But what he has suffered, what he suffers day by day only those can understand who have had the privilege of access to this hero:  the most sensitive and the gentlest of men, silent and reserved; a man of controlled emotions, modest with a timidity that is at once baffling and delightful; loving his people less as a father loves his children than as a son loves his adoring mother.  Of all that cherished kingdom, his pride and his joy, the seat of his happiness, the centre of his love and his security, there is left intact but a handful of cities, which are threatened at every moment by the foulest invader that the world has ever borne.

All the others—­so quaint or so beautiful, so bright, so serene, happy to be there, so inoffensive—­jewels in the crown of Peace, models of pure and upright family life, homes of loyal and dutiful industry, of ready, ever-smiling geniality, with the natural welcome, the ever-proffered hand and the ever-open heart:  all the others are dead cities, of which not one stone is left upon another; and the very country-side, one of the fairest in this world, with its gentle pastures, is now no more than one vast field of horror.

Treasures have perished that were numbered among the noblest and dearest possessions of mankind; monuments have disappeared which nothing can replace; and the half of a nation, among all nations the most attached to its old simple habits, its humble homes, is at present wandering along the roads of Europe.  Thousands of innocent people have been massacred; and of those who remain nearly all are doomed to poverty and hunger.

But that remainder has but one soul, which has taken refuge in the spacious soul of its king.  Not a murmur, not a word of reproach!  But yesterday a town of thirty thousand inhabitants received the order to forsake its white houses, its churches, its ancient streets and squares, the scene of a light-hearted and industrious life.  The thirty thousand inhabitants, women and children and old men, set forth to seek an uncertain refuge in a neighbouring city, which is threatened almost as directly as their own and which to-morrow, it may be, must in its turn set forth, but whither none can say, for the country is so small that its boundaries are quickly reached, its shelter soon exhausted.

No matter:  they obey in silence and one and all approve and bless their sovereign.  He did what had to be done, what every one in his place would have done; and, though they are all suffering as no people has suffered since the barbarous invasions of the earliest ages, they know that he suffers more than any of them, for in him all their sorrows find a goal; in him they are reflected and enhanced.  They do not even harbour the idea that they might have been saved by a sacrifice of honour.  They draw no distinction between duty and destiny.  To them that duty, with its frightful consequences, seems as inevitable as a natural force against which we cannot even dream of struggling, so great is it and so invincible.