ow invasion till you have felt it. However wise, however able
the conquerors, life under them is a living death. True, the farmer's
property was untouched, but his liberty was gone. If you, a well-
behaved citizen, have ever been arrested and marched through the
streets of your home town by a policeman, how did you like it? Give
the policeman a rifle and a fixed bayonet and a full cartridge-box and
transform him into a foreigner and the experience would not be any
more pleasant.

That farmer could not go to the next town without the permission of
the sentries. He could not even mail a letter to his son who was in the
trenches with the Allies. The Germans had taken his horse; theirs the
power to take anything he had--the power of the bayonet. If he
wanted to send his produce to a foreign market, if he wanted to buy
food in a foreign market, the British naval blockade closed the sea to
him. He was sitting on a chair of steel spikes, hands tied and mouth
gagged, whilst his mind seethed, solacing its hate with hope through
the long winter months. If you lived in Kansas and could not get your
wheat to Chicago, or any groceries or newspapers from the nearest
town, or learn whether your son in Wyoming were alive or dead, or
whether the man who owned your mortgage in New York had
foreclosed it or not--well, that is enough without the German sentry.

Only, instead of newspapers or word about the mortgage, the thing
you needed past that blockade was bread to keep you from starving.
America opened a window and slipped a loaf into the empty larder.
Those Belgian soldiers whom I had seen at Dixmude, wounded,
exhausted, mud-caked, shivering, were happy beside the people at
home. They were in the fight. It is not the destruction of towns and
houses that impresses you most, but the misery expressed by that
peasant woman over her washtub.

A writer can make a lot of the burst of a single shell; a photographer
showing the ruins of a block of buildings or a church makes it appear
that all blocks and all churches are in ruins. Running through Antwerp
in a car, one saw few signs of destruction from the bombardment.
You will see them if you are specially conducted. Shops were open,
people were moving about in the streets, which were well lighted. No
need of darkness for fear of bombs dropping here! German barracks
had safe shelter from aerial raids in a city whose people were the
allies of England and France. But at intervals marched the