sped around a corner.

Out of the station came a score of German soldiers returning from the
trenches, on their way to barracks to regain strength in order that they
could bear the ordeal of standing in icy water again. They were not
the kind exhibited on Press tours to illustrate the "vigour of our
indomitable army." Eyelids drooped over hollow eye-sockets; sore,
numbed feet moved like feet which are asleep in their vain effort to
keep step. Sensitiveness to surroundings, almost to existence,
seemed to have been lost.

One was a corporal, young, tall, and full-bearded. He might have
been handsome if he had not been so haggard. He gave the lead to
the others; he seemed to know where they were going, and they
shuffled on after him in dogged painfulness. Four months ago that
corporal, with the spring of the energy of youth when the war was
young, was perhaps in that green column that went through the
streets of Brussels in the thunderous beat of their regular tread on
their way to Paris. The group was an object lesson in how much the
victor must suffer in war in order to make his victim surfer.

Some officers were at breakfast, too. Mostly they were reservists;
mostly bespectacled, with middle age swelling their girth and
hollowing their chests, but sturdy enough to apply the regulations
made for conduct of the conquered. Whilst stronger men were under
shell-fire at the front, they were under the fire of Belgian hate as
relentless as their own hate of England. You saw them always in the
good restaurants, but never in the company of Belgians, these
ostracized rulers. In four months they had made no friends; at least,
no friends who would appear with them in public. A few thousand
guards in Belgium in the companionship of conquest and seven
million Belgians in the companionship of a common helplessness!
Bayonets may make a man silent, but they cannot stop his thinking.

At the breakfast table on that Christmas morning in London, Paris, or
Berlin the patriot could find the kind of news that he liked. His racial
and rational predilections and animosities were solaced. If there
were good news it was "played up"; if there were bad news, it was not
published or it was explained. L'Echo Belge and L'Independance
Belge and all the Brussels papers were either out of business or
being issued as single sheets in Holland and England.

The Belgian, keenest of all the peoples at war for news, having less
occupation to keep his min