Cold ruins mark blocks where sniping was thought to have occurred.  The Germans insist that theirs was the merciful way.  Krieg ist Krieg.  When a hundred citizens of Louvain were gathered and shot because they were the first citizens of Louvain to hand, the purpose was the security of the mass at the expense of the individual, according to the war-is-war machine reasoning.  No doubt there was firing on German troops by civilians.  What did the Germans expect after the way that they had invaded Belgium?  If they had bothered with trials and investigations, the conquerors say, sniping would have kept up.  They may have taken innocent lives and burned the homes of the innocent, they admit, but their defence is that thereby they saved many thousands of their soldiers and of Belgians, and prevented the feud between the rulers and the ruled from becoming more embittered.

Sniping over, the next step in policy was to keep the population quiet with a minimum of soldiery, which would permit a maximum at the front.  In a thickly-settled country, so easily policed, in a land with the population inured to peace, the wisdom of keeping quiet was soon evident to the people.  What if Boers had been in the Belgians’ place?  Would they have attempted guerrilla warfare?  Would you or I want to bring destruction on neighbours in a land without any rural fastnesses as a rendezvous for operations?  One could tell only if a section of our country were invaded.

A burned block cost less than a dead German soldier.  The system was efficacious.  It was mercilessness mixed with craft.  When Prussian brusqueness was found to be unnecessarily irritating to the population, causing rash Belgians to turn desperate, the elders of the Saxon and Bavarian coreligionists were called in.  They were amiable fathers of families, who would obey orders without taking the law into their own hands.  The occupation was strictly military.  It concerned itself with the business of national suffocation.  All the functions of government were in German hands.  But Belgian policemen guided the street traffic, arrested culprits for ordinary misdemeanours, and took them before Belgian judges.  This concession, which also meant a saving in soldiers, only aggravated to the Belgian the regulations directed against his personal freedom.

“Eat, drink, and live as usual.  Go to your own police courts for misdemeanours,” was the German edict in a word; “but remember that ours is the military power, and no act that aids the enemy, that helps the cause of Belgium in this war, is permitted.  Observe that particular affiche about a spy, please.  He was shot.”

At every opportunity Belgians were told that the British and the French could never come to their rescue.  The Allies were beaten.  It was the British who got Belgium into trouble; the British who were responsible for the idleness, the penury, the hunger and the suffering in Belgium.  The British had used Belgium as a cat’s-paw; then they had deserted her.  But Belgians remained mostly unconvinced.  They were making war with mind and spirit, if not with arms.