pillage, massacre and devastation that the world or hell itself has seen since man first learnt the history of the planet on which he lives.  We have here a revelation of qualities and virtues surpassing all that we expected from a nation which nevertheless had accustomed us to expect of her all that goes to make the beauty and the glory of humanity.  One must reside in France, as I have done for many years, to understand and admire as it deserves the incomparable lesson in courage, abnegation, firmness, determination, coolness, conscious dignity, self-mastery, good-humour, chivalrous generosity and utter charity and self-sacrifice which this great and noble people, which has civilized more than half the globe, is at the present moment teaching the civilized world.

Let us also salute boundless Russia, with her wonderful soldiers, innocent and ingenuous as the saints of old, ignorant of fear as children who do not yet know the meaning of death.  Yonder, along a formidable front running from the Baltic to the Black Sea, with silent multitudinous heroism, amid defeats which are but victories delayed, she is beginning the great work of our deliverance, Lastly let us greet Servia, small but prodigious, whom we must one day place on the summit of that monument of glory which Europe will raise to-morrow to the memory of those who have freed her from her chains.

So much for them.  They have a right to all our gratitude, to all our admiration.  They are doing magnificently all that had to be done.  But they occupy a place apart in duty’s splendid hierarchy.  They are the protagonists of direct, material, tangible, undeniable, inevitable duty.  This war is their war.  If they would not accept the worst of disgraces, if they were not prepared to suffer servitude, massacre, ruin and famine, they had to undertake it; they could not do otherwise.  They were attacked by the born enemy, the irreducible and absolute enemy, of whom they knew enough to understand that they had nothing to expect from him but total and unremitting disaster.  It was a question of their continued existence in this world.  They had no choice; they had to defend themselves; and any other nation in their place would have done the same, only there are few who would have done it with the same spirit of self-abnegation, the same devotion, the same perseverance, the same loyalty and the same smiling courage.

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But for us Belgians—­and we may say as much for you English—­it was not a question of this kind of duty.  The horrible drama did not concern us.  It demanded only the right to pass us by without touching us; and, far from doing us any harm, it would have flooded us with the unclaimed riches which armies on the march drag in their wake.  We Belgians in particular, peaceable, hospitable, inoffensive and almost unarmed, should, by the very treaties which assured our existence, have remained complete strangers to this war.  To be sure, we loved France, because we knew her as well as we knew