Belgium.

Let us forget for a moment our terrible distress; let us forget our
plains and meadows, the fairest and most fertile in Europe, now
ravaged to such a degree that the utmost that one can say is powerless
to give any idea of a desolation which seems irremediable. Let us
forget--if to forget them be possible--the women, the children, the
old men, peaceable and innocent, who have been massacred in their
thousands, the tale of whom will amaze the world when once the grim
barrier is broken behind which so many secret horrors are being
committed. Let us forget those who are dying of hunger in our country,
a land without harvests and without homes, a land methodically taxed,
pillaged and crushed until it is drained of the last drop of its
life-blood. Let us forget those remnants of our people who are
scattered hither and thither, who have trodden the path of exile, who
are living on public charity, which, though it show itself full of
brotherhood and affection, is yet so oppressive to those supremely
industrious hands, which had never known the grievous burden of alms.
Let us forget even those last of our cities to be menaced, the
fairest, the proudest, the most beloved of our cities, which
constitute the very face of our country and which only a miracle could
now save. Let us forget, in a word, the greatest calamity and the most
crying injustice of history and think to-day only of our approaching
deliverance. It is not too early to hail it. It is already in all our
thoughts, as it is in all our hearts. It is already in the air which
we breathe, in all the eyes that smile at us, in all the voices that
welcome us, in all the hands outstretched to us, waving the laurels
which they hold; for what is bringing us deliverance is the wonder,
the admiration of the whole world!

2

To-morrow we shall go back to our homes. We shall not mourn though we
find them in ruins. They will rise again more beautiful than of old
from the ashes and the shards. We shall know days of heroic poverty;
but we have learnt that poverty is powerless to sadden souls upheld by
a great love and nourished by a noble ideal. We shall return with
heads erect, regenerated in a regenerated Europe, rejuvenated by our
magnificent misfortune, purified by victory and cleansed of the
littleness that obscured the virtues which slumbered within us and of
which we are not aware. We shall have lost all the goods that perish
but as readily come to live again