In the first days of August, 1914, the enemy of liberty began its march. With a ruthlessness that has no counterpart except in the acts of those barbarian hordes that swept across Europe in the Dark Ages Germany marched into Belgium, a small and peaceful country, giving as the only excuse for her wanton invasion the fact that the easiest road to France lay across that land. She expected Belgium to submit. The giant, swollen with power, would do as it pleased with the pigmy. And when the British Ambassador remonstrated with the German Chancellor over this illegal treatment of a nation that all the powers of Europe had promised to protect the Chancellor answered that the treaty of Germany with Belgium was simply “a scrap of paper.” Germany knew no treaties that opposed her desires; Germany has cared for nothing but her own selfish goal. And the great German people consented to this infamous course, because they had been taught that their first duty was blind obedience to the will of the Fatherland, which meant the will of the House of Hohenzollern. Never in history has a people,--and in this case a people that was supposed to be civilized and thoughtful,--bowed its neck so meekly to the yoke of its overlords. But as the hordes of power-drunk Germans,--whom civilization has rightly named the Huns, in memory of those earlier barbarian invaders of western Europe,--advanced through the peaceful fields of little Belgium they found, to their great surprise, that the Belgian people did not intend to submit to such an outrage without protest. Led by their heroic king, Albert, the Belgians threw themselves in the path of the Huns and checked them for a few days. They could not save their country, but they saved precious days for the French and English, and the Huns found that their march to Paris was not the easy, triumphal progress they had planned.