The Ways of War

by Tom Kettle

One does not need to say anything of her treasury of art; her painters from Van Eyck to the enigmatic madness of Wierbz; her incomparable belfries, hôtels de ville and halles, testifying still to the richest municipal life of the middle ages; her cathedrals; of Bruges of the three hundred bridges—one of which the present writer has cause to remember as he was all but drowned under it—of the Castle of Bouillon, from which Godefroid went to the Holy Land to capture Jerusalem and to refuse to wear a crown of gold where his Saviour had worn a crown of thorns. Nor is there need to say anything of the ambiguous splendour of such places as Ostend, in summer a Paradise at once of children and of those no longer conspicuously childlike. Nor again, of the remote beauty and clean winds of the Ardennes. It is of the life that the Belgian nation, working on its environment, had made for itself in three generations of guaranteed peace, that I like, on this anniversary, to recall some sort of inadequate picture.

Belgium was the most thickly peopled state in Europe. In the Meuse valley, from Liége to Seraing, she possessed the most extensive manufacturing area of its size in the world, surpassing Lancashire and Massachusetts. She had a greater length of railway line per square mile than any other country in Europe. She produced a greater value of manufactured goods per capita than either of her great neighbours, France and Germany, and had a larger per capita foreign trade. Her agriculture was so enterprising that it would have been difficult to find an untilled rood or a rood wasted on a fence, in all Flanders. Such production of wealth had generated on a large scale all the social problems characteristic of our time; and so earnest and loyal was she in her attempt to reach solutions that French writers have been found to call her, not the “cockpit,” but the “social laboratory” of Europe. What is of special interest to us is that, despite the ablest Socialist and Liberal criticism, Belgium had maintained in power for a generation a Catholic Government, and was working out her problems on the basis of Catholic individualism. In all aspects to know her was for a citizen of any small nation a tonic and an inspiration. She was no Paradise assuredly; she had failed in some points in which we have succeeded, but it was impossible to look into any department of her activity without learning something worth the trouble. When it is remembered that, on the one hand, she had a duality of language, and on the other, that through flax she came into intimate touch with North-east Ulster, the interest of her life for an Irishman is obviously enhanced.

Coal, “the bread of manufacturing industry,” was, of course, the basis of Belgian prosperity. In her black country, the “borinage” centred on Mons. She employed 150,000 miners, raised 24,000,000 tons of coal per annum, and consumed almost that quantity in her factories and homes. I have an eerie recollection of climbing the belfry of Mons some years ago, and picking out, or persuading myself that I had succeeded in picking out, the battlefields about it: Malplaquet, Jemappes, Fontenoy, Ligny. A Frenchman on the same errand asked dreamily: “When will there be another?” Alas! we can answer that question now: the “borinage” has taken another full draught of Irish blood.

This precious natural possession of coal Belgium certainly utilises to the full. Her mining country, unhappily, had all the sordor that seems inseparable from that enterprise. Mons had an admirable School of Commerce and Industry. Its watchword was expansion and expatriation. The device may sound strange in our ears; what it means to convey, of course, is that Belgium must find markets abroad. She trains her sons not to be lost to her, but to go abroad and open new fields of conquest for her industries. There was also an unusual dispensary which treated the miners for an endemic complaint called “miner’s worm,” or more learnedly, ankylostomiasis.

The metal industries, of course, centre on Liége. There was no more wonderful sight, not in Pittsburg, not on the Clyde, than the pillars of smoke and the pillars of fire which stream upwards from the steel foundries and factories along the Meuse. It was a singular pride to remember that the whole first impulsion of that great industry proceeded from the brain of an Irishman, John Cockerill. It is known that until 1825, it was, under English law, a criminal offence, punishable by transportation, for a skilled workman to emigrate to a foreign country, or for anyone to export machinery or plans. William Cockerill, however, took the risk, went first to Sweden, where he was ill received, and afterwards to Verviers. He founded the machine woollen industry of Verviers, and his son John, in due course, founded the metal industry of Liége and its belt of towns. The lives of the Cockerills would make a romantic chapter: I am sorry that I have not been able to come on much biographical matter. Obtaining a good deal more iron ore, chiefly from her neighbour, Luxembourg, than she produced herself, Belgium, before the war, reached an annual output of about a million and a half tons each of pig-iron and steel. She made all sorts of machinery and had an immense export of all. I have a vivid memory of a visit to the great Fabrique Nationale (F.N.) at Herstal. The figures of production per day were given to us as something like 800 Browning automatic pistols, 500 Mauser rifles, 400 fowling-pieces, 150 bicycles, 50 motor-bicycles and 10 motor-cars. These two latter items had probably greatly increased. Your guide took great pleasure in dazing you with the degree of specialisation practised. Thus it took 350 special machines or tools to make a Browning, and something like 700 to make a Mauser. If all the plant of Herstal and its neighbouring towns is in German hands, it will be seen that their invasion of Belgium gave them something more even than an opportunity of running murder as a national pastime.

Ghent as a textile city owes its importance mainly to cotton. But both there and at Courtrai linen possessed a keener interest for an Irishman. Ghent possesses the two largest linen-spinning installations in the world. Between these two places and North-east Ireland there was the closest intercourse, and it would have been an interesting exercise to have made a detailed study of the Ulster colony that lived there. Cases were not unknown of the dourest North of Ireland buyers intermarrying with Flemish Catholic families, and ultimately suffering absorption. Lace was, of course, a notable product. It will be remembered that certain enquiries disclosed the fact some years ago that Belgian skill was equal to the fabrication, not only of Brussels and Malines, but also of “Limerick” and “Carrickmacross” lace, chiefly for the American market.

Of the progressive character of agriculture some indication has been given. It is curious that whilst South Germany, Denmark, and even Hungary have been ransacked for models by various Irish propagandists, Belgian agriculture, which was not inferior either in technique or in organisation, was almost ignored. Much of the land is, as with us, rather a manufactured article than a natural product; rich polders stolen from the sea, or sand made fertile by irrigation. If one were to touch on any special point in agriculture, it would be the complete success which Belgium had made of the beet. She produced all her own sugar, including that used in her great brewing industry, and exported great quantities as well.

The productive apparatus of Belgium was assuredly rich and varied. And each industry fed and maintained itself by an educational institute of the first order. Mons has been mentioned. There was also the University of Liége, mainly an engineering University; the great Commercial School of Antwerp, the Agricultural Laboratories at Louvain and Ghent, the Higher School of Textiles at Verviers, and so on. And all this was done at “the cross-roads of Europe,” under the fire of French and German competition, without recourse to any really protectionist tariffs.

But however dominant a factor intensity of production may be, it is rather the attitude of a people towards the problems of distribution that marks it out as, in a human point of view, a success or a failure: Belgium was beyond doubt a success. Not that she had abolished poverty: there was poverty more drab and hopeless in some parts of her countryside than anything of our congested districts. There was the old plague of cheap gin almost everywhere.

But she was facing her social task in the right temper. The Belgian in economic affairs is by nature a realist and an appeasable man. In the number of days per worker lost through labour disputes, Belgium was easily at the foot of the list of industrial countries. “The Social Question,” they repeat after Colins, “is to be settled by science, not by violence.” Time and again the central labour committees, Socialist as well as Catholics, have suppressed strikes inaugurated by their own members. This realism of outlook gave you in Belgium the supreme type of business-like politics. The great Socialist co-operatives of Brussels and Ghent—the “Maison du Peuple” and the “Voormit”—starting from ludicrously small beginnings, bestrode the world of workers like a Colossus. If you were an associate, they sold you your clothes, boots, bread, meat, beer, furniture, books, amusements—everything you consumed—and managed your business as well as gave you free their propagandist papers, and an annual bonus out of the profits, in order to sweeten the principles proposed. The smaller Catholic organisations in the cities acted on similar lines. In the country the great Catholic “Boerenbond,” or Land League, with its headquarters at Louvain, applied the same formula to the buying and selling of agricultural necessaries on a great scale. Such a phenomenon as empty extremism could not arise.