the scope of active operations among the contending
armies prior to the time when the struggle for western Flanders began.
Finally, just after Antwerp fell, I skirted the northern frontiers of
Belgium and watched the refugees pouring across the borders into
Holland. I was four times in Liege and three times in Brussels, and any
number of times I crossed and recrossed my own earlier trails. I
traveled afoot; in a railroad train, with other prisoners; in a taxi-
cab, which we lost; in a butcher's cart, which we gave away; in an open
carriage, which deserted us; and in an automobile, which vanished.

I saw how the populace behaved while their little army was yet intact,
offering gallant resistance to the Germans; I saw how they behaved when
the German wedge split that army into broken fragments and the Germans
were among them, holding dominion with the bayonet and the bullet; and
finally, six weeks later, I saw how they behaved when substantially all
their country, excluding a strip of seaboard, had been reduced to the
state of a conquered fief held and ruled by force of arms.

By turns I saw them determined, desperate, despairing, half rebellious,
half subdued; resigned with the resignation of sheer helplessness, which
I take it is a different thing from the resignation of sheer
hopelessness. It is no very pleasant sight to see a country flayed and
quartered like a bloody carcass in a meat shop; but an even less
pleasant thing than that is to see a country's heart broken. And
Belgium to-day is a country with a broken heart.

These lines were written with intent to be printed early in January. By
that time Christmas was over and done with. On the other side of the
Atlantic Ocean, in lieu of the Christmas carols, the cannon had rung its
brazen Christmas message across the trenches, making mockery of the
words: "On earth peace, good will toward men." On our side of the ocean
the fine spirit of charity and graciousness which comes to most of us at
Christmastime and keeps Christmas from becoming a thoroughly
commercialized institution had begun to abate somewhat of its fervor.

To ourselves we were saying, many of us: "We have done enough for the
poor, whom we have with us always." But not always do we have with us a
land famous for its fecundity that is now at grips with famine; a land
that once was light-hearted, but where now you never hear anyone laugh
aloud; a land that is half a waste and half a captive province