“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” His audience imagined that the preacher alluded only to a spiritual captivity, that he meant:  “How shall we celebrate our freedom in this German prison?” And they listened, like the first Christians in the catacombs, dreading to hear the tramp of the soldiers before the door.  The Cardinal pursued his fearless address:  “The psalm ends with curses and maledictions.  We will not utter them against our enemies.  We are not of the Old but of the New Testament.  We do not follow the old law:  an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but the new law of Love and Christian brotherhood.  But we do not forget that even above Love stands Justice.  If our brother sins, how can we pretend to love him if we do not wish that his sins should be punished....”

Such was the tenor of the Cardinal’s address, the greatest Christian address inspired by the war, uttered under the most tragic and moving circumstances.  For the people knew by then the danger of speaking out their minds in conquered Belgium; they knew that some German spies were in the church taking note of every word, of every gesture.  Still, they could not restrain their feelings, and, at the close of the sermon, when the organ struck up the Brabanconne, they cheered and cheered again, thankful to feel, for an instant, the dull weight of oppression lifted from their shoulders by the indomitable spirit of their old leader.

What strikes us now, when recalling this memorable ceremony, is not so much the address itself as the choice of its text:  “For they that carried us away captive required of us a song.”

Many of those who listened to Cardinal Mercier on July 21st, 1916, have no doubt been “carried away” by now, and they have sung.  They have sung the Brabanconne and the “Lion de Flandres” as a last defiance to their oppressors whilst those long cattle trains, packed with human cattle, rolled in wind and rain towards the German frontier.  And the echo of their song still haunts the sleep of every honest man.

* * * * *

For whatever Germany may do or say, the time is no longer when such crimes can be left unpunished.  Notwithstanding the war and the triumphant power of the mailed fist, there still exists such a thing as public conscience and public opinion.  Nothing can happen, in any part of the world, without awakening an echo in the hearts of men who apparently are not at all concerned in the matter.  The Germans are too clever not to understand this, and the endless trouble which they take in order to monopolise the news in neutral countries and to encounter every accusation with some more or less insidious excuse is the best proof of this.  When one of them declared that Raemaekers’ cartoons had done more harm to Germany than an army corps, he knew perfectly well what he was talking about.  Only they rely so blindly on their own intellectual power and they have such a poor opinion of the brains of other people that they believe in first doing whatever suits their plans and then justify their action afterwards.  They divide the work between themselves:  The soldier acts, the lawyer and the professor undertakes to explain what he has done.  However black the first may become, there is plenty of whitewash ready to restore his innocence.