A buffer state divided in itself—Her ideals those of prosperity—False sentiment regarding the Belgians—Not a war-like people—Moral force of her plutocracy—Ruins exaggerated—German policy of destruction—“Mass” logic—A military occupancy, merciless and crafty—“Reprisals” of the Belgians—Louvain—The bread line at LiÉge—Politics and German propaganda—Her Belgian policy worthy of England at her best—England still true to her ideals.

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 civilisation 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. Leopold liked to make money and Belgium 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 should 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 developed certain sturdy qualities in a people which can and ought to be developed in some other way than with the prospect of spending money for shells to kill other people.

With the world making every Belgian man a hero and the unknowing convinced that a citizen soldiery at LiÉge—defended by the Belgian standing army—had rushed from their homes with rifles and beaten German infantry, it is right to repeat that the shipperke spirit was not universal, that at no time had Belgium more than a hundred and fifty 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 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, characterising 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 practice 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 his 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 CÆsar for individual profit. Therein, Belgium showed that she was not lacking in the moral spirit which, with the shipperke’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 the 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 civilised 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 dÉbris, 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 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 the 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 costs 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 co-religionists 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 the national 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 the 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 reread. 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 mimicry 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 naturalised, and run for office at home. 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 demoralised 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 CÆsar and protected his own people day in and day out, diplomatic, watchful, Belgian. And he was cheerful. What other people could have preserved any vestige of it! 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 dÉbris, 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 soldiers 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 LiÉge, 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 LiÉge 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 LiÉge, 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 he 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 LiÉge 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 Landsturm man 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; or 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 anyway they could. Rascally bakers who sifted the brown flour to get the white to sell to patisseries and the well-to-do, while the bread line got the bran, required shrewd handling when the only means of punishment was through German authority.

“The local burgomaster yesterday offered to sell me some of your Commission’s flour,” wrote a German commandant. “I bought it and have the receipt, in order to prove to you that these Belgians are what we say they are—a vile people. I am turning the flour over to your Commission. We said that we would not take any of it and the German Government keeps its word.”

How that commandant enjoyed making that score! As for the burgomaster, he was proscribed in a way that will brand him among his fellow-citizens for life. When German soldiers took bread from families where they were billeted, the German Government turned over an amount of flour equivalent to the bread consumed.

A certain percentage of Belgians saw the invasion only as a visitation of disaster, like an earthquake. A flat country of gardens limits one’s horizon. They fell in 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 shipperkes 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 be slow in making ready her army, 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 makes a 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 fight for food with such weapons as they had. This must have meant a holocaust of reprisals that would have made the orgy of Louvain comparatively unimportant. 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 economise 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.