rm and telling. At a
skirmish in September, when fifteen hundred Belgians stood off three
thousand Germans for several hours, I counted more dead Germans than
dead Belgians. The German officer in whose hands we were as captives
asked us with great particularity as to how many Belgians he had killed
and wounded. While he was talking with us, his stretcher-bearers were
moving up and down the road for his own casualties. At Alost the street
fighting by Belgian troops behind fish-barrels, with sods of earth for
barricade, was so stubborn that the Germans felt it to be necessary to
mutilate civilian men, women, and children with the bayonet to express
in terms at all adequate their resentment. I am of course speaking of
what I know. Around Termonde, three times in September, the fighting of
Belgians was vigorous enough to induce the Germans on entering the town
to burn more than eleven hundred homes, house by house. If the Germans
throughout their army had not possessed a high opinion of Belgian
bravery and power of retardation, I doubt if they would have released so
widespread and unique a savagery.

At Termonde, Alost, Baliere, and a dozen other points in the Ghent
sector, and, later, at Dixmude, Ramscappelle, Pervyse, Caeskerke, and
the rest of the line of the Yser, my sight of Belgians has been that of
troops as gallant as any. The cowards have been occasional, the brave
men many. I still have flashes of them as when I knew them. I saw a
Belgian officer ride across a field within rifle range of the enemy to
point out to us a market-cart in which lay three wounded. On his horse,
he was a high figure, well silhouetted. Another day, I met a Belgian
sergeant, with a tousled red head of hair, and with three medals for
valor on his left breast. He kept going out into the middle of the road
during the times when Germans were reported approaching, keeping his men
under cover. If there was risk to be taken, he wanted first chance. My
friend Dr. van der Ghinst, of Cabour Hospital, captain in the Belgian
army, remained three days in Dixmude under steady bombardment, caring
unaided for his wounded in the Hospital of St. Jean, just at the Yser,
and finally brought out thirty old men and women who had been frightened
into helplessness by the flames and noise. Because he was needed in that
direction, I saw him continue his walk past the point where fifty feet
ahead of him a shell had just exploded. I watched him walk erect where
even t