“The little Belgian soldier who climbed into the compartment with me was dead tired; he trailed his rifle behind him, threw himself into the seat and fell sound asleep.  He was ready to talk when he awoke an hour later.

“‘Yes, I was up all night with German prisoners,’ he said.  ’It was a bad job, there were only sixteen of us to handle 200 Germans.  We had four box cars and we put twenty-five prisoners in one end of the car and twenty-five in the other, and the four of us with rifles sat guard by the car door.

“’We rode five hours that way and I expected every minute that the whole fifty Germans in the car would jump on us four and kill us.  Four to fifty; that’s heavy odds.  But we had to do it.  You see there aren’t enough soldiers in Belgium to do all the work, so we have to make out the best we can.’

“That’s the plucky little Belgian soldier, all over.

“In the first place, he’s different from most soldiers, because he is willing to fight when he knows he’s going to lose.

“‘We have to make out the best we can,’ is his motto.

“In the second place, he’s a common-sense little fellow.  Even while he’s fighting, he’s doing it coolly, and there is no blind hatred in his heart that causes him to waste any effort.  He gets down to the why and wherefore of things.

“‘I really felt sorry for those German prisoners,’ said a comrade of the first soldier.  ’They were all decent fellows.  They told me their officers had fooled them.  They said the officers gave them French money on the German frontier and then yelled to them, “On into France!” They went on three days and got to Liege before they knew they were in Belgium instead of France.

“‘We didn’t want to hurt Belgium,’ they told us, because we’re from Alsace-Lorraine ourselves.’

“‘You see,’ continued the logical little Belgian, ’it wasn’t their fault, so we couldn’t be mad at them.’

“That is the Belgian idea—­cool logic.

“‘Why did you fight the Germans?’ I asked a high government official.

“’Because civilization can’t exist without treaties, and it is the duty that a nation owes to civilization to fight to the death when written treaties are broken,’ was the reply.

“’It must be a rule among nations that to break a treaty means to fight.  The Germans broke the neutrality treaty with Belgium and we had to fight.’

“‘But did you expect to whip the Germans?’

“’How could we?  We knew that hordes of Germans would follow the first comers, but we had no right to worry about who would be whipped; all we had to do was to fight, and we’ve done it the best we could.’

“It has been a cool-headed logical matter with the Belgians from the start.  Treaties are made with ink; they’re broken with blood, and just as naturally and coolly as the Belgian diplomats used ink in signing the treaties with Germany so the Belgian soldiers have used their blood in trying to maintain the agreements.”