With the world making every Belgian man a hero and the unknowing convinced that a citizen soldiery at Liege—­defended by the Belgian standing army—­had rushed from their homes with rifles and beaten German infantry, it is right to repeat that the schipperke spirit was not universal, that at no time had Belgium more than a hundred thousand men under arms, and that on the Dixmude line she maintained never more than eighty thousand men out of a population of seven millions, which should yield from seven hundred thousand to a million; while they lost a good deal of sympathy both in England and in France, from all I heard, through the number of able-bodied refugees who were disinclined to serve.  It was a mistaken idealism that swept over the world, early in the war, characterizing a whole nation with the gallantry of its young king and his little army.

The spirit of the Boers or of the Minute Men at Lexington was not in the Belgian people.  It could not be from their very situation and method of life.  They did not believe in war; they did not expect to practise war; but war came to them out of the still blue heavens as it came to the prosperous Incas of Peru.

Where one was wrong was in the expectation that her bankers and capitalists—­an aristocracy of money not given to the simple life—­and her manufacturers, artisans, and traders, if not her peasants, would soon make truce with Caesar for individual profit.  Therein, Belgium showed that she was not lacking in the moral spirit which, with the schipperke’s, became a fighting spirit.  It seemed as if the metal of many Belgians, struck to a white heat in the furnace of war, had cooled under German occupation to the tempered steel of a new nationalism.

When you travelled over Belgium after it was pacified, the logic of German methods became clear.  What was haphazard in their reign of terror was due to the inevitable excesses of a soldiery taking the calculated redress ordered by superiors as licence in the first red passion of war to a war-mad nation, which was sullen because Belgians had not given up the keys of the gate to France.

The extent of the ruins in Belgium east of the Yser has been exaggerated.  They were the first ruins, most photographed, most advertised; bad enough, inexcusable enough, and warrantedly causing a spell of horror throughout the civilized world.  We have heard all about them, mind, while hearing nothing about those in Lorraine, where the Bavarians exceeded Prussian ruthlessness in reprisals.  I mean, that to have read the newspapers in early September, 1914, one would have thought that half the towns of Belgium were debris while the truth is that only a small percentage are—­those in the path of the German army’s advance.  Two-thirds of Louvain itself is unharmed; though the fact alone of its venerable library being in ashes is sufficient outrage, if not another building had been harmed.

The German army planned destruction with all the regularity that it billeted troops, or requisitioned supplies, or laid war indemnities.  It did not destroy by shells exclusively.  It deliberately burned homes.  No matter whether the owners were innocent or not, the homes were burned as an example.  The principle applied was that of punishing half a dozen or all the boys in the class in the hope of getting the real culprit.