Whenever passion swept and tempted to join their ranks, the figure of Gremberg comes looming up to rebuke me.  He was a common soldier whose camaraderie I enjoyed for ten days during the skirmishing before Antwerp.  In him the whole tragedy of Belgium was incarnated.  He had lost his two brothers; they had gone down before the German bullets.  He had lost his home; it had gone up in flames from the German torch.  He had lost his country; it had been submerged beneath the gray horde out of the north.

“Why is it, Gremberg,” I asked, “you never rage against the Boches?  I should think you would delight to lay your hands on every German and tear him into bits.  Yet you don’t seem to feel that way.”

“No, I don’t,” he answered.  “For if I had been born a Boche, I know that I would act just like any Boche.  I would do just as I was ordered to do.”

“But the men who do the ordering, the officers and the military caste, the whole Prussian outfit?”

“Well, I have it in for that crowd,” Gremberg replied, “but, you see, I’m a Socialist, and I know they can’t help it.  They get their orders from the capitalists.”

The capitalists, he explained, were likewise caught in the vicious toils of the system and could act no differently.  Bayonet in hand, he expounded the whole Marxian philosophy as he had learned it at the Voorhuit in Ghent.  The capitalists of Germany were racing with the capitalists of England for the markets of the world, so they couldn’t help being pitted against each other.  The war was simply the transference of the conflict from the industrial to the military plane, and Belgium, the ancient cockpit of Europe, was again the battlefield.

He emphasized each point by poking me with his bayonet.  As an instrument of argument it is most persuasive.  When I was a bit dense, he would press harder until I saw the light.  Then he would pass on to the next point.

I told him that I had been to Humanite’s office in Paris after Jaures was shot, and the editors, pointing to a great pile of anti-war posters, explained that so quickly had the mobilization been accomplished, that there had been no time to affix these to the walls.

“The French Socialists had some excuse for their going out to murder their fellow workers,” I said, “and the Germans had to go or get shot, but you are a volunteer.  You went to war of your own free-will, and you call yourself a Socialist.”

“I am, but so am I a Belgian!” he answered hotly.  “We talked against war, but when war came and my land was trampled, something rose up within me and made me fight.  That’s all.  It’s all right to stand apart, but you don’t know.”

I did know what it was to be passion swept, but, however, I went on baiting him.

“Well, I suppose that you are pretty well cured of your Socialism, because it failed, like everything else.”

“Yes, it did,” he answered regretfully, “but at any rate people are surprised at Socialists killing one another—­not at the Christians.  And anyhow if there had been twice as many priests and churches and lawyers and high officials, that would not have delayed the war.  It would have come sooner; but if there had been twice as many Socialists there would have been no war.”