When a German wanted to buy something he got frigid politeness and attention—very frigid, telling politeness—from the clerk, which said:
“Beast! Invader! I do not ask you to buy, but as you ask, I sell; and as I sell I hate! I hate!! I hate!!!”
An officer entering a shop and seeing a picture of King Albert on the wall, said:
“The orders are to take that down!”
“But don’t you love your Kaiser?” asked the woman, who kept the shop.
“Certainly!”
“And I love my King!” was the answer. “I like to look at his picture just as much as you like to look at your Kaiser’s.”
“I had not thought of it in that way!” said the officer.
Indeed, it is very hard for any conqueror to think of it in that way. So the picture remained on the wall.
How many soldiers would it take to enforce the regulation that no Belgian was to wear the Belgian colours? Imagine thousands and thousands of Landsturm men moving about and plucking King Albert’s face or the black, yellow and red from Belgian buttonholes! No sooner would a buttonhole be cleared in front than the emblem would appear in a buttonhole in the rear. The Landsturm would face counter, flank, frontal, and rear attacks in a most amusing military manœuvre, which would put those middle-aged conquerors fearfully out of breath and be rare sport for the Belgians. You could not arrest the whole population and lead them off to jail; and if you bayoneted a few—which really those phlegmatic, comfortable old Landsturms would not have the heart to do for such a little thing—why, it would get into the American press and the Berlin Foreign Office would say: