it distinctly making efforts to crawl behind my spine. At my first
word of German his face relaxed. Ditto my stomach.

"You are an American," he said. "Well, good for that. I don't know
what we would have done were you a Belgian. Our orders are to
suffer no Belgian in this whole district."

Then he began an apologia which I heard repeated identically
again and again, as if it were learned by rote: "The Germans had
peacefully entered the land; boiling hot water was showered on
them from upper stories; they were shot at from houses and
hedges; many soldiers had thus been killed; the wells had been
poisoned. Such acts of treachery had necessarily brought
reprisals, etc., etc." It was the defense so regularly served up to
neutrals that we learned in time to reproduce it almost word for
word ourselves.

We all rise to the glorification of suffering little Belgium. Whatever
brief we may hold for her though, we ought not to picture even her
peasant people as a mild, meek and inoffensive lot. That isn't the
sort of stuff out of which her dogged and continuing resistance was
wrought. That isn't the mettle which for two weeks stopped up the
German tide before the Liege forts, giving the allies two weeks to
mobilize, and all they had asked the Belgians for was two or three
days of grace. But before the German avalanche hurled itself on
Liege it was this peasant population which bore the first brunt of
the battle.

A mistake in the branching roads brought this home to me. I
turned off in the direction of Verviers and was puzzled to see the