eat and truculent
neighbors. To strike at one another they must strike Belgium. By the
accident of geography and the caprice of boundary lines she has always
been the anvil for their hammers. Jemmapes and Waterloo, to cite two
especially conspicuous examples among great Continental battles, were
fought on her soil. Indeed, there is scarcely an inch of her for the
possession of which men of breeds not her own--Austrians and Spaniards,
Hanoverians and Hollanders, Englishmen and Prussians, Saxons and
Frenchmen--have not contended. These others won the victories or lost
them, kept the spoils or gave them up; she wore the scars of the grudges
when the grudges were settled. So there is a reason for calling her the
cockpit of the nations; but, as I said just now, I shall think of her as
Europe's rag doll--a thing to be clouted and kicked about; to be crushed
under the hoofs and the heels; to be bled and despoiled and ravished.

Thinking of her so, I do not mean by this comparison to reflect in any
wise on the courage of her people. It will be a long time before the
rest of the world forgets the resistance her soldiers made against
overbrimming odds, or the fortitude with which the families of those
soldiers faced a condition too lamentable for description.

Unsolicited, so competent an authority as Julius Caesar once gave the
Belgians a testimonial for their courage. If I recall the commentaries
aright, he said they were the most valorous of all the tribes of Gaul.
Those who come afterward to set down the tale and tally of the Great War
will record that through the centuries the Belgians retained their
ancient valor.

First and last, I had rather exceptional opportunities for viewing the
travail of Belgium. I was in Brussels before it surrendered and after
it surrendered. I was in Louvain when the Germans entered it and I was
there again after the Germans had wrecked it. I trailed the original
army of invasion from Brussels southward to the French border, starting
at the tail of the column and reaching the head of it before, with my
companions, I was arrested and returned by another route across Belgium
to German soil.

Within three weeks thereafter I started on a ten-day tour which carried
me through Liege, Namur, Huy, Dinant and Chimay, and brought me back by
Mons, Brussels, Louvain and Tirlemont, with a side trip to the trenches
before Antwerp--roughly, a kite-shaped journey which comprehended
practically all