isturbance where there is no disturbance, to save money which is not
their money, to deport unemployed who are not unemployed, to oblige them
to work against their country instead of for their country, and in
Germany instead of in Belgium. They are doing everything but what they
want to do, they go anywhere but where they are going, and they say
anything but what they are thinking.

[Footnote 6: Letter of Cardinal Mercier to Governor von Bissing, Nov.
29th, 1916.]

[Footnote 7: Reply of the Deputies of Mons to Governor von Bissing, Nov.
27th, 1916.]

* * * * *

The other day I heard two people--two wizened city clerks--discussing
the war in the train. "When and how will the Germans be beaten?" asked
the first. The other shrugged his shoulders and declared solemnly,
while pulling at his pipe: "The Germans? They have been beaten a long
time ago! They were beaten when they set foot for the first time in
Belgium."

The remark is not new, and I daresay it was a reminiscence of some
sentence picked up in a newspaper or at a popular meeting. But whoever
uttered it for the first time was right. The case of Belgium has
uplifted the whole moral atmosphere of the struggle. Since the first
guns boomed around Liege and the first civilians were shot at Vise, a
war which might have been represented, to a certain extent, as a
conflict of interests, has become a conflict of principles. In a way,
the Germans were beaten because, from that moment, they had to struggle
against unseen and inflexible forces. Whatever you choose to call
them--democratic instinct, Christian aspiration, or the conscience of
the civilised world--they will do their work relentlessly, every day of
the year, every hour of the day. It is their doing that, in spite of the
immense financial influence and the most active propaganda, Germany has
become unpopular all over the world. Other facts, like the _Lusitania_,
the trial of Miss Cavell, the work accomplished by Zeppelins, have
contributed to provoke this feeling. But whether we consider the origin
or the last exploits of German policy, whether we think of two years ago
or of to-day, the image of Belgium, of her invasion, of her martyrdom,
of her oppression, of her deportations, dominates the spiritual aspect
of the whole war.

When they crossed the Belgian frontier, the Germans walked straight into
a bog, and since then they have been sucked deeper and deeper into the
mud of t