ew on their fingers to warm them. The
dead young officer was carried out. His sword gleamed in the sun. They
carried the casket carefully, not to disorder the carefully folded
tunic or the pathetic cap. The body was placed in an ambulance. At a
signal the band commenced to play and the soldiers closed in round the
ambulance.

The path of glory, indeed!

But it was not this boyish officer's hope of glory that had brought
this scene to pass. He died fighting a defensive war, to save what was
left to him of the country he loved. He had no dream of empire, no
vision of commercial supremacy, no thrill of conquest as an invaded
and destroyed country bent to the inevitable. For months since Liege
he had fought a losing fight, a fight that Belgium knew from the
beginning must be a losing fight, until such time as her allies could
come to her aid. Like the others, he had nothing to gain by this war
and everything to lose.

He had lost. The ambulance moved away.

I was frequently in La Panne after that day. I got to know well the
road from Dunkirk, with its bordering of mud and ditch, its heavy
transports, its grey gunboats in the canals that followed it on one
side, its long lines of over-laden soldiers, its automobiles that
travelled always at top speed. I saw pictures that no artist will ever
paint--of horrors and beauties, of pathos and comedy; of soldiers
washing away the filth of the trenches in the cold waters of canals
and ditches; of refugees flying by day from the towns, and returning
at night to their ruined houses to sleep in the cellars; of long
processions of Spahis, Arabs from Algeria, silhouetted against the
flat sky line against a setting sun, their tired horses moving slowly,
with drooping heads, while their riders, in burnoose and turban, rode
with loose reins; of hostile aeroplanes sailing the afternoon breeze
like lazy birds, while shells from the anti-aircraft guns burst
harmlessly below them in small balloon-shaped clouds of smoke.

But never in all that time did I overcome the sense of unreality, and
always I was obsessed by the injustice, the wanton waste and cost and
injustice of it all. The baby at La Panne--why should it go through
life on stumps instead of legs? The boyish officer--why should he have
died? The little sixteen-year-old soldier who had been blinded and who
sat all day by the phonograph, listening to Madame Butterfly,
Tipperary, and Harry Lauder's A Wee Deoch-an'-Doris--why should h