u heard
the tale that Rumpel tells after his escape? How the senior native
officer came to his Belgian commander and complained that they had no
food, the villages were empty, not so much as an egg or chicken to be
got. Irritably, the Belgian officer shouted that the soldiers knew that
no one had food, and they must wait till they got to the next post on
the morrow. 'But,' urged the native sergeant softly, 'there are the
prisoners.' 'Oh, the prisoners,' said the Belgian officer, relieved by
an easy way out of a very difficult situation. 'Well, not more than
sixteen, remember that.' And the sergeant went away."

This and countless other lies did the Germans tell us of our Belgian
Allies. But how different the truth when it reached us at last along the
railway by our troops that came from the northern column to join us at
Morogoro. Not a German woman insulted; not one fat German child missing;
no occupied house even entered by the Belgian troops, not so much as a
chicken stolen from a German compound.

So just, so completely impartial was General Molitor, that he applied to
German prisoners, in territory then occupied by him, the very rules and
regulations that the German command had laid down for the governing of
English and Belgian and other Allied prisoners. Only the vile, the
unspeakable regulations, and every ordinance in that printed list of
German rules that destroyed the prestige of the white man in the
native's eyes, did he omit. If the Germans were indifferent to this one
elementary rule of the white race in equatorial Africa--the white man's
law that no white man be degraded before a native--then the Belgian
would show the Hun how to play the game.

"We must hack our way through," said Bethmann-Hollweg. And we, in
Morogoro, were very curious to see what manner of vengeance the Belgians
might wreak. Nor would we have blamed them over-much for anything they
might have done. I had lived in German prisons with elderly Belgian
officers whose wives and grown-up daughters had been left behind in
occupied parts of Belgium. We all had shuddered at the stories they told
us; nor did we wonder that these unhappy fathers had often gone insane.
And when we learnt the truth about Tabora, and knew too, to our disgust,
that such un-German clemency was attributed to Belgian fear of the
avenging German Michael and not to natural Belgian chivalry, we were
furious. What can one do with such a people?

THE MECHANICAL TRANS