to the trenches, those out of the trenches going back to their billets
for twenty-four hours' rest, and the men who had been on rest moving
up as pickets or reserves. Even in the darkness it was easy to tell
the rested men from the ones newly relieved. Here were mostly
Belgians, and the little Belgian soldier is a cheery soul. He asks
very little, is never surly. A little food, a little sleep--on straw,
in a stable or a church--and he is happy again. Over and over, as I
saw the Belgian Army, I was impressed with its cheerfulness under
unparalleled conditions.

Most of them have been fighting since Liege. Of a hundred and fifty
thousand men only fifty thousand remain. Their ration is meagre
compared with the English and the French, their clothing worn and
ragged. They are holding the inundated district between Nieuport and
Dixmude, a region of constant struggle for water-soaked trenches,
where outposts at the time I was there were being fought for through
lakes of icy water filled with barbed wire, where their wounded fall
and drown. And yet they are inveterately cheerful. A brave lot, the
Belgian soldiers, brave and uncomplaining! It is no wonder that the
King of Belgium loves them, and that his eyes are tragic as he looks
at them.

La Panne at last, a straggling little town of one street and rows of
villas overlooking the sea. La Panne, with the guns of Nieuport
constantly in one's ears, and the low, red flash of them along the
sandy beach; with ambulances bringing in their wounded now that night
covers their movements; with English gunboats close to the shore and a
searchlight playing over the sea. La Panne, with just over the sand
dunes the beginning of that long line of trenches that extends south
and east and south again, four hundred and fifty miles of death.