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.