Out of the station came a score of German soldiers returning from the trenches, on their way to barracks to regain strength so that they could bear the ordeal of standing in icy water again. They were not the kind exhibited on press tours to illustrate the “vigour of our indomitable army.” Eyelids drooped over hollow eye-sockets; sore, numbed feet moved like feet which are asleep in their vain effort to keep step. Sensitiveness to surroundings, almost to existence, seemed to have been lost.
One was a corporal, young, tall, and full-bearded. He might have been handsome if he had not been so haggard. He gave the lead to the others; he seemed to know where they were going, and they shuffled on after him in dogged painfulness. Four months ago that corporal, with the spring of the energy of youth when the war was young, was perhaps in the green column that went through the streets of Brussels in the thunderous beat of their regular tread on the way to Paris. The group was an object lesson in how much the victor must suffer in war in order to make his victim suffer.
Some officers were at breakfast, too. Mostly they were reservists; mostly bespectacled, with middle age swelling their girth and hollowing their chests, but sturdy enough to apply the regulations made for conduct of the conquered. While stronger men were under shell-fire at the front, they were under the fire of Belgian hate as relentless as their own hate of England. You saw them always in the good restaurants, but never in the company of Belgians, these ostracised rulers. In four months they had made no friends; at least, no friends who would appear with them in public. A few thousand guards in Belgium in the companionship of conquest and seven million Belgians in the companionship of a common helplessness! Bayonets may make a man silent, but they cannot stop his thinking.
At the breakfast table on that Christmas morning in London, Paris, or Berlin the patriot could find the kind of news that he liked. His racial and national predilections and animosities were solaced. If there were good news it was “played up”; if there were bad news, it was not published, or it was explained. L’Écho Belge and L’Indépendence Belge, and all the Brussels papers were either out of business or being issued as single sheets in Holland and England.
The Belgian, keenest of all the peoples at war for news, having less occupation to keep his mind off the war, must read the newspapers established under German auspices, which fed him with the pabulum that German chefs provided, reflective of the stumbling degeneracy of England, French weariness of the war, Russian clumsiness, and the invincibility of Germany. If an Englishman had to read German, or a German English, newspapers every morning he might have understood how the Belgian felt.
Those who had sons or fathers or husbands in the Belgian army could not send or receive letters, let alone presents. Families scattered in different parts of Belgium could not hold reunions. But at mass I saw a Belgian standard in the centre of the church. That flag was proscribed, but the priests knew it was safe in that sacred place and the worshippers might feast their eyes on it as they said their aves.
A Bavarian soldier came in softly and stood a little apart from others, many in mourning, at the rear, a man who was of the same faith as the Belgians and who crossed himself with the others in the house of brotherly love. He would go outside to obey orders; and the others to nurse their hate of him and his race. This private in his faded green, bowing his head before that flag in the shadows of the nave, was war-sick, as most soldiers were; and the Belgians were heartsick. They had the one solace in common. But if you had suggested to him to give up Belgium, his answer would have been that of the other Germans: “Not after all we have suffered to take it!” Christians have a peculiar way of applying Christianity. Yet if it were not for Christianity and that infernal thing called the world’s opinion, which did not exist in the days of Cæsar and the Belgii, the Belgians might have been worse off than they were. More of them might have been dead. When they were saying, “Give us this day our daily bread” they were thinking, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” if ever their turn came.
A satirist might have repeated the apocryphal naïveté of Marie Antoinette, who asked why the people wanted bread when they could buy such nice cakes for a sou. For all the patisseries were open. Brussels is famous for its French pastry. With a store of preserves, why shouldn’t the bakeshops go on making tarts with heavy crusts of the brown flour, when war had not robbed the bakers of their art? It gave work to them; it helped the shops to keep open and make a show of normality. But I noticed that they were doing little business. Stocks were small and bravely displayed. Only the rich could afford such luxuries, which in ordinary times were what ice cream cones are to us. Even the jewellery shops were open, with diamond rings flashing in the windows.
“You must pay rent; you don’t want to discharge your employees,” said a jeweller. “There is no place to go except your shop. If you closed it would look as if you were afraid of the Germans. It would make you blue and the people in the street blue. One tries to go through the motions of normal existence, anyway. But, of course, you don’t sell anything. This week I have repaired a locket which carried the portrait of a soldier at the front and I’ve put a mainspring in a watch. I’ll warrant that is more than some of my competitors have done.”
Swing around the circle in Brussels of a winter’s morning and look at the only crowds that the Germans allow to gather, and any doubt that Belgium would have gone hungry if she had not received provisions from the outside was dispelled. Whenever I think of a bread line again I shall see the faces of a Belgian bread line. They blot out the memory of those at home, where men are free to go and come; where war has not robbed the thrifty of food.