Belgium stared its inhospitality, its contempt, its cynical
drolleries at the invader.

I kept thinking of a story I heard in Alaska of a man who had shown
himself yellow by cheating his partner out of a mine. He appeared
one day hungry at a cabin occupied by half a dozen men who knew
him. They gave him food and a bunk that night; they gave him
breakfast; they even carried his blanket-roll out to his sled and
harnessed his dogs as a hint, and saw him go without one man
having spoken to him. No matter if that man believed he had done no
wrong, he would have needed a rhinoceros hide not to have felt this
silence. Such treatment the Belgians have given to the Germans,
except that they furnished the shelter and harnessed the team under
duress, as they so specifically indicate by every act. No wonder, then,
that the old Landsturm guards, used at home to saying "Wie gehts?"
and getting a cheery answer from the people they passed in the
streets, were lonely.

Not only stubborn, but shrewd, these Belgians. Both qualities were
brought out in the officials who had to deal with the Germans,
particularly in the small towns and where destruction had been worst.
Take, for example, M. Nerincx, of Louvain, who has energy enough to
carry him buoyantly through an American political campaign,
speaking from morning to midnight. He had been in America. I
insisted that he ought to give up his professorship, get naturalized,
and run for office in America. I know that he would soon be mayor of
a town, or in Congress.

When the war began he was professor of international law at the
ancient university whose walls alone stand, surrounding the ashes of
its priceless volumes, across from the ruined cathedral. With the
burgomaster a refugee from the horrors of that orgy, he turned man
of action on behalf of the demoralized people of the town with a
thousand homes in ruins. Very lucky the client in its lawyer. He is the
kind of man who makes the best of the situation; picks up the
fragments of the pitcher, cements them together with the first material
at hand, and goes for more milk. It was he who got a German
commander to sign an agreement not to "kill, burn, or plunder" any
more, and the signs were still up on some houses saying that "This
house is not to be burned except by official order."

There in the Hotel de Ville, which is quite unharmed, he had his office,
within reach of the German commander. He yielded to Caesar and
protected his ow