h characteristic official solidarity, vacated his room and
bestowed his presence elsewhere. Then the proprietor was informed
that his guests would return if he would agree to employ German
help and buy his supplies from Germany. He refused, for practical
as well as for sentimental reasons. If he had consented, think what
the Belgians would have done to him after the Germans were gone!
However, officers were gradually returning, for this was the best
hotel in town, and even conquerors are human and German conquerors
have particularly human stomachs.

IX
Christmas In Belgium

Christmas in Belgium with the bayonet and the wolf at the door taught
me to value Christmas at home for more than its gifts and the cheer
of the fireside. It taught me what it meant to belong to a free people
and how precious is that old English saying that a man's house is his
castle, which was the inception of so much in our lives which we
accept as a commonplace. If such a commonplace can be made
secure only by fighting, then it is best to fight. At any time a foreign
soldier might enter the house of a Belgian and take him away for trial
before a military court.

Breakfast in the same restaurant as before the city's fall! Again the
big grapes which are a luxury of the rich man's table or an
extravagance for a sick friend with us! The hothouses still grew them.
What else was there for he hothouses to do, though the export of
their products was impossible? A shortage of the long, white-leafed
chicory that we call endive in New York restaurants? There were piles
of it in the Brussels market and on the hucksters' carts; nothing so
cheap!

One might have excellent steaks and roasts and delicious veal; for
the heifers were being butchered as the Germans had taken all
fodder. But the bread was the Commission's brown, which everyone
had to eat. Belgium, growing quality on scanty acres with intensive
farming, had food luxuries but not the staff of life.

I looked out of the windows on to the square which four months
before I had seen crowded with people bedecked with the Allies'
colours and eagerly buying the latest editions containing the
communiques of hollow optimism. No flag in sight now except a
German flag flying over the station! But small revenges may be
enjoyed. A German soldier tried to jump on the tail of a cart driven by
a Belgian, but the Belgian whipped up his horse and the German fell
off on to the pavement, whilst the cart