Until the very last moment our enemies deluded themselves as to the loyalty of the Belgians: they still hoped that the latter would only resist as a matter of form. This idea is openly expressed in the Chancellor's speech of the 2nd December; it is also implicitly contained in the proclamation of General von Emmich (see _6th Report_, I). The officers and soldiers who crossed the frontier at the beginning of the war were quite bewildered by the unforeseen resistance of the Belgian Army; this is what the German prisoners interned at Bruges tell their relatives; they even go so far as to deplore having to fight a neutral country. LETTERS FROM GERMAN PRISONERS OF WAR. We hear from Belgium:-- The correspondence of the German prisoners of war (to the number of about two thousand) who, at the beginning of the war, were interned in the barracks of the Bruges Lancers, has passed almost entirely through our hands. All say they are well treated. Some even hope that the Belgian prisoners in Germany will be as well treated as they. One wounded soldier in a Bruges hospital relates that the Belgians treat the German wounded like brothers; another speaks only of his "Belgian comrades"! The good food served to them seems to make a great impression. Most of them say, "We have enough to eat"; or even, "We have food in abundance." Only one complains of "beer without flavour and bad wine"; but another says with much simplicity: "The people here are very kind to us, for we have enough to eat and drink." The word _for_ is amusing.... The letters of the officers are quite different. No more joy because their lives are safe. The war absorbs them entirely. They are warriors at heart and the struggle interests them passionately. They know nothing of what is happening, or rather they are not told what is happening, and they want to know ... to know, and it is painful to hear in each letter the same question: what news? The forced inactivity becomes a torture. Boredom presses on them: they are discouraged and greatly disillusioned; they had hoped to pass very rapidly across Belgium (it must be remembered that at this time the war was only beginning, that Brussels was not yet occupied, and that the letters date from this period). The attack upon Belgium does not seem to please a great many of them. "We have attacked a neutral country," says a medical officer, "and we shall now have to suffer the eventual consequences." "When we got out of the train," says another, "we received the order to fight against Belgium, a thing which is to me and to all highly antipathetic. But what is commanded has to be executed." "The attack on Belgium was from the first a shameful thing." "We violated Belgium before any declaration of war had been made"!