l
Belgium as the gallant king once more ascended the steps of his
palace.

Worthy of England at her best was her consent to allow the
Commission's food to pass, which she accompanied by generous
giving. She might seem slow in making ready her army--though I do
not think that she was--but give she could and give she did. It was a
grave question if her consent was in keeping with the military policy
which believes that any concession to sentiment in the grim business
of war is unwise. Certainly, the Krieg ist Krieg of Germany would not
have permitted it.

There is the very point of the war that ought to make any neutral take
sides. If the Belgians had not received bread from the outside world,
then Germany would either have had to spare enough to keep them
from starving or faced the desperation of a people who would fight for
food with such weapons as they had. This must have brought a
holocaust of reprisals that would have made the orgy of Louvain
comparatively insignificant. However much the Germans hampered
the Commission with red tape and worse than red tape through the
activities of German residents in Belgium, Germany did not want the
Commission to withdraw. It was helping her to economize her food
supplies. And England answered a human appeal at the cost of hard-
and-fast military policy. She was still true to the ideals which have set
their stamp on half the world.

XI
Winter In Lorraine

Only a winding black streak, that four hundred and fifty miles of
trenches on a flat map. It is difficult to visualize the whole as you see
it in your morning paper, or to realize the labour it represents in its
course through the mire and over mountain slopes, through villages
and thick forests and across open fields.

Every mile of it was located by the struggle of guns and rifles and
men coming to a stalemate of effort, when both dug into the earth
and neither could budge the other. It is a line of countless battles and
broken hopes; of charges as brave as men ever made; a symbol of
skill and dogged patience and eternal vigilance of striving foe against
striving foe.

From the first, the sector from Rheims to Flanders was most familiar
to the public. The world still thinks of the battle of the Marne as an
affair at the door of Paris, though the heaviest fighting was from Vitry-
le-Francois eastward and the fate of Paris was no less decided on the
fields of Lorraine than on the fields of Champagne. The storm