Not only stubborn, but shrewd, these Belgians.  Both qualities were brought out in the officials who had to deal with the Germans, particularly in the small towns and where destruction had been worst.  Take, for example, M. Nerincx, of Louvain, who has energy enough to carry him buoyantly through an American political campaign, speaking from morning to midnight.  He had been in America.  I insisted that he ought to give up his professorship, get naturalized, and run for office in America.  I know that he would soon be mayor of a town, or in Congress.

When the war began he was professor of international law at the ancient university whose walls alone stand, surrounding the ashes of its priceless volumes, across from the ruined cathedral.  With the burgomaster a refugee from the horrors of that orgy, he turned man of action on behalf of the demoralized people of the town with a thousand homes in ruins.  Very lucky the client in its lawyer.  He is the kind of man who makes the best of the situation; picks up the fragments of the pitcher, cements them together with the first material at hand, and goes for more milk.  It was he who got a German commander to sign an agreement not to “kill, burn, or plunder” any more, and the signs were still up on some houses saying that “This house is not to be burned except by official order.”

There in the Hotel de Ville, which is quite unharmed, he had his office, within reach of the German commander.  He yielded to Caesar and protected his own people day in and day out, diplomatic, watchful, Belgian.  And he was cheerful.  What other people could have retained any vestige of cheer!  Sometimes one wondered if it were not partly due to an absence of keen nerve-sensibilities, or to some other of the traits which are a product of the Belgian hothouse and Belgian inheritance.

I might tell you about M. Nerincx’s currency system; how he issued paper promises to pay when he gave employment to the idle in repairing those houses which permitted of being repaired, and cleaned the streets of debris, till ruined Louvain looked as shipshape as ruined Pompeii; and how he got a little real money from Brussels to stop depreciation when the storekeepers came to him and said that they had stacks of his notes which no mercantile concern would cash.

M. Nerincx was practising in the life about all that he ever learned and taught at the university, “which we shall rebuild!” he declared, with cheery confidence.  “You will help us in America,” he said.  “I’m going to America to lecture one of these days about Louvain!”

“You have the most famous ruins, unless it is Rheims,” I assured him.  “You will get flocks of tourists”—­particularly if he fenced in the ruins of the library and burned leaves of ancient books were on sale.

“Then you will not only have fed, but have helped to rebuild Belgium,” he added.

A shadow of apprehension overhung his anticipation of the day of Belgium’s delivery.  Many a Belgian had arms hidden from the alert eye of German espionage, and his bitterness was solaced by the thought; “I’ll have a shot at the Germans when they go!” The lot of the last German soldier to leave a town, unless the garrison slips away overnight, would hardly make him a good life-insurance risk.