The Ways of War
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: UNDER THE HEEL OF THE HUN I.?A World Adrift Brussels, August 5, 1914. All Europe is a study in strain. The unexpected swing of events has brought Belgium? Belgium which for eighty years has lived only for a neutral independence?to the centre of the arena. The Waterloo of 1914, as that of 1815, may very well be fought on Belgian soil. It is impossible to exaggerate the sincere amazement of the man in the street, the man in the cafe. " We have gorged the Albuches with money. They have blacklegged us in business. We are stuffed with them?bah ! our national life is choked with these German sausages. And now ! Traitors, cowards, violators of honour and the free Belgian frontier!" The anti-German feeling is heating rapidly to a frenzy. No more demi-Munichs in the restaurants. Even if the beer be of German nativi
...ty, which is sometimes a little in doubt, it must be sold as Belgian. The more discreet patrons had already painted out, or draped in patriotic bunting, all advertisements for German products. But the ruse was not general nor always successful. The window-breakers had already appeared, waving the tricolour, chanting " La Brabanfonne." Every street, and,indeed, every buttonhole, has blossomed as suddenly as the staff of Tannhauser. Cockades, rosettes, bows, the tricolours of France and Belgium, the red, white and blue of England, flower inexplicably into being. At ten centimes a time we manifest our sympathies, and make dazzling fortunes for the street-sellers. At the house of a public official one finds a sort of synopsis of the general desolation. The family has just scrambled back from Switzerland. The eldest son, a captain of engineers, had already left for the front, ordered to action too urgently to wait even for a last handshake, a last kiss. His children can...
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