isoners,' he said. 'It was a bad
job, there were only sixteen of us to handle 200 Germans. We had four
box cars and we put twenty-five prisoners in one end of the car and
twenty-five in the other, and the four of us with rifles sat guard by
the car door.

"'We rode five hours that way and I expected every minute that the whole
fifty Germans in the car would jump on us four and kill us. Four to
fifty; that's heavy odds. But we had to do it. You see there aren't
enough soldiers in Belgium to do all the work, so we have to make out
the best we can.'

"That's the plucky little Belgian soldier, all over.

"In the first place, he's different from most soldiers, because he is
willing to fight when he knows he's going to lose.

"'We have to make out the best we can,' is his motto.

"In the second place, he's a common-sense little fellow. Even while he's
fighting, he's doing it coolly, and there is no blind hatred in his
heart that causes him to waste any effort. He gets down to the why and
wherefore of things.

"'I really felt sorry for those German prisoners,' said a comrade of
the first soldier. 'They were all decent fellows. They told me their
officers had fooled them. They said the officers gave them French money
on the German frontier and then yelled to them, "On into France!" They
went on three days and got to Liege before they knew they were in
Belgium instead of France.

"'We didn't want to hurt Belgium,' they told us, because we're from
Alsace-Lorraine ourselves.'

"'You see,' continued the logical little Belgian, 'it wasn't their
fault, so we couldn't be mad at them.'

"That is the Belgian idea--cool logic.

"'Why did you fight the Germans?' I asked a high government official.

"'Because civilization can't exist without treaties, and it is the duty
that a nation owes to civilization to fight to the death when written
treaties are broken,' was the reply.

"'It must be a rule among nations that to break a treaty means to fight.
The Germans broke the neutrality treaty with Belgium and we had to
fight.'

"'But did you expect to whip the Germans?'

"'How could we? We knew that hordes of Germans would follow the first
comers, but we had no right to worry about who would be whipped; all we
had to do was to fight, and we've done it the best we could.'

"It has been a cool-headed logical matter with the Belgians from the
start. Treaties are made with ink; they're broken with blood, and just
as naturally and