appen at Matching's Easy....

Mr. Van der Pant did not seem to be angry with the Germans. But he
manifestly regarded them as people to be killed. He denounced nothing
that they had done; he related. They were just an evil accident that had
happened to Belgium and mankind. They had to be destroyed. He gave Mr.
Britling an extraordinary persuasion that knives were being sharpened in
every cellar in Brussels and Antwerp against the day of inevitable
retreat, of a resolution to exterminate the invader that was far too
deep to be vindictive.... And the man was most amazingly unconquered.
Mr. Britling perceived the label on his habitual dinner wine with a
slight embarrassment. "Do you care," he asked, "to drink a German wine?
This is Berncasteler from the Moselle." Mr. Van der Pant reflected. "But
it is a good wine," he said. "After the peace it will be Belgian....
Yes, if we are to be safe in the future from such a war as this, we must
have our boundaries right up to the Rhine."

So he sat and talked, flushed and, as it were, elated by the vividness
of all that he had undergone. He had no trace of tragic quality, no hint
of subjugation. But for his costume and his trimmed beard and his
language he might have been a Dubliner or a Cockney.

He was astonishingly cut off from all his belongings. His house in
Antwerp was abandoned to the invader; valuables and cherished objects
very skilfully buried in the garden; he had no change of clothing except
what the rucksack held. His only footwear were the boots he came in. He
could not get on any of the slippers in the house, they were all too
small for him, until suddenly Mrs. Britling bethought herself of Herr
Heinrich's pair, still left unpacked upstairs. She produced them, and
they fitted exactly. It seemed only poetical justice, a foretaste of
national compensations, to annex them to Belgium forthwith....

Also it became manifest that Mr. Van der Pant was cut off from all his
family. And suddenly he became briskly critical of the English way of
doing things. His wife and child had preceded him to England, crossing
by Ostend and Folkestone a fortnight ago; her parents had come in
August; both groups had been seized upon by improvised British
organisations and very thoroughly and completely lost. He had written to
the Belgian Embassy and they had referred him to a committee in London,
and the committee had begun its services by discovering a Madame Van der
Pant hitherto unknown t