2. "By the Waters of Babylon"

VI. The Olive Branch

Through the Iron Bars




I.

THE PRISON GATES.


The English-speaking public is generally well informed concerning the
part played in the war by the Belgian troops. The resistance of our
small field army at Liège, before Antwerp, and on the Yser has been
praised and is still being praised wherever the tale runs. This is easy
enough to understand. The fact that those 100,000 men should have been
able to hold so long in check the forces of the first military Empire in
Europe, and that a great number of them, helped by new contingents of
recruits and led by their young King, should still be fighting on their
native soil, must appeal strongly to the imagination.

If it be told how the new Belgian army, reorganised and re-equipped
after the terrible ordeal on the Yser, is at the present moment much
stronger than at the beginning of the war, how it has been able lately
to extend its front in Flanders, and how some of its units have rendered
valuable help to the cause of the Allies in East Africa and even in
Galicia, the story sounds like a fairy tale. There is, in the history of