children, all the realities which they had left behind them. King
Albert and his Belgians, on the other hand, knew full well that, in
barring the invader's road, they were inevitably sacrificing their
homes, their wives and their children. Unlike the heroes of Sparta,
instead of possessing an imperative and vital interest in fighting,
they had everything to gain by not fighting and nothing to lose--save
honour. In the one scale were fire and the sword, ruin, massacre, the
infinite disaster which we see; in the other was that little word
honour, which also represents infinite things, but things which we do
not see, or which we must be very pure and very great to see quite
clearly. It has happened now and again in history that a man standing
higher than his fellows perceives what this word represents and
sacrifices his life and the life of those whom he loves to what he
perceives; and we have not without reason devoted to such men a sort
of cult that places them almost on a level with the gods. But what had
never yet happened--and I say this without fear of contradiction from
whosoever cares to search the memory of man--is that a whole people,
great and small, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, deliberately
immolated itself thus for the sake of an unseen thing.


2

And observe that we are not discussing one of those heroic resolutions
which are taken in a moment of enthusiasm, when man easily surpasses
himself, and which have not to be maintained when, forgetting his
intoxication, he lapses on the morrow to the dead level of his
everyday life. We are concerned with a resolution that has had to be
taken and maintained every morning, for now nearly four months, in the
midst of daily increasing distress and disaster. And not only has this