Part 3 (1/2)

Then you gave her death for her laughter, As you looked on her mischievous face.

You hated the tiny peasant, With the hate of your famous race.

You were not frenzied and angry; You were cold and efficient and keen.

Your thrust was as thorough and deadly As the stroke of a faithful machine.

You stabbed her deep with your rifle: You had good reason to sing, As you footed it on through Flanders Past the broken and quivering thing.

Something impedes your advancing, A dragging has come on your hosts.

And Paris grows dim now, and dimmer, Through the blur of your raucous boasts.

Your singing is sometimes broken By guttural German groans.

Your ankles are wet with _her_ bleeding, Your pike is blunt from _her_ bones.

The little peasant has tripped you.

She hangs to your b.l.o.o.d.y stride.

And the dimpled hands are fastened Where they fumbled before she died.

THE STEAM ROLLER

The Steam Roller, the final method, now operating in Belgium to flatten her for all time, is the most deadly and universal of the three. It is a calculated process to break the human spirit. People speak as if the injury done Belgium was a thing of the past. It is at its height now.

The spy system with its clerks, waiters, tourists, business managers, reached directly only some thousands of persons. The atrocities wounded and killed many thousands of old men, women, and children. But the German occupation and sovereignty at the present moment are denationalizing more than six million people. The German conquerors operate their Steam Roller by clever lies, thus separating Belgium from her real friends; by taxation, thus breaking Belgium economically; by enforced work on food supplies, railways, and ammunition, thus forcing Belgian peasants to feed their enemy's army and destroy their own army, and so making unwilling traitors out of patriots; by fines and imprisonment that hara.s.s the individual Belgian who retains any sense of nationality; by official slander from Berlin that the Belgians are the guilty causes of their own destruction; and finally by the fact of sovereignty itself, that at one stroke breaks the inmost spirit of a free nation.

I was still in Ghent when the Germans moved up to the suburbs.

”I can put my artillery on Ghent,” said the German officer to the American vice-consul.

That talk is typical of the tone of voice used to Belgians: threat backed by murder.

The whole policy of the Germans of late is to treat the Belgian matter as a thing accomplished.

”It is over. Let bygones be bygones.”

It is a process like the trapping of an innocent woman, and when she is trapped, saying,

”Now you are compromised, anyway, so you had better submit.”

A friend of mine who remained in Ghent after the German occupation, had German officers billetted in his home. Daily, industriously, they said to him that the English had been poor friends of his country, that they had been late in coming to the rescue. Germany was the friend, not England. In the homes throughout Belgium, these unbidden guests are claiming slavery is a beneficent inst.i.tution, that it is better to be ruled by the German military, and made efficient for German ends, than to continue a free people.

For a year, our Red Cross Corps worked under the direction and authority of the Belgian prime minister, Baron de Broqueville. The prime minister in the name of his government has sent to this country an official protest against the new tax levied by the Germans on his people. The total tax for the German occupation amounts to $192,000,000. He writes:

”The German military occupation during the last fifteen months has entirely prevented all foreign trade, has paralyzed industrial activity, and has reduced the majority of the laboring cla.s.ses to enforced idleness. Upon the impoverished Belgian population whom Germany has unjustly attacked, upon whom she has brought want and distress, who have been barely saved from starvation by the importation of food which Germany should have provided--upon this population, Germany now imposes a new tax, equal in amount to the enormous tax she has already imposed and is regularly collecting.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: One of the dangerous Belgian franc-tireurs, who made it necessary for the German Army to burn and bayonet babies and old women.

His name is Gaspar. He is three years old.]

The Belgian Legation has protested unavailingly to our Government that Germany, in violation of The Hague Conventions, has forced Belgian workmen to perform labor for the German army. Belgian Railway employees at Malines, Luttre and elsewhere refused to perform work which would have released from the transportation service and made available for the trenches an entire German Army Corps. These Belgian workmen were subjected to coersive measures, which included starvation and cruel punishments. Because of these penalties on Belgians refusing to be traitors, many went to hospitals in Germany, and others returned broken in health to Belgium.

After reading the chapter on the German spy system, a Belgian wrote me: