Above and beyond everything he looks young, this man; young with a youth that will never desert him, as though he holds within himself "the secrets of ever-recurring spring."
On we fly.
We are right inside the Belgian lines now; the Belgian soldiers are all around us, brave, wonderful "Petits Belges!"
They always speak of themselves like that, the Belgian Army: "Les Petits Belges!"
Perhaps the fact that they have proved themselves heroes of an immortality that every race will love and bow down to in ages to come, makes these blue-coated men thus lightly refer to themselves, with that inimitable flash of the Belgian smile, as "little Belgians."
For never before was the Belgian Army greater than it is to-day, with its numbers depleted, its territory wrested from it, its homes ruined, its loved ones scattered far and wide in strange lands.
Like John Brown's Army it "still goes fighting on," though many of its uniforms, battered and stained with the blood and mud and powder of one campaign after another, are so ragged as to be almost in pieces.
"We are no longer chic!"
A Belgian Captain says it with a grin, as he chats to us at a halt where we shew our passes.
He flaps his hands in his pockets of his ragged overcoat and smiles.