he renowned fighting men of an allied race were stooping and
hiding, because he held his life as nothing when there were wounded to
be rescued. I saw Lieutenant Robert de Broqueville, son of the prime
minister of Belgium, go into Dixmude on the afternoon when the town was
leveled by German guns. He remained there under one of the heaviest
bombardments of the war for three hours, picking up the wounded who lay
on curbs and in cellars and under debris. The troops had been ordered
to evacuate the town, and it was a lonely job that this youngster of
twenty-seven years carried on through that day.

I have seen the Belgians every day for several months. I have seen
several skirmishes and battles and many days of shell-fire, and the
impression of watching many thousand Belgians in action is that of
excellent fighting qualities, starred with bits of sheer daring as
astonishing as that of the other races. With no country left to fight
for, homes either in ruin or soon to be shelled, relatives under an
alien rule, the home Government on a foreign soil, still this second
army, the first having been killed, fights on in good spirit. Every
morning of the summer I have passed boys between eighteen and
twenty-five, clad in fresh khaki, as they go riding down the poplar lane
from La Panne to the trenches, the first twenty with bright silver
bugles, their cheeks puffed and red with the blowing. Twelve months of
wounds and wastage, wet trenches and tinned food, and still they go out
with hope.

[Illustration: BELGIANS IN THEIR NEW KHAKI UNIFORM. IN PRAISE OF WHICH
THEY WROTE A SONG.

Albert's son, the Crown Prince Leopold, has been a common soldier in
this regiment.]

And the helpers of the army have shown good heart. Breaking the silence
of Rome, the splendid priesthood of Belgium, from the cardinal to the
humblest cure, has played the man. On the front line near Pervyse, where
my wife lived for three months, a soldier-monk has remained through the
daily shell-fire to take artillery observations and to comfort the
fighting men. Just before leaving Flanders, I called on the sisters in
the convent school of Furnes. They were still cheery and busy in their
care of sick and wounded civilians. Every few days the Germans shell the
town from seven miles away, but the sisters will continue there through
the coming months as through the last year. The spirit of the best of
the race is spoken in what King Albert said recently in an unpublishe