Part 4

The Cardinal had gone on but a short way when the uproar behind him caused him to stop and look back at what was happening. When he saw the priest led off by the soldiers, he and his companions turned back and followed the soldiers to the little guardhouse. He walked directly in, looking neither to the right nor the left, standing a head above the rest of the crowd. He fixed his piercing black eyes upon the eyes of the priest; then he beckoned him to come and turned and walked out, followed by the priest.

The soldiers made no attempt to stop them. They seemed to recognize an authority that they could not help obeying, even though they did not want to. The Cardinal accompanied by the three priests went on down the road and out of Malines towards Brussels. They walked about half way to the city and then took the trolleys.

In speaking of the Germans, the Cardinal is reported to have said, "They are so stupid, these Germans! Sometimes I feel that they are like silly, cruel children, and that I should do something to help them."

He loves America and the Americans and is grateful for all that the United States have done for his suffering people. He told one of his fellow-workers who had become discouraged, "If you follow a great Captain, as I do, you will never be discouraged."

In him martyred Belgium has found a voice heard round the world. He has never ceased to denounce the atrocious crimes of the German masters of his country and he has continually sought to comfort and cheer his unhappy people. He sees far, and so he sees clearly the power outside ourselves that finally brings to Right the victory over Might. His Pastoral Letter, Christmas, 1914, will never be forgotten nor will the words of cheer to his suffering people when he reminds them of the greatest truth of life, that only through sacrifice and suffering come the things best worth while. His statement in letters to the German Commandant of the facts concerning the deportation of Belgians into Germany, to work as virtual slaves, will forever form part of the records of history's blackest deeds.

This Pastoral Letter of Christmas, 1914, is in part as follows:

It was in Rome itself that I received the tidings--stroke after stroke--of the destruction of the church of Louvain, of the burning of the Library and of the scientific laboratories of our great University and of the devastation of the city, and next of the wholesale shooting of citizens, and tortures inflicted upon women and children, and upon unarmed and undefended men. And while I was still under the shock of these calamities, the telegraph brought us news of the bombardment of our beautiful metropolitan church, of the church of Notre Dame, of the episcopal palace, and of a great part of our dear city of Malines.

Afar, without means of communication with you, I was compelled to lock my grief within my own afflicted heart, and to carry it, with the thought of you, which never left me, to my God.

I needed courage and light, and sought them in such thoughts as these. A disaster has come upon the world, and our beloved little Belgium, a nation so faithful in the great mass of her population to God, so upright in her patriotism, so noble in her King and Government, is the first sufferer. She bleeds; her sons are stricken down, within her fortresses, and upon her fields, in defense of her rights and of her territory. Soon there will not be one Belgian family not in mourning. Why all this sorrow, my God? Lord, Lord, hast Thou forsaken us?

The truth is that no disaster on earth is as terrible as that which our sins provoke.

I summon you to face what has befallen us, and to speak to you simply and directly of what is your duty, and of what may be your hope. That duty I shall express in two words: Patriotism and Endurance.

PATRIOTISM

When, on my return from Rome, I went to Havre to greet our Belgian, French, and English wounded; when, later at Malines, at Louvain, at Antwerp, it was given to me to take the hands of those brave men who carried a bullet in their flesh, a wound on their forehead, because they had marched to the attack of the enemy, or borne the shock of his onslaught, it was a word of gratitude to them that rose to my lips. "O brave friends," I said, "it was for us, it was for each one of us, it was for me, that you risked your lives and are now in pain. I am moved to tell you of my respect, of my thankfulness, to assure you that the whole nation knows how much she is in debt to you."

For in truth our soldiers are our saviors.

A first time, at Liége, they saved France; a second time, in Flanders, they halted the advance of the enemy upon Calais. France and England know it; and Belgium stands before them both, and before the entire world, as a nation of heroes. Never before in my whole life did I feel so proud to be a Belgian as when, on the platforms of French stations, and halting a while in Paris, and visiting London, I was witness of the enthusiastic admiration our allies feel for the heroism of our army. Our King is, in the esteem of all, at the very summit of the moral scale; he is doubtless the only man who does not recognize that fact, as, simple as the simplest of his soldiers, he stands in the trenches and puts new courage, by the calmness of his face, into the hearts of those of whom he requires that they shall not doubt of their country. The foremost duty of every Belgian citizen at this hour is gratitude to the army.

If any man had rescued you from shipwreck or from a fire, you would hold yourselves bound to him by a debt of everlasting thankfulness. But it is not one man, it is two hundred and fifty thousand men who fought, who suffered, who fell for you so that you might be free, so that Belgium might keep her independence, so that after battle, she might rise nobler, purer, more erect, and more glorious than before.

Pray daily, my Brethren, for these two hundred and fifty thousand, and for their leaders to victory; pray for our brothers in arms; pray for the fallen; pray for those who are still engaged; pray for the recruits who are making ready for the fight to come.

Better than any other man, perhaps, do I know what our unhappy country has undergone. Nor will any Belgian, I trust, doubt of what I suffer in my soul, as a citizen and as a Bishop, in sympathy with all this sorrow. These last four months have seemed to me age-long. By thousands have our brave ones been mown down; wives, mothers are weeping for those they shall not see again; hearths are desolate; dire poverty spreads, anguish increases. At Malines, at Antwerp, the people of two great cities have been given over, the one for six hours, the other for thirty-four hours of a continuous bombardment, to the throes of death. I have passed through the greater part of the most terribly devastated districts and the ruins I beheld, and the ashes, were more dreadful than I, prepared by the saddest of forebodings, could have imagined. Other parts which I have not yet had time to visit have in like manner been laid waste. Churches, schools, asylums, hospitals, convents in great numbers, are in ruins. Entire villages have all but disappeared. At Werchter-Wackerzeel, for instance, out of three hundred and eighty homes, a hundred and thirty remain; at Tremeloo two thirds of the village are overthrown; at Bueken out of a hundred houses, twenty are standing; at Schaffen one hundred and eighty-nine houses out of two hundred are destroyed--eleven still stand. At Louvain the third part of the buildings are down; one thousand and seventy-four dwellings have disappeared; on the town land and in the suburbs, one thousand eight hundred and twenty-three houses have been burnt.

In this dear city of Louvain, perpetually in my thoughts, the magnificent church of St. Peter will never recover its former splendor. The ancient college of St. Ives, the art-schools, the consular and commercial schools of the University, the old markets, our rich library with its collections, its unique and unpublished manuscripts, its archives, its gallery of great portraits of illustrious rectors, chancellors, professors, dating from the time of its foundation, which preserved for masters and students alike a noble tradition and were an incitement in their studies--all this accumulation of intellectual, of historic, and of artistic riches, the fruit of the labors of five centuries--all is reduced to dust.

Thousands of Belgian citizens have in like manner been deported to the prisons of Germany, to Münsterlagen, to Celle, to Magdeburg. At Münsterlagen alone three thousand one hundred civil prisoners were numbered. History will tell of the physical and moral torments of their long martyrdom. Hundreds of innocent men were shot. I possess no complete list, but I know that there were ninety-one shot at Aerschot, and that there, under pain of death, their fellow citizens were compelled to dig their graves. In the Louvain group of communes one hundred and seventy-six persons, men and women, old men and babies, rich and poor, in health and sickness, were shot or burnt.

In my diocese alone I know that thirteen priests were put to death. One of these, the parish priest of Gelrode, suffered, I believe, a veritable martyrdom.

We can neither number our dead nor compute the measure of our ruins. And what would it be if we turned our sad steps towards Liége, Namur, Andenne, Dinant, Tamines, Charleroi, and elsewhere?

And where lives were not taken, and where buildings were not thrown down, what anguish unrevealed! Families, hitherto living at ease, now in bitter want; all commerce at an end, all careers ruined; industry at a standstill; thousands upon thousands of workingmen without employment; working-women, shop-girls, humble servant-girls without the means of earning their bread; and poor souls forlorn on the bed of sickness and fever, crying, "O Lord, how long, how long?"

How long, O Lord, they wondered, how long wilt Thou suffer the pride of this iniquity? Or wilt Thou finally justify the impious opinion that Thou carest no more for the work of Thy hands? A shock from a thunderbolt, and behold all human foresight is set at naught. Europe trembles upon the brink of destruction.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

Many are the thoughts that throng the breast of man to-day, and the chief of them all is this: God reveals Himself as the Master. The nations that made the attack, and the nations that are warring in self-defense, alike confess themselves to be in the hand of Him without whom nothing is made, nothing is done. Men long unaccustomed to prayer are turning again to God. Within the army, within the civil world, in public, and within the individual conscience, there is prayer. Nor is that prayer to-day a word learnt by rote, uttered lightly by the lip; it surges from the troubled heart, it takes the form, at the feet of God, of the very sacrifice of life.

God will save Belgium, my Brethren, you cannot doubt it.

Nay, rather, He is saving her.

Across the smoke of conflagration, across the stream of blood, have you not glimpses, do you not perceive signs, of His love for us? Is there a patriot among us who does not know that Belgium has grown great? Nay, which of us would have the heart to cancel this last page of our national history? Which of us does not exult in the brightness of the glory of this shattered nation? Let us acknowledge that we needed a lesson in patriotism. There were Belgians, and many such, who wasted their time and their talents in futile quarrels of class with class, of race with race, of passion with personal passion.

Yet when, on the second of August, a mighty foreign power, confident in its own strength and defiant of the faith of treaties, dared to threaten us in our independence, then did all Belgians, without difference of party, or of condition, or of origin, rise up as one man, [close-ranged] about their own king and their own government, and cry to the invader: "Thou shalt not pass!"

At once, instantly, we were conscious of our own patriotism. For down within us all is something deeper than personal interests, than personal kinships, than party feeling, and this is the need and the will to devote ourselves to that more general interest which Rome called the public thing, _Res publica_. And this profound will within us is Patriotism.

Our country is not a mere gathering of persons or of families dwelling on the same soil, having amongst themselves relations, more or less intimate, of business, of neighborhood, of a community of memories, happy or unhappy. Not so; it is an association of living souls to be defended and safeguarded at all costs, even the cost of blood, under the leadership of those presiding over its fortunes. And it is because of this general spirit that the people of a country live a common life in the present, through the past, through the aspirations, the hopes, the confidence in a life to come, which they share together. Patriotism, an internal principle of order and of unity, an organic bond of the members of a nation, was placed by the finest thinkers of Greece and Rome at the head of the natural virtues.

ENDURANCE

We may now say, my Brethren, without unworthy pride, that our little Belgium has taken a foremost place in the esteem of nations. I am aware that certain onlookers, notably in Italy and in Holland, have asked how it could be necessary to expose this country to so immense a loss of wealth and of life, and whether a verbal manifesto against hostile aggression, or a single cannon-shot on the frontier, would not have served the purpose of protest. But assuredly all men of good feeling will be with us in our rejection of these paltry counsels.

On the 19th of April, 1839, a treaty was signed in London, by King Leopold, in the name of Belgium on the one part, and by the Emperor of Austria, the King of France, the Queen of England, the King of Prussia, and the Emperor of Russia on the other; and its seventh article decreed that Belgium should form a separate and perpetually neutral State, and should be held to the observance of this neutrality in regard to all other States. The signers promised, for themselves and their successors, upon their oaths, to fulfill and to observe that treaty in every point and every article. Belgium was thus bound in honor to defend her own independence. She kept her oath. The other Powers were bound to respect and to protect her neutrality. Germany violated her oath; England kept hers.

These are the facts.

The laws of conscience are sovereign laws. We should have acted unworthily had we evaded our obligation by a mere feint of resistance. And now we would not change our first resolution; we exult in it. Being called upon to write a most solemn page in the history of our country, we resolved that it should be also a sincere, also a glorious page. And as long as we are required to give proof of endurance, so long we shall endure.

All classes of our citizens have devoted their sons to the cause of their country; but the poorer part of the population have set the noblest example, for they have suffered also privation, cold, and famine. If I may judge of the general feeling from what I have witnessed in the humbler quarters of Malines, and in the most cruelly afflicted districts of my diocese, the people are energetic in their endurance. They look to be righted; they will not hear of surrender.

The sole lawful authority in Belgium is that of our King, of the elected representatives of the nation. This authority alone has a right to our affection, our submission.

Occupied provinces are not conquered provinces. Belgium is no more a German province than Galicia is a Russian province. Nevertheless the occupied portion of our country is in a position it is compelled to endure. The greater part of our towns, having surrendered to the enemy on conditions, are bound to observe those conditions. From the outset of military operations, the civil authorities of the country urged upon all private persons the necessity of avoiding hostile acts against the enemy's army. That instruction remains in force. It is our army, and our army solely, in league with the brave troops of our Allies, that has the honor and the duty of national defense. Let us intrust the army with our final deliverance.

Towards the persons of those who are holding dominion among us by military force, and who cannot but know of the energy with which we have defended, and are still defending, our independence, let us conduct ourselves with all needful forbearance. Let us observe the rules they have laid upon us so long as those rules do not violate our personal liberty, nor our consciences, nor our duty to our country. Let us not take bravado for courage, nor tumult for bravery.

Our distress has moved the other nations. England, Ireland, and Scotland; France, Holland, the United States, Canada, have vied with each other in generosity for our relief. It is a spectacle at once most mournful and most noble. Here again is a revelation of the Providential Wisdom which draws good from evil. In your name, my Brethren, and in my own, I offer to the governments and the nations that have succored us the assurance of our admiration and our gratitude.

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert.... Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

AND THE COCK CREW[1]

"I hate them all!" said old Gaspard, And in his weather-beaten face The lines of bitterness grew hard, For he had seen his dwelling-place Laid waste in very wantonness, And all his little treasures flung Into that never-sated press From which no wine, but gall, had sprung-- And not his heart alone was sore, For in his frail old limbs he bore Wounds of the heavy, ruthless hand That weighed so cruelly of late Upon the people and the land. It was not hard to understand Why old Gaspard should hate Even the German lad who lay His neighbor in the hospital, The boy who pleaded night and day: "Don't let me die! don't let me die! When I see the dawn, I know I shall live out that day, and then I'm not afraid--till dark--but oh, How soon the night comes round again! Don't let me die! don't let me die!"

The old man muttered at each low, Pitiful, half delirious cry, "They should die, had I the say, In hell's own torment, one and all!" And then would drag himself away, Despite each motion's agony, To where the wounded poilus lay, And cheer them with his mimicry Of barnyard noises, and his gay Old songs of what life used to be. One night the lad suddenly cried, "Mother!" And though the sister knew-- He was so young, so terrified, "You're safe--the east is light," she lied. But "No!" he sobbed, "the cock must crow Before the dawn!" They did not hear A cripple crawl across the floor, But all at once, outside the door, In the courtyard, shrill and clear, Once, twice and thrice, chanticleer crew. The blue eyes closed and the boy sighed, "I'm not afraid, now day's begun. I'll live--till--" With a smile, he died.

And in that hour when he denied The god of hate, I think that One Passed through the hospital's dim yard And turning, looked on old Gaspard.

AMELIA JOSEPHINE BURR.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] COPYRIGHT BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

A BELGIAN LAWYER'S APPEAL

One of the great lawyers of Belgium in behalf of the members of the bar of Brussels, Liége, Ghent, Charleroi, Mons, Louvain, and Antwerp, appeared twice before the German Court of Justice at Brussels and appealed for more just treatment of the Belgian people. In his first appeal, he protested against the illegal manner in which the Belgians were accused of crime, tried, and convicted at the pleasure of German officials. He concluded with the following eloquent words:

I can understand martial law for armies in the field. It is the immediate reply to an aggression against the troops, the quick justice of the commander of the army responsible for his soldiers. But our armies are far away; we are no longer in the zone of military operations. Nothing here threatens your troops, the inhabitants are calm.

The people have taken up work again. You have bidden them do it. Each one attends to his business--magistrates, judges, officials of the provinces and cities, the clergy, all are at their posts, united in one outburst of national interest and brotherhood.

However, this does not mean that they have forgotten. The Belgian people lived happily in their corner of the earth, confident in their dream of independence. They saw this dream dispelled; they saw their country ruined and devastated; its ancient hospitable soil has been sown with thousands of tombs where our own sleep; the war has made tears flow which no hand can dry. No, the murdered soul of Belgium will never forget.

His second appeal will be spoken by school children in Belgium, and perhaps in America, when the names of the German judges to whom he spoke are forgotten even in Germany.

We are not annexed. We are not conquered. We are not even vanquished. Our army is fighting. Our colors float alongside those of France, England, and Russia. The country subsists. She is simply unfortunate. More than ever, then, we now owe ourselves to her, body and soul. To defend her rights is also to fight for her.

We are living hours now as tragic as any country has ever known. All is destruction and ruin around us. Everywhere we see mourning. Our army has lost half of its effective forces. Its percentage in dead and wounded will never be reached by any of the belligerents. There remains to us only a corner of ground over there by the sea. The waters of the Yser flow through an immense plain peopled by the dead. It is called the Belgian Cemetery. There sleep our children by the thousands. There they are sleeping their last sleep. The struggle goes on bitterly and without mercy.

Your sons, Mr. President, are at the front; mine as well. For months we have been living in anxiety regarding the morrow.

Why these sacrifices, why this sorrow? Belgium could have avoided these disasters, saved her existence, her treasures, and the lives of her children, but she preferred her honor.