Through the Iron Bars: Two Years of German Occupation in Belgium

Belgian troops. The resistance of our small field army at Liège, before Antwerp, and on the Yser has

litary Empire in Europe, and that a great number of them, helped by new contingents of recruits and led b

landers, and how some of its units have rendered valuable help to the cause of the Allies in East Africa and even in Galicia, the story sounds like a fairy tale. There is, in the history of this unequal struggle, the true ring of le

ances of Leonidas or Marathon. My heroes risk their lives, but they are not soldiers, merely prosaic "bourgeois" and workmen. They have no weapon, they cannot fight. They have only to remain cheery in adversity and patient in the face of taunts. They cannot render blow for blow, they have no sword to flourish against an insolent conqu

good time, they might escape notice. People might forget that, besides the 150,000 to 200,000 heroes who are now waging war for Belgium on the Western front, there are 7,500,000 heroes who are suffering for Bel

o my readers how they are saving themselves from despair, from spiritual starvation, I should be well repaid for my trouble, for, among all the wonders of this war, which has displa

ed by spies and subjected constantly to the most severe individual and collective punishments on the slightest pretext, is obliged to refrain from any manifestation of patriotic sentiments-that such a population, completely cut off from its Government and from most of its political leaders, and, moreover, poisoned every day by news concocted by the enemy, should remain unshakable in its courage and loyalty and

ss, had not yet assumed its most ruthless and systematic character; and, after the fall of the great fortress, when the yoke of the conqueror weighed more heavily on the vanquished shoulders, and when the Belgian population,

nment and the Pro-German Press. Besides, in a way, the atrocities committed during the last days of August, 1914, ought not to be considered as the culminating point of Belgium's martyrdom. They have, of course, appealed to the imagination of the masses, they have filled the world with horror and indignation, but they did not extend all over the country, as the present oppression does; they only affected a few thousand men and women, instead of involving hundreds of thousands. They were clean wo

ntly condemned. What is to be the verdict now that they have succeeded, after two years of efforts, in sacking the whole country, ruining her industry and commerce, throwing out of employment her best workmen and leading into slavery tens of thousands of her staunchest patriots? The horrors of Louvain and Dinant were compared, with some reason, to the excesses of the Thirty Years War, but modern history offers no other instance of forced labour and wholesale depo

hinking that deliverance was at their gates. To sober their spirit-or to exasperate their patience?-the Governor General ordered that a few Belgian prisoners, some of them wounded, with their quickfiring gun drawn by a dog, should be marched through the crowded streets. The men were covered with dust, their heads wrapped in blood-stained bandages, and they kept their eyes on the ground as if ashamed. Some women sobbed on see

ibrating boom of the German heavies was heard louder than ever. The listening Bruxellois grew paler, straining every nerve to catch the voice of Antwerp. It was as if their own life as a nation was slowly dying away, as if they were mourning their ow

shelter his children from cold, or of a Saint suffering every physical privation in order to gain the Kingdom of Heaven. It is an uncanny spirit composed of wild energy and bitter-sweet irony. "First Liège, then Brussels, t

of the Allies, any successful sortie from Antwerp, might have jeopardized all the conqueror's plans and necessitated an immediate retreat. The Yser-Ypres struggle barred the way to Brussels as well as to Calais. The Germans knew now that they were safe, at least for a good many months, and began systematically to "organize the country." All communications with the uninterrupted part of B