The very same thing was repeated to me by hundreds of people while I was in Belgium.
A lady who ten or twelve years since has spent every winter in her beautiful villa in Bordighera, and who, for the first time, did not this year leave Brussels, where she is managing an emergency hospital for children, said to me: "When you go back to England, please tell the English that we Belgians do not want to be judged by those of us who are now in London enjoying themselves in theatres and night clubs. What they spend in an evening would be sufficient to keep one of our starving families for a week. We know, from some refugees who have come back, how even a number of young men are enjoying in England an idle life and a free and large hospitality. Such people should not be surprised if, when the war is over and they are back in Belgium, they are considered as outcasts. We shall not have any room for them in our society. They have deserted Belgium when she was most in need of them; they have made us look like cowards in the eyes of the country which has been helping us most gallantly, and they will not be surprised, I think, to be ostracised by the rest of their countryfolk.
"This war," continued the lady, who bears one of the oldest and best names of Belgium, "this war has produced in our country a new form of socialism—a socialism which has nothing in common with the theories of Bebel or Marx, but which seems to derive its origin from the Commandments of the Bible.
"I know of ladies who would not, before the war, have thought it in themselves to do any such useful work as looking after entire families of refugees; others have been converted by the circumstances of war into efficient sick nurses, relief organisers, and even into cooks for our kitchens for the poor. I know of families who would have shivered at the idea of having a stranger in their home, especially if that stranger happened to be of low class, who are now giving hospitality to whole families; I know of middle-aged gentlemen who almost every week risk their lives to go into Holland to get letters from soldiers fighting at the front and to bring back hope to hundreds of families. These and our soldiers are the true Belgians."
Poor people often told me the same thing. "Do you think we are of the kind to allow the Germans to turn us out of our own houses?" a little Belgian woman asked me. She was living with her five children in a little ruined cottage near Liége, while her husband was fighting at the front. A piece of shell remained jutting from a wall of the little house, which had newspapers at the windows instead of glass.
"I did not bother to have new glass put in just yet," said the little woman, smiling; "first of all because we have no money to spare, and also because we expect to see more fighting soon; at least, we hope so. We know it will be hell when the Germans are pushed back, but we are waiting anxiously for that moment. Ah! sir, this is not life; this is worse than all being dead," she ended, kissing the fair head of her last-born—born since the Germans came.
In many, many towns did I hear this very same hope expressed by all kinds and conditions of people and in the same manner: "When are we going to get rid of them?"
"Get rid of them" does not mean only that the Belgians desire to reassume the dignity of a free nation, have their own rulers, nor see any more pointed helmets, but also that they want to be able to start business again, to live, to eat, to be free in every sense of the word.
The subject of a country which has not suffered invasion for centuries and centuries can hardly realise what all this means.
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