Between the Seine and the Rhine lay once a beautiful land wherein more history was made, and recorded in old monuments full of grace and grandeur and fancy, than in almost any other region of the world. The old names were best, for each aroused memory and begot strange dreams: Flanders, Brabant, the Palatinate; Picardy, Valois, Champagne, Franche-Comté; Artois, Burgundy, and Bar. And the town names ring with the same sonorous melody, evoking the ghosts of a great and indelible past: Bruges, Ghent, Louvain, and Liége; Aix-la-Chapelle, Coblentz, and Trèves; Ypres and Lille, Tournai and Fontenay, Arras and Malplaquet; Laon, Nancy, Verdun, and Varennes; Amiens, Soissons, and Reims. Cæsar, Charlemagne, St. Louis, Napoleon, with proconsuls, paladins, crusaders, and marshals unnumbered; kings, prince-bishops, monks, knights, and aureoled saints take form and shape again at the clang of the splendid names. And in all these places, and by all these men (and elsewhere, endlessly, and by hands unnumbered), two thousand years had wrought their visible manifestation in abbey, church, and cathedral; in manor and palace and castle, in trade hall and civic hall, and in library and seminary and school. Wars, great and small, have swept it from river to river, but much has been free for a century and all of it free for forty years. Under every oppression and every adversity it has thriven and grown rich, not in material things alone, but in those commodities that have actual intrinsic value; and a short year ago it was the most prosperous, peaceful, and industrious quarter of Europe. Whatever the war, however violent the opposing agencies, its priceless records of architecture and other acts were piously or craftily spared, except when the madness of the French Revolution swept over its convents and cloisters, leaving Coxyde, Villers, St. Bavon, St. Jean des Vignes, the Abbaye des Lys, dead witnesses of the faith that had built them and the spared monuments as well. And now a thing calling itself the highest civilisation in Europe, with the name of God in its mouth, again sweeps the already well-swept land. In defiance of Peace Palaces and Conferences; in spite of the bankers of the world and their double-knotted purse-strings; in spite of a socialism that said war should not happen again, and an evolutionary philosophy that said it could not happen again (men now being so civilised), the world is at war, and the old arena of Europe flames as at Armageddon, while those things too sacred for pillage and destruction by the armies and the commanders of five centuries are given over to annihilation in order that the peril of the Slav, on the other side of Europe, may not menace the treasured civilisation of the West, whose vestiges even now are blazing pyres, or cinders and ashes!