KING ALBERT'S ANSWER TO THE POPE
"With him who broke his word, devastated my country, burned my villages, destroyed my towns, desecrated my churches, and murdered my people, I will not make peace before he is expelled from my country and punished for his crimes."
The war has been singularly barren of heroic figures, perhaps because the magnitude of the events has called forth such a multitude of individually heroic acts that no one can be placed before the rest; yet, when this greatest phase of history comes to be written down with historic perspective, one figure—that of King Albert of Belgium—will stand as that of a twentieth-century Bayard, a great knight without fear and without reproach.
Action on such far-flung lines as those of the European conflict has called for no great leaders in the sense in which that phrase has applied to previous wars; no Napoleon has arisen, though William Hohenzollern has aspired to Napoleonic dignity; war has become more mechanical, more a matter of mathematics—and the barbarians of Germany have made it more horrible. But, as if to accentuate German brutality and crime, this figure of King Albert stands emblematic of the virtues in which civilization is rooted; to the broken word of Germany it opposes untarnished honour; to the treacherous spirit of Germany it opposes inviolable truth; to the relentless selfishness of Germany it opposes the vicarious sacrifice of self, of a whole country and nation for the sake of a principle. And, in later days, men will remember how this truly great king held steadfastly to the little portion of his kingdom that the invasion left him; how he remained to inspirit his men by noble example, stubbornly rejecting peace without honour, and holding, when all else was wrecked, to the remnants of that army which saved Europe in the gateway of Liége. Amid violation, desecration, and destruction, Albert of Belgium has won imperishable fame.
E. CHARLES VIVIAN.
The Gas Fiend
