 Finally, he finds for it a pradlical application 
 and labels it accordingly, even as he himself 
 is classified and labelled for his task in life. 
 
 In science the Germans have never faced a 
 great new opening. Their paths are always 
 lateral. From the highway of Descartes 
 spring the side-roads of Leibnitz and Kant; 
 there could hardly have been a Haeckel with- 
 out a Darwin ; Koch and Bering found their 
 labours upon the work of Pasteur. 
 
 To the development of this second-hand 
 
 90
 
 GERMANY UNCI VILIZABLE 
 
 scientific research flock crowds of second-rate 
 scholars. Each one, working in his little 
 corner on his particular little subjeft, feels 
 himself someone and swells with pompous 
 vanity. Every little provincial university be- 
 comes a nest of learning, happy in the sun- 
 shine of the German conception of scholarship 
 and seriousness. But it is really barrack life 
 in a laboratory, and lacks utterly initiative, 
 spontaneity, and above all, revolt. 
 
 If the German people had any real civili- 
 zation they could not have kept silence in 
 the face of Belgium's martyrdom. But even 
 among those whose expressed ideas were 
 hostile to every existing form of government, 
 not a single one protested against this deed, 
 admitted by the German Chancellor in full 
 Reichstag to be a crime. The world has not 
 yet recovered from its amazement at this 
 silence. Liebknecht alone excepted, the 
 German Social Democrats are dishonoured 
 men. There was a cry to expel them from 
 the " International." They made excuses, 
 deepening their shame : 
 
 " Our members would have been im- 
 prisoned." 
 
 91
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 And the answer was : 
 
 " Were they then afraid to suffer for their 
 faith?" 
 
 The Social Democratic party in Germany 
 was organized and brigaded like the uni- 
 versities and the army. Its voting power 
 was enormous. It seemed invincible, tri- 
 umphant. In other countries men said: 
 
 "That is the real Germany." 
 
 May it serve as a bitter warning to all 
 democracies ! Its admirers declared that at 
 the moment of need, this Socialist party 
 would swallow the Imperialists at a gulp. 
 In August last year, in one hour in the 
 Reichstag, it was itself swallowed. 
 
 Quite recently some German socialists 
 visited the Maison du Peuple at Brussels. 
 They expressed astonishment that the Belgian 
 democrats set such store by the invasion of 
 their country. 
 
 "What is it binds you so closely to your 
 native land.''" 
 
 "Honour," replied the Belgians. 
 
 "Honour!" scoffed the Germans. "How 
 absurdly middle-class ! " 
 
 But honour is, all the same, the essence of 
 
 92
 
 GERMANY UNCIVI LIZABLE 
 
 civilization. As an ideal it is aristocratic, 
 having come down to us from the great men 
 of past ages. With a more perfedted training, 
 force comes to oppose itself. It becomes con- 
 trolled, intelligent, tempered with reserve and 
 tad. Brute force becomes moral force ; power 
 becomes justice. 
 
 The further a nation is advanced in this 
 development, the further she is from the 
 material, the nearer to the spiritual, the 
 greater the resped: she shows in her institu- 
 tions to the mass of humanity as a whole, 
 the more she is civilized and the more she 
 is noble. 
 
 Such a nation keeps her word. Interest, 
 even necessity cannot force her to betrayal. 
 She seeks to protedt and not to crush those 
 weaker than herself. She strives to spread 
 through the world social ideals of a certain 
 kind, which, however they may be Utopian, are 
 good to cherish in the heart, so that life may 
 be not merely for the present but also for 
 the future. 
 
 These social ideals are the expression of 
 fundamental human generosity. They will 
 never be put wholly in pradice, but towards 
 
 93
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 their achievement efforts will always be made. 
 They are the negation of brute force; they 
 guide the world towards a common peace; 
 they have faith in the infinite perfedibility 
 of human conscience. But only a nation 
 whose civilization is noble can conceive such 
 visions, can realize such harmony as possible 
 among men. Germany has never attained to 
 this conception, because her people are un- 
 adaptable and impossible to educate. 
 
 During my life I have been present at 
 numerous gatherings in many European capi- 
 tals, where Englishmen, Frenchmen, Italians, 
 Russians, and Germans, jostled and argued 
 in varied languages. Often the assembled 
 company had great reputations, one and all. 
 But I never saw, at any one of them, a 
 German really appear to advantage. They 
 are always half awkward, half aggressive, 
 with a politeness little more than skin-deep. 
 They seem afraid of appearing old-fashioned in 
 idea. They applaud the most eccentric taste ; 
 they interpret "modernity" to mean the ex- 
 treme of up-to-dateness ; it would positively 
 pain them if anyone in their presence praised 
 anything the least bit bygone. As soon as a 
 
 94
 
 GERMANY U NCI VILIZABLE 
 
 German can get a hearing and begin to talk, 
 he holds forth. But his harangue makes a 
 point neither of clearness of phrase nor 
 subtlety of meaning. 
 
 And it is the same in public as in private 
 affairs. How cumbrous is the movement of 
 the German diplomat about the foreign office 
 tables of Europe. With what clumsy violence 
 does the German conqueror impose himself 
 on the lands he wins. 
 
 France, in fifty years, has made herself 
 beloved in Savoy ; in two centuries she as- 
 similated Lille, Dunkirk, Strasburg, and 
 Alsace. England in a few decades has at- 
 tached to herself Egypt and South Africa. 
 But Germany is still a hated name alike 
 in Poland, Schleswig and Alsace-Lorraine. 
 Wherever she goes, she is unwanted. She 
 knows only the way to tear apart ; not the 
 way to unite and heal. Her proclamations 
 shrivel the human mind as frost shrivels 
 plants. She can neither attradt, nor tempt, 
 nor civilize, because she has herself no deep 
 spiritual force. Europe, under the successive 
 hegemony of Athens, Rome, and Paris, has 
 been the noblest home of human progress 
 
 95
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 and development. Under German domina- 
 tion she will drift dismally into a gloomy 
 officialdom, organized and drilled by a tyran- 
 nous ruling caste. 
 
 Nowadays we are forced to believe, how- 
 ever sadly, that the true Germany is, only by 
 accident, that of Goethe, Beethoven, and 
 Heine. Generally, almost always, she is a 
 country of cruel barons and brutal soldiery. 
 Thousands of years ago she let loose her 
 hordes upon Europe, and she is doing the 
 same to-day; it is her awful and sinister 
 fundion. Let us make no mistake for the 
 future. She is dangerous because she cannot 
 be civilized, and in her castles, her valleys, 
 and her barracks is a store, unexhausted and 
 perhaps inexhaustible, of human savagery. 
 
 96
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 GERMANY AND ART 
 
 NATIONS cannot live if one among 
 them sees existence as a stage on which 
 she can a6l with arrogance and violence for 
 herself alone. Germany seeks to absorb the 
 lives of all peoples in her own. She claims to 
 be the sovereign nation responsible only to 
 herself for her excesses. It is for her to think, 
 feel, and will in the name of all the world. It 
 is for her to lay down what is permissible and 
 what is not. She assumes the role on earth, 
 not of destiny, but of God. 
 
 It is easy for her to persuade herself that a 
 moral conquest comes with a material one, 
 that to dominate is also to charm. Her 
 discipline — that is to say her tyranny — she 
 considers indispensable to future progress. 
 She does not pause to ask whether the gradu- 
 ated and wide-spread vassaldom which her 
 discipline and her tyranny implies, is not the 
 
 97 H
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 greatest obstacle to the acceptance of her rule. 
 Nevertheless, her methods, which she believes 
 essential, are doomed to become merely futile, 
 her strength, which she believes infallible, to 
 become as infallible a weakness. 
 
 To impose her supremacy, therefore, Ger- 
 many must control, so far as she may, the 
 individual life of other nations. She must 
 check the development of their differences and 
 their contrasts, she must wage war on the 
 originality of each group of human beings, on 
 their various ideas of progress, order, and 
 happiness. She must consequently, whether 
 she wishes it or no, combat their special 
 conceptions of beauty. Art, in its turn, must 
 become booty and prey to her. She must crush 
 and destroy all art that is not her own. Her 
 mad conceit will convince her of the justice 
 and necessity of the deed. She must go further 
 and attack the past. No witness, whether of 
 stone or bronze, will be heard that denies her 
 aesthetic supremacy. Already Reims and her 
 cathedral, things lovely as the day and night 
 themselves, are razed to the ground. Already 
 Ypres and her Market Hall, which sprang 
 like a wonderful arch from the earth, are a 
 
 98
 
 GERMANY AND ART 
 
 heap of cinders. Already the church of St. 
 Pierre and the Library of Louvain, the alms- 
 houses of Terinonde, are dead. To reproaches 
 Germany replies : "I will replace these ancient 
 monuments with finer modern substitutes. 
 My taste shall provide them." 
 
 Always the pedagogue, she is infallible in 
 all things, and beauty also is to be shaped by 
 her hands alone. All the nobility of the genius 
 of a race or of an individual, shall only survive 
 with the modifications and at the command 
 of the Teutonic despot. Irony and wit shall be 
 curbed; originality and spontaneity abolished. 
 The rhythm of the goose-step shall dominate 
 all other rhythms ; it shall be heard even in 
 poetry. Free and personal art has had its day ; 
 the art of the future shall be hard, sharp, and 
 glittering as a sword. 
 
 Of such an art the world has a horror ; it 
 can barely conceive so monstrous a thing. Till 
 to-day, beauty, evolving from century to 
 century, has found unity in diversity ; it has 
 blossomed, successively or simultaneously, in 
 the countries of its choice. Italy, Flanders, 
 and France have been specially favoured ; but 
 no one of them has ever sought, by brutality, 
 
 99
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 to impose her temporary superiority on the 
 others. The very opposite was the case. 
 Influence was reciprocal and always peaceful 
 and advantageous. At certain times, in the 
 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Italy claimed 
 the admiration of the world for Fra Angelico, 
 Verrochio, Botticelli, Masaccio, while Flanders 
 replied by flashing abroad the brilliance of 
 Van Eyck, Van der Goes, Memling, Juste de 
 Gand, Gerard David, Van der Weyden. 
 
 Later, to Carracci, Reni, Domenichino, Al- 
 bani, the Barrocci, Caravaggio, Bernini, made 
 answer Rubens, Van Dyck, Seghers, Cornelius 
 de Vos, Grayer, Jordaens,Teniers, Spain, with 
 Velasquez, Herrera, Ribera, Zurbaran, and 
 Murillo ; Holland, with Rembrandt, Vermeer, 
 Ruysdael, Hobbema, Fabritius, Steen, Hals, 
 and Pieter de Hooch ; and France, with 
 Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Dughet, Lesueur, 
 and Callot, spread over the whole of Europe 
 the light of noble art. 
 
 Art was, at the same time and according to 
 the country in which it developed, idealist or 
 realist, ascetic or sensual. And along the walls 
 of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, it 
 hung a splendid garland, to which each flower 
 
 lOO
 
 GERMANY AND ART 
 
 contributed its particular and harmonious 
 
 beauty. 
 
 Never in modern times have nations striven 
 with such ardour after beauty; even the 
 ancient world was rivalled, if not surpassed. 
 
 If Germany were Europe's conqueror, such 
 a golden age of art, even were geniuses alive 
 as great as these, would be impossible. Ger- 
 many would break, systematically and scien- 
 tifically, every one of those subtle ties between 
 the artist and his proud and noble race, which 
 spring from the heart of his mysterious power. 
 The creator of masterpieces would shrink 
 under the German determination to regulate, 
 to brigade, to organize ; he would be compelled 
 to work after the ideals of Munich and Berlin ; 
 apt and mechanical rules, with axioms and 
 arguments as commentary, would tell him 
 that he can only avoid the production of 
 ugliness, by yielding to the orders of tyranny 
 and working as he is told to work. 
 
 Slowly, year by year, decade by decade, a 
 European art has come into being. Those who 
 toiled for it had litde consciousness of it. 
 They were instindive in their efforts to pluck 
 out from their own natures whatever was 
 
 lOI
 
 BELGIUM' S AGONY 
 
 narrow and exclusive. They humanized their 
 feelings and their thoughts, but without losing 
 their originality of mind. Everyone of them 
 was faithful to his race, although he rose above 
 and beyond it ; he knew no constraint. Ger- 
 many is attacking this European art at its 
 vital point. It was rising in freedom ; she 
 seeks to hold it down and curb it to her will. 
 In the effort she is really killing it at one 
 blow. 
 
 After the war it will be necessary for national 
 art, even nationalist art, to be again stressed 
 and developed. Germany conquered, every 
 man will be more passionately attached than 
 before to the corner of ground he came so 
 near to losing altogether. Europe will return 
 to the old conception of territorial literature 
 and painting. The different schools will appear 
 again, each in its respedive country. 
 
 Germany will turn into herself again, as 
 she did after J6na. She will colled: all the 
 strength that remains to her to work, and her 
 silence will be blent of disillusion and bitter- 
 ness. Art, which has not been lavish to her 
 during her time of madness and bombast, will 
 perhaps be more generous in her misfortune. 
 
 I02
 
 GERMANY AND ART 
 
 The resources of a nation may be likened 
 to geological strata. One stratum lies deep ; 
 another less so ; a third, a surface stratum, 
 lies exposed. Perhaps that stratum of Ger- 
 many which yielded Goethe and Schiller, will 
 once more be worked, while those which 
 produced Bismarck and von Moltke lie neg- 
 ledled. 
 
 Let us, indeed, pray for a German artistic 
 renaissance. First, for the common good and 
 beauty of the world; second, so that the 
 flowers of this new blossoming may cloak the 
 dung-hill of to-day's crimes. 
 
 Those who talk of exterminating the Ger- 
 mans do not realize that a young people cannot 
 be exterminated. Only old and decaying 
 nations can perish altogether. But the world 
 has to defend itself against Germany with 
 courage and tenacity. France and England 
 must prepare to abandon confidence and live 
 in mistrust. They must accept a future, in 
 which life will be harsh and at extreme tension, 
 like a drawn bow. Germany must be countered 
 as soon as she goes too far. We must not 
 seek to kill her, as I have already said. She 
 must be crippled, like her Emperor. 
 
 103
 
 CHAPTER X 
 GERMANY THE INQUISITOR 
 
 NOTHING in the world is more cynical 
 or shameless than the habit of dog- 
 matic assertion, which modern Germany has 
 acquired. Her people have little aptitude for 
 suppleness of speech ; their minds are little 
 suited to lucid or ingenious reasoning. They 
 are compelled, therefore, to resort to brutality 
 in their words as in their deeds. Now brutality 
 of the mind is naked and shameless dogmatism. 
 
 The Kaiser says : " God is with us. I am 
 His spirit and His sword. When we vanquish 
 our foes, the honour and glory are His." 
 
 On what authority ? The man merely voices 
 his dreams and his visions. Lunatics do the 
 same. In truth, God's honour would have a 
 strange bed-fellow in that of William II. 
 
 German geographers proclaim : "From the 
 Baltic to the North Sea, from Riga to Boulogne, 
 Germany, Champagne, Belgium, and part of 
 
 104
 
 GERMANY THE INQUISITOR 
 
 France, all these lands are peopled by the 
 Germanic race ; Northern Europe, therefore, 
 should be, and shall be, ours." 
 
 The assertion is simply untrue. These 
 peoples are of varied origin. Some are Gauls, 
 others, like the Walloons, Latin through and 
 through. 
 
 The German sage, in the person of Herr 
 Ostwald, professor of chemistry, writes : 
 " German civilization is the foremost in the 
 world, because it has abandoned the epoch of 
 individualism and entered upon that of or- 
 ganization. Among our enemies the Russians 
 are still in the tribal epoch, while the French 
 and the English have arrived at a stage of 
 cultural development which we left behind us 
 50 years ago." 
 
 But the organized civilization thus vaunted 
 is really retrogressive. In the Middle Ages 
 the Catholic Church imposed it far and wide 
 on Europe. In economics the guilds established 
 it, with its resulting tyranny and stagnation. 
 Everything was done by special groups for 
 the benefit of special groups. The individual 
 ceased to count. Initiative and invention 
 became impossible. The machine stifled intel- 
 
 105
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 le(5l ; 1789 was needed to revive in Europe the 
 spirit of independent thought and discovery, 
 to start industrial and scientific progress on a 
 new career of speed and lasting brilliance. 
 Civilization is a mixture of freedom and con- 
 trol. But excess of freedom is anarchy, and 
 excess of control tyranny. German organiza- 
 tion is a vast machine which has cowed the 
 German people into servitude. Everyone is 
 the flunlcey of the man above him. No pride, 
 no self-respedl can survive. The Press is held 
 on the leash. Literary and scientific thought 
 are drilled and brigaded. The man who resists 
 the Emperor is broken. Liebknecht alone ex- 
 cepted, the German Socialist Party — itself, 
 like the German State, a model of organization 
 and discipline — has put the whole of European 
 democracy to shame. 
 
 If the organization, lauded by Herr Ostwald, 
 is to spread over the world, German dogma 
 will scourge and terrorize humanity as did 
 formerly the dogma of the Catholic Church. 
 There is at bottom only this difference between 
 the two dodtrines — one is religious and the 
 other civil. Both demand absolute submission 
 and passive obedience. Both believe themselves 
 
 106
 
 GERMANY THE INQUISITOR 
 
 unique and destined for supremacy. The 
 Roman Church proclaims itself the best of all 
 the Churches, as the German State proclaims 
 itself the best of all the States. Both have a 
 blind belief in their power, and shrink from 
 no sacrifice in support of it. Both have their 
 apostles and their martyrs. Human life and 
 death are for them merely stepping stones to 
 world-power. The Roman Church has been 
 organized for tyranny throughout history : 
 Germany only for fifty years. But she intends 
 to make up for lost time. Already, like the 
 Church in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 
 she is plunged in mad and savage cruelties. 
 She kills, loots, and burns. She stands for the 
 terrorism of man as the Church stood for the 
 terrorism of God. And as the irony of fate 
 decrees that similar forces always struggle 
 against one another, German savagery has as- 
 saulted Louvain, Malines, Reims, and other 
 manifestations of Catholic power. Numbers 
 of priests have been killed, and numbers of 
 Churches have been razed to the ground 
 without hesitation and without pity. 
 
 More than that, William II, at the very 
 time he was paying assiduous court to the 
 
 107
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 Pope, told his sister-in-law, who, despite his 
 wishes, had become a Catholic, that Catholicism 
 it was which must be regarded as the enemy. 
 So hateful is it to him that its destruction is 
 the aim of his life ; but he does not hesitate, 
 before he joins battle, to adopt its formidable 
 discipline and its headlong folly, its evil and 
 unshrinking dogmatism. 
 
 All creeds assert their belief, and do not 
 trouble to prove them. Founded on faith, 
 they do not go beyond their proper r61e to 
 appeal to reason. But States are a different 
 matter. This, however, does not prevent 
 Germany's determination to be regarded as a 
 sort of earthly paradise. She permits no denial 
 either of the infallibility of her culture or the 
 perfection of her power. That is to say she 
 transports, from the realm of the spiritual into 
 that of the temporal, a whole system of per- 
 suasion and trust. She distorts the conception 
 of natural objects; she deceives, or seeks to 
 deceive, the whole world. 
 
 A process somewhat similar may succeed 
 sometimes among simple and ignorant people. 
 The constant asseveration of the same so-called 
 truths results in their being accepted. The 
 
 io8
 
 GERMANY THE INQUISITOR 
 
 German nation has been duped by their 
 Prussian teachers, whose very words are law, 
 who have blunted and atrophied their victims' 
 powers of discernment and discrimination. 
 These teachers have directed the eyes of their 
 pupils towards a past of military and feudal 
 despotism; they have forced on them the 
 ideal, not of Heine and Schiller, but of Herr 
 Ostwald, professor of chemistry, who thinks 
 no doubt that a nation should form an organ- 
 ization by a series of adlions and rea6lions, as 
 a deposit forms at the bottom of a crucible. 
 Spontaneity and deathless progress being thus 
 subjedled, Germany will reign triumphant 
 over a stunned and fettered world of thought. 
 If the world permits such a murder of 
 liberty, it will be the greatest crime of our 
 age. Modern Europe must be able to show 
 to history a garland of diverse civilizations to 
 which each nation has contributed a flower of 
 her genius. The power of Germany, in lessen- 
 ing, weakening, or crushing the power of 
 France, England, Italy, Russia, Belgium, or 
 Spain, is destroying a treasure of ideas, feel- 
 ings, and impulses, which by itself it can never 
 replace. These ideas, feelings, and impulses 
 
 109
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 are blossoming every day into noble deeds 
 and beautiful creation. They are the honour 
 and glory of the Western world. In fifty years 
 the genius of Germany has been perverted 
 into something aggressive and destru6live, and 
 this something it is which to-day has become 
 a menace and a pestilence. 
 
 I lO
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 GERMANY THE ASIATIC 
 
 IN the sixteenth century Spain, with her 
 savagery and her fanaticism, seemed like 
 a fragment of Africa soldered on to Western 
 Europe. The Moors had conquered her. 
 They had forced her to accept their brutal 
 idea of violent authority. The Moors invaded 
 France, but they were driven out again. They 
 rooted themselves on the other side of the 
 Pyrenees, among the mountain ranges of 
 Castile. Cordova and Granada became their 
 fortresses and their dominion. 
 
 Under the rule of Isabella the Catholic 
 Spain was freed, but her tyrants had left their 
 mark, so that her Christianity had the quality 
 of her Islamism. She imposed her faith by 
 blood and iron, thus following in the footsteps 
 of Mahomet. She had her warrior-apostles ; 
 Alva. She had her dreaded hosts ; Antwerp and 
 the Flanders knew them well. She organized 
 
 II I
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 terror with wholesale murder, with espionage, 
 with denunciation, with torture. In the soul 
 of each one of her soldiers she sowed the 
 lessons of cruelty. 
 
 As Spain in the sixteenth century was im- 
 bued with the spirit of Africa, so Germany in 
 the twentieth century is imbued with the spirit 
 of Asia. 
 
 It is true that, as has been said above, her 
 organization, with its myriad and rigid detail, 
 is copied from that of mediaeval Catholicism. 
 But the spirit which animates this vast machine 
 is utterly opposed to Christianity ; it is Semitic. 
 
 Let the fadts speak. The Jews have thrust 
 themselves, more numerously than anywhere 
 else, into German lands. Nearly all the names 
 they have adopted are German names. They 
 flaunt them about the world. When their 
 ghettos were suppressed, they toiled for the 
 prosperity of the free cities — Labeck, Ham- 
 burg, Bremen, Frankfort. Everywhere they 
 amassed wealth. Their power became so great 
 that it could dispense with proud display. It 
 was a6tive and strong, but secret. 
 
 When, after 1870, Germany turned to the 
 development of her trade and industry, it was 
 
 1 12
 
 GERMANY THE ASIATIC 
 
 the Jews that taught her to organize her efforts 
 and to be skilful at business. They were won- 
 derful teachers, probably the finest in the 
 world. The great German shops, the steam- 
 ship companies, the elec^lrical firms are still 
 ruled by powerful Jews. In other a6livities, 
 they are less prominent. They prefer to leave 
 ostensible direction to native Germans, while, 
 from behind the scenes, they exercise the true 
 control. And more than that. They surround 
 the Emperor, and he chooses from among 
 them his intimate advisers. Junkers and 
 nobles, tempted by the desire for wealth, 
 entrust them with their fortunes, confide to 
 them their hopes. In every undertaking of 
 German finance, we meet either them, or 
 their equally Semitic cousins, the German- 
 Americans. 
 
 The Jewish spirit — and this is not said as 
 an attack upon it, but rather to show its vic- 
 torious influence — has penetrated every de- 
 partment of German life, both bourgeois and 
 aristocratic. It has blended most completely 
 of all in Prussia, for it is in itself an exaggera- 
 tion of the Prussian spirit. 
 
 With the exception of the newspapers of 
 
 113 I
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 the Catholic Centre, every great daily of 
 Vienna, Frankfort and Berlin is controlled 
 by Jews. Jewish ingenuity, intelligence, in- 
 dustry, and wealth have made these papers 
 prosper. They are up-to-date, well-informed, 
 keen-minded and all-embracing. Matters 
 artistic are treated as vital and important. 
 Art is honoured, perhaps it is genuinely loved. 
 To-day the German press is peevish, pre- 
 judiced, hypocritical, foolishly boastful. For 
 the moment it is subje6l to its hour and its 
 surroundings. Before the war the opinions of 
 the day were dominated by it. 
 
 It worked tirelessly, day after day, to trans- 
 form the old Germany. It propagated the 
 idea of unity, it won over Bavaria, Saxony, 
 Wurtemberg. To a people formerly idealist 
 it taught efficiency and realism. It turned the 
 eyes of the race towards conquest and booty, 
 it urged ceaseless vigilance, boundless love of 
 gain, skilful daring, endless patience, untiring 
 perseverance. Finally, the idea that everything 
 has its price, that business dominates the 
 world, that all of life is self-interest and none 
 of it sentiment, became gradually, not only a 
 Jewish but also a German conviction, and so 
 
 114
 
 GERMANY THE ASIATIC 
 
 far altered the life and charader of the new 
 German Empire that Karl August would no 
 longer have recognized his people. Germany 
 became a great industrial and commercial 
 power. England and France were out-dis- 
 tanced. The supremacy of America was 
 threatened. 
 
 This spirit of successful daring that another 
 race had taught to German commerce, became, 
 in the eyes of German diplomacy and state- 
 craft, a desirable possession. They began to 
 regard international relations as matters for 
 bargaining. A just cause, a nation's pride or 
 conscience, seemed mere phrases, ridiculous 
 and obsolete. Governments reasoned in one 
 way, ordinary people in another. 
 
 And so, in high politics, one either advanced 
 or retreated according as one's diplomatic 
 moves were skilful or clumsy. A demand 
 followed a concession ; an attack, a retreat. 
 Even when Germany presented her ultimatum 
 to Belgium, she came prepared for huckstering. 
 Never for an instant did she consider that the 
 Belgians had spiritual fervour in their souls. 
 She talked of profit and loss as on the Stock 
 Exchange. When her offers were rejected she 
 
 115
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 was amazed. Her surprise turned to anger, 
 and her anger has not yet cooled. 
 
 But it is above all in the condu6l of war 
 that Germany has revealed the spirit of Asia 
 that dominates her. Aryan Europe has, since 
 the middle ages, gradually christianized her 
 barbarous instindls. She has fought her battles 
 with honour. She has created the most perfect 
 type of soldier — the knight. She introduced 
 the Truce of God. She condemned deceit and 
 treachery. During the Renaissance Francis I 
 and Bayard were the models of honour and no- 
 bility. In the eighteenth century, at Fontenoy, 
 war was courteous and gallant. During the 
 French Revolution and the First Empire it 
 was sublime. 
 
 To-day, thanks to Germany, war is branded 
 and dishonoured by treachery and lies. No 
 longer can one rely on the word of the enemy ; 
 no longer can one trust his promises; his 
 every adlion is known to cloak a crime. 
 Candour and honour have disappeared; they 
 are mocked and scorned. Cruelty and barbarism 
 have become a system. Pity has vanished. 
 The wounded are butchered, the dead thrown 
 into a river. Dying men are burned alive, 
 
 ii6
 
 GERMANY THE ASIATIC 
 
 prisoners are slain. Prussian methods recall 
 those bas-reliefs of the relentless Assurbanipal, 
 commanding the torture of his conquered foes, 
 their total extermination. Pillage, arson, whole- 
 sale destruction were the orders given in war 
 by the Babylonians of Asia centuries ago. 
 They are the orders given in war by the 
 Germans of Europe to-day. The two empires 
 are aduated by the same insane pride. It is 
 refleded in those ancient documents preserved 
 by the Louvre and the British Museum. It 
 finds expression in this document of yesterday, 
 published in Grossdeutchland und Mitieleuropa 
 um das Jahr 1950 : 
 
 " After a short term of years, we shall see 
 some such sight as this. The German flag 
 will wave over 86 millions of Germans, and 
 they will govern a dominion peopled by 
 130 millions of Europeans. In this great 
 empire, only the Germans will have political 
 rights, only the Germans will be owners of 
 property. They will be a nation of masters, 
 permitting, by condescension, that the 
 peoples under their rule should perform 
 menial labour." 
 It matters little which tyrant of the ancient 
 
 117
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 East puts his signature to this pronouncement 
 — Cambyses, Artaxerxes, Sennacherib, Nebu- 
 chadnezzar. Through it breathes the most 
 savage spirit of inhumanity that has existed 
 upon earth. It seeks to plunge the world once 
 more into tyranny, to revive slavery, to set 
 back history three thousand years. Since the 
 Christians of Rome transformed the universe, 
 no such mad perversion of power has swayed 
 the mind of a conqueror. A nation which 
 cherishes such an ideal, arouses once again all 
 the savage instinds that were regarded as for 
 ever crushed. Such a nation must be battled 
 with as one battles with death itself. Europe 
 must, as one man, flee from it and avoid it. 
 The Turks alone can be its allies ; they are 
 predestined so to be, seeing that they also have 
 inherited the barbarism of Asia. May they 
 fight and fall together, and together be hurled 
 beyond the pale of civilization. 
 
 ii8
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 GERMANY, as has been said, has suc- 
 ceeded in breathing into the rigid 
 organization, which she has modelled on that 
 of the Catholic Church, the keen and material 
 spirit of the Jews. To unite two powers, 
 each one victoriously emerged from the test 
 of centuries, was a fine idea but not an easy- 
 one to carry out. Prussia first undertook 
 the task of animating with a Jewish soul the 
 Roman body. She had no hesitations ; her 
 military tradition, at once relentless and 
 corrupt, came to her aid. She succeeded. 
 
 This achieved, the work went quickly and 
 skilfully forward, from land to land across 
 the Germanics. Bavaria and Austria sub- 
 mitted with a bad grace. They suffered at 
 having to abandon their ancient religious 
 traditions of goodness and pity, to crush 
 their human kindness, to become states with- 
 
 119
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 out generosity and without faith. Austria, 
 especially, could not cut adrift her past nor 
 forget that it was against her that the new 
 German spirit had won its spurs. Sadowa 
 came bitterly to mind. She yielded, however, 
 because at the bottom of her heart she knew 
 that she also was a bird of prey among 
 nations. 
 
 As for Germany herself, when her vidlory 
 over France had given her the preponderance 
 of power in Europe, she became the wonder 
 of the West. She blustered and bullied and 
 none knew better than she, how to win obedi- 
 ence. Bismarck was of all men the most adept 
 at trampling under his great boots rights and 
 protestations. His word was hung upon in 
 fear and silence. So far from being over- 
 shadowed by the German eagle, he lent to it 
 the brilliance of his genius. 
 
 He remade a nation, arming it with vigour 
 and courage, imbueing it with his own abrupt- 
 ness and terse violence. He turned its mind 
 from the ideal to the profitable and the 
 modern. He was a great and terrible teacher, 
 and, according to his own words : "A German 
 fears nothing under the sun, only God." 
 
 I20
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 After the fall from power and then the 
 death of her pilot and saviour, Germany felt 
 herself strong enough to control her own 
 destiny. She had schools and barracks. She 
 set about acquiring fa6lories and dockyards. 
 She had a slight, but respe(5tful, distrust of 
 her young Emperor. 
 
 From end to end her territory became a 
 hive of industry. The Main, the Oder, the 
 Rhine, the Elbe were hedged with fadlory 
 chimneys. Railways and waterways ran side 
 by side or crossed each other in every direc- 
 tion. Great railway stations were built, their 
 huge glass roofs gleaming at night like stars. 
 Each ancient city had its new quarter; vast 
 shops sprang into being, temples of the new 
 German fever; suburbs writhed into the 
 country like clutching tentacles; the old 
 sun gloomed behind dense clouds of smoke. 
 Trashy goods, fatal but beloved of the crowd, 
 began to litter the high roads of the new 
 German commerce. They were spread the 
 world over, catering to the endless different 
 desires and tastes of every nation. Orders 
 were taken and executed from every corner 
 of the earth. Formerly European industry 
 
 121
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 had dominated its clients ; distant lands 
 must needs use commodities manufa6lured 
 for western tastes. Germany changed all 
 this. Her trade was the servant of every 
 public and prospered beyond her wildest 
 dreams. Soon she was the nation to which 
 the markets of Asia, Africa, America, and 
 the islands of the seas looked before any 
 other. The Stock Exchanges of Sydney, 
 of New York, of Singapore, of Bombay 
 rang with the clatter of German gold. The 
 Frankfort broker became the aorent of na- 
 tional ambition ; the commercial traveller 
 from Berlin was the spy or the emissary of 
 German world-policy. While she was in 
 this way becoming ever stronger and greater 
 in every land, Germany began, with tireless 
 patience, to win herself a place on the high 
 seas. 
 
 In Bismarck's time there was pra6lically no 
 imperial fleet. Over-sea colonization seemed 
 to the great statesman mere chimerical rash- 
 ness. His policy was European. He worked 
 for a union of the three Empires — German, 
 Russian, and Austrian — which should domi- 
 nate the Latin races. 
 
 122
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 Nevertheless, even during his time, Ham- 
 burg was becoming of first importance. 
 Bismarck did all in his power to help the 
 city. In his retirement he lived not far 
 away. He owned a newspaper of the town. 
 From this Patmos by the sea, he spoke to 
 the world and to the Emperor, never as a 
 rebel, but as an opponent whose words had 
 sometime won attention. But when, one 
 day, a voice said: "Our future lies upon the 
 water," it was not Bismarck's voice but that 
 of William II. 
 
 And all the time the destiny of Germany 
 was growing. The greatest shipping-combine 
 in the world, led by Ballin, a Jew, covered the 
 seas with its ships. Bremen and Li'ibeck joined 
 Hamburg. The Nord-Deuischer Lloyd^ in 
 rivalry, coalesced with the Hamburg- Amerika. 
 England felt herself touched in a tender spot. 
 She could not realize all the naked truth 
 behind these wonderful German liners that 
 passed to and fro over the ocean more swiftly 
 and more surely than her own. The will to 
 conquer seized the minds of both countries. 
 England in this struggle showed the first signs 
 of fear, Germany began to increase, with 
 
 123
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 sudden bounds, her fleets of war. The wealth 
 of the Empire was poured out to build ships 
 and ever more ships. Germany seemed in 
 the grip of a disciplined fury that could not 
 stop or even set a limit to the violence of its 
 fever. 
 
 In the meantime, in the universities and in 
 the army, theorists of a new and dangerous 
 type began to appear. They laid down, in a 
 kind of revised edition of the Declaration of 
 the Rights of Man, the spirit in which this 
 vast new acquisition of power and pride should 
 be administered. And so, from boyhood on- 
 ward, the young German was trained to a 
 code of master-morals. The text-books are 
 well-known. They have been edited by 
 Gobineau, Ostwald, Treitschke, Bernhardi, 
 Lasson. In them might dominates right. 
 Rigid and relentless organization is upheld 
 as the new and unfailing path to perfedion. 
 Germany makes herself out as discoverer of 
 this path, as the guide who thereby will lead 
 the world to a higher level of civilization. 
 She alone has the secret of the way. She 
 creates new meanings and values for good and 
 evil. Necessity is her only law. To necessity 
 
 124
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 must bow treaties, promises, oaths, pride, 
 honour, generosity, pity, liberty, progress — 
 all the obsolete trash of a vanished era. 
 Germany alone has the key to the new morality, 
 because she alone has the force necessary to 
 maintain it. It is consequently her duty to 
 impose her ideas on the world, and all that she 
 does in their name is right. In her relations 
 with other peoples she need consider only 
 herself. 
 
 During the twenty years spent in building 
 this new morality on the foundations of 
 German power and industry, the German 
 soul has correspondingly changed. Its egot- 
 ism is now a vast deformity. There is, hence- 
 forth, in the world nothing but the German. 
 He is incapable of seeing outside himself, of 
 understanding anything that is not his already. 
 The German diplomat is stupid and clumsy, 
 the German soldier is automatic and unrefled- 
 ing, the German people is blind and obstinate, 
 because they cannot, in the least degree, under- 
 stand their enemies. They can never put 
 themselves in another's shoes. They weep or 
 rejoice, suffer or triumph, for this reason or 
 for that, and cannot realize that their neigh- 
 
 125
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 hours and their enemies may, for the same 
 cause, laugh when they weep, suffer when 
 they rejoice. Their psychology is that of the 
 child. 
 
 This blind egotism leads only to a general 
 weakness and colledlive folly, of which a 
 representative, or rather a symbol, is found 
 in William II. The Emperor is clothed with 
 brilliance, but beneath the splendour he is 
 wasted and feeble. He has to the full the 
 specious talent required for the work he has 
 to do. 
 
 Bismarck held the present, refradory and 
 living, in his hands, and curbed it to his will. 
 William II contents himself with words. He 
 juggles with phrases, gilded like his uniforms, 
 and thinks that to prophecy vidory in his 
 harangues is enough to put it within his 
 grasp. His impatience is a danger to his 
 country. 
 
 As though to push to its furthest limits 
 his own folly and the egotism of his people, 
 he has gathered in the deep folds of his 
 own vague mysticism all the selfishness, 
 all the hate, and all the savagery of those 
 around him. Even though his dodors and 
 
 126
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 his professors of philosophy still spoke in 
 terms of a vague humanity, he himself held 
 forth in the name of his own uncontrolled 
 sagacity. The God whom Bismarck venerated 
 he has given a place at his side. The Deity 
 is now his intimate and his colleague. He is 
 enjoined to devote Himself to the cause of 
 Germany, the chosen land, the genius of the 
 world, the sword of destiny. The kings of 
 Israel and their prophets talked six thousand 
 years ago at Jerusalem as he talks to-day at 
 Potsdam and Berlin. And his madness even 
 achieves a sort of magnificence. 
 
 The economic enterprise, the science, the 
 discipline, the strength of Germany, the arro- 
 gance of the German Emperor, have now 
 become a national myth, in which the world 
 must be taught to believe and whose value it 
 must learn to cherish. 
 
 German civilization is a blend of all these 
 elements. It has become an instrument of 
 despotism. It reaches, like a ladder, from 
 material prosperity to transcendent mysticism, 
 and among its rungs are commercial, scientific, 
 and military organization. But is this civili- 
 zation the new discovery it boasts itself to 
 
 127
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 be ? Are we non-Germans to regard it as a 
 second revelation? 
 
 To begin with, nothing is older than to 
 base a scheme of social perfection on a claim 
 to Divine Right. William II is a scrupulous 
 imitator. He has revived the most ancient 
 traditions of Europe. He is emperor and 
 king by the Grace of God. When he goes out 
 to war, he reminds us either of Mahomet or 
 of St. Louis. He talks to his troops as these 
 two visionaries must have talked to theirs. 
 His lofty mysticism cankers even the principles 
 of German domination in Europe and the 
 world. The history of mediaeval kings, and 
 of the tyrants of the Renaissance, shows us 
 what we shall undergo if he succeeds in 
 planting himself in France, England, or 
 Belgium. The organization which this mystic 
 tyranny demands is the oldest organization 
 in the world, because it is slavery. Professor 
 Ostwald and all the pan-Germanists are 
 agreed upon that. The old conception of a 
 master-people and subjed; peoples must be 
 restored. 
 
 Further, liberty must be diminished and 
 most carefully controlled. Submission is in- 
 
 128
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 finitely more important than thought. The 
 university models itself on the barracks. Work 
 in the factories is skilfully graded and divided, 
 but at the same time it is brigaded to an absurd 
 degree. It suggests the gilds and corporations 
 of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 
 Everything is foreseen, regulated, congealed, 
 stereotyped; everything is ordered to per- 
 fection. But what is all that but rusty fetters 
 and discredited formulae that the world has 
 long ago rejeded .? 
 
 The methods of organization, whether gov- 
 ernmental, economic, or social, which Germany 
 has to show us, have been used for centuries 
 and are now worn out. All the good that the 
 toil and experience of a hundred nations has 
 been able to get from them, is enshrined in 
 history. We know what has produced on 
 earth terror, cruelty, the inquisition, savage 
 organization, passive obedience, religious or 
 scientific dogmatism, submission of thought 
 and longing to the service of some one aim 
 that has declared itself sacred, the will for 
 power made one with arbitrary tyranny. It is 
 the ancient spirit of the feudal world that 
 Germany has revived, the same spirit with 
 
 129 K
 
 BELGIUM'S AGONY 
 
 hardly a difference. And just as, for thousands 
 of years, humanity has striven to crush it, so 
 it must now once and for all be crushed at 
 this hour of supreme destiny. 
 
 The spirit of to-day, wrought of pride and 
 liberty, wrought of human reason and human 
 idealism, wrought of an emotion infectious 
 and splendidly dangerous, the spirit of to-day 
 which is little more than a hundred years old, 
 and the strength and brilliance of which time 
 has not yet brought fully to light, is most 
 utterly opposed to the spirit of Germany. 
 It is the former and not the latter which is 
 young, and which turns its face forward to 
 the future. It is the former spirit alone that 
 contains the seed of the future, and enables 
 man to adapt himself to new conditions of 
 life, that gives him strength to accomplish 
 the inevitable evolution. It is the former 
 spirit alone that enshrines the ever-growing 
 strength and the ultimate salvation of the 
 world. 
 
 And of this spirit, thou, Belgium, art the 
 symbol ! Thou, even before France and Eng- 
 land, defiedst the cruel power of Germany. 
 Never has greater honour been thine, honour 
 
 130
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 which thou hast won with a heroism, simple 
 and magnificent. What matter that at this 
 moment thou art bleeding and in agony! 
 Never hast thou been more lovely, never 
 more beloved. 
 
 FINIS.
 
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