as this.
They had dully waited for two hours with scarce a murmur.

The most pathetic weather-worn old man--a farm drudge, I
surmise--came up to the exit. All I heard were the words of the
officer: "You speak German, eh?"

At a flash this dead throng became an infuriated blood-thirsting
mob. "Allemand! Espion!" it shouted, swinging forward until the
gates sagged. "Kill him! Kill the damned German!"

The mob would have put its own demand into execution but for the
soldiers, who flung the poor quivering fellow into one corner and
pushed back the Belgians, eager to trample him to the station
floor.

There was the girl Yvonne, who, while the color was mounting to
her pretty face, informed us that she "wanted the soldiers to keel
every German in the world. No," she added, her dark eyes
snapping fire, "I want them to leave just one. The last one I shall
keel myself!"

Yet, every example of Belgian ferocity towards the spoilers one
could match with ten of Belgian magnanimity. We obtained a
picture of Max Crepin, carbinier voluntaire, in which he looks
seventy years of age--he was really seventeen. At the battle of
Melle he had fallen into the hands of the Germans after a bullet
had passed clean through both cheeks. In their retreat the
Germans had left Max in the bushes, and he was now safe with
his friends.

He could not speak, but the first thing he wrote in the little book the
nurse handed him was, "The Germans were very kind to me."
There was a line about his father and mother; then "We had to lie
flat in the bushes for two days. One German took off his coat and
wrapped it around me, though he was cold himself. Another
German gave me all the water in his canteen." Then came a line
about a friend, and finally: "The Germans were very kind to me." I
fear that Max would not rank high among the haters.

Whenever passion swept and tempted to join their ranks, the
figure of Gremberg comes looming up to rebuke me. He was a
common soldier whose camaraderie I enjoyed for ten days during
the skirmishing before Antwerp. In him the whole tragedy of
Belgium was incarnated. He had lost his two brothers; they had
gone down before the German bullets. He had lost his home; it
had gone up in flames from the German torch. He had lost his
country; it had been submerged beneath the gray horde out of the
north.

"Why is it, Gremberg," I asked, "you never rage against the
Boches? I should think you would delight to lay your hands on