Now, out of all these collisions there has come a hardy race, inured to peril, rich in fortitude, loyalty, patience, thrift, self-reliance and persevering faith.  For five hundred years the Belgian children and youth have been brought up upon the deeds of noble renown, achieved by their ancestors.  If Julius Caesar were here today he would wear Belgium’s bravery like a bright sword, girded to his thigh.  And when this brave little people, with a standing army of forty-two thousand men, single-handed defied two millions of Germans, it tells us that Ajax has come back once more to defy the god of lightnings.

A THRILLING CHAPTER FROM BELGIUM’S HISTORY

Perhaps one or two chapters torn from the pages of Belgium history will enable us to understand her present-day heroism, just as one golden bough plucked from the forest will explain the richness of the autumn.  You remember that Venice was once the financial center of the world.  Then when the bankers lost confidence in the navy of Venice they put their jewels and gold into saddle bags and moved the financial center of the world to Nuremburg, because its walls were seven feet thick and twenty feet high.  Later, about 1500 A.D., the discovery of the New World turned all the peoples into races of sea-going folk, and the English and Dutch captains vied with the sailors of Spain and Portugal.  No captains were more prosperous than the mariners of Antwerp.  In 1568 there were 500 marble mansions in this city on the Meuse.  Belgium became a casket filled with jewels.  Then it was that Spain turned covetous eyes northward.  Sated with his pleasures, broken by indulgence and passion, the Emperor Charles the Fifth resigned his gold and throne to his son, King Philip.  Finding his coffers depleted, Philip sent the Duke of Alva, with 10,000 Spanish soldiers, out on a looting expedition.  Their approach filled Antwerp with consternation, for her merchants were busy with commerce and not with war.  The sack of Antwerp by the Spaniards makes up a revolting page in history.  Within three days 8,000 men, women and children were massacred, and the Spanish soldiers, drunk with wine and blood, hacked, drowned and burned like fiends that they were.  The Belgian historian tells us that 500 marble residences were reduced to blackened ruins.  One incident will make the event stand out.  When the Spaniards approached the city a wealthy burgher hastened the day of his son’s marriage.  During the ceremony the soldiers broke down the gate of the city and crossed the threshold of the rich man’s house.  When they had stripped the guests of their purses and gems, unsatisfied, they killed the bridegroom, slew the men, and carried the bride out into the night.  The next morning a young woman, crazed and half clad, was found in the street, searching among the dead bodies.  At last she found a youth, whose head she lifted upon her knees, over which she crooned her songs, as a young mother soothes her babe.  A Spanish officer passing by, humiliated by the spectacle, ordered a soldier to use his dagger and put the girl out of her misery.