As nearly as we could tell from our brief scrutiny a great change had come over the dwellers in southern Belgium.  In August they had been buoyant and confident of the ultimate outcome and very proud of the behavior of their little army.  Even when the Germans burst through the frontier defenses and descended on them in innumerable swarms they were, for the most part, not daunted by those evidences of the invaders’ numerical superiority and of their magnificent equipment.  The more there were of the Germans the fewer of them there would be to come back when the Allies, over the French border, fell on them.  This we conceived to be the mental attitude of the villagers and the peasants; but now they were different.  The difference showed in all their outward aspects—­in their gaits; in their drooped shoulders and half-averted faces; and, most of all, in their eyes.  They had felt the weight of the armed hand, and they must have heard the boast, filtering down from the officers to the men, and from the men to the native populace, that, having taken their country, the Germans meant to keep it; that Belgium, ceasing to be Belgium, would henceforth be set down on the map as a part of Greater Prussia.

Seeing them now, I began to understand how an enforced docility may reduce a whole people to the level of dazed, unresisting automatons.  Yet a national spirit is harder to kill than a national boundary—­so the students of these things say.  A little flash of flaming hate from the dead ashes of things; a quick, darting glance of defiance; a hissed word from a seemingly subdued man or woman; a shrill, hostile whoop from a ragged youngster behind a hedge—­things such as these showed us that the courage of the Belgians was not dead.  It had been crushed to the ground, but it had not been torn up by the roots.  The roots went down too far.  The under dog had secret dreams of the day to come, when he should not be underneath, but on top.

Even had there been no abandoned custom-houses to convince us of it, we should have known when we crossed from southern Belgium into northern France; for in France the proportion of houses that had suffered in punitive attacks was, compared with Belgium, as one to ten.  Understand, I am speaking of houses that had been deliberately burned in punishment, and not of houses that stood in the way of the cannon and the rapid-fire guns, and so underwent partial or complete destruction as the result of an accidental yet inevitable and unavoidable process.  Of these last France, to the square mile, could offer as lamentably large a showing as Belgium; but buildings that presented indubitable signs of having been fired with torches rather than with shells were few.

Explaining this and applauding it, Germans of high rank said it presented direct and confirmatory proof of their claim that sheer wanton reprisals were practically unknown in their system of warfare.  Perhaps I can best set forth the German attitude in this regard by quoting a general whom we interviewed on the subject: