are very lonely, the loneliest men I have known. Back of the
fighting Frenchman, you sense the gardens and fields of France, the
strong, victorious national will. In a year, in two years, having made
his peace with honor, he will return to a happiness richer than any that
France has known in fifty years. And the Englishman carries with him to
the stresses of the first line an unbroken calm which he has inherited
from a thousand years of his island peace. His little moment of pain and
death cannot trouble that consciousness of the eternal process in which
his people have been permitted to play a continuing part. For him the
present turmoil is only a ripple on the vast sea of his racial history.
Behind the Tommy is his Devonshire village, still secure. His mother and
his wife are waiting for him, unmolested, as when he left them. But the
Belgian, schooled in horror, faces a fuller horror yet when the guns of
his friends are put on his bell-towers and birthplace, held by the
invaders.

"My father and mother are inside the enemy lines," said a Belgian
officer to me as we were talking of the final victory. That is the
ever-present thought of an army of boys whose parents are living in
doomed houses back of German trenches. It is louder than the near guns,
the noise of the guns to come that will tear at Bruges and level the
Tower of St. Nicholas. That is what the future holds for the Belgian. He
is only at the beginning of his loss. The victory of his cause is the
death of his people. It is a sacrifice almost without a parallel.

[Illustration: A BELGIAN BOY SOLDIER IN THE UNIFORM OF THE FIRST ARMY
WHICH SERVED AT LIEGE AND NAMUR.

In the summer of 1915 this costume was exchanged for khaki (see page
148). The present Belgian Army is largely made up of boys like this.]

And now a famous newspaper correspondent has returned to us from his
motor trips to the front and his conversations with officers to tell us
that he does not highly regard the fighting qualities of the
Belgians. I think that statement is not the full truth, and I do not
think it will be the estimate of history on the resistance of the
Belgians. If the resistance had been regarded by the Germans as
half-hearted, I do not believe their reprisals on villages and towns and
on the civilian population would have been so bitter. The burning and
the murder that I saw them commit throughout the month of September,
1914, was the answer to a resistance unexpectedly fi