I think, though, this cankered apathy has its merciful compensations.  After the first shock and panic of war there appears to descend on all who have a share in it, whether active or passive, a kind of numbed indifference as to danger; a kind of callousness as to consequences, which I find it difficult to define in words, but which, nevertheless, impresses itself on the observer’s mind as a definite and tangible fact.  The soldier gets it, and it enables him to endure his own discomforts and sufferings, and the discomforts and sufferings of his comrades, without visible mental strain.  The civic populace get it, and, as soon as they have been readjusted to the altered conditions forced on them by the presence of war, they become merely sluggish, dulled spectators of the great and moving events going on about them.  The nurses and the surgeons get it, or else they would go mad from the horrors that surround them.  The wounded get it, and cease from complaint and lamenting.

It is as though all the nerve ends in every human body were burnt blunt in the first hot gush of war.  Even the casual eyewitness gets it.  We got it ourselves; and not until we had quit the zone of hostilities did we shake it off.  Indeed, we did not try.  It made for subsequent sanity to carry for the time a drugged and stupefied imagination.

Barring only Huy, where there had been some sharp street fighting, as attested by shelled buildings and sandbag barricades yet resting on housetops and in window sills, we encountered in the first stage of our journey no considerable evidences of havoc until late in the afternoon, when we reached Dinant.  I do not understand why the contemporary chronicles of events did not give more space to Dinant at the time of its destruction, and why they have not given it more space subsequently.

I presume the reason lies in the fact that the same terrible week which included the burning of Louvain included also the burning of Dinant; and in the world-wide cry of protestation and distress which arose with the smoke of the greater calamity the smaller voice of grief for little ruined Dinant was almost lost.  Yet, area considered, no place in Belgium that I have visited—­and this does not exclude Louvain—­suffered such wholesale demolition as Dinant.

Before war began, the town had something less than eight thousand inhabitants.  When I got there it had less than four thousand, by the best available estimates.  Of those four thousand more than twelve hundred were then without food from day to day except such as the Germans gave them.  There were almost no able-bodied male adults left.  Some had fled, some were behind bars as prisoners of the Germans, and a great many were dead.  Estimates of the number of male inhabitants who had been killed by the graycoats for offenses against the inflexible code set up by the Germans in eastern Belgium varied.  A cautious native whispered that nine hundred of