y act of its Government is
inviolable to opposing armies. The Prussian crime of Silesia, nearly
two centuries before, the succeeding infamies of 1864, and the forgery
of the Ems dispatch, the whole proclaimed tradition of contempt for
the sanctities of Christendom, proceeding from Frederick the Great,
had indeed accustomed men to successive stages in the decline of
international morals; but nothing of the wholly crude character which
this violation of Belgium bore was to be discovered in the past, even
of Prussia, and posterity will mark it as a curious term and possibly
a turning-point in the gradual loss of our common religion, and of the
moral chaos accompanying that loss.

4. The preparations of this country by land were not complete. Those
of the French were belated compared with those of the Germans, and the
prospect of even a short delay in the falling of the blow was
exaggerated in value by all the intensity of that anxiety with which
the blow was awaited.

To proceed from these preliminaries to the story.

* * * * *

The German Army had for its ultimate object, when it should be fully
mobilized, the passage of the greater part of its forces over the
Belgian Plain.

This Belgian Plain has for now many centuries formed the natural
avenue for an advance upon the Gauls.

It has been represented too often as a sort of meeting-place, where
must always come the shock between what is called Latin civilization
and the Germanic tribes. But this view is both pedantic and
historically false. There never was here a shock or conflict between
two national ideals. What is true is, that civilization spread far
more easily up from the Gauls through that fertile land towards the
forests of Germany, and that when the Roman Empire broke down, or
rather when its central government broke down, the frontier garrisons
could here depend upon wealthier and more numerous populations for the
support of their local government. That body of auxiliary soldiers in
the Roman army which was drawn from the Frankish tribes ruled here
when Rome could no longer rule. It was from Tournai that the father of
Clovis exercised his power; and in the resettlement of the local
governments in the sixth century, the Belgian Plain was the avenue
through which the effort of the civilized West was directed towards
the Rhine. It has Roman Cologne for its outpost; later it evangelized
the fringes of German barbarism, and late