; a land
that cannot find bread to feed its hungry mouths, yet is called on to
pay a tribute heavy enough to bankrupt it even in normal times; a land
whose best manhood is dead on the battleground or rusting in military
prisons; whose women and children by the countless thousands are either
homeless wanderers thrust forth on the bounty of strangers in strange
places, or else are helpless, hungry paupers sitting with idle hands in
their desolated homes--and that land is Belgium.

Having been an eyewitness to the causes that begot this condition and to
the condition itself, I feel it my duty to tell the story as I know it.
I am trying to tell it dispassionately, without prejudice for any side
and without hysteria. I concede the same to be a difficult undertaking.

Some space back I wrote that I had been able to find in Belgium no
direct proof of the mutilations, the torturings and other barbarities
which were charged against the Germans by the Belgians. Though fully a
dozen seasoned journalists, both English and American, have agreed with
me, saying that their experiences in this regard had been the same as
mine; and though I said in the same breath that I could not find in
Germany any direct evidence of the brutalities charged against the
Belgians by the Germans, the prior statement was accepted by some
persons as proof that my sympathy for the Belgians had been chilled
through association with the Germans. No such thing. But what I desire
now is the opportunity to say this: In the face of the present plight of
this little country we need not look for individual atrocities. Belgium
herself is the capsheaf atrocity of the war. No matter what our
nationality, our race or our sentiments may be, none of us can get away
from that.

Going south into France from the German border city of Aix-la-Chapelle,
our automobile carried us down the Meuse. On the eastern bank, which
mainly we followed during the first six hours of riding, there were
craggy cliffs, covered with forests, which at intervals were cleft by
deep ravines, where small farms clung to the sides of the steep hills.
On the opposite shore cultivated lands extended from the limit of one's
vision down almost to the water. There they met a continuous chain of
manufacturing plants, now all idle, which stretched along the river
shore from end to end of the valley. Culm and flume and stack and kiln
succeeded one another unendingly, but no smoke issued from any ch