any book, but I gathered he was a German,
a widely traveled man, and he seems to have spent much time in Belgium,
for I found intimate records of the smallest things. I used his guide
for five months over there. I must say right here I was disappointed in
it. And that isn't just the word, either. I was annoyed by it. It gave
all the effect of accuracy, and then when I got there it wasn't so. He
kept speaking of buildings as "beautiful," "one of the loveliest
unspoiled pieces of thirteenth century architecture in Europe," and when
I took a lot of trouble and visited the building, I found it half down,
or a butt-end, or sometimes ashes. I couldn't make his book tally up.
It doesn't agree with the landscape and the look of things. He will take
a perfectly good detail and stick it in where it doesn't belong, and
leave it there. And he does it all in a painstaking way and with evident
sincerity.

His volume had been so popular back in his own country that it had
brought a lot of Germans into Belgium. I saw them everywhere. They were
doing the same thing I was doing, checking up what they saw with the map
and text and things. Some of them looked puzzled and angry, as they went
around. I feel sure they will go home and give Baedeker a warm time,
when they tell him they didn't find things as he had represented.

For one thing, he makes out Belgium a lively country, full of busy,
contented people, innocent peasants, and sturdy workmen and that sort of
thing. Why, it's the saddest place in the world. The people are not
cheery at all. They are depressed. It's the last place I should think of
for a holiday, now that I have seen it. And that's the way it goes, all
through his work. Things are the opposite of what he says with so much
meticulous care. He would speak of "gay cafe life" in a place that
looked as if an earthquake had hit it, and where the only people were
some cripples and a few half-starved old folks. If he finds that sort of
thing gay as he travels around, he is an easy man to please. It was so
wherever I went. It isn't as if he were wrong at some one detail. He is
wrong all over the place, all over Belgium. It's all different from the
way he says it is. I know his fellow-countrymen who are there now will
bear me out in this.

Let me show one place. I took his book with me and used it on Nieuport.
That's a perfectly fair test, because Nieuport is like a couple of
hundred other towns.

"Nieuport," says Herr Baedek