prohibited, your farmers shot, your women and children terrified,
your papers and public meetings suppressed, your streets
patrolled by aliens with drawn swords as your enemies' bands
triumphantly play their national airs. Picture, then, yourself lied
about by hireling spies, thrown into prison, compelled to breathe
foul air and sleep upon a floor, fed on black bread, and held day
after day for sentence in nerve-racking suspense. Picture to
yourself now the abject humiliation of being compelled to stand
bare-headed in salute before these wreckers and spoilers of your
land. Do you think you might keep back from your eyes sparks
from that blazing rebellion in your soul? Then it was not
imagination that made me see the murderous gleam in the eyes of
those high-spirited Belgians. "Salute the Major!" the Germans
shouted. What seeds of hate those words planted in those Belgian
souls the future will show, when they who sow the wind shall reap
the whirlwind.

That is the unseen horror of war; pictures can reveal the damage
wrought by shot and shell, fire and flood in the blasted cities and in
the fields of the dead. But nothing can ever show the irreparable
spiritual damage wrought to the human soul by hates, humiliations,
fears and undying animosities.




Chapter II

Sweating Under The German Third Degree