danger; a kind of callousness as to consequences,
which I find it difficult to define in words, but which, nevertheless,
impresses itself on the observer's mind as a definite and tangible fact.
The soldier gets it, and it enables him to endure his own discomforts
and sufferings, and the discomforts and sufferings of his comrades,
without visible mental strain. The civic populace get it, and, as soon
as they have been readjusted to the altered conditions forced on them by
the presence of war, they become merely sluggish, dulled spectators of
the great and moving events going on about them. The nurses and the
surgeons get it, or else they would go mad from the horrors that
surround them. The wounded get it, and cease from complaint and
lamenting.

It is as though all the nerve ends in every human body were burnt blunt
in the first hot gush of war. Even the casual eyewitness gets it. We
got it ourselves; and not until we had quit the zone of hostilities did
we shake it off. Indeed, we did not try. It made for subsequent sanity
to carry for the time a drugged and stupefied imagination.

Barring only Huy, where there had been some sharp street fighting, as
attested by shelled buildings and sandbag barricades yet resting on
housetops and in window sills, we encountered in the first stage of our
journey no considerable evidences of havoc until late in the afternoon,
when we reached Dinant. I do not understand why the contemporary
chronicles of events did not give more space to Dinant at the time of
its destruction, and why they have not given it more space subsequently.

I presume the reason lies in the fact that the same terrible week which
included the burning of Louvain included also the burning of Dinant; and
in the world-wide cry of protestation and distress which arose with the
smoke of the greater calamity the smaller voice of grief for little
ruined Dinant was almost lost. Yet, area considered, no place in Belgium
that I have visited--and this does not exclude Louvain--suffered such
wholesale demolition as Dinant.

Before war began, the town had something less than eight thousand
inhabitants. When I got there it had less than four thousand, by the
best available estimates. Of those four thousand more than twelve
hundred were then without food from day to day except such as the
Germans gave them. There were almost no able-bodied male adults left.
Some had fled, some were behind bars as prisoners of the Ger