art of Belgian painters is world famous and graces the finest
galleries in both Europe and America. Many of the paintings of Rubens
and other master artists are almost priceless. As lace makers the women
of Belgium are famous the world around. From early morning until late at
night these toilers sit in their low chairs and the skill with which
they shoot the little thread-bobbins back and forth across the cushions
is indescribable. Neither men nor women in Belgium are overly much given
to amusements. They work with all their might, but when the national
holidays come they abandon themselves to the amusements for the moment
and have a most enjoyable time.

While many are illiterate, the Belgians are giving much attention to
schools these times. Even while they were guests of France, with their
government located at Havre, they established twenty-four schools for
the children and a single woman had more than five thousand pupils under
her care and direction. They also established large schools at that
place for disabled soldiers and many of them became not only skilled
workers, but inventors. One of these disabled men invented a process to
make artificial limbs out of waste paper and it is said that these limbs
are the best made. Many of these legless soldiers with artificial limbs
can walk so well that one would never imagine that they had been
wounded.

Providence seems to have made Belgium the great battlefield of Europe.
Nearly every great general of European history has fought on Belgian
soil. When the Spaniards looted Belgian cities and set up the
inquisition it seemed as though the very imps of the lower regions were
turned loose. I have looked upon many of the instruments of torture that
can still be seen in European museums and they were even more terrible
than anything used in the late war. Again and again has Belgian soil
been drenched with blood. Only a little more than one hundred years ago
the hosts of Napoleon and Wellington decided the destiny of nations at
the battle of Waterloo.

Here was this great hive of industry, with the wheels of her factories
humming and her people happy, industrious and contented up to that
fateful day in August, 1914. No people were more loyal to their ideals,
more trustful of others or more anxious to serve humanity than these
honest-hearted, hard-working people. They felt secure, for the treaty
which protected them had been signed by all the nations around them.
This treat