Our chauffeur, Baron de Maleingren them. But the Belgian, schooled in horror, faces a fuller horror yet when the guns of his friends are put on his bell-towers and birthplace, held by the invaders.

"My father and mother are inside the enemy lines," said a Belgian officer to me. as we were talking of the final victory. That is the ever-present thought of an army of boys whose parents are living in doomed houses back of German trenches. It is louder than the near guns, the noise of the guns to come that will tear at Bruges and level the Tower of St. Nicholas. That is what the future holds for the Belgian. He is only at the beginning of his loss. The victory of his cause is the death of his people. It is a sacrifice almost without a parallel.

And now a famous newspaper correspondent has returned to us from his motor trips to the front and his conversations with officers to tell us that he does not highly regard the fighting qualities of the Belgians. I think that statement is not the full truth, and I do not think it will be the estimate of history on the resistance of the Belgians. If the resistance had been regarded by the Germans as half-hearted, I do not believe their re

prisals on villages and towns and on the civilian population would have been so bitter. The burning and the murder that I saw them commit throughout the month of September, 1914, was the answer to a resistance unexpectedly firm and telling. At the skirmish of Melle on September 7, when fifteen hundred Belgians stood off three thousand Germans for several hours, I counted more dead Germans than dead Belgians. The German officer in whose hands we were as captives asked us with great particularity as to how many Belgians he had killed and wounded. While he was talking with us, his stretcher-bearers were moving up and down the road for his own casualties. At Alost the street fighting by Belgian troops behind fish-barrels, with sods of earth for barricade, was so stubborn that the Germans felt it to be necessary to mutilate civilian men, women, and children with the bayonets to express in terms at all adequate their re

times in September, the fighting of Belgians was vigorous enough to induce the Germans on entering the town to burn eleven hundred homes, house by house. If the Germans throughout their army had not possessed a high opinion of Belgian bravery and power of retardation, I doubt if they would have released so wide-spread and unique a savagery.

At Termonde, Alost, Balière, and a dozen other points in the Ghent sector, and, later, at Dixmude, Ramscappelle, Pervyse, Caeskerke, and the rest of the line of the Yser, my sight of Belgians has been that of troops as gallant as any. The

A Belgian worker in the "Océan Ambulance" and a British nurse

cowards have been occasional, the brave men many. I still have flashes of them as when I saw them. I saw a Belgian officer ride across a field within rifle range of the enemy to point out to us a market-cart in which lay three wounded. On his horse, he was a high figure, well silhouetted. Another day, I met a Belgian sergeant, with a tousled red head of hair, and with three medals for valor on his left breast.

"With my best feelings, William De Groote"

He kept going out into the middle of the road during the times when Germans were reported approaching, keeping his men under cover. If there was risk to be taken, he wanted first chance. My friend Dr. Van der Ghinst, of Cabour Hospital, captain in the Belgian army, mained three days in Dixmude under steady bombardment, caring unaided for his wounded in the Hospital of St. Jean, just at the Yser, and finally brought out thirty old men and women who had been frightened into helplessness by the flames and noise. Because he was needed in that direction, I saw him continue his walk past the point where fifty feet ahead of him a shell had just exploded. I saw him walk erect where even the renowned fighting men of an allied race were stooping and hiding, because he held his life as nothing when there were wounded to be rescued. For many weeks our group of Red Cross helpers had the privilege of working with Lieutenant Robert de Broqueville, son of the prime minister of Belgium. I saw him go into Dixmude on the afternoon when the town was leveled by German guns. He remained there under one of the heaviest bombardments of the war for three hours, picking up the wounded who lay on curbs and in cellars and under debris. The troops had been

Gaspar, a refugee baby ordered to evacuate the town, and it was a lonely job that this youngster of twenty-seven years carried on through that day.

Our corps has seen the Belgians every day for several months. We have seen several skirmishes and battles and many days of shell-fire, and the impression of watching perhaps twenty thousand Belgians in action is that of excellent fighting qualities, starred with bits of sheer daring as astonishing as that of any other races. With no country left to fight for, homes. either in ruin or soon to be shelled, relatives under an alien rule, the home Government on a foreign soil, still this second army, the first having been killed, fights on in good spirit. Every morning of the summer I have watched those of them that have been resting in La Panne, boys between eighteen and twenty-five, clad in fresh khaki, go riding down the poplar lane from La Panne to the trenches, the first twenty with bright silver bugles, their cheeks puffed and red with the blowing. Twelve months of wounds and wastage, wet trenches and tinned food, and still they go out with hope.

gium, from the cardinal to the humblest curé, has played the man. On the front line near Pervyse, where my wife lived for three months, a priest has remained through the daily shell-fire to administer last rites to his dying soldiers and to comfort the fighting men. Just before leaving Flanders, I called on the sisters in the convent school of Furnes. They were still cheery and busy in their care of sick and wounded civilians. Every few days the Germans shell the town from seven miles away, but the sisters will continue there through the coming months as through the last year. The spirit of the best of the race is spoken in what King Albert said recently in an unpublished conversation to the gentlemen of the English mission:

"The English will cease fighting before the Belgians. If there is talk of yielding,

shown good heart. Breaking the silence

of Rome, the splendid priesthood of Bel

us."

That was a playful way of saying that

there will be no yielding by any of the Western Allies. The truth is still as true as it was at Liège that the Belgians held up the enemy till France was ready to receive them. And the price Belgium paid for that resistance was the massacre of women and children and the house-to-house burning of homes.

Since rendering that service for all time to France and England, through sixteen months of such a life as exiles know the Belgians have fought on doggedly, recovering from the misery of the Antwerp retreat, and showing a resilience of spirit equaled only by the Fusiliers Marins of France. One afternoon in late June my friend Robert Toms, who came four thousand miles to lend a hand with the wounded, was sitting on the beach at La Panne, watching the soldiers swimming in the channel. Suddenly he called to me, and aimed his camera. There on the sand in the sunlight the Belgian army was changing its clothes. The faithful suits of blue, rained on and trench-worn, were being tossed into great heaps on the beach, and brand-new yellow khaki, clothes and cap, was buckled on. It was a transformation. We had learned to know that army, and their uniform had grown familiar and pleasant to us. The dirt, ground in till it

became part of the texture; the worn cloth, shapeless, but yet molded to the man by long association-all was an expression of the stocky little soldier inside. The new khaki hung slack. The caps were too large for Flemish heads. To us, watching the change, it was the loss of the last possession that connected them with their past; with homes and country gone, now the very clothing that had covered them through famous fights was shuffled off. It was as if the Belgian army had been swallowed up in the sea at our feet, like Pharaoh's phalanx, and up from the beach to the barracks scuffled an imitation English corps, spattering their ill-fitting garments with jest, writing and singing a poem in praise. This is the chorus which a Belgian soldier, clad in his fresh yellow, sang to us as we grouped around him on a sand-dune:

"Regardez nos p'tits soldats,
Ils ont l'air d'être un peu là,
Habiller.

D'la tête jusquaux pieds
En khaki, en khaki,
Ils sont contents de servir,
Mais non pas de mourir,
Et cela c'est parce que on leur a mis,
En quelque sorte, la t'nue khaki."