They had heard the sound of the guns at Dixmude the night before. Didn't the sound seem a little nearer? No. The wind from that direction was stronger. When? When would the Allies come?
X
The Future Of Belgium
In former days the traveller hardly thought of Belgium as possessing patriotic homogeneity. It was a land of two languages, French and Flemish. He was puzzled to meet people who looked like well-to-do mechanics, artisans, or peasants and find that they could not answer a simple question in French. This explained why a people so close to France, though they made Brussels a little Paris, would not join the French family and enter into the spirit and body of that great civilization on their borders, whose language was that of their own literature. Belgium seemed to have no character. Its nationality was the artificial product of European politics; a buffer divided in itself, which would be neither French, nor German, nor definitely Belgian.
In later times Belgium had prospered enormously. It had developed the resources of the Congo in a way that had aroused a storm of criticism. Old King Leopold made the most of his neutral position to gain advantages which no one of the great Powers might enjoy because of jealousies. The International Sleeping Car Company was Belgian and Belgian capitalists secured concessions here and there, wherever the small tradesman might slip into openings suitable to his size. Leopold was not above crumbs; he made them profitable; he liked to make money; and Belgians liked to make money.
Her defence guaranteed by neutrality, Belgium need have no thought except of thrift. Her ideals were those of prosperity. No ambition of national expansion stirred her imagination as Germany's was stirred; there was no fire in her soul as in that of France in apprehension of the day when she would have to fight for her life against Germany; no national cause to harden the sinews of patriotism. The immensity of her urban population contributed its effect in depriving her of the sterner stuff of which warriors are made. Success meant more comforts and luxuries. In towns like Brussels and Antwerp this doubtless had its effect on the moralities, which were hardly of the New England Puritan standard. She had a small standing army; a militia system in the process of reform against the conviction of the majority, unlike that of the Swiss mountaineers, that Belgium would never have any need for soldiers.
If militarism means conscription as it exists in France and Germany, then militarism has improved the physique of races in an age when people are leaving the land for the factory. The prospect of battle's test unquestionably develops in a people certain sturdy qualities which can and ought to be developed in some other way than with the prospect of spending money for shells to kill people.
With the world making every Belgian man a hero and the unknowing convinced that a citizen soldiery at Liege—defended by the Belgian standing army—had rushed from their homes with rifles and beaten German infantry, it is right to repeat that the schipperke spirit was not universal, that at no time had Belgium more than a hundred thousand men under arms, and that on the Dixmude line she maintained never more than eighty thousand men out of a population of seven millions, which should yield from seven hundred thousand to a million; while they lost a good deal of sympathy both in England and in France, from all I heard, through the number of able-bodied refugees who were disinclined to serve. It was a mistaken idealism that swept over the world, early in the war, characterizing a whole nation with the gallantry of its young king and his little army.
The spirit of the Boers or of the Minute Men at Lexington was not in the Belgian people. It could not be from their very situation and method of life. They did not believe in war; they did not expect to practise war; but war came to them out of the still blue heavens as it came to the prosperous Incas of Peru.
Where one was wrong was in the expectation that her bankers and capitalists—an aristocracy of money not given to the simple life—and her manufacturers, artisans, and traders, if not her peasants, would soon make truce with Caesar for individual profit. Therein, Belgium showed that she was not lacking in the moral spirit which, with the schipperke's, became a fighting spirit. It seemed as if the metal of many Belgians, struck to a white heat in the furnace of war, had cooled under German occupation to the tempered steel of a new nationalism.
When you travelled over Belgium after it was pacified, the logic of German methods became clear. What was haphazard in their reign of terror was due to the inevitable excesses of a soldiery taking the calculated redress ordered by superiors as licence in the first red passion of war to a war-mad nation, which was sullen because Belgians had not given up the keys of the gate to France.