IT is well sometimes, despite all that has happened since, to turn back to Belgium and remember the rape, rapine, and arson of 1914. There will be plenty of time to let bygones be bygones when might and right are found on the same side and Justice, who is using her sword just now, resumes her impartial scales; but until the Central Nations experience a defeat of magnitude sufficient to penetrate to the hearts and heads of their people, we may continue to keep in the forefront of our minds the story of Belgium under Germany’s heel.

That tale of brutal tyranny is not even yet told, for, short of selling the deported Belgians as slaves, Germany would seem still to be doing all that Hun and Vandal ever accomplished. But Raemaekers gives us a glimpse from the past, when conquest was still in progress and the German obsession of franc-tireurs reached its height. How far they pretended this fear to excuse their own murder of the defenseless, or how far they really felt it, matters little; for it has been shown that the cry was deliberately excited—by fabrication and circulation through Germany of countless “fearful” falsehoods. Soldiery about to pass from the Fatherland to Belgium were inflamed, as with drink, by lies of the horrible treatment they must expect and endure from civil populations and non-combatants. They were warned by calculated propaganda at home that their eyes would be gouged out, their legs sawn off, their wounded men murdered, with fiendish details of suffering by the Belgians.

German valets of the type of Houston Chamberlain and Sven Hedin spread these stories; Pastor Conrad wrote a little book and sold it to the school children that they, too, might read about their fathers’ gouged-out eyes in Belgium.

The result was certain when German soldiers found themselves with a free hand among unarmed women and their little ones; for Germany in Belgium and Poland, and Austria in Serbia, have not been content to destroy the manhood of weak nations: they have striven to stamp out their virginity and their childhood also.

EDEN PHILLPOTTS.