s height from the simple
soldiers who stood around him, and as he came down the steps he
had the dignity of his own manhood but no outward sign of royalty. I
could hardly see his face then, but afterwards in the daylight I saw
him pass down the lines of some of his heroic regiments and saw his
gravity and the sadness of his eyes, and his extreme simplicity... The
first time I had seen him was in a hall in Brussels, when he opened
the Great Exhibition in royal state, in the presence of many princes
and ministers and all his Court. Even then it seemed to me he had a
look of sadness--it may have been no more than shyness--as though
the shadow of some approaching tragedy touched his spirit. I spoke
of it at the time to a friend of mine and he smiled at the foolishness of
the remark.

Here in Furnes his personality was touched with a kind of sanctity
because his kingship of the last piece of Belgian soil symbolized all
the ruin and desolation of his poor country and all the heroism of its
resistance against an overpowering enemy and all the sorrows of
those scattered people who still gave him loyalty. Men of Republican
instincts paid a homage in their hearts to this young king, sanctified
by sorrow and crowned with martyrdom. Living plainly as a simple
soldier, sharing the rations, the hardships and the dangers of his
men, visiting them in their trenches and in their field-hospitals,
steeling his nerves to the sight of bloody things and his heart to the
grim task of fighting to the last ditch of Belgian ground, he seemed to
be the type of early kingship, as it was idealized by poets and
minstrels, when those who were anointed by the Church dedicated
their souls to the service of the people and their swords to justice. He
stood in this modern world and in this modern war as the supreme
type of the Hero, and mythical stories are already making a legend of
his chivalrous acts and virtue, showing that in spite of all our
incredulities and disillusions hero-worship is still a natural instinct in
the minds of men.

7

I had a job to do on my first night in Furnes, and earned a dinner, for
a change, by honest work. The staff of an English hospital with a
mobile column attached to the Belgian cavalry for picking up the
wounded on the field, had come into the town before dusk with a
convoy of ambulances and motorcars. They established themselves
in an old convent with large courtyards and many rooms, and they
worked hurriedl