Let us think of our sons sleeping forever down there in the trenches of Haelen and Tirlemont and Aerschot; of those brave artillerymen who, for twenty days, have been waiting in the forts at Liege the help so many times promised from the allies; of our lancers charging into mitrailleuse-fire as if they were in a tournament; let us remember that our heroic little infantrymen, crouched behind a hedge or in a trench, keeping up their fire for ten hours running until their ammunition was exhausted, and forced at last to retire, wounded and worn out, without a chief to take orders from, have had no other thought than that of finding some burgomaster or commissioner of police, in order not to be taken for deserters.  Let us think a little of all these brave men and be worthy of them.

There were no music-halls in Belgium and there were posters on the blank walla, even of little villages, reminding bands and hurdy-gurdy players and the proprietors of dance-halls that this was no time for unnecessary noise.  There were no soldiers going gayly off to war; the Belgians were coming back from war.  They had been asked to hold out for three days, and they had held for three weeks.  All their little country was a battle-field, and Belgium open to the invader.

It was too late to get to Brussels, but there was still a train to Antwerp.  At Puers soldiers were digging trenches and stringing approaches with barbed wire.  The dikes had been opened and part of the country flooded.  Farther on we passed the Antwerp forts, then comely suburbs where houses had been torn down and acres of trees and shrubs—­ precious, as may be imagined, to a people who line their country roads with elms and lindens like avenues in parks, and build monuments to benevolent-looking old horticulturists—­chopped down and burned.  And go, presently, into the old city itself, dull-flaming with the scarlet, gold, and black, of the Belgian flag, and with something that seemed to radiate from the life itself of this hearty, happy people, after all their centuries of trade and war, and good food, and good art—­like their own Rubenses and Van Dycks.

There was no business, not a ship moving in the Scheldt.  All who worked at all were helping prepare for the possible siege; those who didn’t crowded the sidewalk cafes, listening to tales from the front, guessing by the aid of maps whither, across the silent, screened southwest, the German avalanche was spreading.

“Treason,” “betrayal,” “savagery,” were on everybody’s lips.  For Antwerp, you might say, had been “half German”; many of its rich and influential men were of German origin, although they had lived in Belgium for years.  And now the Belgians felt they had lived there as spies, and the seizure of Belgium was an act long and carefully planned.  One was told of the finding of rifles in German cellars, marked “Preserves,” of German consuls authorized to give prizes for the most complete inventories of their neighborhoods turned in by amateur spies.