“In every case the principle which guided our general was that war must be made terrible to the civil population, so that it may sue for peace.”
And so on, and so on. Little Belgium—her gallant soldiers and her laborious peasants alike—has been mashed to a bloody pulp where the heel of the Prussian, shod with iron and with this damnable philosophy, has passed. And all the time the Belgians kept on asking in hope, in despair, “Where are the English? Where are the French?” Can you wonder if in the end they began to ask it in anger? Would it be a contradiction of all the laws of human nature to suppose that the panic terror which swept over the undefended land may have penetrated through the steel blinds of the forts of Namur, taken the heart out of the troops, impelled to surrender?
Let us examine our consciences. What have we done to show our appreciation of Belgium? There was the Royal message. There was Lord Sydenham’s noble letter in The Times which has been quoted everywhere. There is a subscription on foot. There is the promised loan. So far so good. But it is not enough. The stunned sense of having been delivered to Armageddon is noticeable everywhere, but especially in Flanders. The Flemish journals such as the Laatste Nieuws are full of violent anti-French, and in a less degree of anti-English articles. Germanophiles are harping on the kinship of the Flemish tongue, the Flemish stock and manners, to Germany. People sneer at the loan. My Flemish barber said to me on Sunday: “Oh! you are a fine people, you English. You look for business among the corpses. You will kindly lend us money at a good, whacking rate of interest. You philanthropists!”
What, then, is needed? War means blood and treasure. That faded phrase has been lit up suddenly, and we know what it means. The proof of blood the gallant soldiers of the two great Western Allies have already given at Mons and along the Sambre. I am convinced that the United Kingdom would be acting with fruitful generosity if Parliament were not to sanction a loan, but to vote a free grant.
Conjoined with that I hope and assume that Sir Edward Grey will renew the solemn pledges already given that, come what may, we mean to see Belgium through. The fear is general that the Germans may be allowed to get such a footing in Belgium as to have some plausible case in international law for proclaiming annexation. Let Parliament announce—and these dramatic cries and gestures of diplomacy are necessary—that so long as there is one shot left and one soldier to fire it, the Allies will never allow one foot of Belgian soil to remain under German domination.
What I have written is not inspired by even the least touch of discouragement. The breakneck advance on the German right seems to me not the stride of conquerors, but the mad hurry of columns flung forward in a frenzied gamble. Sursum corda! But let us remember that all alliances need delicate handling. Belgium is in agony. A stroke, swift and generous, such as suggested, will recall her, and all her people, to the glorious courage of Liége. Antwerp, and the field army now sheltered about it, have still a great part to play.
BELGIUM IN PEACE
WORK OF THREE GENERATIONS—COMPARISONS WITH IRELAND—SOME MEMORIES
It is an irony characteristic of this scurvy and disastrous time that Belgium should have first found her way to the general imagination of these countries through the waste redness of war. Peace was her whole being. For eighty years, trusting to the good faith of Europe, she had pursued an economical evolution without parallel. For national defence she had relied on that most solemn treaty of the nineteenth century. Even a little time ago, even since Agadir, her army, although unsuspectedly alert in technique, was still a jest of vaudeville. In temper and fibre, the Belgian people was the least militarist on the Continent. It is true that in recent years, wise foreseeing men of arms and men of politics, troubled by the audacity of Prussian apostles of conquest like Bernhardi, had begun to take alarm. Brialmont, the great engineer, had fortified Liége against Germany, and improved the defences of Namur against France. He had also, of course, planned the new entrenched position of Antwerp, the war-capital, and incidentally provided us with the first-class mystery of its subsequent easy fall. De Broqueville had carried a new army scheme which in due development would have given Belgium at need a million bayonets to defend her neutrality instead of three hundred thousand. King Leopold, couched like a super-spider behind his fine-drawn webs of diplomacy and finance, had made way for King Albert of the simpler gospel. But on the whole the temper of Belgium was not radically changed. When in 1912 the Kaiser, receiving General Heimburger, Governor of Liége, at Aix-la-Chapelle during manœuvres, expressed his astonishment at the improvement of the defences on the Belgo-German frontier, the latter had no stronger reply than: “Well, Majesty, we soldiers had a chance of getting something extra out of our Government, and we took it.” Neither your courteous and subtle Liégois, nor your genial and abundant citizen of Brussels, nor your four-square indomitable Flamand really believed that the treaty would ever be violated, or that he would ever be called on to die for his independence.
We know now how that treaty was respected. There will be pens, and to spare, to celebrate the heroic defence of the valley of the Meuse, the stubborn withdrawal of an outmatched but unbroken army, the tide of rapine and devastation that marched with the Treaty-Breakers, the driving into exile of a gallant people, the rosary of desolation, Liége, Visé, Louvain, Termonde, Namur, Ypres. For my part I should like to recall something of what Belgium was in peace, and what she did give or was in train of giving to the triumphs of civilisation.