ime as peace had been restored and they might be returned with safety
to their original positions.

"So you see, gentlemen," said Professor von Falke, "the Germans are not
despoiling Belgium of its wealth of pictures and statues. We are taking
pains to preserve and perpetuate them. They belong to Belgium--not to
us; and we have no desire to take them away. Certainly we are not
vandals who would wantonly destroy the splendid things of art, as our
enemies have claimed."

He was plainly a sincere man and he was much in love with his work;
that, too, was easy to see. Afterward, though, the thought came to us
that, if Belgium was to become a German state by right of seizure and
conquest, he was saving these masterpieces of Vandyke and Rubens, not
for Belgium, but for the greater glory of the Greater Empire.

However, that was beside the mark. What at the moment seemed to us of
more consequence even than rescuing holy pictures was that all about us
were sundry hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who did not
need pictures, but food. You had only to look at them in the streets to
know that their bellies felt the grind of hunger. Famine knocked at half
the doors in that city of Brussels, and we sat in the glittering cafe of
the Palace Hotel and talked of pictures!

We called on Minister Brand Whitlock, whom we had not seen--McCutcheon
and I--since the Sunday afternoon a month and a half before when we two
left his official residence in a hired livery rig for a ride to
Waterloo, which ride extended over a thousand miles, one way and
another, and carried us into three of the warring countries. Mention of
this call gives me opportunity to say in parenthesis, so to speak, that
if ever a man in acutely critical circumstances kept his head, and did a
big job in a big way, and reflected credit at a thousand angles on
himself and the country that had the honor to be served by him, that man
was Brand Whitlock. To him, a citizen of another nation, the people of
forlorn Brussels probably owe more than to any man of their own race.

Grass was sprouting from between the cobbles of the streets in the
populous residential districts through which we passed on the way from
the American Ministry to our next stopping place. Viewed at a short
distance each vista of empty street had a wavy green beard on its face;
and by this one might judge to what a low ebb the commerce and the
pleasure of the city had fallen since its oc