ing been
greatly harassed by the pursuing Germans. On the 13th, Ostend was
evacuated, and was occupied by the Germans, and Bruges on the following
day. The German forces now controlled the whole of Belgium, with the
exception of the northwest corner, north of Ypres, to the coast of the
Channel. This little slip of territory they held throughout the entire
war, and at what a cost! But the heroic defense of this territory by the
Belgians saved the French coast cities and prevented the Germans from
breaking through the line which extended now from the North Sea to
Belgium.

THE LAST DITCH IN BELGIUM

ARNO DOSCH

Copyright, World's Work, January, 1915.

[Sidenote: The Yser the Belgian's last ditch.]

A little piece of the Low Countries, so small I walked across it in two
hours, was all that remained of Belgium in the last days of October. A
tide-water stream, the Yser, ebbed and flowed through the sunken fields,
and there King Albert with his remnant of an army stopped the German
military machine in its advance on Calais. If he and his forty thousand
men had been crushed back ten miles farther they would have been
fighting on French soil. The Yser was the last ditch in Belgium.

The Belgians were able to hold that mere strip of land against more men
and better artillery because they had determined to die there. Some of
those who had not yet paid the price of death told me. They were not
tragic about it. There was no display of heroics. They said it
seriously, but they smiled a little, too, over their wine glasses, and
the next morning they were back in the firing-line.

I counted on my American passport and my _permit de sejour_ in Paris
seeing me through the zone of the fighting, and they did. At the station
at Dunkirk, when I admitted I had no _laisser passer_, an obliging
gendarme led me to his commander, and he placed his visee on my passport
without question. He asked me whether I was a correspondent, and I
confessed to it, but it seemed only to facilitate the affair. Earlier
experiences had made me feel that the French gendarmes were my natural
enemies, but I have had a kindlier regard for them since.

[Sidenote: Troop trains.]

The train I was on had ten cars full of French and Belgian soldiers. The
Belgians had all been recently re-equipped. On other troop trains which
passed us going forward there were many more Belgian soldiers, some of
whom I had seen only a few hours earlier in the streets of