re
there were of the Germans the fewer of them there would be to come back
when the Allies, over the French border, fell on them. This we
conceived to be the mental attitude of the villagers and the peasants;
but now they were different. The difference showed in all their outward
aspects--in their gaits; in their drooped shoulders and half-averted
faces; and, most of all, in their eyes. They had felt the weight of the
armed hand, and they must have heard the boast, filtering down from the
officers to the men, and from the men to the native populace, that,
having taken their country, the Germans meant to keep it; that Belgium,
ceasing to be Belgium, would henceforth be set down on the map as a part
of Greater Prussia.

Seeing them now, I began to understand how an enforced docility may
reduce a whole people to the level of dazed, unresisting automatons.
Yet a national spirit is harder to kill than a national boundary--so the
students of these things say. A little flash of flaming hate from the
dead ashes of things; a quick, darting glance of defiance; a hissed word
from a seemingly subdued man or woman; a shrill, hostile whoop from a
ragged youngster behind a hedge--things such as these showed us that the
courage of the Belgians was not dead. It had been crushed to the
ground, but it had not been torn up by the roots. The roots went down
too far. The under dog had secret dreams of the day to come, when he
should not be underneath, but on top.

Even had there been no abandoned custom-houses to convince us of it, we
should have known when we crossed from southern Belgium into northern
France; for in France the proportion of houses that had suffered in
punitive attacks was, compared with Belgium, as one to ten. Understand,
I am speaking of houses that had been deliberately burned in punishment,
and not of houses that stood in the way of the cannon and the rapid-fire
guns, and so underwent partial or complete destruction as the result of
an accidental yet inevitable and unavoidable process. Of these last
France, to the square mile, could offer as lamentably large a showing as
Belgium; but buildings that presented indubitable signs of having been
fired with torches rather than with shells were few.

Explaining this and applauding it, Germans of high rank said it
presented direct and confirmatory proof of their claim that sheer wanton
reprisals were practically unknown in their system of warfare. Perhaps
I can bes