At every opportunity the Belgians were told that the British and the French could never come to their rescue. The Allies were beaten. It was the British who got Belgium into trouble; the British who were responsible for the idleness, the penury, the hunger, and the suffering in Belgium. The British had used Belgium as a cat’s-paw; then they had deserted her. But Belgians remained mostly unconvinced. They were making war with mind and spirit, if not with arms. “We know how to suffer in Belgium,” said a Belgian jurist. “Our ability to suffer and to hold fast to our hearths has kept us going through the centuries. Flemish and French, we have stubbornness in common. Now a ruffian has come into our house and taken us by the throat. He can choke us to death, or he can slowly starve us to death, but he cannot make us yield. No, we shall never forgive!” “You, too, hate, then?” I asked. “Of course I hate. For the first time in my life I know what it is to hate; and so do my countrymen. I begin to enjoy my hate. It is one of the privileges of our present existence. We cannot stand on chairs and tables as they do in Berlin cafés and sing our hate, but no one can stop our hating in secret.” Beside the latest _verboten_ and regulation of Belgian conduct on the city walls were posted German official news bulletins. The Belgians stopped to read; they paused to reread. And these were the rare occasions when they smiled, and they liked to have a German sentry see that smile. “_Pour les enfants!_” they whispered, as if talking to one another about a _crèche_. Little ones, be good! Here is a new fairy tale! When a German wanted to buy something he got frigid politeness and attention--very frigid, telling politeness--from the clerk, which said: “Beast! Invader! I do not ask you to buy, but as you ask, I sell; and as I sell I hate! I hate!! I hate!!!” An officer entering a shop and seeing a picture of King Albert on the wall, said: “The orders are to take that down!” “But don’t you love your Kaiser?” asked the woman, who kept the shop. “Certainly!” “And I love my King!” was the answer. “I like to look at his picture just as much as you like to look at your Kaiser’s.” “I had not thought of it in that way!” said the officer. Indeed, it is very hard for any conqueror to think of it in that way. So the picture remained on the wall.