from Van Eyck to the enigmatic madness of Wierbz; her incomparable
belfries, hôtels de ville and halles, testifying still to the richest
municipal life of the middle ages; her cathedrals; of Bruges of the
three hundred bridges--one of which the present writer has cause to
remember as he was all but drowned under it--of the Castle of Bouillon,
from which Godefroid went to the Holy Land to capture Jerusalem
and to refuse to wear a crown of gold where his Saviour had worn a
crown of thorns. Nor is there need to say anything of the ambiguous
splendour of such places as Ostend, in summer a Paradise at once of
children and of those no longer conspicuously childlike. Nor again,
of the remote beauty and clean winds of the Ardennes. It is of the
life that the Belgian nation, working on its environment, had made for
itself in three generations of guaranteed peace, that I like, on this
anniversary, to recall some sort of inadequate picture.
Belgium was the most thickly peopled state in Europe. In the Meuse
valley, from Liége to Seraing, she possessed the most extensive
manufacturing area of its size in the world, surpassing Lancashire and
Massachusetts. She had a greater length of railway line per square
mile than any other country in Europe. She produced a greater value of
manufactured goods _per capita_ than either of her great neighbours,
France and Germany, and had a larger _per capita_ foreign trade. Her
agriculture was so enterprising that it would have been difficult to
find an untilled rood or a rood wasted on a fence, in all Flanders.
Such production of wealth had generated on a large scale all the social
problems characteristic of our time; and so earnest and loyal was she
in her attempt to reach solutions that French writers have been found
to call her, not the “cockpit,” but the “social laboratory” of Europe.
What is of special interest to us is that, despite the ablest Socialist
and Liberal criticism, Belgium had maintained in power for a generation
a Catholic Government, and was working out her problems on the basis of
Catholic individualism. In all aspects to know her was for a citizen
of any small nation a tonic and an inspiration. She was no Paradise
assuredly; she had failed in some points in which we have succeeded,
but it was impossible to look into any department of her activity
without learning something worth the trouble. When it is remembered
that, on the one hand, she had a duality of language, and on the other,
that through flax she came into intimate touch with North-east Ulster,
the interest of her life for an Irishman is obviously enhanced.
Coal, “the bread of manufacturing industry,” was, of course, the basis
of Belgian prosperity. In her black country, the “borinage” centred on
Mons. She employed 150,000 miners, raised 24,000,000 tons of coal per
annum, and consumed almost that quantity in her factories and homes. I
have an eerie recollection of climbing the belfry of Mons some years
ago, and picking out, or persuading myself that I had succeeded in
picking out, the battlefields about it: Malplaquet, Jemappes, Fontenoy,
Ligny. A Frenchman on the same errand asked dreamily: “When will there
be another?” Alas! we can answer that question now: the “borinage” has
taken another full draught of Irish blood.
This precious natural possession of coal Belgium certainly utilises
to the full. Her mining country, unhappily, had all the sordor that
seems inseparable from that enterprise. Mons had an admirable School of
Commerce and Industry. Its watchword was expansion and expatriation.
The device may sound strange in our ears; what it means to convey, of
course, is that Belgium must find markets abroad. She trains her sons
not to be lost to her, but to go abroad and open new fields of conquest
for her industries. There was also an unusual dispensary which treated
the miners for an endemic complaint called “miner’s worm,” or more
learnedly, ankylostomiasis.
The metal industries, of course, centre on Liége. There was no more
wonderful sight, not in Pittsburg, not on the Clyde, than the pillars
of smoke and the pillars of fire which stream upwards from the steel
foundries and factories along the Meuse. It was a singular pride
to remember that the whole first impulsion of that great industry
proceeded from the brain of an Irishman, John Cockerill. It is known
that until 1825, it was, under English law, a criminal offence,
punishable by transportation, for a skilled workman to emigrate to a
foreign country, or for anyone to export machinery or plans. William
Cockerill, however, took the risk, went first to Sweden, where he
was ill received, and afterwards to Verviers. He founded the machine
woollen industry of Verviers, and his son John, in due course, founded
the metal industry of Liége and its belt of towns. The lives of the
Cockerills would make a romantic chapter: I am sorry that I have
not been able to come on much biographical matter. Obtaining a good
deal more iron ore, chiefly from her neighbour, Luxembourg, than she
produced herself, Belgium, before the war, reached an annual output of
about a million and a half tons each of pig-iron and steel. She made
all sorts of machinery and had an immense export of all. I have a vivid
memory of a visit to the great Fabrique Nationale (F.N.) at Herstal.
The figures of production per day were given to us as something like
800 Browning automatic pistols, 500 Mauser rifles, 400 fowling-pieces,
150 bicycles, 50 motor-bicycles and 10 motor-cars. These two latter
items had probably greatly increased. Your guide took great pleasure in
dazing you with the degree of specialisation practised. Thus it took
350 special machines or tools to make a Browning, and something like
700 to make a Mauser. If all the plant of Herstal and its neighbouring
towns is in German hands, it will be seen that their invasion of
Belgium gave them something more even than an opportunity of running
murder as a national pastime.
Ghent as a textile city owes its importance mainly to cotton. But
both there and at Courtrai linen possessed a keener interest for an
Irishman. Ghent possesses the two largest linen-spinning installations
in the world. Between these two places and North-east Ireland there
was the closest intercourse, and it would have been an interesting
exercise to have made a detailed study of the Ulster colony that
lived there. Cases were not unknown of the dourest North of Ireland
buyers intermarrying with Flemish Catholic families, and ultimately
suffering absorption. Lace was, of course, a notable product. It will
be remembered that certain enquiries disclosed the fact some years ago
that Belgian skill was equal to the fabrication, not only of Brussels
and Malines, but also of “Limerick” and “Carrickmacross” lace, chiefly
for the American market.
Of the progressive character of agriculture some indication has been
given. It is curious that whilst South Germany, Denmark, and even
Hungary have been ransacked for models by various Irish propagandists,
Belgian agriculture, which was not inferior either in technique or in
organisation, was almost ignored. Much of the land is, as with us,
rather a manufactured article than a natural product; rich polders
stolen from the sea, or sand made fertile by irrigation. If one were
to touch on any special point in agriculture, it would be the complete
success which Belgium had made of the beet. She produced all her own
sugar, including that used in her great brewing industry, and exported
great quantities as well.
The productive apparatus of Belgium was assuredly rich and varied. And
each industry fed and maintained itself by an educational institute of
the first order. Mons has been mentioned. There was also the University
of Liége, mainly an engineering University; the great Commercial School
of Antwerp, the Agricultural Laboratories at Louvain and Ghent, the
Higher School of Textiles at Verviers, and so on. And all this was done
at “the cross-roads of Europe,” under the fire of French and German
competition, without recourse to any really protectionist tariffs.
But however dominant a factor intensity of production may be, it is
rather the attitude of a people towards the problems of distribution
that marks it out as, in a human point of view, a success or a failure:
Belgium was beyond doubt a success. Not that she had abolished
poverty: there was poverty more drab and hopeless in some parts of her
countryside than anything of our congested districts. There was the old
plague of cheap gin almost everywhere.
But she was facing her social task in the right temper. The Belgian in
economic affairs is by nature a realist and an appeasable man. In the
number of days per worker lost through labour disputes, Belgium was
easily at the foot of the list of industrial countries. “The Social
Question,” they repeat after Colins, “is to be settled by science, not
by violence.” Time and again the central labour committees, Socialist
as well as Catholics, have suppressed strikes inaugurated by their
own members. This realism of outlook gave you in Belgium the supreme
type of business-like politics. The great Socialist co-operatives of
Brussels and Ghent--the “Maison du Peuple” and the “Voormit”--starting
from ludicrously small beginnings, bestrode the world of workers like
a Colossus. If you were an associate, they sold you your clothes,
boots, bread, meat, beer, furniture, books, amusements--everything you
consumed--and managed your business as well as gave you free their
propagandist papers, and an annual bonus out of the profits, in order
to sweeten the principles proposed. The smaller Catholic organisations
in the cities acted on similar lines. In the country the great Catholic
“Boerenbond,” or Land League, with its headquarters at Louvain,
applied the same formula to the buying and selling of agricultural
necessaries on a great scale. Such a phenomenon as empty extremism
could not arise.
These immense co-operatives were, perhaps, the most characteristic
Belgian contribution to social readjustment. But in direct action by
the State they had also been pioneers. The first experiment in Old Age
Pensions did not come from Germany--formerly the worshipped idol of
English Liberals and Tariff Reformers alike. It came from the city of
Ghent. The first experiment in the deliberate building of “workmen’s
dwellings” as such was not made in Mülhausen, it was made in Verviers.
The whole body of Belgian law regulating economic life is expounded
in two masterly volumes issued from Louvain by Father Vermeersh, the
Jesuit, who so bravely exposed the early atrocities in the Congo.
(Perhaps it is as well to interpolate here that if the crimes were
great, the amendment has been complete. On the same terms it would
be possible to forgive all the sins of history.) The intervention of
formal law is not quite as comprehensive as it is in these countries.
But it helps the worker at all his crises: birth, marriage, accident,
disease, old age. In one respect at least it is far superior to our
code: property in small parcels is much more readily accessible to the
labourer. This is accomplished by exemption of workmen’s home sites
and garden plots from various heads of taxation, and by the provision
of cheap loans. It will be found in the end that this accessibility to
land, to land in fee-simple, is the real solution of half our labour
difficulties, and the real counter-programme to Socialism. And the
nation that pioneered it will enjoy deserved honour. Like other Latin
countries Belgium has what we, to our shame, have not: a Homestead and
Household Protection Act, the only bulwark against usury.
As to the particular points in which Belgian experience may enlighten
ours, there is one which ought to be mentioned. Cheap fee-simple land
for industrial workers plus cheap railways, has done a great deal
to break the isolation of country and town, and to solve housing
difficulties. There is also a distinct human gain. Your industrial
worker who grows his own vegetables on his own land is a very different
man from the unit of your propertyless proletariat. The railway policy
of Belgium is generally misunderstood. In the first instance, only
the main lines are owned by the State; in the second, the complaint
that the State Railways “do not pay” misses the whole essence of the
matter. They are not run as dividend-producing concerns; they are run
as one of the fundamental public utilities. Roads used to “pay”; now
they are paid for out of the public purse. Who complains? The Belgian
State Railways did certainly not lose money; further, their policy was
not controlled by the necessity of making it directly. Railways so
conducted yield a diffused national dividend of utility, the value of
which is incalculable.
A further token of this firm handling of the tangles of everyday life
is to be found in the work done in the School of Social Sciences at
Louvain. I had not much opportunity of studying its courses, but I
fancy that Father Corcoran, the distinguished Jesuit educationist,
would know all about it. It is likely that he derived from it the idea
of the Leo Guild. In Belgium, at all events, it was a thing of course
that a priest should be not an economist--a poor title and quality--but
a trained healer of economic disease. The activity manifested under
the inspiration of the Church was extremely rich, and diversified. And
not only in Flanders, but also in Wallonie. I have a list showing for
the little Walloon town of Soignies, a town of 9000 inhabitants, no
less than fifteen different Catholic economic societies. Nobody can
ever have gone to Mass in Belgium without contributing at the door his
“denier scolaire” for the education of poor children, or without seeing
the Catholic Young Guards, engaged in some of their manifestations.
Priests in Belgium would tell you that their success is due to the
care with which they have avoided every hint of “clericalism.” At
all events, a Catholic Government has been able in one of the freest
countries in Europe to maintain, and at the last election, to
strengthen, its position against all assaults. It used to be said that
the industrialisation of the Campine--now agricultural, but rich in
coal as yet unmined--would ultimately put Socialism in the saddle. The
war has intervened. Who will venture to cast a horoscope now?
The language situation in Belgian was well known to Irish readers.
Indeed the compliment was returned. The last paper I remember looking
at before the German column under Van Boehm wheeled by Ghent was a copy
of _Ons Land_. It contained excellent photographs of prominent Gaelic
League personages, with an account of the movement in Ireland. In
Flanders, the position is a sort of transposition of ours into another
key. The Flamand is in a majority of nine to eight. He presents,
although a Catholic, a marked temperamental resemblance to our typical
Protestant Ulsterman. So far as one could judge he has pretty well had
his own way in all points except one. His language will live side by
side with French, but it can hardly hope, or even desire, to displace
the lingua franca of civilisation. By the way, it was interesting to
notice the Pro-German articles in some of the Flemish papers even after
the invasion. The Germans, it was said, were first cousins of the
Flemings, Teutons like them, solid, pious, religious people, not like
the atheistical Walloons and French! I am afraid that the burning zeal
of the Germans towards their kinsmen was too lamentably literal for
that campaign to succeed. But it is well known that German agents have
been promising the Flamands an autonomous Flanders, under the eagle of
Berlin... after the annexation. Certain journalists lately addressed a
manifesto to King Albert. They received a cold and dignified answer,
to the effect that the first task of the Belgian nation was to recover
Belgium, and all Belgium; afterwards the nation would settle its own
future. The most interesting by-product of the conflict of tongues
in Belgium is one that will certainly not be repeated here. In the
Marolles--the Coombe, so to say, of Brussels--the necessities of daily
intercourse have produced a mixture of French and Flemish which has
developed strong individuality. One heard songs in it which cannot be
described by any candid person as being funny without being vulgar. The
linguistic future of Belgium will, no doubt, be worked out on a basis
of equality. The clash was never charged with any political menace;
after the war separation of any deep kind would be unimaginable.
Belgium, said King Albert, has lost everything except her soul. Is it
not even true that, for the first time, she has found her soul? As the
poet, Antoine Classe, phrased it--
“Flamands, Walloons,
Ne sont que des prénoms,
Belge est notre nom de famille.”
In literature, written in French, Brussels is to Paris something as
Dublin is to London. The same gibes at the “Brussels Brogue,” the same
uneasy and all but indignant tremor when a great Belgian writer steps
on the scene, the same grudged applause, finally the same adulation. It
is a notable fact that most of the Belgians who have planted conquering
banners in French literature are of Flemish stock--Maeterlinck,
Verhaeren, Rodenbach, Cammaerts. Their imagination is coloured by two
traditions. Of Maeterlinck one need say nothing. Verhaeren is certainly
one of our supreme living poets, perhaps the supreme poet of our
civilisation. Rodenbach, more local, is for ever part of the beauty and
sadness of Bruges. Cammaerts is known by his exquisite songs. Camille
Lemonnier, the painter and author, is perhaps the most vital and
abundant representative of the Walloon stream of influence.
* * * * *
Such is an inadequate outline, a cinema survey of the work and the
place of Belgian in time of peace. Such was the little, great nation
that William the Treaty-Breaker has violated and ravaged. When one
remembers it all--memory on golden memory, remembers the black ruins
where a year ago men laboured and prayed at peace with other men,
remembers the slow building-up and the sudden devastation, eighty
years gone in a fortnight--does not the heart harden against these
metaphysical barbarians of Prussia? Belgium to-day is the most
illustrious evicted tenant of modern history. But, her enemies put
down, she will return. _Vive la Belgique!_
“G.H.Q.”
There is a certain magic in initial letters, and they seem to be most
magical when they run in trinities. Who has not heard of the G.O.M. and
B.M.G and A.B.C. and G.B.S. and that R.I.P. which has a richer gloom
than even Raleigh’s forlorn _Hic Jacet_? But in this war the greatest
of all is G.H.Q.
G.H.Q. stands for General Headquarters, known to most newspaper readers
as the place where the telegrams come from to depress or to cheer us.
But they have a great deal more to do at G.H.Q. than merely to receive
messages from the fighting front, and to send them home. Having had
the privilege of paying a visit there within the last ten days, I can
realise that fact with the vivid actuality of a thing seen. If the
Commander-in-Chief and his General Staff are the brain of an army,
cerebellum and cerebrum, G.H.Q. supplies its nervous and motor system.
Nerves, efferent and afferent, carrying in thrills of sensation and
carrying out waves of movement to the extreme limits of the military
organism, muscles in association with the nerves--these make up G.H.Q.
Let me detail some of its activities.
When you export an army you have got to export with it a government.
Our army in France is to all intents and purposes a colony in arms,
with a purely male population larger than the total population of New
Zealand. G.H.Q. is at once its Westminster and its War Office; its
railway--from booking-office to clearing-house--and its Bank; its
Scotland Yard and its Harley Street; its tinker, tailor, butcher, baker
and candlestick-maker.
In Pantheistic philosophies all things issue from a central principle,
and all return to it. G.H.Q. is the Om of the East, the Absolute of
that cloudy rhetorician from Berlin whom we used to call a philosopher,
Hegel. Without G.H.Q. nothing; with G.H.Q. everything.
It is not a bad description of war to say that it consists in carrying
heavy things from one place to another, and that victory depends on
carrying them faster and more efficiently than the enemy. The heavy
things may be soldiers, rifles, bully beef, howitzers, cartridges,
hospital appliances, shells, or a score of other things indispensable.
That is the reason why the first aspect of war that impresses one is
transportation. From London to the front there is a line of troop
trains, transports and convoys, linked together very nigh as closely
as the boats in a pontoon bridge. Behind the whole of the front every
road, railway and canal is scheduled.
On any road traffic must proceed in only one prescribed direction. If
by any mischance you find yourself heading the other way, the first
military policeman will very abruptly let you know all about it.
A line, at once elastic and unbreakable, carries our resolve from the
centre of formation here to the point of contact in the trenches. It
goes _ohne Hast_ and _ohne Rast_, to borrow Teutonisms that were once
more popular than they are likely ever to be again. No hurry, but no
intermission of effort, that is the motto and practice of G.H.Q. The
picturesque, bloody and heroic phases of war are praised everywhere and
fire the imagination. But consider to yourself how our army would get
on without its Carter Paterson! Its Carter Paterson is G.H.Q.
G.H.Q. has got to see that things are carried, and it sees that they
are. The foolish French Minister of War told a misled nation in 1870
that there was not a button missing from the gaiter of a soldier. That
boast, so mad and disastrous, is to-day for our Expeditionary Force
the “frigid and calculated” truth. The soldiers say to you all over
the lines: “Anything you send arrives. Nothing goes wrong.” There are
many others to praise as well as the Olympians of G.H.Q.--the chauffeur
mending his tyre with lyrical profanity _faute de mieux_, the mechanic
sweating behind the scenes at Boulogne or Calais, Mr. Tennant, Lord
Kitchener--but, without G.H.Q. nothing.
They clothe themselves with all varieties of function. There is the
A.G. (Adjutant-General), who does everything, and, when he gets tired,
does something else for a change. There is the I.O. (Intelligence
Officer), who sees that every visitor is passed through an infinite
succession of sieves, lest he should prove to be a spy. There is the
Provost-Marshal, the Chairman of the Prison Commissioners of the
Battlefield. There is the Chief Engineer. There is the R.A.M.C. There
is the Casualty Clearing Station. There is the Field Cashier. There
is the R.T.O. (Railway Transportation Officer), who, if he does not
like the look of you, sets you emulating Puck in the rapidity of your
return. There is... What is there not?
G.H.Q. is an army, a government, an administration, a literature. You
see those who wield its sceptre going about a French provincial town,
yawning down deserted boulevards strewn with the debris of autumn,
smoking in bare French rooms with green jalousies, always unperturbed,
always efficient, always courteous, generally bored. You see them
walking arm-in-arm, or in the saddle, knee to knee, with French staff
officers, maintaining and deepening the Alliance. Some of them have
tunics beribboned with the record of five campaigns; some are raw boys;
but, all together, they keep the fight going. They are the Business
Organisers of the war.
Now that the news of our advance is coming hotly in, they will praise
bullets and bayonets. Mike O’Leary’s and General Fochs; but when one
comes to think of it, it is hard on G.H.Q. that the patient, continuous
infallibility which had not yet left a section, or even an individual
soldier, short of bread, beef, cartridges or medical care should be
left out of the picture.
“ZUR ERINNERUNG”
A LETTER TO AN AUSTRIAN FELLOW-STUDENT
_In Unconquered France_
MY DEAR FRANZ,