The reports circulated by the Government of Belgium, as anybody who refers back to them may ascertain, were carefully drawn up and substantially true. The statement that the Belgians were under the impression alleged in this declaration, is, in face of the now known facts of the Allied plan of the campaign, ludicrous. Still more remarkable, however, is the calm assumption that neither Belgium nor its Government had the smallest right to defend themselves, and that any attempt to exercise that right was, in effect, an act of rebellion against Germany. In fact, the presumption is that Belgium was already part of Germany; and this in face of the “solemn assurance” offered on August 9. Last, but not least, has been the effort more recently made to suggest, despite this declaration, that the “unrelenting severity” and “examples of frightfulness” are hallucinations of Belgian excitement.[H] These things speak for themselves. Nine towns in Belgium--Louvain, Aerschot, Tirlemont, Termonde, Jodoigne, Dinant, Ardenne, Visé, Charleroi, and Mons--had been reduced to ruins. Others, like Malines, Diest, and Alost, had been in great part wrecked. At Liége a whole quarter of the city had been surrounded, set on fire, and its terrified and unarmed inhabitants, as they fled from the burning houses, shot down wholesale by machine guns until the streets ran with blood.[I] Yet the world was solemnly assured that it was all no more than a bad dream. So far from aiding, as intended, the military situation of the German forces, this policy of rapine tended to defeat itself. After the defeat of the German armies on the Marne, the Government of Berlin made a second offer of accommodation to the Belgian Ministry. The reply was a sortie in full force from the Belgian lines, which obliged the enemy to employ against them three army corps of reserves they were just then sending through northern Belgium into France. In France, those reinforcements were urgently needed. It is evident that this second offer of accommodation merely had as its primary object the prompt arrival of those troops. They had to be recalled from the French frontier, and to join with the forces of occupation in a fiercely fought four days’ battle.