r; but the
first year of the Great War is the longest year most of us have ever
known.

Le brave Belge! One must be honest about him. The man who lets
his heart run away with his judgment does his mind an injustice. A
fellow-countryman who was in London and fresh from home in the
eighth month of the war, asked me for my views of the relative
efficiency of the different armies engaged.

"Do you mean that I am to speak without regard to personal
sympathies?" I asked.

"Certainly," he replied.

When he had my opinion he exclaimed:

"You have mentioned them all except the Belgian army. I thought it
was the best of all."

"Is that what they think at home?" I asked.

"Yes, of course."

"The Atlantic is broad," I suggested.

This man of affairs, an exponent of the efficiency of business, was a
sentimentalist when it came to war, as Anglo-Saxons usually are. The
side which they favour--that is the efficient side. When I ventured to
suggest that the Belgian army, in a professional sense, was hardly to
be considered as an army, it was clear that he had ceased to
associate my experience with any real knowledge.

In business he was one who saw his rivals, their abilities, the
organization of their concerns, and their resources of competition with
a clear eye. He could say of his best personal friend: "I like him, but
he has a poor head for affairs." Yet he was the type who, if he had
been a trained soldier, would have been a business man of war who
would have wanted a sharp, ready sword in a well-trained hand and
to leave nothing to chance in a battle for the right. In Germany, where
some of the best brains of the country are given to making war a
business, he might have been a soldier who would rise to a position
on the staff. In America he was the employer of three thousand men--
a general of civil life.

"But look how the Belgians have fought!" he exclaimed. "They
stopped the whole German army for two weeks!"

The best army was best because it had his sympathy. His view was
the popular view in America: the view of the heart. America saw the
pigmy fighting the giant rather than let him pass over Belgian soil.
On that day when a gallant young king cried, "To arms!" all his
people became gallant to the imagination.

When I think of Belgium's part in the war I always think of the little
Belgian dog, the schipperke who lives on the canal boats. He is a
home-staying dog, loyal, affectionate, domestic, who never goes