line of trenches--it
was quite in keeping that the aide to the commandant of Liege, who
looked after my pass to leave the country, should be a young officer
of Hussars. He spoke English well; he was amiable and intelligent.
While I waited for the commandant to sign the pass the aide chatted
of his adventures on the pursuit of the British to the Marne. The
British fought like devils, he said. It was a question if their new army
would be so good. He showed me a photograph of himself in a British
Tommy's overcoat.

"When we took some prisoners I was interested in their overcoats,"
he explained. "I asked one of the Tommies to let me try on his. It fitted
me perfectly, so I kept it as a souvenir and had this photograph made
to show my friends."

Perhaps a shade of surprise passed over my face.

"You don't understand," he said. "That Tommy had to give me his
coat! He was a prisoner."

On my way out from Liege I was to see Vise--the town of the
gateway--the first town of the war to suffer from frightfulness. I had
thought of it as entirely destroyed. A part of it had survived.

A delightful old Bavarian Landsturmman searched me for contraband
letters when our cart stopped on the Belgian side of a barricade at
Maastricht, with Dutch soldiers on the other side. His examination
was a little perfunctory, almost apologetic, and he did want to be
friendly. You guessed that he was thinking he would like to go around
the corner and have "ein Glas Bier" rather than search me. What a
hearty "Auf wiedersehen!" he gave me when he saw that I was
inclined to be friendly, too!

I was glad to be across that frontier, with a last stamp on my
Passierschein; glad to be out of the land of those ghostly Belgian
millions in their living death; glad not to have to answer again their
ravenously whispered "When?" When would the Allies come?

The next time that I was in Belgium it was in the British lines of the
Ypres salient, two months later. When should I be next in Brussels?
With a victorious British army, I hoped. A long wait it was to be for a
conquered people, listening each day and trying to think that the
sound of gun-fire was nearer.

The stubborn, passive resistance and self-sacrifice that I have
pictured was that of a moral leadership of a majority shaming the
minority; of an ostracism of all who had relations with the enemy. Of
course, it was not the spirit of the whole. The American Commission,
as charity usually must, had to