We passed a file of Spahis, native Algerians who speak Arabic.  They come from Tunis and Algeria, and, as may be imagined, they were suffering bitterly from the cold.

They peered at us with bright, black eyes from the encircling folds of the great cloaks with pointed hoods which they had drawn closely about them.  They have French officers and interpreters, and during the spring fighting they probably proved very valuable.  During the winter they gave me the impression of being out of place and rather forlorn.  Like the Indian troops with the British, they were fighting a new warfare.  For gallant charges over dry desert sands had been substituted mud and mist and bitter cold, and the stagnation of armies.

Terrible tales have been told of the ferocity of these Arabs, and of the Turcos also.  I am inclined to think they are exaggerated.  But certainly, met with on a lonely road, these long files of men in their quaint costumes moving silently along with heads lowered against the wind were sombre, impressive and rather alarming.

The car, going furiously, skidded, was pulled sharply round and righted itself.  The conversation went on.  No one appeared to notice that we had been on the edge of eternity, and it was not for me to mention it.  But I made a jerky entry in my notebook: 

“Very casual here about human life.  Enlarge on this.”

The general, who was a Belgian, continued his complaint.  It was about the Belgian absentee tax.

The Germans now in control in Belgium had imposed an absentee tax of ten times the normal on all Belgians who had left the country and did not return by the fifteenth of March.  The general snorted his rage and disgust.

“But,” I said innocently, “I should think it would make very little difference to you.  You are not there, so of course you cannot pay it.”

“Not there!” he said.  “Of course I am not there.  But everything I own in the world is there, except this uniform that I have on my back.”

“They would confiscate it?” I asked.  “Not the uniform, of course; I mean your property.”

He broke into a torrent of rapid French.  I felt quite sure that he was saying that they would confiscate it; that they would annihilate it, reduce it to its atomic constituents; take it, acres and buildings and shade trees and vegetable garden, back to Germany.  But as his French was of the ninety horse-power variety and mine travels afoot, like Bayard Taylor, and limps at that, I never caught up with him.

Later on, in a calmer moment, I had the thing explained to me.

It appears that the Germans have instituted a tax on all the Belgian refugees of ten times the normal tax; the purpose being to bring back into Belgium such refugees as wish to save the remnants of their property.  This will mean bringing back people of the better class who have property to save.  It will mean to the far-seeing German mind a return of the better class of Belgians to reorganise things, to put that prostrate country on its feet again, to get the poorer classes to work, to make it self-supporting.