tier to the west and to the
Italian frontier. Italy had lost half Venetia and enormous
quantities of guns in the breach of her defences at Caporetto. It
seemed indeed at any moment, when the ice and snow of that dreadful
winter of 1917-18 melted, as though Italy would share the fate of
Rumania. Though the British army had had a grand success with their
Tanks, they had, ere 1917 ended, lost nearly all the ground gained
round Cambrai. Besides, the submarine menace was imperilling the
British food supplies and connections with America. As to the United
States: was their intervention going to be more than money loans and
supplies of material? Would they really supply the fighting men, the
one thing at this crisis necessary to defeat Germany?

Belgium had been divided administratively into two distinct
portions, north and south of the Meuse. North of the Meuse she was
to be a Dutch-speaking country either part of Germany eventually, or
given to Holland to compensate her for her very benevolent
neutrality towards Germany during the War. A handful of Flemish
adventurers appeared at Brussels to form the Council of Flanders,
and sickened the Bruxellois by their lavish praise of the German
administration and servile concurrence with all German measures.

The events of the spring of 1918 accentuated the despair in the
Belgian capital. When the Germans broke through the defences of the
new lines which ran through Picardy and Champagne, reached the
vicinity of Amiens, retook Soissons, and recrossed the Marne, it
seemed as though Belgian independence had been lost; the utmost she
could hope for would be the self-government of a German province.

But Vivie was not among the pessimists. She discerned a smouldering
discontent among the German soldiers, even when Germany seemed near
to a sweeping victory over France and Britain.

The brutality of the soldiers, their deliberate, nasty dirtiness
during the first two years of the War seemed due rather to their
officers' orders than to an anti-human disposition of their own.
Many of the soldiers in Belgium, in Brussels, turned round--so to
speak--and conceived a horror of what they had done, of what they
had been told to do. Men who on the instigation of their
officers--and these last, especially the Prussians, seemed fiends
incarnate--had offered violence to young Belgian women, ended by
offering to marry them, even showed themselves kind husbands, only
too willing to become domesticat