I was still in Ghent when the Germans moved up to the suburbs.
"I can put my artillery on Ghent," said the German officer to the American vice-consul.
That talk is typical of the tone of voice used to Belgians: threat backed by murder.
The whole policy of the Germans of late is to treat the Belgian matter as a thing accomplished.
"It is over. Let bygones be bygones."
It is a process like the trapping of an innocent woman, and when she is trapped, saying,
"Now you are compromised, anyway, so you had better submit."
A friend of mine who remained in Ghent after the German occupation, had German officers billetted in his home. Daily, industriously, they said to him that the English had been poor friends of his country, that they had been late in coming to the rescue. Germany was the friend, not England. In the homes throughout Belgium, these unbidden guests are claiming slavery is a beneficent institution, that it is better to be ruled by the German military, and made efficient for German ends, than to continue a free people.
For a year, our Red Cross Corps worked under the direction and authority of the Belgian prime minister, Baron de Broqueville. The prime minister in the name of his government has sent to this country an official protest against the new tax levied by the Germans on his people. The total tax for the German occupation amounts to $192,000,000. He writes:
"The German military occupation during the last fifteen months has entirely prevented all foreign trade, has paralyzed industrial activity, and has reduced the majority of the laboring classes to enforced idleness. Upon the impoverished Belgian population whom Germany has unjustly attacked, upon whom she has brought want and distress, who have been barely saved from starvation by the importation of food which Germany should have provided—upon this population, Germany now imposes a new tax, equal in amount to the enormous tax she has already imposed and is regularly collecting."