on the Western front. To put it simply, they wish to avoid public
disturbance where there is no disturbance, to save money which is not
their money, to deport unemployed who are not unemployed, to oblige them
to work against their country instead of for their country, and in
Germany instead of in Belgium. They are doing everything but what they
want to do, they go anywhere but where they are going, and they say
anything but what they are thinking.

[Footnote 6: Letter of Cardinal Mercier to Governor von Bissing, Nov.
29th, 1916.]

[Footnote 7: Reply of the Deputies of Mons to Governor von Bissing, Nov.
27th, 1916.]

* * * * *

The other day I heard two people--two wizened city clerks--discussing
the war in the train. "When and how will the Germans be beaten?" asked
the first. The other shrugged his shoulders and declared solemnly,
while pulling at his pipe: "The Germans? They have been beaten a long
time ago! They were beaten when they set foot for the first time in
Belgium."

The remark is not new, and I daresay it was a reminiscence of some
sentence picked up in a newspaper or at a popular meeting. But whoever
uttered it for the first time was right. The case of Belgium has
uplifted the whole moral atmosphere of the struggle. Since the first
guns boomed around Liège and the first civilians were shot at Visé, a
war which might have been represented, to a certain extent, as a
conflict of interests, has become a conflict of principles. In a way,