The art of Belgian painters is world famous and graces the finest galleries in both Europe and America. Many of the paintings of Rubens and other master artists are almost priceless. As lace makers the women of Belgium are famous the world around. From early morning until late at night these toilers sit in their low chairs and the skill with which they shoot the little thread-bobbins back and forth across the cushions is indescribable. Neither men nor women in Belgium are overly much given to amusements. They work with all their might, but when the national holidays come they abandon themselves to the amusements for the moment and have a most enjoyable time.
While many are illiterate, the Belgians are giving much attention to schools these times. Even while they were guests of France, with their government located at Havre, they established twenty-four schools for the children and a single woman had more than five thousand pupils under her care and direction. They also established large schools at that place for disabled soldiers and many of them became not only skilled workers, but inventors. One of these disabled men invented a process to make artificial limbs out of waste paper and it is said that these limbs are the best made. Many of these legless soldiers with artificial limbs can walk so well that one would never imagine that they had been wounded.
Providence seems to have made Belgium the great battlefield of Europe. Nearly every great general of European history has fought on Belgian soil. When the Spaniards looted Belgian cities and set up the inquisition it seemed as though the very imps of the lower regions were turned loose. I have looked upon many of the instruments of torture that can still be seen in European museums and they were even more terrible than anything used in the late war. Again and again has Belgian soil been drenched with blood. Only a little more than one hundred years ago the hosts of Napoleon and Wellington decided the destiny of nations at the battle of Waterloo.
Here was this great hive of industry, with the wheels of her factories humming and her people happy, industrious and contented up to that fateful day in August, 1914. No people were more loyal to their ideals, more trustful of others or more anxious to serve humanity than these honest-hearted, hard-working people. They felt secure, for the treaty which protected them had been signed by all the nations around them. This treaty had been held sacred for more than eighty years and was to last as long as time. It had held them secure during the great crisis of 1870-1871 and when the war cloud gathered in Austria and Servia they felt secure.
Soon, however, it became plain that Germany had been planning for years to crush this little country like an egg shell. Four double-track lines of railway had been built up to the Belgian border. Miles of concrete platforms had been built, but no suspicions had been aroused. When the enemy started across Belgium he had better maps of the country than any Belgian had ever seen. At once many Germans in Belgium left their homes silently and the surprise of Belgian neighbors can be better imagined than described when they saw their old friends coming back with the enemy's army. They had been spies all these years.
When the great siege guns were brought from their hiding places in the Krupp factories into Belgium, the foundations for them were already there. These guns were so heavy that the London Times stated that it took thirteen traction engines to pull a single one of them. They threw shells that weighed almost a ton twenty miles and a single one of them would destroy a building as large as our own national capital building in Washington. So accurately had these foundations been placed that scarcely a single shell was wasted.
It is said that years ago some so-called German university men asked the Belgian Government for permission to study the geology of their country. This permission was granted freely. But these were mostly military men and spent months investigating and surveying and marking certain places. Once more these men came to the Belgian Government stating that they wished to study the formation of rocks and soil which would necessitate digging into the earth and as they did not wish to be bothered by the public, asked permission to build barricades around the places where they worked. Their request was granted instantly and by this means they built the foundations for these great siege guns.
Finally the fateful day came. Germany told Belgium that she intended going across her territory anyway and if she would allow this to be done peaceably she would pay her double price for everything destroyed; that it would be to her best interests to allow this and that she might have twelve hours to think it over. In the darkest hours of the war, when it seemed that the Germans would be victorious, I heard the Belgian minister in Washington say in an address: "Yes, they gave us twelve hours to decide, but they gave us eleven hours and fifty-nine minutes too much time." As long as time, it will be remembered to the glory of Belgium that she told Germany instantly to stay upon her own territory; that the world would never say that Belgium went back upon her word; that if war came she would remain neutral as in the treaty she had agreed to do. The minister referred to above also said in this darkest hour: "They now have all but three hundred square miles of our territory, but what will it profit a man though he gain the whole world and lose his own soul.' We have lost our property, but we have saved our soul, and if it were to do over again we would do exactly the same thing."
Brave little Belgium! For four and one half years she stood bleeding and with her head bowed in sorrow! Her homes were destroyed, her old men and women shot down like dogs, her women outraged, her youths and maidens enslaved, her little children misused, but Belgium still lives, and always will live in the hearts of men and women wherever civilization is known! Her King and Queen were brave and heroic through all those horrible times; her church leaders could not be bought or sold, and her common people were true as steel. As a nation she blundered in days agone, but what nation has not made mistakes? Belgium saved democracy for a thousand years and is today the nation that the whole world honors.