Chapter III: Treitschke and the Professors 230 (4)

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.

TREATING BELGIUM DECENTLY

_August 31, 1914._

Perhaps the finest thing in the whole colossal business in which we are now engaged is the frankness with which the French and British War Offices, and the Press in these countries, admit the checks and even actual reverses which the Allies are sustaining, and are bound in certain areas to sustain. It is understood that we cannot romance ourselves into victory. For the rest the censorship has been very prudently exercised, and is now much mitigated.

These circumstances make it difficult to understand the bald ambiguity of the news from Namur. Is it the town that has fallen or is it the forts? If the first, nothing; if the second, a new twist to the campaign. We are bound to assume, as all the military writers do, that the circle of forts has been captured or surrendered.

I do not want to say one word as to the military significance of the affair. And if a torrential German advance has, after enormous losses, swamped the defence, I do not want to say anything at all. But if, by chance, the defenders of Namur lacked the spirit of those of Liége; if, overwhelmed by the picture of blood, devastation, and panic which the south-east of Belgium now presents, they yielded up their position; then the question, “Are we treating Belgium decently?” has a grave and urgent meaning.

I arrived yesterday from Belgium, knowing nothing of Namur. It seemed to me a clear duty to attempt in a small way to bring home to the people of these islands the appalling price that Belgium has had to pay for holding to the path of honour and courage. Nothing said here is a criticism of the purely military aspects of the prologue now concluded. It was inevitable that in the clash of millions, Belgium and her two hundred thousand soldiers should have been treated as a mere right-wing pawn. But think what the gambit meant to a Belgium patriot. It meant, in any and all circumstances, the devastation of Liége and the country behind it. It meant the surrender not only of the capital, but of the whole country except Antwerp. And the Belgians were under no illusions as to the terrorisation of non-combatants which is an essential part of the Prussian art of war. I quote from a Belgian journal the following summary of it. It is headed--

“THUS SPAKE... BISMARCK IN 1870

“True strategy consists in hitting your enemy, and hitting him
hard. Above all, you must inflict on the inhabitants of invaded
towns the maximum of suffering, so that they may become sick of
the struggle, and may bring pressure to bear on their Government
to discontinue it. You must leave the people through whom you
march only their eyes to weep with.

“In every case the principle which guided our general was that
war must be made terrible to the civil population, so that it may
sue for peace.”

And so on, and so on. Little Belgium--her gallant soldiers and her laborious peasants alike--has been mashed to a bloody pulp where the heel of the Prussian, shod with iron and with this damnable philosophy, has passed. And all the time the Belgians kept on asking in hope, in despair, “Where are the English? Where are the French?” Can you wonder if in the end they began to ask it in anger? Would it be a contradiction of all the laws of human nature to suppose that the panic terror which swept over the undefended land may have penetrated through the steel blinds of the forts of Namur, taken the heart out of the troops, impelled to surrender?

Let us examine our consciences. What have we done to show our appreciation of Belgium? There was the Royal message. There was Lord Sydenham’s noble letter in _The Times_ which has been quoted everywhere. There is a subscription on foot. There is the promised loan. So far so good. But it is not enough. The stunned sense of having been delivered to Armageddon is noticeable everywhere, but especially in Flanders. The Flemish journals such as the _Laatste Nieuws_ are full of violent anti-French, and in a less degree of anti-English articles. Germanophiles are harping on the kinship of the Flemish tongue, the Flemish stock and manners, to Germany. People sneer at the loan. My Flemish barber said to me on Sunday: “Oh! you are a fine people, you English. You look for business among the corpses. You will kindly lend us money at a good, whacking rate of interest. You philanthropists!”

What, then, is needed? War means blood and treasure. That faded phrase has been lit up suddenly, and we know what it means. The proof of blood the gallant soldiers of the two great Western Allies have already given at Mons and along the Sambre. I am convinced that the United Kingdom would be acting with fruitful generosity if Parliament were not to sanction a loan, but to vote a free grant.

Conjoined with that I hope and assume that Sir Edward Grey will renew the solemn pledges already given that, come what may, we mean to see Belgium through. The fear is general that the Germans may be allowed to get such a footing in Belgium as to have some plausible case in international law for proclaiming annexation. Let Parliament announce--and these dramatic cries and gestures of diplomacy are necessary--that so long as there is one shot left and one soldier to fire it, the Allies will never allow one foot of Belgian soil to remain under German domination.

What I have written is not inspired by even the least touch of discouragement. The breakneck advance on the German right seems to me not the stride of conquerors, but the mad hurry of columns flung forward in a frenzied gamble. Sursum corda! But let us remember that all alliances need delicate handling. Belgium is in agony. A stroke, swift and generous, such as suggested, will recall her, and all her people, to the glorious courage of Liége. Antwerp, and the field army now sheltered about it, have still a great part to play.

BELGIUM IN PEACE

WORK OF THREE GENERATIONS--COMPARISONS WITH IRELAND--SOME MEMORIES

It is an irony characteristic of this scurvy and disastrous time that Belgium should have first found her way to the general imagination of these countries through the waste redness of war. Peace was her whole being. For eighty years, trusting to the good faith of Europe, she had pursued an economical evolution without parallel. For national defence she had relied on that most solemn treaty of the nineteenth century. Even a little time ago, even since Agadir, her army, although unsuspectedly alert in technique, was still a jest of vaudeville. In temper and fibre, the Belgian people was the least militarist on the Continent. It is true that in recent years, wise foreseeing men of arms and men of politics, troubled by the audacity of Prussian apostles of conquest like Bernhardi, had begun to take alarm. Brialmont, the great engineer, had fortified Liége against Germany, and improved the defences of Namur against France. He had also, of course, planned the new entrenched position of Antwerp, the war-capital, and incidentally provided us with the first-class mystery of its subsequent easy fall. De Broqueville had carried a new army scheme which in due development would have given Belgium at need a million bayonets to defend her neutrality instead of three hundred thousand. King Leopold, couched like a super-spider behind his fine-drawn webs of diplomacy and finance, had made way for King Albert of the simpler gospel. But on the whole the temper of Belgium was not radically changed. When in 1912 the Kaiser, receiving General Heimburger, Governor of Liége, at Aix-la-Chapelle during manœuvres, expressed his astonishment at the improvement of the defences on the Belgo-German frontier, the latter had no stronger reply than: “Well, Majesty, we soldiers had a chance of getting something extra out of our Government, and we took it.” Neither your courteous and subtle Liégois, nor your genial and abundant citizen of Brussels, nor your four-square indomitable Flamand really believed that the treaty would ever be violated, or that he would ever be called on to die for his independence.

We know now how that treaty was respected. There will be pens, and to spare, to celebrate the heroic defence of the valley of the Meuse, the stubborn withdrawal of an outmatched but unbroken army, the tide of rapine and devastation that marched with the Treaty-Breakers, the driving into exile of a gallant people, the rosary of desolation, Liége, Visé, Louvain, Termonde, Namur, Ypres. For my part I should like to recall something of what Belgium was in peace, and what she did give or was in train of giving to the triumphs of civilisation.

One does not need to say anything of her treasury of art; her painters from Van Eyck to the enigmatic madness of Wierbz; her incomparable belfries, hôtels de ville and halles, testifying still to the richest municipal life of the middle ages; her cathedrals; of Bruges of the three hundred bridges--one of which the present writer has cause to remember as he was all but drowned under it--of the Castle of Bouillon, from which Godefroid went to the Holy Land to capture Jerusalem and to refuse to wear a crown of gold where his Saviour had worn a crown of thorns. Nor is there need to say anything of the ambiguous splendour of such places as Ostend, in summer a Paradise at once of children and of those no longer conspicuously childlike. Nor again, of the remote beauty and clean winds of the Ardennes. It is of the life that the Belgian nation, working on its environment, had made for itself in three generations of guaranteed peace, that I like, on this anniversary, to recall some sort of inadequate picture.

Belgium was the most thickly peopled state in Europe. In the Meuse valley, from Liége to Seraing, she possessed the most extensive manufacturing area of its size in the world, surpassing Lancashire and Massachusetts. She had a greater length of railway line per square mile than any other country in Europe. She produced a greater value of manufactured goods _per capita_ than either of her great neighbours, France and Germany, and had a larger _per capita_ foreign trade. Her agriculture was so enterprising that it would have been difficult to find an untilled rood or a rood wasted on a fence, in all Flanders. Such production of wealth had generated on a large scale all the social problems characteristic of our time; and so earnest and loyal was she in her attempt to reach solutions that French writers have been found to call her, not the “cockpit,” but the “social laboratory” of Europe. What is of special interest to us is that, despite the ablest Socialist and Liberal criticism, Belgium had maintained in power for a generation a Catholic Government, and was working out her problems on the basis of Catholic individualism. In all aspects to know her was for a citizen of any small nation a tonic and an inspiration. She was no Paradise assuredly; she had failed in some points in which we have succeeded, but it was impossible to look into any department of her activity without learning something worth the trouble. When it is remembered that, on the one hand, she had a duality of language, and on the other, that through flax she came into intimate touch with North-east Ulster, the interest of her life for an Irishman is obviously enhanced.

Coal, “the bread of manufacturing industry,” was, of course, the basis of Belgian prosperity. In her black country, the “borinage” centred on Mons. She employed 150,000 miners, raised 24,000,000 tons of coal per annum, and consumed almost that quantity in her factories and homes. I have an eerie recollection of climbing the belfry of Mons some years ago, and picking out, or persuading myself that I had succeeded in picking out, the battlefields about it: Malplaquet, Jemappes, Fontenoy, Ligny. A Frenchman on the same errand asked dreamily: “When will there be another?” Alas! we can answer that question now: the “borinage” has taken another full draught of Irish blood.

This precious natural possession of coal Belgium certainly utilises to the full. Her mining country, unhappily, had all the sordor that seems inseparable from that enterprise. Mons had an admirable School of Commerce and Industry. Its watchword was expansion and expatriation. The device may sound strange in our ears; what it means to convey, of course, is that Belgium must find markets abroad. She trains her sons not to be lost to her, but to go abroad and open new fields of conquest for her industries. There was also an unusual dispensary which treated the miners for an endemic complaint called “miner’s worm,” or more learnedly, ankylostomiasis.

The metal industries, of course, centre on Liége. There was no more wonderful sight, not in Pittsburg, not on the Clyde, than the pillars of smoke and the pillars of fire which stream upwards from the steel foundries and factories along the Meuse. It was a singular pride to remember that the whole first impulsion of that great industry proceeded from the brain of an Irishman, John Cockerill. It is known that until 1825, it was, under English law, a criminal offence, punishable by transportation, for a skilled workman to emigrate to a foreign country, or for anyone to export machinery or plans. William Cockerill, however, took the risk, went first to Sweden, where he was ill received, and afterwards to Verviers. He founded the machine woollen industry of Verviers, and his son John, in due course, founded the metal industry of Liége and its belt of towns. The lives of the Cockerills would make a romantic chapter: I am sorry that I have not been able to come on much biographical matter. Obtaining a good deal more iron ore, chiefly from her neighbour, Luxembourg, than she produced herself, Belgium, before the war, reached an annual output of about a million and a half tons each of pig-iron and steel. She made all sorts of machinery and had an immense export of all. I have a vivid memory of a visit to the great Fabrique Nationale (F.N.) at Herstal. The figures of production per day were given to us as something like 800 Browning automatic pistols, 500 Mauser rifles, 400 fowling-pieces, 150 bicycles, 50 motor-bicycles and 10 motor-cars. These two latter items had probably greatly increased. Your guide took great pleasure in dazing you with the degree of specialisation practised. Thus it took 350 special machines or tools to make a Browning, and something like 700 to make a Mauser. If all the plant of Herstal and its neighbouring towns is in German hands, it will be seen that their invasion of Belgium gave them something more even than an opportunity of running murder as a national pastime.

Ghent as a textile city owes its importance mainly to cotton. But both there and at Courtrai linen possessed a keener interest for an Irishman. Ghent possesses the two largest linen-spinning installations in the world. Between these two places and North-east Ireland there was the closest intercourse, and it would have been an interesting exercise to have made a detailed study of the Ulster colony that lived there. Cases were not unknown of the dourest North of Ireland buyers intermarrying with Flemish Catholic families, and ultimately suffering absorption. Lace was, of course, a notable product. It will be remembered that certain enquiries disclosed the fact some years ago that Belgian skill was equal to the fabrication, not only of Brussels and Malines, but also of “Limerick” and “Carrickmacross” lace, chiefly for the American market.

Of the progressive character of agriculture some indication has been given. It is curious that whilst South Germany, Denmark, and even Hungary have been ransacked for models by various Irish propagandists, Belgian agriculture, which was not inferior either in technique or in organisation, was almost ignored. Much of the land is, as with us, rather a manufactured article than a natural product; rich polders stolen from the sea, or sand made fertile by irrigation. If one were to touch on any special point in agriculture, it would be the complete success which Belgium had made of the beet. She produced all her own sugar, including that used in her great brewing industry, and exported great quantities as well.

The productive apparatus of Belgium was assuredly rich and varied. And each industry fed and maintained itself by an educational institute of the first order. Mons has been mentioned. There was also the University of Liége, mainly an engineering University; the great Commercial School of Antwerp, the Agricultural Laboratories at Louvain and Ghent, the Higher School of Textiles at Verviers, and so on. And all this was done at “the cross-roads of Europe,” under the fire of French and German competition, without recourse to any really protectionist tariffs.

But however dominant a factor intensity of production may be, it is rather the attitude of a people towards the problems of distribution that marks it out as, in a human point of view, a success or a failure: Belgium was beyond doubt a success. Not that she had abolished poverty: there was poverty more drab and hopeless in some parts of her countryside than anything of our congested districts. There was the old plague of cheap gin almost everywhere.

But she was facing her social task in the right temper. The Belgian in economic affairs is by nature a realist and an appeasable man. In the number of days per worker lost through labour disputes, Belgium was easily at the foot of the list of industrial countries. “The Social Question,” they repeat after Colins, “is to be settled by science, not by violence.” Time and again the central labour committees, Socialist as well as Catholics, have suppressed strikes inaugurated by their own members. This realism of outlook gave you in Belgium the supreme type of business-like politics. The great Socialist co-operatives of Brussels and Ghent--the “Maison du Peuple” and the “Voormit”--starting from ludicrously small beginnings, bestrode the world of workers like a Colossus. If you were an associate, they sold you your clothes, boots, bread, meat, beer, furniture, books, amusements--everything you consumed--and managed your business as well as gave you free their propagandist papers, and an annual bonus out of the profits, in order to sweeten the principles proposed. The smaller Catholic organisations in the cities acted on similar lines. In the country the great Catholic “Boerenbond,” or Land League, with its headquarters at Louvain, applied the same formula to the buying and selling of agricultural necessaries on a great scale. Such a phenomenon as empty extremism could not arise.

These immense co-operatives were, perhaps, the most characteristic Belgian contribution to social readjustment. But in direct action by the State they had also been pioneers. The first experiment in Old Age Pensions did not come from Germany--formerly the worshipped idol of English Liberals and Tariff Reformers alike. It came from the city of Ghent. The first experiment in the deliberate building of “workmen’s dwellings” as such was not made in Mülhausen, it was made in Verviers. The whole body of Belgian law regulating economic life is expounded in two masterly volumes issued from Louvain by Father Vermeersh, the Jesuit, who so bravely exposed the early atrocities in the Congo. (Perhaps it is as well to interpolate here that if the crimes were great, the amendment has been complete. On the same terms it would be possible to forgive all the sins of history.) The intervention of formal law is not quite as comprehensive as it is in these countries. But it helps the worker at all his crises: birth, marriage, accident, disease, old age. In one respect at least it is far superior to our code: property in small parcels is much more readily accessible to the labourer. This is accomplished by exemption of workmen’s home sites and garden plots from various heads of taxation, and by the provision of cheap loans. It will be found in the end that this accessibility to land, to land in fee-simple, is the real solution of half our labour difficulties, and the real counter-programme to Socialism. And the nation that pioneered it will enjoy deserved honour. Like other Latin countries Belgium has what we, to our shame, have not: a Homestead and Household Protection Act, the only bulwark against usury.

As to the particular points in which Belgian experience may enlighten ours, there is one which ought to be mentioned. Cheap fee-simple land for industrial workers plus cheap railways, has done a great deal to break the isolation of country and town, and to solve housing difficulties. There is also a distinct human gain. Your industrial worker who grows his own vegetables on his own land is a very different man from the unit of your propertyless proletariat. The railway policy of Belgium is generally misunderstood. In the first instance, only the main lines are owned by the State; in the second, the complaint that the State Railways “do not pay” misses the whole essence of the matter. They are not run as dividend-producing concerns; they are run as one of the fundamental public utilities. Roads used to “pay”; now they are paid for out of the public purse. Who complains? The Belgian State Railways did certainly not lose money; further, their policy was not controlled by the necessity of making it directly. Railways so conducted yield a diffused national dividend of utility, the value of which is incalculable.

A further token of this firm handling of the tangles of everyday life is to be found in the work done in the School of Social Sciences at Louvain. I had not much opportunity of studying its courses, but I fancy that Father Corcoran, the distinguished Jesuit educationist, would know all about it. It is likely that he derived from it the idea of the Leo Guild. In Belgium, at all events, it was a thing of course that a priest should be not an economist--a poor title and quality--but a trained healer of economic disease. The activity manifested under the inspiration of the Church was extremely rich, and diversified. And not only in Flanders, but also in Wallonie. I have a list showing for the little Walloon town of Soignies, a town of 9000 inhabitants, no less than fifteen different Catholic economic societies. Nobody can ever have gone to Mass in Belgium without contributing at the door his “denier scolaire” for the education of poor children, or without seeing the Catholic Young Guards, engaged in some of their manifestations. Priests in Belgium would tell you that their success is due to the care with which they have avoided every hint of “clericalism.” At all events, a Catholic Government has been able in one of the freest countries in Europe to maintain, and at the last election, to strengthen, its position against all assaults. It used to be said that the industrialisation of the Campine--now agricultural, but rich in coal as yet unmined--would ultimately put Socialism in the saddle. The war has intervened. Who will venture to cast a horoscope now?

The language situation in Belgian was well known to Irish readers. Indeed the compliment was returned. The last paper I remember looking at before the German column under Van Boehm wheeled by Ghent was a copy of _Ons Land_. It contained excellent photographs of prominent Gaelic League personages, with an account of the movement in Ireland. In Flanders, the position is a sort of transposition of ours into another key. The Flamand is in a majority of nine to eight. He presents, although a Catholic, a marked temperamental resemblance to our typical Protestant Ulsterman. So far as one could judge he has pretty well had his own way in all points except one. His language will live side by side with French, but it can hardly hope, or even desire, to displace the lingua franca of civilisation. By the way, it was interesting to notice the Pro-German articles in some of the Flemish papers even after the invasion. The Germans, it was said, were first cousins of the Flemings, Teutons like them, solid, pious, religious people, not like the atheistical Walloons and French! I am afraid that the burning zeal of the Germans towards their kinsmen was too lamentably literal for that campaign to succeed. But it is well known that German agents have been promising the Flamands an autonomous Flanders, under the eagle of Berlin... after the annexation. Certain journalists lately addressed a manifesto to King Albert. They received a cold and dignified answer, to the effect that the first task of the Belgian nation was to recover Belgium, and all Belgium; afterwards the nation would settle its own future. The most interesting by-product of the conflict of tongues in Belgium is one that will certainly not be repeated here. In the Marolles--the Coombe, so to say, of Brussels--the necessities of daily intercourse have produced a mixture of French and Flemish which has developed strong individuality. One heard songs in it which cannot be described by any candid person as being funny without being vulgar. The linguistic future of Belgium will, no doubt, be worked out on a basis of equality. The clash was never charged with any political menace; after the war separation of any deep kind would be unimaginable. Belgium, said King Albert, has lost everything except her soul. Is it not even true that, for the first time, she has found her soul? As the poet, Antoine Classe, phrased it--

“Flamands, Walloons,
Ne sont que des prénoms,
Belge est notre nom de famille.”