V

PRO PATRIA: I[2]


1

I need not here recall the events that hurled Belgium into the depths
of distress most glorious where she is struggling to-day. She has been
punished as never nation was punished for doing her duty as never
nation did before. She saved the world while knowing that she could
not be saved. She saved it by flinging herself in the path of the
oncoming barbarians, by allowing herself to be trampled to death in
order to give the defenders of justice time, not to rescue her, for
she was well aware that rescue could not come in time, but to collect
the forces needed to save our Latin civilization from the greatest
danger that has ever threatened it. She has thus done this
civilization, which is the only one whereunder the majority of men are
willing or able to live, a service exactly similar to that which
Greece, at the time of the great Asiatic invasions, rendered to the
mother of this civilization. But, while the service is similar, the
act surpasses all comparison. We may ransack history in vain for aught
to approach it in grandeur. The magnificent sacrifice at Thermopylæ,
which is perhaps the noblest action in the annals of war, is illumined
with an equally heroic but less ideal light, for it was less
disinterested and more material. Leonidas and his three hundred
Spartans were in fact defending their homes, their wives, their