Nevertheless, evidences of distressing want increased, more especially among those too proud to ask alms, who, before the war, had been comfortably off.
During that summer and the following winter these once well-to-do and industrious citizens swelled the long lines of hunger-driven, ill-clad beings who, in rain, snow, or sunshine, stood for hours outside soup-kitchens to obtain the loaf of bread and jug of hot broth provided by charity. I think no visible sign of the country’s calamity was more painfully impressive than the sight of those silent, patient files of heterogeneous humanity, extending at certain hours along whole blocks of the city’s streets. Chiefly were they eloquent during the early dusk of winter, when, exposed to the blast of cold winds, to sleety rain, or penetrating fog, refined men and women, old and young, stood shivering side by side with the lowest inhabitants of rue Haute!
Some faces seen in those sad gatherings I shall never forget; faces of haggard, hopeless men, whose brave efforts to live honestly had been frustrated when success was almost attained; of wan women, whose husbands were dead or fighting in the trenches, whose children starved in a heatless home; old women and young, in whose eyes all human reasoning was eclipsed by an animal hunger—old men and young with that same anguish in their eyes, but with the hard and morose expression of embryo criminals lurking about their down-drooping, sullenly closed lips.
Ah, only those who lived in the midst of Belgium’s agony, who beheld a guiltless people verily crucified as recompense for their loyalty to honour and truth, can fully appreciate the wrong that was done them! Only those who saw with their own eyes the callous and inhuman rage of the invader’s earlier treatment,—when, confident of conquering a startled world with every diabolical device of destruction which mind could conceive, he ignored all laws, and deliberately aimed at crushing the very heart of this little land that had done no wrong,—only those can understand with what contempt, what loathing, we who did witness it came to look upon the ruler and the chiefs of that race whose history has been thus stained! For we saw these people starving while Germany was seizing their crops, their horses, cows, even the contents of dry-goods and other shops; shipping away the coal, for need of which so many perished during the cold winters; taking all fats, so that butter was unprocurable and milk too rare and dear for the poor to buy. We beheld the famished mothers struggling to keep their fading children alive on what charity could provide—so small a portion for each of the many thousands to be cared for!—the country’s youth stricken down with tuberculosis, and honest men driven to thieving and crime!
Indeed, the bare sight of those lines of hunger-wan creatures, stretching like black stains through the city, awoke depressing conjectures as to whether man’s intelligence was, after all, of a higher order than that of beasts, or merely the same limited capacity, artificially burnished! Through nearly two-thirds of the civilized world, life, beauty, and the harvests of ages were being ruthlessly and insanely destroyed; every principle of right, every element of higher sentiment scorned or ignored, in a senseless and hideous conflict between men—between the most exalted of all living creatures! Truth, the acknowledgment of a higher Power, and even kindred sympathy—manifested even by the lowest animals—were sacrificed day after day to an atrocious passion, costing millions of lives, billions of wealth, and a loss in treasures, in architecture, literature, and art such as a thousand years of labour can never replace!
What wonder that individuals did not escape the almost universal retrogression, and that, amid a people who had so nobly stood loyal to their ideals, dishonesty and contempt for law gradually developed from the festering and unalleviated wounds unjustly dealt them!
Signs of this inevitable consequence of war became apparent later, not only in Brussels, but throughout the whole of Belgium, as in Russia and (more or less) in all the involved nations.
War! who after this can ever again insult patriotism by relating it to the beat of drums and the roar of cannon? Every rational being who has witnessed its dire and degrading effects, even in so small a scene as the prison-capital of its vast tragic stage, must curse those philosophic minds of Germany who exerted their intellects to exalt intellect’s most horrible opponent, and sold their souls to the devil for a vain Emperor’s praise!
On them, as much as on him they flattered, must be laid the crime of a catastrophe that has menaced the very foundations of civilization. Where now can be seen the benefits of that “drastic medicine for the human race” which Treitschke informs us must always recur by the Almighty’s will? He pretends that war is elevating because the individual disappears before the great conception of the State, and that to check war would be “a perversion of morality,” in that it would abolish heroism! Is heroism more beautiful or advantageous when forced from a man on the battlefield, than when, of his own will, he proves it in a peaceful struggle to live righteously and let others live?