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,
from all I heard, 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, characterizing 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
practise 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 the 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 Caesar for individual profit. Therein, Belgium
showed that she was not lacking in the moral spirit which, with the
schipperke'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