One might have excellent steaks and roasts and delicious veal; for the heifers were being butchered as the Germans had taken all fodder.  But the bread was the Commission’s brown, which everyone had to eat.  Belgium, growing quality on scanty acres with intensive farming, had food luxuries but not the staff of life.

I looked out of the windows on to the square which four months before I had seen crowded with people bedecked with the Allies’ colours and eagerly buying the latest editions containing the communiques of hollow optimism.  No flag in sight now except a German flag flying over the station!  But small revenges may be enjoyed.  A German soldier tried to jump on the tail of a cart driven by a Belgian, but the Belgian whipped up his horse and the German fell off on to the pavement, whilst the cart sped around a corner.

Out of the station came a score of German soldiers returning from the trenches, on their way to barracks to regain strength in order that they could bear the ordeal of standing in icy water again.  They were not the kind exhibited on Press tours to illustrate the “vigour of our indomitable army.”  Eyelids drooped over hollow eye-sockets; sore, numbed feet moved like feet which are asleep in their vain effort to keep step.  Sensitiveness to surroundings, almost to existence, seemed to have been lost.

One was a corporal, young, tall, and full-bearded.  He might have been handsome if he had not been so haggard.  He gave the lead to the others; he seemed to know where they were going, and they shuffled on after him in dogged painfulness.  Four months ago that corporal, with the spring of the energy of youth when the war was young, was perhaps in that green column that went through the streets of Brussels in the thunderous beat of their regular tread on their way to Paris.  The group was an object lesson in how much the victor must suffer in war in order to make his victim surfer.

Some officers were at breakfast, too.  Mostly they were reservists; mostly bespectacled, with middle age swelling their girth and hollowing their chests, but sturdy enough to apply the regulations made for conduct of the conquered.  Whilst stronger men were under shell-fire at the front, they were under the fire of Belgian hate as relentless as their own hate of England.  You saw them always in the good restaurants, but never in the company of Belgians, these ostracized rulers.  In four months they had made no friends; at least, no friends who would appear with them in public.  A few thousand guards in Belgium in the companionship of conquest and seven million Belgians in the companionship of a common helplessness!  Bayonets may make a man silent, but they cannot stop his thinking.

At the breakfast table on that Christmas morning in London, Paris, or Berlin the patriot could find the kind of news that he liked.  His racial and rational predilections and animosities were solaced.  If there were good news it was “played up”; if there were bad news, it was not published or it was explained.  L’Echo Belge and L’Independance Belge and all the Brussels papers were either out of business or being issued as single sheets in Holland and England.