III—A BELGIAN MOTHER AND HER BABE
Ingelmünster, November, 1914.
In Fosses, near Namur, I happened to be the only physician in the place, as all the doctors had fled. So it came about that the first prescriptions that I have ever written were in the French language. It was rather odd, but it went. The sixty-five-year-old apothecary and I have opened many good bottles of Burgundy in his bachelor apartment while he told of his student days in Geneva and Brussels; I of Germany and its glories.
One time I was called to a village an hour distant to the help of a young mother. And it may have presented a curious and unforgettable spectacle to the Belgian peasants when after two hours' hard work the "jeune docteur Allemand," shirt-sleeved, armed and girt with a woman's apron, presented the young mother with a tiny, howling Belgian, while outside the guns thundered in the distance, killing perhaps hundreds and hundreds of other Belgians.
Willy Treller.
(Translations by Julian Bindley Freedman for the New York Tribune.)
BAITING THE BOCHE—THE WIT OF THE BELGIANS
Told by W. F. Martindale