By acts not his own, his consciousness is crowded with
horror. Names of his ancient cities which should ring
pleasantly in his ear--Louvain, Dinant, Malines: there is an
echo of the sound of bells in the very names--recall him to
his suffering. No indemnity will cleanse his mind of the
vileness committed on what he loved. By every aspect of a
once-prized beauty, the face of his torment is made more
clear. Of all that fills the life of memory--the secure
home, the fruitful village and the well-loved land--there is
no acre remaining where his thought can rest. Each
remembered place brings a sharper stroke of poignancy to the
mind that is dispossessed.
His is a mental life uprooted and flung out into a vast
loneliness. Where can his thought turn when it would heal
itself? To the disconsolate there has always been comfort
in recalling the early home where childhood was nourished,
the orchard and the meadow where first love came to the
meeting, the eager city where ambition, full-panoplied,
sprang from the brain. The mind is hung with pictures of
what once was. But there must always be a local habitation
for these rekindled heats. Somewhere, in scene and setting,
the boy played, the youth loved, the man struggled. That
richness of feeling is interwoven with a place. No passion
or gladness comes out of the buried years without some bit
of the soil clinging to it.
Now, in a passing autumn, for a nation of people, all places
are alike to them bitter in the recollection. The Belgian,
disinherited, can never summon a presence out of the past
which will not, in its coming, bring burning and slaughter.
All that was fair in his consciousness has been seared with
horror. Where can he go to be at home? To England? To a new
continent? What stranger-city will give him back his
memories? He is condemned forever to live in the moment,
never to let his mind stray over the past. For, in the past,
in gracious prospect, lie village and city of Flanders, and
the name of the ravaged place will suddenly release a cloud
of darkness with voices of pain.