UNDER THE HEEL OF THE HUN

I.—A World Adrift

Brussels, August 5, 1914.

All Europe is a study in strain. The unexpected swing of events has brought Belgium—Belgium which for eighty years has lived only for a neutral independence—to the centre of the arena. The Waterloo of 1914, as that of 1815, may very well be fought on Belgian soil.

It is impossible to exaggerate the sincere amazement of the man in the street, the man in the café. “We have gorged the Albuches with money. They have blacklegged us in business. We are stuffed with them—bah! our national life is choked with these German sausages. And now! Traitors, cowards, violators of honour and the free Belgian frontier!”

The anti-German feeling is heating rapidly to a frenzy. No more demi-Munichs in the restaurants. Even if the beer be of German nativity, which is sometimes a little in doubt, it must be sold as Belgian. The more discreet patrons had already painted out, or draped in patriotic bunting, all advertisements for German products. But the ruse was not general nor always successful. The window-breakers had already appeared, waving the tricolour, chanting “La Brabançonne.” Every street, and, indeed, every buttonhole, has blossomed as suddenly as the staff of Tannhäuser. Cockades, rosettes, bows, the tricolours of France and Belgium, the red, white and blue of England, flower inexplicably into being. At ten centimes a time we manifest our sympathies, and make dazzling fortunes for the street-sellers.

At the house of a public official one finds a sort of synopsis of the general desolation. The family has just scrambled back from Switzerland. The eldest son, a captain of engineers, had already left for the front, ordered to action too urgently to wait even for a last handshake, a last kiss. His children cannot go out to breathe the air because the governess is German, and therefore liable to patriotic assault. The household is keyed up to any disaster.

At the Post Office there is a tumult that soon settles down into a patient queue outside the savings bank and money-order offices. The cashiers pay out the new five-franc notes; fresh and crisp, obviously and attractively new, they are fingered with distrustful fingers. Then the fingers grow suddenly ashamed of their distrust in the star of Belgium, stuff their notes into their wallets, and step briskly out to the music of the drums that beat in all hearts.

The English declaration of war has evoked extraordinary enthusiasm, and at the same time brought so near the sombre and terrible crisis as to still the expression of that enthusiasm. It was no light-hearted crowd that stood to watch the Red Cross go to the front this morning. They streamed by in commandeered or volunteered motor-cars. Soldiers, unshaven and unslept, lounged with their boots upon cushions that a few days ago ministered to the very dainty masters of luxury. Limousines, taxis, trade-cars all went by laden with stretchers and medicine-cases. Everywhere the smell of rubber and antiseptics. And everywhere the desolating thought that before midnight these snowy bandages will be bloodied, and these stretchers laden with human debris. À la guerre comme à la guerre!

Everywhere girls are hurrying through the streets with tin collecting-boxes. We subscribe to the Red Cross, to funds to support those about to become widows of the sword, to buy milk for the infants. Many of the great hotels have already been offered as hospitals. The gleaming symbol of Geneva—that inexplicable lapse of the soldiers of Europe into plain Christian mercy—is already displayed on them. Shops, big and small, are being prepared to serve as depots for the distribution of food in case of need.

It is impossible not to be with Belgium in the struggle. It is impossible any longer to be passive. Germany has thrown down a well-considered challenge to all the deepest forces of our civilisation. War is hell, but it is only a hell of suffering, not a hell of dishonour. And through it, over its flaming coals, Justice must walk, were it on bare feet.

II.—“Europe against the Barbarians”

Brussels, August 8.

We may well doubt whether any imagination is large enough to contain the issues of the war. It overwhelms us and freezes our blood fast like a vision of terror from the Apocalypse. What is, perhaps, most terrible of all is the complete and necessary banishment of peace from the scene of Europe. Hereafter there may be a time for such a word, but not now. The arbitration movement to which we had committed so many hopes has gone up in flames like a cardboard Elysium. Europe, we said, was a monstrous contradiction in terms—an armed peace. There is no contradiction now, it is a manual of pure logic after Krupp. The Norman Angell evangel to the money-masters has failed; there is even something noble in the sudden appeal of the financiers of every country to a higher plane of values. You may suspend your International Bureau of Labour which used to function at Brussels. Jaurès is dead; Vandervelde, cherishing la patrie beyond everything else, has joined the Ministry; in Germany, as in France, Belgium, and Great Britain, the comrades are with the colours. When next the committee-room of the Maison du Peuple receives the European chiefs of labour what a change will be there!

As for Serbia, it seems probable that nobody will have time to go to war with her. Her function has been that of the electric button which discharges the great gun of a fortress. And now that the lightnings have been released, what is the stake for which we are playing? It is as simple as it is colossal. It is Europe against the barbarians. The authentic Teuton touch betrayed itself in the gross proposition of bribes, followed by the instant violation of the Belgian frontier. The “big blonde brute” stepped from the pages of Nietzsche out on to the plains about Liége. Brought suddenly to think of it, one realises the corruption of moral standards for which Germany has in our time been responsible. Since Schopenhauer died nothing has come from her in the region of philosophy except that gospel of domination.

And now we suddenly understand that the Immoralists meant what they said. We were reading, not as we thought a string of drawing-room paradoxes, but the advance proof-sheets of a veritable Bullies’ Bible. The General Bernhardis who have been teaching Germany to desire war, to provoke it, to regard it as a creative and not a destructive act, to accept it as merely the inevitable prologue to German domination, have proved to be not only brutal, but formidable. Since Belgium, and its protecting treaty, barred the way, both simply had to go. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted to the strong.” Afterwards it will be the turn of the others. And at the end of the process a monster, gorged with blood and with the torn limbs of civilisation, is to lie sprawled over all Central Europe, while some new metaphysician from Berlin booms heavily into his self-intoxicated brain some new fable of preordination.

I do not wish in any way to exaggerate. France has her corruptions. But the whole set of her thought, even when it abjured Christian “illusions,” was towards solidarity, towards reasonableness, and co-operation. Russia has her vile tyrannies. But from all Russian literature there comes an immense and desolating sob of humility and self-reproach. Great Britain has not yet liquidated her account with Ireland, nor altogether purified her relations with India and Egypt. But Great Britain does not, at any rate, throw aside all plain, pedestrian Christian standards as rubbish. In the Rhineland, too, and in the south there are millions of hearty men and women who are not yet Prussified, and who still think it possible that there may exist a Being greater in some respects than the Imperial Kaiser. But all the central thought of Germany has been for a generation corrupt. It has been foul with the odour of desired shambles.

The issue, then, is Europe against the barbarians. It is not easy, perhaps, for anyone living at home in our islands to develop fully What may be called the European sense. You acquire it as you get your sea legs, quickly, but not without actual experience. There underlies the whole Continent a minutely reticulated system of nerves which convey, and multiply, every shock of feeling from one end of it to the other. Here in Brussels we are, for the time at least, at the central sensorium. The élan of Belgium takes possession of you. The courage and anguish of this glorious little nation, fighting now for its very life, stir one to something like the clear mood of its own heroism. In every direction there opens a vista of waste and suffering. Already the long trail of wounded has begun to wind its sorrowful way back to the capital. Prisoners arrive, too simple of aspect, one would think, to be the instruments by which Europe is to be tortured to the pattern of a new devilry. You say to yourself, as you hear all the world saying: C’est incroyable! It is not to be believed. It is a nightmare! And then the conviction shapes itself clearly, settles upon and masters your mind, that this German assault on civilisation has got to be repelled and utterly shattered once and for all.

Had Belgium consented to a free passage across her territory so that the French forts might be evaded, the problem was simply to profit by the slow mobilisation of France, and to strike straight and hard at Paris. On her refusal the problem was to hamstring Belgium. Liége was to be carried by a coup de main, and the advance pushed right on to Antwerp. This would have cut the country in two, made anything like an effective Belgian mobilisation impossible, detached outlying places from their supply depots, and left Belgium helpless under the heel of a comparatively small section of the German forces. Both gambits have been countered. There has been no free passage and no surprise victory. The Belgian mobilisation has not been even hampered. The whole German plan was founded on a swift and invincible dash; in the actual event both characteristics are lacking. General Leman and Liége have given the Allies day on invaluable day to come up. The prestige which since 1871 has enveloped the Prussians and their war methods has disappeared at a blow. “Ah!”, says the Belgian pioupiou to you, “those great Prussian teeth that chewed up France in the ’70, they have bitten themselves to fragments against the forts of Liége. Nous sommes un peu là! Eh?”

The great outstanding pinnacle of a fact is, perhaps, the definitive entrance of England into the comity of Europe. Regret it or not, there can be no more isolation. And the other fact, noted here also as of main importance, is the attitude of Ireland. Mr. Redmond’s proffer of friendship, in return for justice, had been made often before, but never in such dramatic circumstances. I am appalled to hear rumours to the effect that Sir Edward Carson proposes at this moment to force Mr. Bonar Law to bedevil the whole situation by a political trick. He actually proposes, one hears, that a course should be followed depriving Ireland of the Home Rule Bill, which is coming to her automatically by the mere efflux of a few weeks. Can such madness still be possible? Is there any imagination left in England?

Here, at the opening of this vast and bloody epic, Great Britain is right with the conscience of Europe. It is assumed that she has reconciled Ireland. A reconciled Ireland is ready to march side by side with her to any desperate trial. And suddenly the lawyer, with the Dublin accent, who had been the chief architect of destruction in the whole Empire, and who was thought to have come to reason, proposes for Ireland what I can only call a Prussian programme. England goes to fight for liberty in Europe and for Junkerdom in Ireland. It is incredible. Were it to come true it would become utterly impossible to act on Mr. Redmond’s speech. Another dream would have gone down into the abyss. Ireland, wounded anew, would turn sullenly away from you. Is that what a sound Tory ought to desire? Will Tory England, enlightened at last as to the real attitude of Ireland, allow such a fatal crime to be committed?

III.—Termonde

The fate of Termonde is already known. But I do not apologise for adding to the literature of its devastation an account of a visit which I paid to-day. Imagination lacks the stringency of the scandal actually seen, and we have got, by repeated strokes, to hammer into the imagination of the world the things that Prussia has done in Belgium.

I went from Ghent to Zele by train this morning, and from Zele to Termonde by carriage. They call Ghent the flower-town, and not without some reason. It lies in that part of Flanders in which cultivation is at its most intensive. That is to say, it is the centre of one of the greatest agricultural areas in the world. Near Ghent it was nursery-gardens all the way, a checker-board of colour. The geraniums, we thought, will never again look like fire; they will look like blood. Further into the country fewer flowers and more crops and cattle. Not a square millimetre wasted. All the familiar Flemish picture; the windmill that looks like two combs crossed, and revolving on a pepper-box; the old churches, the old castles, reminiscent of the Spanish persecution; the strong peasant-faces—like those of my own “Ulster,” but Catholic—lined with labour; the wayside statues; the villages, with little beauty save that of fruitful effort.

It is a flat country all the way to Termonde, and especially as one nears the Scheldt. It is well timbered. I noticed again a contrast I have often noticed before. In England the trees look like gentlemen of leisure. If they do any good it is by a sort of graceful accident. In Belgium they look like soldiers. They stand there in planned ranks, repelling the infantry of the winds, drawing the artillery of the rain, sheltering, protecting. Add to them the waving patches of hemp, the corn-stacks, the rich herbage, and you get a closely-tufted and almost impenetrable country. It is striped everywhere also with little canals and ditches, so that any sort of military movement, except over the cobbled roads, must be almost impossible. If one remembers that the environs of the towns are almost the only places open enough for a conflict between any substantial forces, a good many events become more intelligible.

What Termonde was

But, for the moment, I am concerned with the impression of remoteness and quiet labour which such a country gives. The peasants yield to it. At Zele, at Lokeren, they feel the war as some great demon that has mysteriously passed them by. And then, eight kilometres away, you turn the bend of a country road at the Bridge of Termonde and drive, let us say, from something that looks very like Kent into something that looks very like Hell.

Termonde was—— Let me recall what it was. It was a not unprosperous town of some eleven or twelve thousand people. Though not destitute of commerce and industries, it lived mainly on law (for it was an assize town), on education, and on the army. The two handsomest residences that I saw—one in puce-coloured brick at the approach to the bridge, the other more grandiose in stone and inexplicably saved in the principal street—belonged one to a judge, the other to an avocat. Termonde, like many other places in the Low Countries, had already been lifted into history by war. It repelled Louis XIV with its dykes, but Marlborough took it dry. Such was Termonde.

To-day it is a tumbled avalanche of brick, stone, twisted iron and shattered glass, over which the remaining public buildings rise like cliffs over a flood. I walked every foot of every street. Of the Rue de l’Eglise, the chief street, the Porte de Boom and Church of Notre Dame at one end, and the Hôtel de Ville, Palais de Justice, and Museum at the other are untouched. So is the avocat’s house, of which I have spoken, chalked over with that piteous legend to which one has become so accustomed. Friends here! Please spare! (in German and German characters). The rest of the street is as if the breath of Armageddon had withered it. The post office, the chapel and convent of the Poor Clares, the hospital, the orphanage have all disappeared.

There is no need to multiply descriptive details. It is always the same capricious devastation, the same arabesques of ruin, with which flame searches its mad way through architecture. About one-half of the Grand’ Place has been saved owing to the fact that the Germans were gathered there, drinking champagne, when fire was being sown through the town.

The Marché au Bétail, a pretty little boulevard, has also disappeared. The great College, at its corner, like the other schools, is gone. Each of its façades resembles nothing so much as an X-ray photograph. Through the charred ribs of what was a house the green-red-and-white of a flower-garden flashes the eternal tricolour of nature.

Culture and the Sick

In the Marché au Lin the Church of the Récolletes and the National Bank lie disembowelled. It was here that the Germans laid on the pavements the sick and wounded while they burned the beds from which they had dragged them and the roof that had sheltered them.

A few small factory buildings on the left bank of the river and the poorest section of the workmen’s quarter remain. The rest of Termonde is a mere heap of bricks. It was; it no longer is. Walking out towards the southern side of the town I came suddenly—everything here happens suddenly—upon a note of desolation, not the most desolate, but the most crying of all. Through a chasm in a shattered façade I saw the white walls of little houses, the white coifs of nuns, and the waving green of trees. It was the Béguinage. Anyone who knows Flanders knows these remote pools of silence, these quiet backwaters where no oar breaks the surface, where the old and spent await death as one courteously awaits an honoured visitor. I stepped in and found myself in an irregular triangle of almshouses. At first nothing seemed to have been touched. But in the centre there was a church, fringed with dwarf cypress. Walking over, I found that it was, like Termonde, a skeleton. The Germans, a nun told me, had on the entreaty of two Dutch ladies, members of the community, consented to spare the cottages. But they insisted on making a bonfire of the “cottage of the Bon Dieu!”

Nothing was lacking in this abomination of desolation. I determined to have some photographs made. Yes! our guide—a big country farmer, who had out of pure courtesy accompanied us from Zele—knew of a photographer who would doubtless be able to do our business. We went to look for him. His street had disappeared, his house with it. We walked back to the estaminet to ask where he might be found.

“But, monsieur! he was one of the first to be shot by the Germans!” Later, on one of the quays we saw a white wooden cross, with lime stamped down about its base. Bystanders told us that it marked the grave of two Belgian civilians. “Ah!” said our farmer, “it is perhaps there!”

Organised Infamy

Now as to the procedure of the Germans. The facts admit of no doubt. I set aside forthwith any damage caused to Termonde by the bombardment. The bridge was dynamited, a number of houses on the outskirts were shattered by shells. Nobody is childish enough to complain about that. War is war, and, technically, Termonde is a fortified town—though the old fortifications have been dismantled. But the burning was deliberate, scientific, selective, devoid of military purpose.

The German commander demanded a levy of two million francs. The money was not there in the public treasury, and the Burgomaster was not there to save his town as Braun saved Ghent. General Sommerfeld—that is the name that now wears such a nimbus of infamy—had a chair brought from an inn into the centre of the Grand Place. He sat down on it, crossed his legs, and said: “It is our duty to burn the town!”

The inhabitants were allowed two hours to clear out. Then the soldiers went to work. Their apparatus is in the best tradition of German science—patented, for all I know, from Charlottenburg. It consists of a small portable pressure-caisson filled with benzine and fitted with a spray. Other witnesses said that there was also a great caisson on wheels. With this they sprinkled the doors, the ground storeys of the houses—as doorposts were once fatally sprinkled with blood in Egypt—and set fire to the buildings.

Others used a sort of phosphorus-paste with which they smeared the object to be destroyed. They completed the work by flinging hand-grenades and prepared fuses into the infant flames.

The selective power of this apparatus was remarkable. Remembering Louvain, and how the burning of the University had destroyed German prestige for a century, General Sommerfeld had evidently given directions that public monumental buildings were to be spared. Thus the Museum and the Hôtel de Ville both stand; but right between them his petroleurs picked out and destroyed a hotel as neatly as you pick a winkle out of a shell. Similarly they cut the avocat’s house, of which I have spoken, out of their sea of destruction.

General Sommerfeld’s soldiery stole, pillaged, and drank everything on which they could lay hands. Witnesses on this point are many, and unshakable. Their moderation must impress anybody who talks to them. A citizen of Termonde who had himself been held as a hostage said to me, standing amid the ruins of his town—

“Monsieur! there is human nature also among the Germans. I saw many officers in tears. A lieutenant came and shook me by the hand, crying: ‘It is not our fault! It is a shame!’”

“He must be Hanged”

Do not think that the evil, written here in the debris of Belgium, will be cancelled and blotted out by subscriptions and indemnities. It calls also for that holy vengeance without which all public law is a nullity. Sommerfeld has got to be hanged. When are the Allies going to issue a proclamation placing definitely outside the privilege of military law Sommerfeld and his kind?

The more one sees of Belgium the more deeply her magnificent courage pierces into the soul. I saw women weeping amid the ruins of Termonde. But I also saw builders’ men stolidly smoking their pipes as they shovelled out the bricks and rubble to make room for new foundations.

I talked with the pioupious. They had torn up half the pavement on the southern road and stretched barbed wire and brambles over the loose stones... to encourage the Uhlans. As you approached from without you saw the wicked eyes of the street trenches, and the grass-grown mounds of the old fortifications, winking down at you. The town was held by an outpost of three or four companies.

“Sir! American Sir!” said one of the pioupious, in the sort of English which an Antwerp Fleming who has spent two years among Scotchmen in the United States may be expected to speak. “Fourth Infantry of the Line at your service! We have two things only which we greatly much desire: Cigarettes and Revenge!”

Irish Horses

On the other side of the town a battery of artillery, magnificently horsed, was waiting under the trees for any alarm. Most of the horses were Irish. I felt a little nostalgia as I rubbed the sensitive nose of a roan mare. I wished that I had with me a poet or two of the Celtic renaissance to make a poem telling her how she had begun at the fair of Ballina, or Moy, or perhaps Ballsbridge itself, and how she would wander the white roads of Europe—not white now, but red—and die at last over there on the banks of the Rhine near pleasant Coblenz, or many-pinnacled Cologne. There being no poet about, I could but scratch the butt of her ears and give her some chocolate.

Two hours in the tram, five on the carriage-trip, three and a half to accomplish the hour’s train journey from Lokeren to Antwerp. I am now writing this impression of Termonde in this besieged city (in which no light is permitted after eight) by the light of two most excellent candles.

IV.—Malines

The prompt, creative courage of these Belgians is admirable. No sooner have the soldiers “cleaned” an invaded district than the engineers hurry along to rebuild bridges, repair railways, to open again the encumbered channels of intercourse. It was therefore without surprise that I found trains running again from Antwerp to Malines, crowded but comfortable, and sharp almost to the minute. Their resuscitating effect on the town, however, was not very great. It looked too much like pumping blood into a corpse.

The journey is right across one of the most important sectors of the Antwerp defences. The countryside shows the aspect of a sort of terrible security. It has been stripped not only to the skin, but to the skeleton. Woods, houses, where necessary, crops, have been sacrificed to the impregnability of the war capital. The typical prepared position shows a criss-cross entanglement of barbed wire, a long stretch of level ground, now entirely naked, more wire or chevaux-de-frise of pointed stakes, raised trenches, defended in front by artificial ditches, and glaring grimly down on the whole scene of the forts of Brialmont, with death lying couched in its guns.

Of Malines little of the material fabric of the town has suffered, with the exception of the cathedral. Through about twenty other houses shells had torn gashes as erratic as those which apparently a bullet tears through living tissue. But most of the streets remain unchanged. This statement is not, perhaps, as reassuring as it sounds. It is as if you were to say, in speaking of an attack on Oxford, that only the colleges had suffered. Malines is not only a cathedral city; the cathedral, situated geographically at its heart, dominates its whole economy. It is the spiritual centre of Belgium. The Cardinal Archbishop’s palace, unpretentious between its thick trees and its quiet canal, is in some sense the moral capital of this valorous people.

Like Louvain, Malines got its bread largely by education. Its manufacturing industries, so to say, radiated from the cathedral. It printed missals and breviaries. It made lace for ecclesiastical vestments, and then other lace. It cut and carved heavy oak into furniture for churches, and then it made other furniture. Every shell launched against the cathedral was therefore launched against the very being and essence of Malines city.

I am not ashamed to confess that when I, an Irish Catholic, walked into the Grand’ Place and saw the stamp of Berlin imprinted on those good grey walls I did not think at once of material injury, or money, or subscriptions. What came was anger against the desecration of a holy place. My mind said to me, “This is how Nietzsche has, from his grave, spat, as he wished to spit, upon Nazareth.” A picture came of that sinister Quixote, who made cruelty his sacrament, and who was yet so humanly dear in some of his moods, standing behind a great Krupp howitzer and shouting, “Charlottenburg contra Christ. I back Charlottenburg!”

One notices in some of the English papers protests against the too ready acceptance of unanalysed and unconfirmed “atrocities.” So liable is panic to mix myth with fact that I have pleaded more than once for the constitution of an International Commission to examine all the evidence. But in the meantime we find it difficult to divest ourselves of the faculty of inference. If you come, during time of war, upon a civilian, hanging by the neck, with his hands tied behind his back, and a fire burning under him, the theory of suicide or accident does not seem to embrace the full scope of the fact. A similar process of reasoning forces you to the conclusion that the Germans would not have hit Malines Cathedral so often if they had not aimed at it. The other buildings struck by shells are either on the line of fire to the Grand’ Place or in its immediate neighbourhood.

The city was three times bombarded. Unlike Termonde, it is open and without the least trace of fortification. None of the bombardments achieved any military object. No attempt was made to capture, fire, shell, or in any way diminish in efficiency the State railway works. I fear that the case looks complete. The Germans deliberately broke through the laws of civilised war, and, just as deliberately, broke through the walls of the cathedral.

To describe in detail, and to put an estimate on the damage done, is a task for experts with ample time at their command. The Belgian Commission were to open a formal enquiry on the day following my visit, and kindly invited me to accompany them, but it was impossible. The following invoice of Hunnery is, therefore, only provisional. There is not a whole pane of glass left in the cathedral. The middle lateral window on the assailed flank of the edifice was itself struck; the others were shattered by the detonation. The stained glass is, I believe, modern, but as you saw it lying heaped on the pavement, like the shards of a rainbow, it looked beautiful enough to have been spared. A great gulf has been torn through the groined roof near its junction with the tower. The tower itself is blotched here and there a pallid white by the exploding shells. The great clock, the largest in Belgium, had been also struck, and its hands flapped in the wind like torn ribbons. The famous carillon, or peal of bells, does not, however, seem to have been injured.

In the left aisle the charred remnant of a canvas still hung in its frame, but what the picture was no one could tell me. The pavement itself was torn up here and there like ground uprooted by swine. The equestrian monument near the southerly entrance has, as to the horse, suffered decapitation, and the figure has lost an arm. Fragments chipped off mouldings and capitals lie about in desolate heaps. And to complete the desolation, all the precious objects have been removed from the cathedral as from the other churches and public buildings. The ciboria, the chalices, the candlesticks, the rich orphreyed vestments have been removed to Antwerp.

Thither have gone Van Dyck’s “Crucifixion,” and Rubens’s “Miraculous Draught of Fishes.” In its own way the most bizarre inhibition imposed by the war is that which prevents you from seeing a Rubens in Antwerp. They are all hidden away from the cultured burglars of Berlin. The “carnal ideal,” which Verhaeren discovers behind the great strokes of his spiritual ancestor would, it is feared, prove irresistible to Attila.

On the day of my visit Cardinal Mercier had returned. I had last met him at Louvain—not in the flesh, but in his books. This master of psychology is one of those who have dared to think that the Latin definiteness of Thomas of Aquin is closer to the sound soul of Europe than the fog of Koenigsberg, or the cloudy intoxication of Hegel. The scholar, called to rule, has also been called to suffer. He was passing through the Grand’ Place as a long procession of women stood formed up outside the door of the municipal offices waiting wretchedly for bread. There was a stir, cheering, excitement which he repressed with a gesture. To those who approached him he said: “Your cheers are due to the army and the King, not to me. I am a Belgian citizen, no more.”

The ruin of the civil population does not, as in Termonde, brand itself on your eyes, but it is, of course, none the less real. The city is a mere cemetery of shutters. The bombardments came after Louvain had been taught its lesson, and the Malinois did not stop to write notes on the text of that lesson. They fled en masse. One sees them in the rain and wind-swept bathing machines at Ostend. You hear them at Folkestone and in London. I saw still another packed trainload leaving Malines for Heyst-sur-Mer, from which many will disperse over the littoral generally, and others will filter into England. In Malines itself a few cafés, a few bakeries, and other shops of prime necessity are open. Everything else is as in a city of plague.

Consider what that means. It means, very bluntly, the triumph of German terrorism. If the Hague Convention is worth anything, and is not merely another “scrap of paper,” the lace-makers and the chair-makers of Malines should, under its protection, be now at work, and not in forced idleness and exile.

Readers must be weary of hearing the Prussian method characterised as one of scientific blackguardism. But that is what it is. There is nothing incoherent, tumultuous, or spasmodic about it; it goes on a well-formulated principle. And it has succeeded. By producing a panic among the civil population it has created the problem of the refugees. It inflicts day by day on Belgium an economic loss, the size of which cannot even be guessed at. Can nothing be done to check its operation? Can nothing be done to guarantee Malines against the fate of Termonde? The Belgian Commission in its last report stated the case with such concentrated force that no apology is needed for recalling their words—

“The true motives behind the atrocities, of which we have collected such heart-breaking evidence, can only be, on the one hand, the desire to terrorise and demoralise the civil population, conformably to the inhuman theories of German military writers, and, on the other hand, the desire to pillage. A shot fired, no one knows where, or by whom, or at whom, by a drunken soldier, or an excitable official, serves as a pretext for the sacking of a whole city. Individual looting is followed by the levying of war contributions so large as to be unpayable, and by the taking away of hostages to be shot or held prisoners till the payment of the full ransom, after the approved and classical method of brigandage. It must also be remembered that all resistance opposed by the regular army is, according to the needs of the situation, ascribed to the inhabitants, and that the invader invariably avenges on the civil population the checks which he suffers during the campaign, and even his own mistakes.

“In the course of this enquiry we cite only facts supported by conclusive evidence. It is further to be observed that so far we have been able to signalise only a small part of a mass of crimes against law, humanity, and civilisation which will fill one of the most sinister and revolting pages in contemporary history. If an international enquiry, such as that made in the Balkans by the Carnegie Commission, could be made in Belgium, we are convinced that it would establish the truth of our assertions.”

Why can it not be made? There are two public opinions in the United Kingdom—one sensational and weak, the other slow and strong. The first demands, so to say, a photograph of every limb of every corpse, and then “registers a protest.” The second demands iron for iron and blood for blood. It is of the second that we have need. Accumulate and examine your evidence by all means, but then act. A nation, with sword in hand, is not a public meeting; its function is not to protest, but to punish. A joint declaration by the Allies that every commanding officer, up to the Kaiser himself, guilty of an infraction of the laws of war, will be brought to trial and retribution, either immediately on capture, or after the victory, would, I am convinced, effectively stop the present plan of terrorism.

And what about America? Does her moral prestige not impose upon her a clear duty of initiative in this matter of an International Enquiry? Can she ultimately afford to keep such familiar company with the cloudy murderers of Berlin? These questions are hot for an answer.

* * * * *

The guns were hammering away all day over towards Termonde, and before I got back to Antwerp I had walked into a warm skirmish of patrols. They are at present the settled order of the day. Both sides keep nibbling away, but neither is in a position at present to risk a real mouthful.

V.—In Ostend

Sept. 24, Ostend.

From the military point of view Belgium is a backwater. It has no tide of its own. All its future movement depends on the ebb and flow of the immense struggle in France. The advance posts, or wandering patrols—if I may change the image—snarl and snap at one another continually. Every day, almost, from here to Antwerp, a German “Taube”—surely the most ill-omened dove that ever invaded the skies—hums over us. But Belgium has not yet got its cue.

The Belgian army would risk too much in a swoop on Brussels. The Germans, on the other hand, while less depleted than might have been anticipated, and strong enough to hold their own, are not strong enough to take the offensive with effect. We hear every day two scare stories. One is that Brussels has been evacuated; the other that von Goltz is pounding the forts at Antwerp. The mere mathematics of war rules out both; one for the present, the other, we hope and believe, for all time.

The weather has cleared. The equinox would seem to have spent its showers, and the bloody and desperate pause on the Aisne should soon be resolved to our advantage. The moment that happens the “pistol of Antwerp” will go off. But the revenge is not yet.

It ought to be remembered that Belgium is one of the allied countries which had to sacrifice, and did sacrifice without a murmur, her richly beautiful capital, to the large strategical game which General Joffre has played with such brilliant success. She has since rejected temptations to peace offered under flag of truce at Antwerp by the Germans. With a noble faith and restraint she has put herself last, and the law of Europe first.

Meantime the Germans are reported to spend most of their time digging trenches north of Brussels. A very interesting traveller, who has just got back from the capital, tells us that the invaders call the Belgians “the little black rats,” because of the effectiveness with which our pioupious pop up, pick off their men, and pop down again into invulnerability.

At Brussels French newspapers find their subterranean way through the whole population. The Hunnish attempt to kill knowledge of facts as they are born has been a gross failure. According to this witness, the whole temper of the population has changed. They have “learned the great language, caught the clear accent” of that magnificent Burgomaster of theirs, with the explosive name, M. Max. They no longer allow themselves to be bullied.

President Wilson once wrote that in order to be moral you must cultivate the feeling that somebody is always looking on. In Brussels the American Minister, Mr. Brand Whitlock, is looking on. As lawyer, politician, and novelist, he possesses a triple intensity of vision. There will be no Termondes while that eye is levelled.

One is glad to say that, amid the general softness and protestations, King Albert’s Government is standing for the salutary, strong law. At Sempst, near Malines, yesterday a German trooper was captured in a farmyard, in which he had just killed two children. He was taken to Waelhem, the facts were briefly established, and, without further ado, he was shot.

I notice that the Right Hon. G. W. E. Russell asks in The Daily News if we have the right to kill. Have we the right to spare? One thing we cannot escape from: the duty to punish. Nobody talks of revenge, or vindictiveness, or cruelty. But since we are fighting for justice, and since the gospel of murder—murder of the body and of the spirit—has been loosed against Europe, we have no choice.

We cannot restore Louvain, but we can give back to Belgium the glory of her own Rubens now exiled in the great gallery of Munich. We cannot call back Rheims out of its smoke of dissolution, but we can put Cologne again under the care of civilised France. We must not spoil or ravage one monument of humane effort, religious or secular, in Germany. But the Denkmal at Bingen has got to go, and the Column of Insolence at Berlin has got to go. Mr. Lowes Dickinson has said that Germany must not be humiliated. Not Germany, but Prussia must be humiliated. Berlin militarism must pass under the Caudine Forks, and the forks must be set so low as to sweep the spike of the helmet as it passes.

I saw a mad Belgian soldier taken away from the Ostend Infirmary a few days ago. Of course, I don’t know, of my own personal observation, why he went mad. But one of the attendants told me that the soldier told him that he had remained the only survivor of a Belgian patrol which had repelled the attack of a much heavier German advance post. Reinforcements arrived; all his comrades were killed, and he was taken prisoner. His captors roped him up against a tree, in the posture of crucifixion, but without lifting his feet from the ground.

A firing party was ordered to take its stand at the usual twelve paces. Time after time their rifles went up to the “present!” Sometimes a volley was at that moment fired behind him. At last he was cut down; somehow or other he scrambled within reach of the Red Cross. They were very kind to him in Ostend, but he kept on babbling about crucifixions and a crucifixion near Jerusalem.

The story is wholly “unverified,” but the man himself so far believed it as to go mad. And since L’Indépendance Belge has thought that it should be published, I, who also saw the madman, also put it in print.