I was guilty of a faint suspicion that he was a diplomatist.

VIII

In Belgium Under The Germans

No week at the front, where war is made, left the mind so full as this

week beyond the sound of the guns with war's results. It taught the

meaning of the simple words life and death, hunger and food, love

and hate. One was in a house with sealed doors where a family of

seven millions sat in silence and idleness, thinking of nothing but war

and feeling nothing but war. He had war cold as the fragments of an

exploded shell beside a dead man on a frozen road; war analysed

and docketed for exhibition, without its noise, its distraction, and its

hot passion.

In Ostend I had seen the Belgian refugees in flight, and I had seen

them pouring into London stations, bedraggled outcasts of every

class, with the staring uncertainty of the helpless human flock flying

from the storm. England, who considered that they had suffered for

her sake, opened her purse and her heart to them; she opened her

homes, both modest suburban homes and big country houses which

are particular about their guests in time of peace. No British family

without a Belgian was doing its duty. Bishop's wife and publican's wife

took whatever Belgian was sent to her. The refugee packet arrived

without the nature of contents on the address tag. All Belgians had

become heroic and noble by grace of the defenders of Liege.

Perhaps the bishop's wife received a young woman who smoked

cigarettes, and asked her hostess for rouge, and the publican's wife

received a countess. Mrs. Smith, of Clapham, who had brought up

her children in the strictest propriety, welcomed as play-mates for her

dears, whom she had kept away from the contaminating associations

of the alleys, Belgian children from the toughest quarters of Antwerp,

who had a precocity that led to baffling confusion in Mrs. Smith's mind

between parental responsibility and patriotic duty. Smart society gave

the run of its houses sometimes to gentry who were used to getting

the run of that kind of houses by lifting a window with a jemmy on a

dark night. It was a refugee lottery. When two hosts met one said:

"My Belgian is charming!" and the other said: "Mine isn't. Just listen--"

But the English are game; they are loyal; they bear their burden of

hospitality bravely.

The strange things that happened were not the more agreeable

because of the attitude of some refugees who, when they were

getting better fare than they ever had at home, thought that, as they

had given their "all" for England, they should be getting still better, not

to mention wine on the table in temperance families; whilst there was

a disinclination towards self-support by means of work on the part of

certain heroes by proxy which promised a Belgian occupation of

England that would last as long as the German occupation of

Belgium. England was learning that there are Belgians and Belgians.

She had received not a few of the "and Belgians."

It was only natural. When the German cruisers bombarded

Scarborough and the Hartlepools, the first to the station were not the

finest and sturdiest. Those with good bank accounts and a

disinclination to take any bodily or gastronomic risks, the young idler

who stands on the street corner ogling girls and the girls who are

always in the street to be ogled, the flighty-minded, the irresponsible,

the tramp, the selfish, and the cowardly, are bound to be in the van of

flight from any sudden disaster and to make the most of the generous

sympathy of those who succour them.

The courageous, the responsible, those with homes and property at

stake, those with an inborn sense of real patriotism which means

loyalty to locality and to their neighbours, are more inclined to remain

with their homes and their property. Besides, a refugee hardly

appears at his best. He is in a strange country, forlorn, homesick, a

hostage of fate and personal misfortune. The Belgian nation had

taken the Allies' side and now individual Belgians expected help from

the Allies.

England did not get the worst of the refugees. They could travel no

farther than Holland, where the Dutch Government appropriated

money to care for them at the same time that it was under the

expense of keeping its army mobilized. Looking at the refugees in the

camp at Bergen-op-Zoom, an observer might share some of the

contempt of the Germans for the Belgians. Crowded in temporary

huts in the chill, misty weather of a Dutch winter, they seemed listless,

marooned human wreckage. They would not dig ditches to drain their

camp; they were given to pilfering from one another the clothes which

the world's charity supplied. The heart was out of them. They were

numbed by disaster.

"Are all these men and women who are living together married?" I

asked the Dutch officer in charge.

"It is not for us to inquire," he replied. "Most of them say that they

have lost their marriage certificates."

They were from the slums of that polyglot seaport town Antwerp,

which Belgians say is anything but real Belgium. To judge Belgium by

them is like judging an American town by the worst of its back streets,

where saloons and pawnshops are numerous and red lights twinkle

from dark doorways.

Around a table in a Rotterdam hotel one met some generals who

were organizing a different kind of campaign from that which brought

glory to the generals who conquered Belgium. It was odd that Dr.

Rose--that Dr. Rose who had discovered and fought the hook worm

among the mountaineers of the Southern States--should be

succouring Belgium, and yet only natural. Where else should he and

Henry James, Jr., of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Mr. Bicknell, of

the American Red Cross, be, if not here directing the use of an

endowment fund set aside for just such purposes?

They had been all over Belgium and up into the Northern

Departments of France occupied by the Germans, investigating

conditions. For they were practical men, trained for solving the

problem of charity with wisdom, who wanted to know that their money

was well spent. They had nothing for the refugees in London, but they

found that the people who had stayed at home in Belgium were

worthy of help. The fund was allowing five hundred thousand dollars a

month for the American Commission for Relief in Belgium, which was

the amount that the Germans had spent in a single day in the

destruction of the town of Ypres with shells. Later they were to go to

Poland; then to Serbia.

With them was Herbert C. Hoover, a celebrated mining engineer, the

head of the Commission. When American tourists were stranded

over Europe at the outset of the war, with letters of credit which could

not be cashed, their route homeward must lie through London. They

must have steamer passage. Hoover took charge. When this work

was done and Belgium must be helped, he took charge of a task that

could be done only by a neutral. For the adjutants and field officers of

his force he turned to American business men in London, to Rhodes

scholars at Oxford, and to other volunteers hastening from America.

When "Harvard, 1914," who had lent a hand in the American

refugees' trials, appeared in Hoover's office to volunteer for the new

campaign, Hoover said: "You are going to Rotterdam to-night." "So I

am!" said Harvard, 1914, and started accordingly. Action and not red

tape must prevail in such an organization.

The Belgians whom I wished to see were those behind the line of

guards on the Belgo-Dutch frontier; those who had remained at home

under the Germans to face humiliation and hunger. This was possible

if you had the right sort of influence and your passport the right sort of

visés to accompany a Bescheinigung, according to the form of "31

Oktober, 1914, Sect. 616, Nr. 1083," signed by the German consul at

Rotterdam, which put me in the same motor-car with Harvard, 1914,

that stopped one blustery, snowy day of late December before a

gate, with Belgium on one side and Holland on the other side of it, on

the Rosendaal-Antwerp road. "Once more!" said Harvard, 1914, who

had made this journey many times as a dispatch rider.

One of the conquerors, the sentry representing the majesty of

German authority in Belgium, examined the pass. The conqueror was

a good deal larger around the middle than when he was young, but

not so large as when he went to war. He had a scarf tied over his

ears under a cracked old patent-leather helmet, which the Saxon

Landsturm must have taken from their garrets when the Kaiser sent

the old fellows to keep the Belgians in order so that the young men

could be spared to get rheumatism in the trenches if they escaped

death.

You could see that the conqueror missed his wife's cooking and

Sunday afternoon in the beer garden with his family. However much

he loved the Kaiser, it did not make him love home any the less. His

nod admitted us into German-ruled Belgium. He looked so lonely that

as our car started I sent him a smile. Surprise broke on his face.

Somebody not a German in uniform had actually smiled at him in

Belgium!

My last glimpse of him was of a grin spreading under the scarf toward

his ears.

Belgium was webbed with these old Landsturm guards. If your

Passierschein was not right, you might survive the first set of sentries

and even the second, but the third, and if not the third some

succeeding one of the dozens on the way to Brussels, would hale you

before a Kommandatur. Then you were in trouble. In travelling about

Europe I became so used to passes that when I returned to New

York I could not have thought of going to Hoboken without the

German consul's visa or of dining at a French restaurant without the

French consul's.

"And again!" said Harvard, 1914, as we came to another sentry.

There was good reason why Harvard had his pass in a leather-bound

case under a celluloid face. Otherwise, it would soon have been worn

out in showing. He had been warned by the Commission not to talk

and he did not talk. He was neutrality personified. All he did was to

show his pass. He could be silent in three languages. The only time I

got anything like partisanship out of him and two sentences in

succession was when I mentioned the Harvard-Yale football game.

"My! Wasn't that a smear! In their new stadium, too! Oh, my! Wish I

had been there!"

When the car broke a spring half-way to Antwerp, he remarked,

"Naturally!" or, rather, a more expressive monosyllable which did not

sound neutral.

While he and the Belgian chauffeur, with the help of a Belgian farmer

as spectator, were patching up the broken spring, I had a look at the

farm. The winter crops were in; the cabbages and Brussels sprouts in

the garden were untouched. It happened that the scorching finger of

war's destruction had not been laid on this little property. In the yard

the wife was doing the week's washing, her hands in hot water and

her arms exposed to weather so cold that I felt none too warm in a

heavy overcoat. At first sight she gave me a frown, which instantly

dissipated into a smile when she saw that I was not German.

If not German, I must be a friend. Yet if I were I would not dare talk--

not with German sentries all about. She lifted her hand from the suds

and swung it out to the west toward England and France with an

eager, craving fire in her eyes, and then she swept it across in front of

her as if she were sweeping a spider off a table. When it stopped at

arm's length there was the triumph of hate in her eyes. I thought of

the lid of a cauldron raised to let out a burst of steam as she asked

"When?" When? When would the Allies come and turn the Germans

out?

She was a kind, hardworking woman, who would help any stranger in

trouble the best she knew how. Probably that Saxon whose smile had

spread under his scarf had much the same kind of wife. Yet I knew

that if the Allies' guns were heard driving the Germans past her

house and her husband had a rifle, he would put a shot in that

Saxon's back, or she would pour boiling water on his head if she

could. Then, if the Germans had time, they would burn the farmhouse

and kill the husband who had shot one of their comrades.

I recollect a youth who had been in a railroad accident saying: "That

was the first time I had ever seen death; the first time I realized what

death was." Exactly. You don't know death till you have seen it; you

don't know invasion till you have felt it. However wise, however able

the conquerors, life under them is a living death. True, the farmer's

property was untouched, but his liberty was gone. If you, a well-

behaved citizen, have ever been arrested and marched through the

streets of your home town by a policeman, how did you like it? Give

the policeman a rifle and a fixed bayonet and a full cartridge-box and

transform him into a foreigner and the experience would not be any

more pleasant.

That farmer could not go to the next town without the permission of

the sentries. He could not even mail a letter to his son who was in the

trenches with the Allies. The Germans had taken his horse; theirs the

power to take anything he had--the power of the bayonet. If he

wanted to send his produce to a foreign market, if he wanted to buy

food in a foreign market, the British naval blockade closed the sea to

him. He was sitting on a chair of steel spikes, hands tied and mouth

gagged, whilst his mind seethed, solacing its hate with hope through

the long winter months. If you lived in Kansas and could not get your

wheat to Chicago, or any groceries or newspapers from the nearest

town, or learn whether your son in Wyoming were alive or dead, or

whether the man who owned your mortgage in New York had

foreclosed it or not--well, that is enough without the German sentry.

Only, instead of newspapers or word about the mortgage, the thing

you needed past that blockade was bread to keep you from starving.

America opened a window and slipped a loaf into the empty larder.

Those Belgian soldiers whom I had seen at Dixmude, wounded,

exhausted, mud-caked, shivering, were happy beside the people at

home. They were in the fight. It is not the destruction of towns and

houses that impresses you most, but the misery expressed by that

peasant woman over her washtub.

A writer can make a lot of the burst of a single shell; a photographer

showing the ruins of a block of buildings or a church makes it appear

that all blocks and all churches are in ruins. Running through Antwerp

in a car, one saw few signs of destruction from the bombardment.

You will see them if you are specially conducted. Shops were open,

people were moving about in the streets, which were well lighted. No

need of darkness for fear of bombs dropping here! German barracks

had safe shelter from aerial raids in a city whose people were the

allies of England and France. But at intervals marched the German

patrols.

When our car stopped before a restaurant a knot gathered around it.

Their faces were like all the other faces I saw in Belgium--unless

German--with that restrained, drawn look of passive resistance,

persistent even when they smiled. When? When were the Allies

coming? Their eyes asked the question which their tongues dared

not. Inside the restaurant a score of German officers served by

Belgian waiters were dining. Who were our little party? What were we

doing there and speaking English--English, the hateful language of

the hated enemy? Oh, yes! We were Americans connected with the

relief work. But between the officers' stares at the sound of English

and the appealing inquiry of the faces in the street lay an abyss of

war's fierce suspicion and national policies and racial enmity, which

America had to bridge.

Before we could help Belgium, England, blockading Germany to keep

her from getting foodstuffs, had to consent. She would consent only if

none of the food reached German mouths. Germany had to agree

not to requisition any of the food. Someone not German and not

British must see to its distribution. Those rigid German military

authorities, holding fast to their military secrets, must consent to

scores of foreigners moving about Belgium and sending messages

across that Belgo-Dutch frontier which had been closed to all except

official German messages. This called for men whom both the

German and the British duellists would trust to succour the human

beings crouched and helpless under the circling flashes of their steel.

Fortunately, our Minister to Belgium was Brand Whitlock. He is no

Talleyrand or Metternich. If he were, the Belgians might not have

been fed, because he might have been suspected of being too much

of a diplomatist. When an Englishman, or a German, or a Hottentot,

or any other kind of a human being gets to know Whitlock, he

recognizes that here is an honest man with a big heart. When leading

Belgians came to him and said that winter would find Belgium without

bread, he turned from the land that has the least food to that which

has the most--his own land.

For Belgium is a great shop in the midst of a garden. Her towns are

so close together that they seem only suburbs of Brussels and

Antwerp. She has the densest population in Europe. She produces

only enough food to last her for two months of the year. The food for

the other ten months she buys with the products of her factories. In

1914-15 Belgium could not send out her products; so we were to help

feed her without pay, and England and France were to give money to

buy what food we did not give.

But with the British navy generously allowing food to pass the

blockade, the problem was far from solved. Ships laden with supplies

steaming to Rotterdam--this was a matter of easy organization. How

get the bread to the hungry mouths when the Germans were using

Belgian railroads for military purposes? Germany was not inclined to

allow a carload of wheat to keep a carload of soldiers from reaching

the front, or to let food for Belgians keep the men in the trenches from

getting theirs regularly. Horse and cart transport would be

cumbersome, and the Germans would not permit Belgian teamsters

to move about with such freedom. As likely as not they might be

spies.

Anybody who can walk or ride may be a spy. Therefore, the way to

stop spying is not to let anyone walk or ride. Besides, Germany had

requisitioned most of the horses that could do more than draw an

empty phaeton on a level. But she had not drawn the water out of the

canals; though the Belgians, always whispering jokes at the expense

of the conquerors, said that the canals might have been emptied if

their contents had been beer. There were plenty of idle boats in

Holland, whose canals connect with the web of canals in Belgium.

You had only to seal the cargoes against requisition, the seal to be

broken only by a representative of the Relief Commission, and start

them to their destination.

And how make sure that those who had money should pay for their

bread, while all who had not should be reached? The solution was

simple compared to the distribution of relief after the San Francisco

earthquake and fire, for example, in our own land, where a sparser

population makes social organization comparatively loose.

The people to be relieved were in their homes. Belgium is so old a

country, her population so dense, she is so much like one big

workshop, that the Government must keep a complete set of books.

Every Belgian is registered and docketed. You know just how he

makes his living and where he lives. Upon marriage a Belgian gets a

little book, giving his name and his wife's, their ages, their

occupations, and address. As children are born their names are

added. A Belgian holds as fast to this book as a woman to a piece of

jewellery that is an heirloom.

With few exceptions, Belgian local officials had not fled the country.

They realized that this was a time when they were particularly needed

on the job to protect the people from German exactions and from

their own rashness. There were also any number of volunteers. The

thing was to get the food to them and let them organize local

distribution.

The small force of Americans required to oversee the transit must

watch that the Germans did not take any of the food and retain both

British and German confidence in the absolute good faith of their

intentions. The volunteers were paid their expenses; the rest of their

reward was experience, and it was "soom expeerience," as a Belgian

said who was learning a little American slang. They talked about

canal-boat cargoes as if they had been from Buffalo to Albany on the

Erie Canal for years; they spoke of "my province" and compared

bread-lines and the efficiency of local officials. And the Germans took

none of the food; orders from Berlin were obeyed. Berlin knew that

any requisitioning of relief supplies meant that the Relief Commission

would cease work and announce to the world the reason.

However many times Americans were arrested they must be patient.

That exception who said, when he was put in a cell overnight

because he entered the military zone by mistake, that he would not

have been treated that way in England, needed a little more coaching

in preserving his mask of neutrality. For I must say that nine out of ten

of these young men, leaning over backward to be neutral, were pro-

Ally, including some with German names. But publicly you could

hardly get an admission out of them that there was any war. As for

Harvard, 1914, hang a passport carrier around the Sphinx's neck and

you have him done in stone.

Fancy any Belgian trying to get him to carry a contraband letter or a

German commander trying to work him for a few sacks of flour! When

I asked him what career he had chosen he said, "Business!" without

any waste of words. I think that he will succeed in a way to surprise

his family. It is he and all those young Americans of whom he is a

type, as distinctive of America in manner, looks, and thought as a

Frenchman is of France or a German of Germany, who carried the

torch of Peace's kindly work into war-ridden Belgium. They made you

want to tickle the eagle on the throat so he would let out a gentle,

well-modulated scream; of course, strictly in keeping with neutrality.

Red lanterns took the place of red flags swung by Landsturm sentries

on the run to Brussels as darkness fell. There was no relaxation of

watchfulness at night.

All the twenty-four hours the systematic conquerors held the net tight.

Once when my companion repeated his "Again!" and held out the

pass in the lantern's rays, I broke into a laugh, which excited his

curiosity, for you soon get out of the habit of laughing in Belgium.

"It has just occurred to me that my guidebook states that passports

are not required in Belgium!" I explained.

The editor of that guidebook will have a busy time before he issues

the next edition. For example, he will have a lot of new information

about Malines, whose ruins were revealed by the motor-lamps in

shadowy broken walls on either side of the main street. Other places

where less damage had been done were equally silent. In the smaller

towns and villages the population must keep indoors at night; for

egress and ingress are more difficult to control there than in large

cities, where guards at every corner suffice--watching, watching,

these disciplined pawns of remorselessly efficient militarism; watching

every human being in Belgium.

"The last time I saw that statue of Liege," I remarked, peering into the

darkness as we rode into the city, "the Legion of Honour conferred by

France on Liege for its brave defence was hung on its breast. I

suppose it is gone now."

"I guess yes," said Harvard, 1914.

We went to the hotel at Brussels which I had left the day before the

city's fall. English railway signs on the walls of the corridor had not

been disturbed. More ancient relic still seemed a bulletin board with

its announcement of seven passages a day to England, traversing

the Channel in "fifty-five minutes via Calais" and "three hours via

Ostend," with the space blank where the state of the weather for the

despair or the delight of intending voyagers had been chalked up in

happier days. The same men were in attendance at the office as

before; but they seemed older and their politeness that of cheerless

automatons. For five months they had been serving German officers

as guests with hate in their hearts and, in turn, trying to protect their

property.

A story is told of how that hotel had filled with officers after the

arrival of the Germanic flood and how one day, when it was learned

that the proprietor was a Frenchman, guards were suddenly placed

at the doors and the hall was filled with luggage as every officer,

acting with characteristic official solidarity, vacated his room and

bestowed his presence elsewhere. Then the proprietor was informed

that his guests would return if he would agree to employ German

help and buy his supplies from Germany. He refused, for practical

as well as for sentimental reasons. If he had consented, think what

the Belgians would have done to him after the Germans were gone!

However, officers were gradually returning, for this was the best

hotel in town, and even conquerors are human and German conquerors

have particularly human stomachs.

IX

Christmas In Belgium

Christmas in Belgium with the bayonet and the wolf at the door taught

me to value Christmas at home for more than its gifts and the cheer

of the fireside. It taught me what it meant to belong to a free people

and how precious is that old English saying that a man's house is his

castle, which was the inception of so much in our lives which we

accept as a commonplace. If such a commonplace can be made

secure only by fighting, then it is best to fight. At any time a foreign

soldier might enter the house of a Belgian and take him away for trial

before a military court.

Breakfast in the same restaurant as before the city's fall! Again the

big grapes which are a luxury of the rich man's table or an

extravagance for a sick friend with us! The hothouses still grew them.

What else was there for he hothouses to do, though the export of

their products was impossible? A shortage of the long, white-leafed

chicory that we call endive in New York restaurants? There were piles

of it in the Brussels market and on the hucksters' carts; nothing so

cheap!

One might have excellent steaks and roasts and delicious veal; for

the heifers were being butchered as the Germans had taken all

fodder. But the bread was the Commission's brown, which everyone

had to eat. Belgium, growing quality on scanty acres with intensive

farming, had food luxuries but not the staff of life.

I looked out of the windows on to the square which four months

before I had seen crowded with people bedecked with the Allies'

colours and eagerly buying the latest editions containing the

communiqués of hollow optimism. No flag in sight now except a

German flag flying over the station! But small revenges may be

enjoyed. A German soldier tried to jump on the tail of a cart driven by

a Belgian, but the Belgian whipped up his horse and the German fell

off on to the pavement, whilst the cart sped around a corner.

Out of the station came a score of German soldiers returning from the

trenches, on their way to barracks to regain strength in order that they

could bear the ordeal of standing in icy water again. They were not

the kind exhibited on Press tours to illustrate the "vigour of our

indomitable army." Eyelids drooped over hollow eye-sockets; sore,

numbed feet moved like feet which are asleep in their vain effort to

keep step. Sensitiveness to surroundings, almost to existence,

seemed to have been lost.

One was a corporal, young, tall, and full-bearded. He might have

been handsome if he had not been so haggard. He gave the lead to

the others; he seemed to know where they were going, and they

shuffled on after him in dogged painfulness. Four months ago that

corporal, with the spring of the energy of youth when the war was

young, was perhaps in that green column that went through the

streets of Brussels in the thunderous beat of their regular tread on

their way to Paris. The group was an object lesson in how much the

victor must suffer in war in order to make his victim surfer.

Some officers were at breakfast, too. Mostly they were reservists;

mostly bespectacled, with middle age swelling their girth and

hollowing their chests, but sturdy enough to apply the regulations

made for conduct of the conquered. Whilst stronger men were under

shell-fire at the front, they were under the fire of Belgian hate as

relentless as their own hate of England. You saw them always in the

good restaurants, but never in the company of Belgians, these

ostracized rulers. In four months they had made no friends; at least,

no friends who would appear with them in public. A few thousand

guards in Belgium in the companionship of conquest and seven

million Belgians in the companionship of a common helplessness!

Bayonets may make a man silent, but they cannot stop his thinking.

At the breakfast table on that Christmas morning in London, Paris, or

Berlin the patriot could find the kind of news that he liked. His racial

and rational predilections and animosities were solaced. If there

were good news it was "played up"; if there were bad news, it was not

published or it was explained. L'Echo Belge and L'Indépendance

Belge and all the Brussels papers were either out of business or

being issued as single sheets in Holland and England.

The Belgian, keenest of all the peoples at war for news, having less

occupation to keep his mind off the war, must read the newspapers

established under German auspices, which fed him with the pabulum

that German chefs provided, reflective of the stumbling degeneracy

of England, French weariness of the war, Russian clumsiness, and

the invincibility of Germany. If an Englishman had to read German, or

a German English, newspapers every morning he might have

understood how the Belgian felt.

Those who had sons or fathers or husbands in the Belgian army

could not send or receive letters, let alone presents. Families

scattered in different parts of Belgium could not hold reunions. But at

mass I saw a Belgian standard in the centre of the church. That flag

was proscribed, but the priests knew it was safe in that sacred place

and the worshippers might feast their eyes on it as they said their

avis.

A Bavarian soldier came in softly and stood a little apart from the

worshippers, many in mourning, at the rear; a man who was of the

same faith as the Belgians and who crossed himself with the others in

the house of brotherly love. He would go outside to obey orders; and

the others to nurse their hate of him and his race. This private in his

faded green, bowing his head before that flag in the shadows of the

nave, was war-sick, as most soldiers were; and the Belgians were

heartsick. They had the one solace in common. But if you had

suggested to him to give up Belgium, his answer would have been

that of the other Germans: "Not after all we have suffered to take it!"

Christians have a peculiar way of applying Christianity. Yet, if it were

not for Christianity and that infernal thing called the world's opinion,

which did not exist in the days of Caesar and the Belgse, the Belgians

might have been worse off than they were. More of them might have

been dead. When they were saying, "Give us this day our daily

bread" they were thinking, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,"

if ever their turn came.

A satirist might have repeated the apochryphal naïveté of Marie

Antoinette, who asked why the people wanted bread when they could

buy such nice cakes for a sou! For all the pâtisserie shops were

open. Brussels is famous for its French pastry. With a store of

preserves, why shouldn't the bakeshops go on making tarts with

heavy crusts of the brown flour, when war had not robbed the bakers

of their art? It gave work to them; it helped the shops to keep open

and make a show of normality. But I noticed that they were doing little

business. Stocks were small and bravely displayed. Only the rich

could afford such luxuries, which in ordinary times were what ice-

cream cones are to us. Even the jewellery shops were open, with

diamond rings flashing in the windows.

"You must pay rent; you don't want to discharge your employees,"

said a jeweller. "There is no place to go except your shop. If you

closed it would look as if you were afraid of the Germans. It would

make you blue and the people in the street blue. One tries to go

through the motions of normal existence, anyway. But, of course, you

don't sell anything. This week I have repaired a locket which carried

the portrait of a soldier at the front and I've put a mainspring in a

watch. I'll warrant that is more than some of my competitors have

done."

Swing around the circle in Brussels of a winter's morning and look at

the only crowds that the Germans allow to gather, and any doubt that

Belgium would have gone hungry if she had not received provisions

from the outside was dispelled. Whenever I think of a bread-line

again I shall see the faces of a Belgian bread-line. They blot out the

memory of those at home, where men are free to go and come;

where war has not robbed the thrifty of food.

It was fitting that the great central soup kitchen should be established

in the central express office of the city. For in Belgium these days

there is no express business except in German troops to the front

and wounded to the rear. The dispatch of parcels is stopped, no less

than the other channels of trade, in a country where trade was so rife,

a country that lived by trade. On the stone floor, where once

packages were arranged for forwarding to the towns whose names are

on the walls, were many great cauldrons in clusters of three, to economize

space and fuel.

"We don't lack cooks," said a chef-who had been in a leading hotel.

"So many of us are out of work. Our society of hotel and restaurant

keepers took charge. We know the practical side of the business. I

suppose you have the same kind of a society in New York and would

turn to it for help if the Germans occupied New York?"

He gave me a printed report in which I read, for example, that "M.

Arndt, professor of the École Normale, had been good enough to

take charge of accounts," and "M. Catteau had been specially

appointed to look after the distribution of bread." Most appetizing that

soup prepared under direction of the best chefs in the city! The meat

and green vegetables in it were Belgian and the peas American.

Steaming hot in big cans it was sent to the communal centres, where

lines of people with pots, pitchers, and pails waited to receive their

daily allowance. A democracy was in that bread-line such as I have

never seen anywhere except at San Francisco after the earthquake.

Each person had a blue or a yellow ticket, with numbers to be

punched, like a commuter. The blue tickets were for those who had

proved to the communal authorities that they could not pay; the

yellow for those who paid five centimes for each person served. A

flutter of blue and yellow tickets all over Belgium, and in return life I

With each serving of soup went a loaf of the American brown bread.

The faces in the line were not those of people starving--they had

been saved from starvation. There was none of the emaciation which

pictures of famine in the Orient have made familiar; but they were

pinched faces, bloodless faces, the faces of people on short rations.

To the Belgian bread is not only the staff of life; it is the legs. At home

we think of bread as something that goes with the rest of the meal; to

the poorer classes of Belgians the rest of the meal is something that

goes with bread. To you and me food has meant the payment of

money to the baker and the butcher and the grocer, or the hotel-

keeper. You get your money by work or from investments. What if

there were no bread to be had for work or money? Sitting on a

mountain of gold in the desert of Sahara would not quench thirst.

Three hundred grammes, a minimum calculation--about half what the

British soldier gets--was the ration. That small boy sent by his mother

got five loaves; his ticket called for an allowance for a family of five.

An old woman got one loaf, for she was alone in the world.

Each one as he hurried by had a personal story of what war had

meant to him. They answered your questions frankly, gladly, with the

Belgian cheerfulness which was amazing considering the circumstances.

A tall, distinguished-looking man was an artist.

"No work for artists these days," he said.

No work in a community of workers where every link of the chain of

economic life had been broken. No work for the next man, a

chauffeur, or the next, a brass worker; the next, a teamster; the next,

a bank clerk; the next, a doorkeeper of a Government office; whilst

the wives of those who still had work were buying in the only market

they had. But the husbands of some were not at home. Each answer

about the absent one had an appeal that nothing can picture better

than the simple words or the looks that accompanied the words.

"The last I heard of my husband he was fighting at Dixmude--two

months ago."

"Mine is wounded, somewhere in France."

"Mine was with the army, too. I don't know whether he is alive or

dead. I have not heard since Brussels was taken. He cannot get my

letters and I cannot get his."

"Mine was killed at Liege, but we have a son."

So you out in Nebraska who gave a handful of wheat might know that

said handful of wheat reached its destination in an empty stomach. If

you sent a suit of clothes, or a cap, or a pair of socks, come along to

the skating-rink, where ice-polo was played and matches and

carnivals were held in better days, and look on at the boxes, packed

tight with gifts of every manner of thing that men and women and

children wear except silk hats, which are being opened and sorted

and distributed into hastily-constructed cribs and compartments.

A Belgian woman whose father was one of Belgium's leading

lawyers--her husband was at the front-was the busy head of this

organization, because, as she said, the busier she was the more it

"keeps my mind off------" and she did not finish the sentence. How

many times I heard that "keeps my mind off------" a sentence that was

the more telling for not being finished. She and some other women

began sewing and patching and collecting garments; "but our

business grew so fast"--the business of relief is the one kind in

Belgium that does grow these days--"that now we have hundreds of

helpers. I begin to feel that I am what you would call in America a

captainess of industry."

Some of the good mothers in America were a little too thoughtful in

their kindness. An odour in a box that had evidently travelled across

the Atlantic close to the ship's boilers was traced to the pocket of a

boy's suit, which contained the hardly-distinguishable remains of a

ham sandwich, meant to be ready to hand for the hungry Belgian boy

who got that suit. Broken pots of jam were quite frequent. But no

matter. Soap and water and Belgian industry saved the suit, if not the

sandwich. Sweaters and underclothes and overcoats almost new,

and shiny old morning coats and trousers with holes in seat and

knees might represent equal sacrifice on the part of some American

three thousand miles away, and all were welcome. Needlewomen

were given work cutting up the worn-outs of grown-ups and making

them over into astonishingly good suits or dresses for youngsters.

"We've really turned the rink into a kind of department store," said the

lady. "Come into our boot department. We had some leather left in

Belgium that the Germans did not requisition, so we bought it and that

gave more Belgians work in the shoe factories. Work, you see, is

what we want to keep our minds off------"

Blue and yellow tickets here, too! Boots for children and thick-set

working-women and watery-eyed old men!

And each was required to leave behind the pair he was wearing.

"Sometimes we can patch up the cast-offs, which means work for the

cobblers," said the captainess of industry. "And who are our clerks?

Why, the people who put on the skates for the patrons of the rink, of

course!"

One could write volumes on this systematic relief work, the

businesslike industry of succouring Belgium by the businesslike

Belgians, with American help. Certainly one cannot leave out those

old men stragglers from Louvain and Bruges and Ghent--venerable

children with no offspring to give them paternal care--who took their

turn in getting bread, which they soaked thoroughly in their soup for

reasons that would be no military secret, not even in the military zone.

On Christmas Day an American, himself a smoker, thinking what

class of children he could make happiest on a limited purse,

remembered the ring around the stove and bought a basket of cheap

brier pipes and tobacco. By Christmas night some toothless gums

were sore, but a beatific smile of satiation played in white beards.

Nor can one leave out the very young babies at home, who get their

milk if grown people do not, and the older babies beyond milk but not

yet old enough for bread and meat, whose mothers return from the

bread-line to bring their children to another line, where they got

portions of a syrupy mixture which those who know say is the right

provender. On such occasions men are quite helpless. They can only

look on with a frog in the throat at pale, improperly nourished mothers

with bundles of potential manhood and womanhood in their arms. For

this was woman's work for woman. Belgian women of every class

joined in it: the competent wife of a workman, or the wife of a

millionaire who had to walk like everybody else now that her motor-

car was requisitioned by the army.

Pop-eyed children, ruddy-cheeked, aggressive children, pinched-

faced children, kept warm by sweaters that some American or

English children spared, happy in that they did not know what their

elders knew! Not the danger of physical starvation so much as the

actual presence of mental starvation was the thing that got on your

nerves in a land where the sun is seldom seen in winter and rainy

days are the rule. It was bad enough in the "zone of occupation," so

called, a line running from Antwerp past Brussels to Mons. One could

guess what it was like in the military zone to the westward, where only

an occasional American relief representative might go.

This is not saying that the Germans were stricter than necessary, if

we excuse the exasperation of their militarism, in order to prevent

information from passing out, when a multitude of Belgians would

have risked their lives gladly to help the Allies. One spy bringing

accurate information might cost the German army thousands of

casualties; perhaps decide the fate of a campaign. They saw the

Belgians as enemies. They were fighting to take the lives of their

enemies and save their own lives, which made it tough for them and

the French and the British--tough all round, but very particularly tough

for the Belgians.

It was good for a vagrant American to dine at the American Legation,

where Mr. and Mrs. Whitlock were far, very far, from the days in

Toledo, Ohio, where he was mayor. Some said that the place of the

Minister to Belgium was at Havre, where the Belgian Government

had its offices; but neither Whitlock nor the Belgian people thought

so, nor the German Government, since they had realized his prestige

with the Belgians and how they would listen to him in any crisis when

their passions might break the bonds of wisdom. Hugh Gibson, being

the omnipresent Secretary of Legation in four languages, naturally

was also present. We recalled dining together in Honduras, when he

was in the thick of vexations.

Trouble accommodatingly waits for him wherever he goes, because

he has a gift for taking care of trouble, in the ascendancy of a

cheerful spirit and much knowledge of international law. His present

for the Minister, who daily received stacks of letters from all sources

asking the impossible, as well as from Americans who wanted to be

sure that the food they gave was not being purloined by the

Germans, was a rubber stamp, "Blame-it-all-there's-a-state-of-war-in-

Belgium!" which he suggested might save typewriting--a recommendation

which the Minister refused to accept, not to Gibson's surprise.

On that Christmas afternoon and evening, the people promenaded

the streets as usual. You might have thought it a characteristic

Christmas afternoon or evening except for the Landsturm patrols. But

there was an absence of the old gaiety, and they were moving as if

from habit and moving was all there was to do.

They had heard the sound of the guns at Dixmude the night before.

Didn't the sound seem a little nearer? No. The wind from that

direction was stronger. When? When would the Allies come?

X

The Future Of Belgium

In former days the traveller hardly thought of Belgium as possessing

patriotic homogeneity. It was a land of two languages, French and

Flemish. He was puzzled to meet people who looked like well-to-do

mechanics, artisans, or peasants and find that they could not answer

a simple question in French. This explained why a people so close to

France, though they made Brussels a little Paris, would not join the

French family and enter into the spirit and body of that great

civilization on their borders, whose language was that of their own

literature. Belgium seemed to have no character. Its nationality was

the artificial product of European politics; a buffer divided in itself,

which would be neither French, nor German, nor definitely Belgian.

In later times Belgium had prospered enormously. It had developed

the resources of the Congo in a way that had aroused a storm of

criticism. Old King Leopold made the most of his neutral position to

gain advantages which no one of the great Powers might enjoy

because of jealousies. The International Sleeping Car Company was

Belgian and Belgian capitalists secured concessions here and there,

wherever the small tradesman might slip into openings suitable to his

size. Leopold was not above crumbs; he made them profitable; he

liked to make money; and Belgians liked to make money.

Her defence guaranteed by neutrality, Belgium need have no thought

except of thrift. Her ideals were those of prosperity. No ambition of

national expansion stirred her imagination as Germany's was stirred;

there was no fire in her soul as in that of France in apprehension of

the day when she would have to fight for her life against Germany; no

national cause to harden the sinews of patriotism. The immensity of

her urban population contributed its effect in depriving her of the

sterner stuff of which warriors are made. Success meant more

comforts and luxuries. In towns like Brussels and Antwerp this

doubtless had its effect on the moralities, which were hardly of the

New England Puritan standard. She had a small standing army; a

militia system in the process of reform against the conviction of the

majority, unlike that of the Swiss mountaineers, that Belgium would

never have any need for soldiers.

If militarism means conscription as it exists in France and Germany,

then militarism has improved the physique of races in an age when

people are leaving the land for the factory. The prospect of battle's

test unquestionably develops in a people certain sturdy qualities

which can and ought to be developed in some other way than with

the prospect of spending money for shells to kill people.

With the world making every Belgian man a hero and the unknowing

convinced that a citizen soldiery at Liege--defended by the Belgian

standing army--had rushed from their homes with rifles and beaten

German infantry, it is right to repeat that the schipperke spirit was not

universal, that at no time had Belgium more than a hundred thousand

men under arms, and that on the Dixmude line she maintained never

more than eighty thousand men out of a population of seven millions,

which should yield from seven hundred thousand to a million; while

they lost a good deal of sympathy both in England and in France,

from all I heard, through the number of able-bodied refugees who

were disinclined to serve. It was a mistaken idealism that swept over

the world, early in the war, characterizing a whole nation with the

gallantry of its young king and his little army.

The spirit of the Boers or of the Minute Men at Lexington was not in

the Belgian people. It could not be from their very situation and

method of life. They did not believe in war; they did not expect to

practise war; but war came to them out of the still blue heavens as it

came to the prosperous Incas of Peru.

Where one was wrong was in the expectation that her bankers and

capitalists--an aristocracy of money not given to the simple life--and

her manufacturers, artisans, and traders, if not her peasants, would

soon make truce with Caesar for individual profit. Therein, Belgium

showed that she was not lacking in the moral spirit which, with the

schipperke's, became a fighting spirit. It seemed as if the metal of

many Belgians, struck to a white heat in the furnace of war, had

cooled under German occupation to the tempered steel of a new

nationalism.

When you travelled over Belgium after it was pacified, the logic of

German methods became clear. What was haphazard in their reign

of terror was due to the inevitable excesses of a soldiery taking the

calculated redress ordered by superiors as licence in the first red

passion of war to a war-mad nation, which was sullen because

Belgians had not given up the keys of the gate to France.

The extent of the ruins in Belgium east of the Yser has been

exaggerated. They were the first ruins, most photographed, most

advertised; bad enough, inexcusable enough, and warrantedly

causing a spell of horror throughout the civilized world. We have

heard all about them, mind, while hearing nothing about those in

Lorraine, where the Bavarians exceeded Prussian ruthlessness in

reprisals. I mean, that to have read the newspapers in early

September, 1914, one would have thought that half the towns of

Belgium were debris while the truth is that only a small percentage

are--those in the path of the German army's advance. Two-thirds of

Louvain itself is unharmed; though the fact alone of its venerable

library being in ashes is sufficient outrage, if not another building had

been harmed.

The German army planned destruction with all the regularity that it

billeted troops, or requisitioned supplies, or laid war indemnities. It did

not destroy by shells exclusively. It deliberately burned homes. No

matter whether the owners were innocent or not, the homes were

burned as an example. The principle applied was that of punishing

half a dozen or all the boys in the class in the hope of getting the real

culprit.

Cold ruins mark blocks where sniping was thought to have occurred.

The Germans insist that theirs was the merciful way. Krieg ist Krieg.

When a hundred citizens of Louvain were gathered and shot

because they were the first citizens of Louvain to hand, the purpose

was the security of the mass at the expense of the individual,

according to the war-is-war machine reasoning. No doubt there was

firing on German troops by civilians. What did the Germans expect

after the way that they had invaded Belgium? If they had bothered

with trials and investigations, the conquerors say, sniping would have

kept up. They may have taken innocent lives and burned the homes

of the innocent, they admit, but their defence is that thereby they

saved many thousands of their soldiers and of Belgians, and

prevented the feud between the rulers and the ruled from becoming

more embittered.

Sniping over, the next step in policy was to keep the population quiet

with a minimum of soldiery, which would permit a maximum at the

front. In a thickly-settled country, so easily policed, in a land with the

population inured to peace, the wisdom of keeping quiet was soon

evident to the people. What if Boers had been in the Belgians' place?

Would they have attempted guerrilla warfare? Would you or I want to

bring destruction on neighbours in a land without any rural fastnesses

as a rendezvous for operations? One could tell only if a section of our

country were invaded.

A burned block cost less than a dead German soldier. The system

was efficacious. It was mercilessness mixed with craft. When

Prussian brusqueness was found to be unnecessarily irritating to the

population, causing rash Belgians to turn desperate, the elders of the

Saxon and Bavarian coreligionists were called in. They were amiable

fathers of families, who would obey orders without taking the law into

their own hands. The occupation was strictly military. It concerned

itself with the business of national suffocation. All the functions of

government were in German hands. But Belgian policemen guided

the street traffic, arrested culprits for ordinary misdemeanours, and

took them before Belgian judges. This concession, which also meant

a saving in soldiers, only aggravated to the Belgian the regulations

directed against his personal freedom.

"Eat, drink, and live as usual. Go to your own police courts for

misdemeanours," was the German edict in a word; "but remember

that ours is the military power, and no act that aids the enemy, that

helps the cause of Belgium in this war, is permitted. Observe that

particular affiche about a spy, please. He was shot."

At every opportunity Belgians were told that the British and the

French could never come to their rescue. The Allies were beaten. It

was the British who got Belgium into trouble; the British who were

responsible for the idleness, the penury, the hunger and the suffering

in Belgium. The British had used Belgium as a cat's-paw; then they

had deserted her. But Belgians remained mostly unconvinced. They

were making war with mind and spirit, if not with arms.

"We know how to suffer in Belgium," said a Belgian jurist. "Our ability

to suffer and to hold fast to our hearths has kept us going through the

centuries. Flemish and French, we have stubbornness in common.

Now a ruffian has come into our house and taken us by the throat. He

can choke us to death, or he can slowly starve us to death, but he

cannot make us yield. No, we shall never forgive!"

"You too hate, then?" I asked.

"Of course I hate. For the first time in my life I know what it is to hate;

and so do my countrymen. I begin to enjoy my hate. It is one of the

privileges of our present existence. We cannot stand on chairs and

tables as they do in Berlin cafés and sing our hate, but no one can

stop our hating in secret."

Beside the latest verboten and regulation of Belgian conduct on the

city walls were posted German official news bulletins. The Belgians

stopped to read; they paused to re-read. And these were the rare

occasions when they smiled, and they liked to have a German sentry

see that smile.

"Pour les enfants!" they whispered, as if talking to one another about

a crèche. Little ones, be good! Here is a new fairy tale!

When a German wanted to buy something he got frigid politeness

and attention--very frigid, telling politeness--from the clerk, which said:

"Beast! Invader! I do not ask you to buy, but as you ask, I sell; and as

I sell I hate! I hate! ! I hate! ! !"

An officer entering a shop and seeing a picture of King Albert on the

wall, said:

"The orders are to take that down!"

"But don't you love your Kaiser?" asked the woman who kept the

shop.

"Certainly!"

"And I love my King!" was the answer. "I like to look at his picture just

as much as you like to look at your Kaiser's."

"I had not thought of it in that way!" said the officer.

Indeed, it is very hard for any conqueror to think of it in that way. So

the picture remained on the wall.

How many soldiers would it take to enforce the regulation that no

Belgian was to wear the Belgian colours? Imagine thousands and

thousands of Landsturm men moving about and plucking King

Albert's face or the black, yellow and red from Belgian buttonholes!

No sooner would a buttonhole be cleared in front than the emblem

would appear in a buttonhole in the rear. The Landsturm would face

counter, flank, frontal, and rear attacks in a most amusing military

manoeuvre, which would put those middle-aged conquerors fearfully

out of breath and be rare sport for the Belgians. You could not arrest

the whole population and lead them off to jail; and if you bayoneted a

few--which really those phlegmatic, comfortable old Landsturms

would not have the heart to do for such a little thing--why, it would get

into the American Press, and the Berlin Foreign Office would say:

"There you are, you soldiers, breaking all the crockery again!"

In the smaller towns, where the Germans were billeted in Belgian

houses, of course the hosts had to serve their unwelcome guests.

"Yet we managed to let them know what was in our hearts," said one

woman. "Some tried to be friendly. They said they had wives and

children at home; and we said: 'How glad your wives and children

would be to see you! Why don't you go home?'"

When a report reached the commander in Ghent that an old man had

concealed arms, a sergeant with a guard was sent to search the

house.

"Yes, my son has a rifle."

"Where is it?"

"In his hands on the Yser, if he is not dead, monsieur. You are

welcome to search, monsieur."

Belgium was developing a new humour, a humour at the expense of

the Germans. In their homes they mimicked their rulers as freely as

they pleased. To carry mimickry into the streets meant arrest for the

elders, but not always for the children. You have heard the story,

which is true, of how some gamins put carrots in old bowler hats to

represent the spikes of German helmets, and at their leader's

command of "On to Paris!" did a goose-step backwards. There is

another which you may not have heard of a small boy who put on

grandfather's spectacles, a pillow under his coat, and a card on his

cap, 'Officer of the Landsturm.' The conquerors had enough sense

not to interfere with the battalion which was taking Paris; but the

pseudo-Landsturm officer was chased into a doorway and got a cuff

after his placard was taken away from him.

When a united public opinion faces bayonets it is not altogether

helpless to reply. By the atmospheric force of mass it enjoys a

conquest of its own. If a German officer or soldier entered a street

car, women drew aside in a way to indicate that they did not want

their garments contaminated. People walked by the sentries in the

streets giving them room as you would give a mangy dog room, yet

as if they did not see the sentries; as if no sentries existed.

The Germans said that they wanted to be friendly. They even

expressed surprise that the Belgians would not return their advances.

They sent out invitations to social functions in Brussels, but no one

came--not even to a ball given by the soldiers to the daughters of the

poor. Belgium stared its inhospitality, its contempt, its cynical

drolleries at the invader.

I kept thinking of a story I heard in Alaska of a man who had shown

himself yellow by cheating his partner out of a mine. He appeared

one day hungry at a cabin occupied by half a dozen men who knew

him. They gave him food and a bunk that night; they gave him

breakfast; they even carried his blanket-roll out to his sled and

harnessed his dogs as a hint, and saw him go without one man

having spoken to him. No matter if that man believed he had done no

wrong, he would have needed a rhinoceros hide not to have felt this

silence. Such treatment the Belgians have given to the Germans,

except that they furnished the shelter and harnessed the team under

duress, as they so specifically indicate by every act. No wonder, then,

that the old Landsturm guards, used at home to saying "Wie gehts?"

and getting a cheery answer from the people they passed in the

streets, were lonely.

Not only stubborn, but shrewd, these Belgians. Both qualities were

brought out in the officials who had to deal with the Germans,

particularly in the small towns and where destruction had been worst.

Take, for example, M. Nerincx, of Louvain, who has energy enough to

carry him buoyantly through an American political campaign,

speaking from morning to midnight. He had been in America. I

insisted that he ought to give up his professorship, get naturalized,

and run for office in America. I know that he would soon be mayor of

a town, or in Congress.

When the war began he was professor of international law at the

ancient university whose walls alone stand, surrounding the ashes of

its priceless volumes, across from the ruined cathedral. With the

burgomaster a refugee from the horrors of that orgy, he turned man

of action on behalf of the demoralized people of the town with a

thousand homes in ruins. Very lucky the client in its lawyer. He is the

kind of man who makes the best of the situation; picks up the

fragments of the pitcher, cements them together with the first material

at hand, and goes for more milk. It was he who got a German

commander to sign an agreement not to "kill, burn, or plunder" any

more, and the signs were still up on some houses saying that "This

house is not to be burned except by official order."

There in the Hôtel de Ville, which is quite unharmed, he had his office,

within reach of the German commander. He yielded to Caesar and

protected his own people day in and day out, diplomatic, watchful,

Belgian. And he was cheerful. What other people could have retained

any vestige of cheer! Sometimes one wondered if it were not partly

due to an absence of keen nerve-sensibilities, or to some other of the

traits which are a product of the Belgian hothouse and Belgian

inheritance.

I might tell you about M. Nerincx's currency system; how he issued

paper promises to pay when he gave employment to the idle in

repairing those houses which permitted of being repaired, and

cleaned the streets of debris, till ruined Louvain looked as shipshape

as ruined Pompeii; and how he got a little real money from Brussels

to stop depreciation when the storekeepers came to him and said

that they had stacks of his notes which no mercantile concern would

cash.

M. Nerincx was practising in the life about all that he ever learned and

taught at the university, "which we shall rebuild!" he declared, with

cheery confidence. "You will help us in America," he said. "I'm going

to America to lecture one of these days about Louvain!"

"You have the most famous ruins, unless it is Rheims," I assured him.

"You will get flocks of tourists"--particularly if he fenced in the ruins

of the library and burned leaves of ancient books were on sale.

"Then you will not only have fed, but have helped to rebuild Belgium,"

he added.

A shadow of apprehension overhung his anticipation of the day of

Belgium's delivery. Many a Belgian had arms hidden from the alert

eye of German espionage, and his bitterness was solaced by the

thought; "I'll have a shot at the Germans when they go!" The lot of the

last German soldier to leave a town, unless the garrison slips away

overnight, would hardly make him a good life-insurance risk.

My last look at a Belgian bread-line was at Liege, that town which

had had a blaze of fame in August, 1914, and was now almost

forgotten. An industrial town, its mines and works were idle. The

Germans had removed the machinery for rifle-making, which has

become the most valuable kind of machinery in the world next to that

for making guns and shells. If skilled Belgians here or elsewhere were

called upon to serve the Germans at their craft, they suddenly

became butter-fingered. So that bread-line at Liege was long, its

queue stretching the breadth of the cathedral square.

As most of the regular German officers in Belgium were cavalrymen--

there was nothing for cavalry to do on the Aisne line of trenches--it

was quite in keeping that the aide to the commandant of Liege, who

looked after my pass to leave the country, should be a young officer

of Hussars. He spoke English well; he was amiable and intelligent.

While I waited for the commandant to sign the pass the aide chatted

of his adventures on the pursuit of the British to the Marne. The

British fought like devils, he said. It was a question if their new army

would be so good. He showed me a photograph of himself in a British

Tommy's overcoat.

"When we took some prisoners I was interested in their overcoats,"

he explained. "I asked one of the Tommies to let me try on his. It fitted

me perfectly, so I kept it as a souvenir and had this photograph made

to show my friends."

Perhaps a shade of surprise passed over my face.

"You don't understand," he said. "That Tommy had to give me his

coat! He was a prisoner."

On my way out from Liege I was to see Visé--the town of the

gateway--the first town of the war to suffer from frightfulness. I had

thought of it as entirely destroyed. A part of it had survived.

A delightful old Bavarian Landsturmman searched me for contraband

letters when our cart stopped on the Belgian side of a barricade at

Maastricht, with Dutch soldiers on the other side. His examination

was a little perfunctory, almost apologetic, and he did want to be

friendly. You guessed that he was thinking he would like to go around

the corner and have "ein Glas Bier" rather than search me. What a

hearty "Auf wiedersehen!" he gave me when he saw that I was

inclined to be friendly, too!

I was glad to be across that frontier, with a last stamp on my

Passierschein; glad to be out of the land of those ghostly Belgian

millions in their living death; glad not to have to answer again their

ravenously whispered "When?" When would the Allies come?

The next time that I was in Belgium it was in the British lines of the

Ypres salient, two months later. When should I be next in Brussels?

With a victorious British army, I hoped. A long wait it was to be for a

conquered people, listening each day and trying to think that the

sound of gun-fire was nearer.

The stubborn, passive resistance and self-sacrifice that I have

pictured was that of a moral leadership of a majority shaming the

minority; of an ostracism of all who had relations with the enemy. Of

course, it was not the spirit of the whole. The American Commission,

as charity usually must, had to overcome obstacles set in its path by

those whom it would aid. Belgian politicians, in keeping with the

weakness of their craft, could no more forego playing politics in time

of distress than some that we had in San Francisco and some we

have heard of only across the British Channel from Belgium.

Zealous leaders exaggerated the famine of their districts in order to

get larger supplies; communities in great need without spokesmen

must be reached; powerful towns found excuses for not forwarding

food to small villages which were without influence. Natural greed got

the better of men used to turning a penny any way they could.

Rascally bakers who sifted the brown flour to get the white to sell to

pâtisserie shops and the well-to-do while the bread-line got the bran,

required shrewd handling, and it was found that the best punishment

was to let the public know the pariah part they had played. In fact that

soon put a stop to the practice. It meant that the baker's business

was ruined and he had lost his friends.

A certain percentage of Belgians, as would happen in any country,

saw the invasion only as a visitation of disaster, like an earthquake. A

flat country of gardens limits one's horizon. They fell into line with the

sentiment of the mass. But as time wore on into the summer and

autumn of the second year, some of them began to think, What was

the use? German propaganda was active. All that the Allies had

cared for Belgium was to use her to check the German tide to Paris

and the Channel ports! Perfidious England had betrayed Belgium!

German business and banking influences, which had been considerable

in Belgium before the war, and the numerous German residents

who had returned, formed a busy circle of appeal to Belgian business

men, who were told that the British navy stood between them and a

return to prosperity. Germany was only too willing that they should

resume their trade with the rest of the world.

Why should not Belgium come into the German customs union? Why

should not Belgium make the best of her unfortunate situation, as

became a practical and thrifty people? But be it a customs union or

annexation that Germany plans, the steel had entered the hearts of

all Belgians with red corpuscles; and King Albert and his

"schipperkes" were still fighting the Germans at Dixmude. A British

army appearing before Brussels would end casuistry; and pessimism

would pass, and the German residents, too, with the huzzas of all

Belgium as the gallant king once more ascended the steps of his

palace.

Worthy of England at her best was her consent to allow the

Commission's food to pass, which she accompanied by generous

giving. She might seem slow in making ready her army--though I do

not think that she was--but give she could and give she did. It was a

grave question if her consent was in keeping with the military policy

which believes that any concession to sentiment in the grim business

of war is unwise. Certainly, the Krieg ist Krieg of Germany would not

have permitted it.

There is the very point of the war that ought to make any neutral take

sides. If the Belgians had not received bread from the outside world,

then Germany would either have had to spare enough to keep them

from starving or faced the desperation of a people who would fight for

food with such weapons as they had. This must have brought a

holocaust of reprisals that would have made the orgy of Louvain

comparatively insignificant. However much the Germans hampered

the Commission with red tape and worse than red tape through the

activities of German residents in Belgium, Germany did not want the

Commission to withdraw. It was helping her to economize her food

supplies. And England answered a human appeal at the cost of hard-

and-fast military policy. She was still true to the ideals which have set

their stamp on half the world.

XI

Winter In Lorraine

Only a winding black streak, that four hundred and fifty miles of

trenches on a flat map. It is difficult to visualize the whole as you see

it in your morning paper, or to realize the labour it represents in its

course through the mire and over mountain slopes, through villages

and thick forests and across open fields.

Every mile of it was located by the struggle of guns and rifles and

men coming to a stalemate of effort, when both dug into the earth

and neither could budge the other. It is a line of countless battles and

broken hopes; of charges as brave as men ever made; a symbol of

skill and dogged patience and eternal vigilance of striving foe against

striving foe.

From the first, the sector from Rheims to Flanders was most familiar

to the public. The world still thinks of the battle of the Marne as an

affair at the door of Paris, though the heaviest fighting was from Vitry-

le-François eastward and the fate of Paris was no less decided on the

fields of Lorraine than on the fields of Champagne. The storming of

Rheims Cathedral became the theme of thousands of words of print

to one word for the defence of the Plateau d'Amance or the struggle

around Lunéville. Our knowledge of the war is from glimpses through

the curtain of military secrecy which was drawn tight over Lorraine

and the Vosges, shrouded in mountain mists. This is about Lorraine

in winter, when the war was six months old.

But first, on our way, a word about Paris, which I had not seen since

September. At the outset of the war, Parisians who had not gone to

the front were in a trance of suspense; they were magnetized by the

tragic possibilities of the hour. The fear of disaster was in their hearts,

though they might deny it to themselves. They could think of nothing

but France. Now they realized that the best way to help France was

by going on with their work at home. Paris was trying to be normal,

but no Parisian was making the bluff that Paris was normal. The

Gallic lucidity of mind prevented such self-deception.

Is it normal to have your sons, brothers, and husbands up to their

knees in icy water in the trenches, in danger of death every minute?

This attitude seems human; it seems logical. One liked the French for

it. One liked them for boasting so little. In their effort at normality

they had accomplished more than they realized; for one-sixth of

the wealth of France was in German hands. A line of steel made

the rest safe for those not at the front to pursue the routine of peace.

When I had been in Paris in September there was no certainty about

railroad connections anywhere. You went to the station and took your

chances, governed by the movement of troops, not to mention other

conditions. This time I took the regular noon express to Nancy, as I

might have done to Marseilles, or Rome, or Madrid, had I chosen.

The sprinkling of quiet army officers on the train were in the new

uniform of peculiar steely grey, in place of the target blue and red. But

for them and the number of women in mourning and one other

circumstance, the train might have been bound for Berlin, with Nancy

only a stop on the way.

The other circumstance was the presence of a soldier in the vestibule

who said: "Votre laisser-passer, monsieur, s'il vous platt!" If you had a

laisser-passer, he was most polite; but if you lacked one, he would

also have been most polite and so would the guard that took you in

charge at the next station. In other words, monsieur, you must have

something besides a railroad ticket if you are on a train that runs past

the fortress of Toul and your destination is Nancy. You must have a

military pass, which was never given to foreigners if they were

travelling alone in the zone of military operations. The pulse of the

Frenchman beats high, his imagination bounds, when he looks

eastward. To the east are the lost provinces and the frontier drawn by

the war of '70 between French Lorraine and German Lorraine. This

gave our journey interest.

Nancy, capital of French Lorraine, is so near Metz, the great German

fortress town of German Lorraine, that excursion trains used to run to

Nancy in the opera season. "They are not running this winter," say

the wits of Nancy. "For one reason, we have no opera--and there are

other reasons."

An aeroplane from the German lines has only to toss a bomb in the

course of an average reconnaissance on Nancy if it chooses; for

Zeppelins are within easy reach of Nancy. But here was Nancy as

brilliantly lighted at nine in the evening as any city of its size at home.

Our train, too, had run with the windows unshaded. After the

darkness of London, and after English trains with every window-

shade closely drawn, this was a surprise.

It was a threat, an anticipation, that darkened London, while Nancy

knew fulfilment. Bombardment and bomb-dropping were nothing new

to Nancy. The spice of danger gives a fillip to business to the town

whose population heard the din of the most thunderously spectacular

action of the war echoing among the surrounding hills. Nancy saw the

enemy beaten back. Now she was so close to the front that she felt

the throb of the army's life.

"Don't you ever worry about aerial raids?" I asked madame behind

the counter at the hotel.

"Do the men in the trenches worry about them?" she answered. "We

have a much easier time than they. Why shouldn't we share some of

their dangers? And when a Zeppelin appears and our guns begin

firing, we all feel like soldiers under fire."

"Are all the population here as usual?"

"Certainly, monsieur!" she said. "The Germans can never take

Nancy. The French are going to take Metz!"

The meal which that hotel restaurant served was as good as in peace

times. Who deserves a good meal if not the officer who comes in

from the front? And madame sees that he gets it. She is as proud of

her poulet en casserole as any commander of a soixante-quinze

battery of its practice. There was steam heat, too, in the hotel, which

gave an American a homelike feeling.

In a score of places in the Eastern States you see landscapes with

high hills like the spurs of the Vosges around Nancy sprinkled with

snow and under a blue mist. And the air was dry; it had the life of our

air. Old Civil War men who had been in the Tennessee Mountains or

the Shenandoah Valley would feel perfectly at home in such

surroundings; only the foreground of farm land which merges into the

crests covered with trees in the distance is more finished. The people

were tilling it hundreds of years before we began tilling ours. They till

well; they make Lorraine a rich province of France.

With guns pounding in the distance, boys in their capes were skipping

and frolicking on their way to school; housewives were going to

market, and the streets were spotlessly clean. All the men of Nancy

not in the army pursued their regular routine while the army went

about its business of throwing shells at the Germans. On the dead

walls of the buildings were M. Deschanel's speech in the Chamber of

Deputies, breathing endurance till victory, and the call for the class of

recruits of 1915, which you will find on the walls of the towns of all

France beside that of the order of mobilization in August, now

weather-stained. Nancy seemed, if anything, more French than any

interior French town. Though near the border, there is no touch of

German influence. When you walked through the old Place

Stanislaus, so expressive of the architectural taste bred for centuries

in the French, you understand the glow in the hearts of this very

French population which made them unconscious of danger while

their flag was flying over this very French city.

No two Christian peoples we know are quite so different as the

French and the Germans. To each every national thought and habit

incarnates a patriotism which is in defiance of that on the other side of

the frontier. Over in America you may see the good in both sides, but

no Frenchman and no German can on the Lorraine frontier. If he

should, he would no longer be a Frenchman or a German in time of

war.

At our service in front of the hotel were waiting two mortals in goatskin

coats, with scarfs around their ears and French military caps on top of

the scarfs. They were official army chauffeurs. If you have ridden

through the Alleghenies in winter in an open car, why explain that

seeing the Vosges front in a motor-car may be a joy ride to an

Eskimo, but not to your humble servant? But the roads were perfect;

as good wherever we went in this mountain country as from New

York to Poughkeepsie. I need not tell you this if you have been in

France; but you will be interested to know that Lorraine keeps her

roads in perfect repair even in war time.

Crossing the swollen Moselle on a military bridge, twisting in and out

of valleys and speeding through villages, one saw who were guarding

the army's secrets, but little of the army itself and few signs of

transportation on a bleak, snowy day. At the outskirts of every village,

at every bridge, and at intervals along the road, Territorial sentries

stopped the car. Having an officer along was not sufficient to let you

whizz by important posts. He must show his pass. Every sentry was a

reminder of the hopelessness of being a correspondent these days

without official sanction.

The sentries were men in the thirties. In Belgium, their German

counterpart, the Landsturm, were the monitors of a journey that I

made. No troops are more military than the first line Germans; but in

the snap and spirit of his salute the French Territorial has an élan, a

martial fervour, which the phlegmatic German in the thirties lacks.

Occasionally we passed scattered soldiers in the village streets, or a

door opened to show a soldier figure in the doorway. The reason that

we were not seeing anything of the army was the same that keeps

the men and boys who are on the steps of the country grocery in

summer at home around the stove in winter. All these villages were

full of reservists who were indoors. They could be formed in the street

ready for the march to any part of the line where a concentrated

attack was made almost as soon after the alarm as a fire engine

starts to a fire. Now, imagine your view of a cricket match limited to

the bowler: and that is all you see in the low country of Flanders. You

have no grasp of what all the noise and struggle means, for you

cannot see over the shoulders of the crowd. But in Lorraine you have

only to ascend a hill and the moves in the chess game of war are

clear.

A panorama unfolds as our car takes a rising grade to the village of

Ste. Geneviève. We alight and walk along a bridge, where the sentry

of a lookout is on watch. He seems quite alone, but at our approach a

dozen of his comrades come out of their "home" dug in the hillside.

Wherever you go about the frozen country of Lorraine it is a case of

flushing soldiers from their shelters. A small, semicircular table is set

up before the lookout, like his compass before a mariner. Here run

blue pencil lines of direction pointing to Pont-à-Mousson, to Château-

Salins, and other towns. Before us to the east rose the tree-clad

crests of the famous Grand Couronné of Nancy, and faintly in the

distance we could see Metz.

"Those guns that I hear, are they firing across the frontier?" I asked.

For some French batteries command one of the outer forts of Metz.

"No, they are near Pont-à-Mousson."

To the north the little town of Pont-à-Mousson lay in the lap of the

river bottom, and across the valley, to the west, the famous Bois le

Prêtre. More guns were speaking from the forest depths, which

showed great scars where the trees had been cut to give fields of fire.

This was well to the rear of our position, marking the boundaries of

the wedge that the Germans drove into the French lines, with its point

at St. Mihiel, in trying to isolate the forts of Verdun and Toul.

Doubtless you have noticed that wedge on the snake maps and have

wondered about it, as I have. It looks so narrow that the French ought

to be able to shoot across it from both sides. If so, why don't the

Germans widen it?

Well, for one thing, a quarter of an inch on a map is a good many

miles of ground. The Germans cannot spread their wedge because

they would have to climb the walls of an alley. That was a fact as

clear to the eye as the valley of the Hudson from West Point. The

Germans occupy an alley within an alley, as it were. They have their

own natural defences for the edges of their wedge; or, where they do

not, they lie cheek by jowl with the French in such thick woods as the

Bois le Prêtre.

At our feet, looking toward Metz, an apron of cultivated land swept

down for a mile or more to a forest edge. This was cut by lines of

trenches, whose barbed-wire protection pricked a blanket of snow.

"Our front is in those woods," explained the colonel who was in

command of the point.

"A major when the war began and an officer of reserves," mon

capitaine, who had brought us out from Paris, explained about the

colonel. We were soon used to hearing that a colonel had been a

major or a major a captain before the Kaiser had tried to get Nancy.

There was quick death and speedy promotion at the great battle of

Lorraine, as there was at Gettysburg and Antietam.

"They charged out of the woods, and we had a battalion of reserves--

here are some of them--mes poilus!"

He turned affectionately to the bearded fellows in scarfs who had

come out of the shelter. They smiled back. Now, as we all chatted

together, officer-and-man distinction disappeared. We were in a

family party.

It was all very simple to mes poilus, that first fight. They had been told

to hold. If Ste. Geneviève were lost, the Amance plateau was in

danger, and the loss of the Amance plateau meant the fall of Nancy.

Some military martinets say that the soldiers of France think too

much. In this case thinking may have taught them responsibility. So

they held; they lay tight, these reserves, and kept on firing as the

Germans swarmed out of the woods.

"And the Germans stopped there, monsieur. They hadn't very far to

go, had they? But the last fifty yards, monsieur, are the hardest

travelling when you are trying to take a trench."

They knew, these poilus, these veterans. Every soldier who serves in

Lorraine knows. They themselves have tried to rush out of the edge

of a woods across an open space against intrenched Germans and

found the shoe on the other foot.

Now the fields in the foreground down to the woods' edge were bare

of any living thing. You had to take mon capitaine's word for it that

there were any soldiers in front of us.

"The Boches are a good distance away at this point," he said. "They

are in the next woods."

A broad stretch of snow lay between the two clumps of woods. It was

not worth while for either side to try to get possession of the

intervening space. At the first movement by either French or

Germans the woods opposite would hum with rifle fire and echo with

cannonading. So, like rival parties of Arctic explorers waiting out the

Arctic winter, they watched each other. But if one force or the other

napped and the other caught him at it, then winter would not stay a

brigade commander's ambition. Three days later in this region the

French, by a quick movement, got a good bag of prisoners to make a

welcome item for the daily French official bulletin.

"We wait and the Germans wait on spring for any big movement,"

said the colonel. "Men can't lie out all night in the advance in weather

like this. In that direction------" He indicated a part of the line where

the two armies were facing each other across the old frontier. Back

and forth they had fought, only to arrive where they had begun.

There was something else which the colonel wished us to see before

we left the hill of Ste. Geneviève. It appealed to his Gallic sentiment,

this quadrilateral of stone on the highest point where legend tells that

"Jovin, a Christian and very faithful, vanquished the German

barbarians 366 A.D."

"We have to do as well in our day as Jovin in his," remarked the

colonel.

The church of Ste. Geneviève was badly smashed by shell. So was

the church in the village on the Plateau d'Amance, as are most

churches in this district of Lorraine. Framed through a great gap in

the wall of the church of Amance was an immense Christ on the

cross without a single abrasion, and a pile of debris at its feet. After

seeing as many ruined churches as I have, one becomes almost

superstitious at how often the figures of Christ escape. But I have

also seen effigies of Christ blown to bits.

Anyone who, from an eminence, has seen one battle fought

visualizes another readily when the positions lie at his feet. Looking

out on the field of Gettysburg from Round Top, I can always get the

same thrill that I had when, seated in a gallery above the Russian and

the Japanese armies, I saw the battle of Liao-yang. In sight of that

Plateau d'Amance, which rises like a great knuckle above the

surrounding country, a battle covering twenty times the extent of

Gettysburg raged, and one could have looked over a battle-line as far

as the eye may see from a steamer's mast.

An icy gale swept across the white crest of the plateau on this

January day, but it was nothing to the gale of shells that descended

on it in late August and early September. Forty thousand shells, it is

estimated, fell there. One kicked up fragments of steel on the field like

peanut-shells after a circus has gone. Here were the emplacements

of a battery of French soixante-quinze within a circle of holes torn by

its adversaries' replies to its fire; a little farther along, concealed by

shrubbery, the position of another battery which the enemy had not

located.

So that was it! The struggle on the immense landscape, where at

least a quarter of a million men were killed and wounded, became as

simple as some Brobdingnagian football match. Before the war

began the French would not move a man within five miles of the

frontier lest it be provocative; but once the issue was joined they

sprang for Alsace and Lorraine, their imagination magnetized by the

thought of the recovery of the lost provinces. Their Alpine chasseurs,

mountain men of the Alpine and the Pyrenees districts, were

concentrated for the purpose.

I recalled a remark I had heard: "What a pitiful little offensive that

was!" It was made by one of those armchair "military experts" who

look at a map and jump at a conclusion. They appear very wise in

their wordiness when real military experts are silent for want of

knowledge. Pitiful, was it? Ask the Germans who faced it what they

think. Pitiful, that sweep over those mountain walls and through the

passes? Pitiful, perhaps, because it failed, though not until it had

taken Château-Salins in the north and Mulhouse in the south. Ask the

Germans if they think that it was pitiful! The Confederates also failed

at Antietam and at Gettysburg, but the Union army never thought of

their efforts as pitiful.

The French fell back because all the weight of the German army was

thrown against France, while the Austrians were left to look after the

slowly mobilizing Russians. Two million five hundred thousand men

on their first line the Germans had, as we know now, against the

French twelve hundred thousand and Sir John French's army fighting

one against four. To make sure of saving Paris as the Germans

swung their mighty flanking column through Belgium, Joffre had to

draw in his lines. The Germans came over the hills as splendidly as

the French had gone. They struck in all directions toward Paris. In

Lorraine was their left flank, the Bavarians, meant to play the same

part to the east that von Kluck played to the west. We heard only of

von Kluck; nothing of this terrific struggle in Lorraine.

From the Plateau d'Amance you may see how far the Germans came

and what was their object. Between the fortresses of Epinal and of

Toul lies the Trouée de Mirecourt--the Gap of Mirecourt. It is said that

the French had purposely left it open when they were thinking of

fighting the Germans on their own frontier and not on that of Belgium.

They wanted the Germans to make their trial here--and wisely, for

with all the desperate and courageous efforts of the Bavarian and

Saxon armies they never got near the gap.

If they had forced it, however, with von Kluck swinging on the other

flank, they might have got around the French army. Such was the

dream of German strategy, whose realization was so boldly and

skilfully undertaken. The Germans counted on their immense force of

artillery, built for this war in the last two years and out-ranging the

French, to demoralize the French infantry. But the French infantry

called the big shells marmites (saucepans), and made a joke of them

and the death they spread as they tore up the fields in clouds of

earth.

Ah, it took more than artillery to beat back the best troops of France in

a country like this--a country of rolling hills and fenceless fields cut by

many streams and set among thick woods, where infantry on a bank

or at a forest's edge with rifles and rapid-firers and guns kept their

barrels cool until the charge developed in the open. Some of these

forests are only a few acres in extent; others are hundreds of acres.

In the dark depths of one a frozen lake was seen glistening from our

viewpoint on the Plateau d'Amance.

"Indescribable that scene which we witnessed from here," said an

officer who had been on the plateau throughout the fighting. "All the

splendid majesty of war was set on a stage before you. It was

intoxication. We could see the lines of troops in their retreat and

advance, batteries and charges shrouded in shrapnel smoke. What

hosts of guns the Germans had! They seemed to be sowing the

whole face of the earth with shells. The roar of the thing was like that

of chaos itself. It was the exhilaration of the spectacle that kept us

from dropping from fatigue. Two weeks of this business! Two weeks

with every unit of artillery and infantry always ready, if not actually

engaged!"

The general in command was directing not one but many battles,

each with a general of its own; manoeuvring troops across streams

and open places, seeking the cover of forests, with the aeroplanes

unable to learn how many of the enemy were hidden in the forests on

his front, while he tried to keep his men out of angles and make his

movements correspond with those of the divisions on his right and

left. Skill this required; skill equivalent to German skill; the skill

which you cannot command in a month after calling for a million

volunteers, but which grows through years of organization.

Shall I call the general in chief command General X? This is

according to the custom of anonymity. A great modern army like the

French is a machine; any man, high or low, only a unit of the

machine. In this case the real name of X is Castelnau. If it lacks the

fame which seems its due, that may be because he was too busy to

take the Press into his confidence. Fame is not the business of

French generals nowadays. It is war. What counted for France was

that he never let the Germans get near the gap at Mirecourt.

Having failed to reach the gap, the Germans, with that stubbornness

of the offensive which characterizes them, tried to take Nancy. They

got a battery of heavy guns within range of the city. From a high hill it

is said that the Kaiser watched the bombardment. But here is a story.

As the German infantry advanced toward their new objective they

passed a French artillery officer in a tree. He was able to locate that

heavy battery and able to signal its position back to his own side. The

French concentrated sufficient fire to silence it after it had thrown forty

shells into Nancy. The same report tells how the Kaiser folded his

cloak around him and walked in silence from his eminence, where the

sun blazed on his helmet. It was not the Germans' fault that they

failed to take Nancy. It was due to the French.

Some time a tablet will be put up to denote the high-water mark of the

German invasion of Lorraine. It will be between the edge of the forest

of Champenoux and the heights. When the Germans charged from

the cover of the forest to get possession of the road to Nancy, the

French artillery and machine-guns which had held their fire turned

loose. The rest of the story is how the French infantry, impatient at

being held back, swept down in a counter-attack, and the Germans

had to give up their campaign in Lorraine as they gave up their

campaign against Paris in the early part of September. Saddest of all

lost opportunities to the correspondent in this war is this fighting in

Lorraine. One had only to climb a hill in order to see everything!

In half an hour, as the officer outlined the positions, we had lived

through the two weeks' fighting; and, thanks to the fairness of his

story--that of a professional soldier without illusions--we felt that we

had been hearing history while it was very fresh.

"They are very brave and skilful, the Germans," he said. "We still

have a battery of heavy guns on the plateau. Let us go and see it."

We went, picking our way among the snow-covered shell-pits. At one

point we crossed a communication trench, where soldiers could go

and come to the guns and the infantry positions without being

exposed to shell-fire. I noticed that it carried a telephone wire.

"Yes," said the officer; "we had no ditch during the fight with the

Germans, and we were short of telephone wire for a while; so we had

to carry messages back and forth as in the old days. It was a pretty

warm kind of messenger service when the German marmites were

falling their thickest."

At length he stopped before a small mound of earth not in any way

distinctive at a short distance on the uneven surface of the plateau. I

did not even notice that there were three other such mounds. He

pointed to a hole in the ground. I had been used to going through a

manhole in a battleship turret, but not through one into a field-gun

position before aeroplanes played a part in war.

"Entrez, monsieur!"

And I stepped down to face the breech of a gun whose muzzle

pointed out of another hole in the timbered roof covered with earth.

"It's very cosy!" I remarked.

"Oh, this is the shop! The living room is below--here!"

I descended a ladder into a cellar ten feet below the gun level, where

some of the gunners were lying on a thick carpet of perfectly dry

straw.

"You are not doing much firing these days?" I suggested.

"Oh, we gave the Boches a couple this morning so they shouldn't get

cocky thinking they were safe It's necessary to keep your hand in

even in the winter."

"Don't you get lonesome?"

"No, we shift on and off. We're not here all the while. It is quite warm

in our salon, monsieur, and we have good comrades. It is war. It is for

France. What would you?"

Four other gun-positions and four other cellars like this! Thousands of

gun-positions and thousands of cellars! Man invents new powers of

destruction and man finds a way of escaping them.

As we left the battery we started forward, and suddenly out of the

dusk came a sharp call. A young corporal confronted us. Who were

we and what business had we prowling about on that hill? If there had

been no officer along and I had not had a laisser-passer on my

person, the American Ambassador to France would probably have

had to get another countryman out of trouble.

The incident shows how thoroughly the army is policed and how

surely. Editors who wonder why their correspondents are not in the

front line catching bullets, please take notice.

It was dark when we returned to the little village on the plateau where

we had left the car. The place seemed uninhabited with all the blinds

closed. But through one uncovered window I saw a room full of

chatting soldiers. We went to pay our respects to the colonel in

command, and found him and his staff around a table covered with

oilcloth in the main living-room of a villager's house. He spoke of his

men, of their loyalty and cheerfulness, as the other commanders had,

as if this were his only boast. These French officers have little "side";

none of that toe-the-mark, strutting militarism which the Germans

think necessary to efficiency. They live very simply on campaign,

though if they do get to town for a few hours they enjoy a good meal.

If they did not, madame at the restaurant would feel that she was not

doing her duty to France.

XII

Smiles Among Ruins

Scorched piles of brick and mortar where a home has been ought to

make about the same impression anywhere. When you have gone

from Belgium to French Lorraine, however, you will know quite the

contrary. In Belgium I suffered all the depression which a nightmare

of war's misery can bring; in French Lorraine I found myself sharing

something of the elation of a man who looks at a bruised knuckle with

the consciousness that it broke a burglar's jaw.

A Belgian repairing the wreck of his house was a grim, heartbreaking

picture; a Frenchman of Lorraine repairing the wreck of his house had

the light of hard-won victory, of confidence, of sacrifice made to a

great purpose, of freedom secure for future generations, in his eyes.

The difference was this: The Germans were still in Belgium; they were

out of French Lorraine for good.

"What matters a shell-hole through my walls and my torn roof!" said a

Lorraine farmer. "Work will make my house whole. But nothing could

ever have made my heart and soul whole while the Germans

remained. I saw them go, monsieur; they left us ruins, but France is

ours!"

I had thought it a pretty good thing to see something of the Eastern

French front; but a better thing was the happiness I found there.

Mon capitaine had come out from the Ministry of War in Paris; but

when we set out from Nancy southward, we had a different local

guide, a major belonging to the command in charge of the region

which we were to visit. He was another example which upsets certain

popular notions of Frenchmen as gesticulating, excitable little men.

Some six feet two in height, he had an eye that looked straight into

yours, a very square chin, and a fine forehead. You had only to look

at him and size him up on points to conclude that he was all there;

that he knew his work.

"Well, we've got good weather for it to-day, monsieur," said a voice

out of a goatskin coat, and I found we had the same chauffeur as

before.

The sun was shining--a warm winter sun like that of a February thaw

in our Northern States--glistening on the snowy fields and slopes

among the forests and tree-clad hills of the mountainous country.

Faces ambushed in whiskers thought it was a good day for trimming

beards and washing clothes. The sentries along the roads had their

scarfs around their necks instead of over their ears. A French soldier

makes ear muffs, chest protector, nightcap, and a blanket out of the

scarf which wife or sister knits for him. If any woman who reads this

knits one to send to France she may be sure that the fellow who

received it will get every stitch's worth out of it.

To-day, then, it was war without mittens. You did not have to sound

the bugle to get soldiers out of their burrows or their houses. Our first

stop was at our own request, in a village where groups of soldiers

were taking a sun bath. More came out of the doors as we alighted.

They were all in the late twenties or early thirties, men of a reserve

regiment. Some had been clerks, some labourers, some farmers,

some employers, when the war began. Then they were piou-pious, in

French slang; then all France prayed godspeed to its beloved piou-

pious. Then you knew the clerk by his pallor; the labourer by his hard

hands; the employer by his manner of command. Now they were

poilus--bearded, hard-eyed veterans; you could not tell the clerk from

the labourer or the employer from the peasant.