The beach is wide and level.  There is no surf.  The sea comes in in long, flat lines of white that wash unheralded about the feet of the cavalry horses drilling there.  Here and there a fisherman’s boat close to the line of villas marks the limit of high tide; marks more than that; marks the fisherman who has become a soldier; marks the end of the peaceful occupations of the little town; marks the change from a sea that was a livelihood to a sea that has become a menace and a hidden death.

The beach at La Panne has its story.  There are guns there now, waiting.  The men in charge of them wait, and, waiting, shiver in the cold.  And just a few minutes away along the sands there was a house built by a German, a house whose foundation was a cemented site for a gun.  The house is destroyed now.  It had been carefully located, strategically, and built long before the war began.  A gun on that foundation would have commanded Nieuport.

Here, in six villas facing the sea, live King Albert and Queen Elisabeth and their household, and here the Queen, grief-stricken at the tragedy that has overtaken her innocent and injured people, visits the hospital daily.

La Panne has not been bombarded.  Hostile aeroplanes are always overhead.  The Germans undoubtedly know all about the town; but it has not been touched.  I do not believe that it will be.  For one thing, it is not at present strategically valuable.  Much more important, Queen Elisabeth is a Bavarian princess by birth.  Quite aside from both reasons, the outcry from the civilised world which would result from injury to any member of the Belgian royal house, with the present world-wide sympathy for Belgium, would make such an attack inadvisable.

And yet who knows?  So much that was considered fundamental in the ethics of modern warfare has gone by the board; so certainly is this war becoming one of reprisals, of hate and venom, that before this is published La Panne may have been destroyed, or its evacuation by the royal family have been decided.

The contrast between Brussels and La Panne is the contrast between Belgium as it was and as it is.  The last time I was in Belgium, before this war, I was in Brussels.  The great modern city of three-quarters of a million people had grown up round the ancient capital of Brabant.  Its name, which means “the dwelling on the marsh,” dates from the tenth century.  The huge Palais de Justice is one of the most remarkable buildings in the world.

Now in front of that great building German guns are mounted, and the capital of Belgium is a fishing village on the sand dunes.  The King of Belgium has exchanged the magnificent Palais du Roi for a small and cheaply built house—­not that the democratic young King of Belgium cares for palaces.  But the contrast of the two pictures was impressed on me that winter morning as I stood on the sands at La Panne and looked at the royal villa.  All round were sentries.  The wind from the sea was biting.  It set the long grey grass to waving, and blew the fine sand in clouds about the feet of the cavalry horses filing along the beach.