_Divide ut imperes_--make a faction among your enemies, and thus
overcome them. This is German policy all over the world. By it the Danes
of Slesvig have been to a large extent robbed of their own language and
national traditions. By it the Prussian intruders have, with
characteristic inability to understand foreign souls, endeavored, in
their periods of repose after acts of brutality, to alienate from France
the French-speaking and French-minded inhabitants of Alsace and
Lorraine. It has failed not only there, but notoriously also in Posen or
Prussian Poland, where it was long ago abandoned in favor of a system of
downright and unscrupulous repression. It has succeeded, for the moment
at least, in Russia, which now lies dismembered at the feet of a
triumphant betrayer. What was a year ago Russia is now dissolved into
Lithuania, Livonia, Esthonia, Courland, Finland, Poland, the Ukraine,
the country of the Don Cossacks, the Caucasus, and the vague and
fluctuating realm of Bolshevism. Historic memories, linguistic
variations, religious differences, local jealousies, class feeling, and
commercial rivalries have been emphasized by German agents behind the
frontier, and through the gaps thus made the German sword has pushed its
point, breaking up the old mortar of loyalty and union. One typical
example of the method employed may be cited here. According to the
Berlin _Lokal Anzeiger_ of March 26, 1917, Zimmermann, the German
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, our Zimmermann, welcomed a
delegation of Lithuanians and piped sweetly to them about the tender
interest his government took in the welfare of their people, promising
to satisfy various local desires. We have seen the result.
German intrigue of the same sort has long been at work in India, where
it has happily been baffled by the good sense of the Indian population
who appreciate the fact that with all their numerous languages, races,
and religions, they owe their concord to the light rule of Britain and
to her even-handed justice. One of the boldest, meanest, and cruelest
instances of the same policy of treacherous penetration was the effort
to cause a rebellion in Ireland, for the Germans knew that rebellion
meant the destruction of their own tools and Ireland's shame and ruin.
As Americans, we have reason to keep our eyes upon the large German
colonies in southern Brazil and upon the outposts of German imperialism
in Mexico, Chile, and Argentina, and still greater reason to look out
for the thin wedges of Prussian intrigue insinuating themselves among
our own many racial and confessional varieties.
The most thinly disguised of all German attempts to conquer by division
is also one of the latest to be disclosed, although it began at least
three years ago. "Love me," says the Kaiser to the outraged daughters of
the Belgian household; "or if you will not both love me, I shall take
the likelier of you, and give her a seat at the royal feast, and put my
ring upon her finger, and make her sister serve us in our mirth."
As is well known, there is no such thing as a Belgian language, and the
people of Belgium speak one or both of two languages, French and
Flemish. Both French and Flemish are and have long been officially
recognized by the Belgian government, and are used in Parliament, in
public documents, in the courts, and in the national schools. The French
spoken and written by educated Belgians is standard or central French,
differing in no essential respect from the language of France; but among
the people who have French as their native tongue, the Walloons, there
is employed a dialect of French, just as the people of many parts of
France, and indeed of all countries, have their local dialects. The
Walloons differ from the rest of the Belgians chiefly in language and in
the fact that they inhabit the southern and southeastern parts of the
kingdom, where mining and metallurgical industry are highly developed.
They also have more points of contact with France, both geographically
and morally. If you take a map of Belgium and draw a line from Vise, the
point where the Meuse passes into Holland, almost straight west through
Brussels, Audenarde, and Courtrai, or a little south of these cities,
you will have traced the northern boundary of the Walloon country.
Almost anywhere along this imaginary line, one can, by going a short
distance south, be among people who nearly all speak French or the
Walloon dialect of French, and, by going a little way north, be among
people who, though they may write French and speak it as an acquired
language, use Flemish as their native tongue. Nevertheless, in this
densely populated, busy, rich, and closely unified kingdom, the various
elements of the population were happily mingled. Thousands of Belgian
families are part Walloon and part Flemish. When a Walloon family moves
north into a Flemish village it usually changes its language in the
second generation, and vice versa. Many Walloons have Flemish names;
many Flemings have Walloon names.
Flemish is scarcely distinguishable from Dutch. Although philologically
they may be regarded as twin dialects of one tongue, they are for
practical purposes the same. There are, to be sure, a few slight
differences of idiom, and numerous differences of vocabulary, even
between standard written Flemish and standard written Dutch, but
scarcely more important than those between the English of Mr. Howells
and the English of Mr. Hardy. In popular speech the gap is naturally
wider, and perhaps justifies the view that Flemish and Dutch are
separate dialects of one language, though "dialect" may really be too
strong a word. From my own observation in East Flanders, I should say
that a Dutchman would be in about the same situation there with regard
to difference of speech as a New Englander in Virginia.
According to the census of 1910, there were in Belgium about 3,832,000
persons speaking French or belonging to French-speaking families, and
about 4,153,000 speaking Flemish or belonging to Flemish families. The
Flemish population, being to a larger extent agricultural, has for many
years been increasing faster than the Walloons. Yet French, being by
acquisition or second-nature a language perfectly familiar to all
educated Belgians, appears to have, and really has, an immense advantage
over Flemish. The literature of the French language is enriched and
glorified with the names of many great authors, from Jean Froissart and
Philippe de Comines to Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, who belong by birth or
residence to what we now call Belgium.
But the Flemish had, and probably always will have, a pride of their
own. In the Middle Ages their cities were among the first in Northern
Europe to emerge from obscurity. The names of Flemish towns strike the
ear with a strange ruggedness in the liquid lapse of Dante's lines, but
a stranger thing it is that even in the thirteenth century these
vigorous municipalities were looked to for independence, and called upon
for vengeance on tyranny; we hear, in the Purgatorio, of "the evil plant
that overshadows all the Christian land," and are told that "if Douai,
Lille, Ghent and Bruges had power, there would soon be vengeance taken."
A curious example this of "ancestral voices prophesying war."
In the sixteenth century Flanders was the scene of tragic resistance to
Spain and the Inquisition. Liberty was lost and recovered and lost
again; but prosperity still bloomed from the ashes of destroyed
commerce, the language and institutions of the land were redeemed with a
fearful price, civilization was preserved with blood and sorrow, art
flourished in the midst of horrors; and how all this came to pass is
explained only by the stubbornness with which the people kept up their
local patriotism. The visible signs of this municipal pride and glory
were, until four years ago, and in part still are, the great churches,
town-halls, and guild-houses of Flanders. Among the most impressive of
these monuments were the Cloth Hall at Ypres, the Belfry of Bruges, the
Town-halls of Audenarde, Alost, Termonde, Louvain, Brussels, and Ghent,
the Cathedrals of Antwerp and Malines, the quaint Beguinages or cities
of retirement for religious women, and many another less renowned but
hardly less beautiful expression of ancient faith and community of
enterprise.
The Austrian yoke was shaken off at the time of the French Revolution,
and after a short period of republican government Belgium, together with
France, came under the domination of Napoleon. At the Congress of
Vienna, in 1815, Belgium and Holland were united under the name of the
Kingdom of the Netherlands, in an ill-assorted combination which lasted
only till 1830, when the present Kingdom of Belgium was established.
From that year to 1914 the Flemish people of Belgium, though more than
satisfied to live in political union with the Walloons, and indeed being
the more prosperous and rapidly growing part of the population, were
solicitous to preserve their local customs and particularly their own
language. Societies were formed for the cultivation of Flemish
literature. Endowments for the same purpose were established. One of the
parliamentary aims of political parties in the provinces of East and
West Flanders and Antwerp and the northern sections of Brabant and
Limbourg was the safe-guarding of Flemish as one of the official
languages and a medium of instruction. There was not the slightest
flavor of disloyalty in this desire. It was entirely constitutional. It
expressed itself openly, and had no need for secrecy. The tendency thus
created was called the Flamingant movement. No one connected with it, so
far as I can discover, entertained the slightest notion of appealing to
Germany for countenance or support. The Flemings in general and the
Flamingants in particular would have been the last people in the world
to admit that their language was a dialect of _German_ or that their
manifest destiny was absorption in the German Empire. The unity of
Belgium was as precious to them as to the Walloons, and was placed above
every consideration of race and speech. But there is no country under
the sun in which local self-government and community interests are so
highly developed as in Belgium. Under the Belgian constitution the
communes enjoy the maximum of freedom. Civic pride nowhere else burns so
bright. It is the habit of local self-government, the strong
personalities developed under this system, and the spirit of the
communes that have saved Belgium from starvation during the war. As
every one of Mr. Hoover's American delegates in Belgium will testify,
the spectacle was and is magnificent. As early as October, 1914, when
the wave of invasion had passed over Belgium, the communes stood firm,
and in all of them committees with almost absolute power, and enjoying
the perfect confidence of the people, were formed and got to work
commandeering the visible supply of food and distributing it prudently.
Within a very short time after the invasion the Germans showed that they
intended to take advantage of the difference between Flemings and
Walloons, a difference which, as we have seen, was purely domestic, and
concerned with no really vital political issue. Among the offices of his
hated administration, Governor-General von Bissing established a bureau
for dealing with "the Flemish question," a bureau consisting of German
specialists in philology and discord. For about seven months, this
commission, which was working in secret, attracted hardly any attention.
Then it began to operate visibly. In the summer of 1915, I was
stationed, as delegate of the Hoover commission, in Ghent, the capital
of East Flanders, and witnessed the beginning of German coquetry. As may
be imagined, it was very clumsy and ineffectual. One day an attempt
would be made to flatter the local pride of the peasants by printing
official notices and war bulletins in Flemish and German only, instead
of Flemish, German, and French, as had previously been the practice; the
next day they would be informed, in these same posters, that they must
surrender their hay-crop to the German military authorities. The Germans
appeared to be as much detested in Flanders as anywhere else in Belgium.
I saw the wife of a distinguished citizen of Ghent burst into tears of
vexation and anxiety because a German officer of high rank spoke to her
in a restaurant. She said she feared she would be distrusted for the
rest of her life by her fellow-citizens for having listened to a German
officer. Yet he was evidently a gentleman, behaved with propriety, and
had the excuse for addressing her that he was quartered in her house. I
have known persons in Ghent to go willingly to prison rather than comply
with German rules or pay fines into the German treasury. "Do you see
that man?" said to me an acquaintance in Ghent one day, pointing to a
German in uniform who was speaking Flemish to some peasants. "He lived
here before the war; he will not be able to live here after the war; his
life will not be safe."
Before the war there were four universities in Belgium: the Catholic
university of Louvain, the liberal or non-sectarian university of
Brussels, and the two state universities of Liege and Ghent. The
instruction was given entirely in French, except that there were certain
courses at Louvain and Ghent which were paralleled, rather expensively,
one would think, by courses in Flemish. In 1911 a bill was introduced in
the Belgian Parliament looking to the gradual transformation of the
University of Ghent into an institution completely Flemish. In 1912 this
proposal was again discussed, and was reported favorably in the Chamber
of Representatives. The war of course put an end to the project.
Now the Germans have taken it up with enthusiasm, trying to harvest for
their own purposes the sympathies that were formerly cultivated in its
favor. Whether they annex all or part or none of Belgium, they desire to
pose as the liberators of Flanders, and to foment a permanent jealousy
between the Flemish-speaking people and the rest of the Belgian
population. This is precisely like their conduct in the south of
Ireland, in the Province of Quebec, and in Russia. They have their eye
on Antwerp, which they intend to keep, whatever happens, and they
realize that Flanders would be a good basis for the eventual absorption
of Holland.
On December 2, 1915, it became known in Belgium that the German
authorities purposed to reopen the University of Ghent, which of course
had been closed, and to make Flemish the language of instruction. Their
design was instantly understood by everybody, including the leaders of
the old Flamingant movement, who, instead of falling in with it, met it
with a vigorous protest. This was disregarded, and on the 31st of
December the decree was promulgated. A commission of German professors
was empowered to draw up regulations for carrying out the plan of
transformation. Meanwhile, in order to encourage as many Belgian young
men as possible to escape from the country and find their way into the
Belgian army, the real authorities of the four universities were keeping
these institutions closed. Their passive resistance enraged the Germans,
who, on March 18, 1916, arrested the two most celebrated professors of
Ghent, Henri Pirenne, and Paul Fredericq, eminent historians, and sent
them to prison-camps in Germany, where they have been treated with
disgusting brutality. The colleagues of these two brave men were not
less courageous themselves, and signed a second protest. Thereupon the
Germans made up a ridiculous little faculty of their own, and imposed it
upon the university, which, we must remember had no students. There were
at first seven of these professors, of whom one was a German, another a
native of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, and five were Belgians without
distinction in the learned world or respectability as citizens. To these
were later added a number of equally insignificant Dutch and German
teachers of minor rank, and a very few Belgians. Opinion in Holland rose
in disgust, and an unpleasant life awaits the Dutch instructors if they
ever dare return to the land of their birth. They have been canny enough
to make sure of pensions from the German government, in view of the
probability that they will in the near future be men without a country.
On April 5, 1916, the German Chancellor, making a curious mixture of
cynicism and hypocrisy, in a speech before the Reichstag, promised that
the Imperial Government would help the Flemish population to free itself
from "the preponderance of French culture." The Germans no doubt
expected some backing from the Flamingant societies, the trustees of the
Flemish endowment funds, and the former political supporters of the
Flemish movement. In this they have been disappointed, for their conduct
has aroused protest upon protest from all these quarters. It is
difficult to determine, from the boasts in the German newspapers and the
denials of exiled Belgians, just how many teachers and students had been
scraped together by the beginning of 1917, but the faculty was a motley
collection of German, Dutch and Belgian nonentities, and there were less
than three students for every teacher. To-day there is only one student
in agriculture, the subject that would naturally be most sought in a
Flemish university. Of all the war-babies, this University of Ghent is
surely the most anaemic. Yet if we are to believe General von Bissing in
the speech in which he declared it alive and viable, "The God of War
held it at the baptismal font with naked sword in hand!" This is _echt
Deutsch_ in taste and feeling. And while these proceedings were solemnly
going on, the deportation of workmen from Ghent was beginning; on the
very day of inauguration, husbands and fathers were being torn from
their families to suffocate in German salt-mines, to sweat and faint in
German collieries, to dig and die in German trenches. Has the world ever
seen a more revolting instance of hypocrisy? I happened to be in
Courtrai one morning when a number of Flemish wives and mothers were
herded into the jail there, from the village of Sweveghem, because their
men had refused to make barbed wire for the Germans. International law
forbids a conqueror to compel the vanquished to produce munitions of
war, but what of that!
Parallel with the ludicrous pretence of enriching Belgium with a
Germano-Flemish university, close observers of Belgian affairs, by
reading the Dutch and German newspapers, have watched the development of
another German scheme for producing discord. On February 14, 1917,
thirty Belgian tools of the German military authorities set themselves
up, or rather were set up by German backers, as a "Council of Flanders,"
with the avowed purpose of creating an autonomous state out of the
Flemish-speaking portion of Belgium. The plot began to culminate in
Baron von Bissing's decree of March 21, 1917, establishing two
administrative regions, one Flemish, the other Walloon. Brussels was to
be the capital of the former, Namur of the latter. This decree sent
consternation into the hearts of all true Belgians, and has led finally
to an ominous result, the resignation of nearly all the Belgian
judiciary. Up to this time, protected by international law and by the
national constitution, which even the Germans professed to respect, the
magistrates of Belgium had continued to perform some of their functions,
thereby shielding the people to a certain extent from direct contact
with German judges and police officers, and no doubt saving the country
from bloody and useless insurrections: for if the minute and daily
administration of local affairs, such as the collection of private debts
and the enforcement of town ordinances, had been all this time in German
hands, the irritation would have been unbearable.
With a few delightful exceptions, newspapers in Belgium, even though
appearing under their old names and in French, are controlled by the
Germans. I used to amuse myself, in 1915, by translating passages from
_Le Bruxellois_, ostensibly a real Belgian journal, back into the German
in which they were originally written or thought. The style betrayed a
Teutonic source. The delightful exceptions are the brave little
clandestine _Libre Belgique_ and other papers of a similar character,
which keep up the spirits of the Belgian people and drive the Germans to
impotent fury.
In this case, as in that of the University of Ghent, the Germans
professed to be responding to Belgian desires. They point to the
so-called Council of Flanders, in reality a collection of renegade
Belgians who were brought together by German influence, and protected by
German arms from the violence of Flemish mobs, who dared to hiss them
and insult them. A delegation of these worthies was conducted to Berlin,
where they presented a humble request for the strangulation of Belgian
liberty and the partition of their native land. Against this plot all
Belgium has risen. How can Belgium have risen? The answer will give some
idea of the bravery of those people, even in the isolation and darkness
and hunger of their present life. Last June between four and five
hundred Belgian magistrates and members of the bar signed a fruitless
petition to the German Chancellor against the decree. Judges and local
administrative officials gave up their functions and their livelihood.
For this, many of them were arrested and deported to Germany. Against
the decree of separation, and in favor of "the Belgian Fatherland, Free
and Indivisible," petitions have been signed by nearly all the former
senators and deputies remaining in Belgium, by the Flamingant leaders,
by municipal councils, and by the heroic Cardinal Mercier. The Cardinal
especially drew attention to the fact that international law demands
that the domestic administration of an invaded country shall be allowed
to proceed unmolested, if military necessity permits. To this point
Baron von Falkenhausen, the German Governor-General, made the following
insolent rejoinder: "Your Eminence addressed to me on the 6th of June a
letter in which, taking your stand on the principles of international
law, you criticize certain of my official acts. I must respectfully
reply to your Eminence that I refuse to enter with you upon a discussion
of this subject."
Decree has followed decree with steady insistence. The courts, even in
Brussels, which is mainly a French-speaking city, must hold their
sessions in Flemish; official correspondence north of the imaginary line
must be in Flemish; the Official Bulletin of German Laws and Decrees in
Occupied Belgium is printed in German and Flemish for one part of the
country and in German and French for the other. On August 9, 1917, von
Falkenhausen issued an edict declaring that in the Flemish
administrative region "Flemish must be the exclusive official language
of all the authorities and all the functionaries of the state, the
provinces, and the communes, as well as their establishments, including
educational institutions and the teachers therein." On October 6 the
communes in the Province of Brabant were ordered immediately to organize
courses in Flemish for the instruction of their employees who did not
know that language.
The invaders have tried to create a Belgian faction in support of their
policy, and have here and there, at different times, organized meetings
and processions of so-called "Activists," or pro-German Belgians. But
these assemblages have never been other than contemptible in size and
composition. They have been hissed and mobbed by vast crowds of
patriotic Belgians, and in Belgium it takes courage to attack a movement
which is protected by German bayonets. On February 9, 1918, the Chief
Justice and two Associate Judges of the Belgian Court of Appeals at
Brussels were arrested for instituting proceedings against the
"Activists," and were ordered to be deported to Germany.
With all their cunning the Germans in Belgium have shown themselves
densely stupid. Their near-sighted pedantry inclines them to put their
trust in formulas, when the thing they are dealing with is life. They
think they can _decree_ an indomitable people into submission. Having
begun with butchery, they declined into robbery, and now they imagine
that because bribery is less rude, it will be regarded as a sort of
mercy. Jealous and quarrelsome at home, fussy and petty in their own
local and domestic affairs, they cannot understand magnanimity in
others. German writers have often admitted and lamented the tendency of
the German people to be parochial (_kleinstaedtisch_) in their outlook,
and stencilled (_schablonenhaft_) in their personality. So they are; and
these bad qualities render them incapable of understanding the spirit of
Belgium, which is independent, individual, far-sighted, and bold. Since
July, 1914, the German heel has stamped its imprint on regions several
times as extensive as the German Empire itself. But a nation of pedants
will never rule the world, and the echo of those iron-bound,
blood-spattered boots will cease to ring when the American people
realize that what the Germans have done in Belgium they will try to do
wherever they find room to tramp.