All along the road, for the rest of that journey the “it must be” of the hotel-keeper and the sergeant seemed to be written over the whole country-side. It was harvest-time, and women, lads and little girls were working in the fields, replacing absent husbands, fathers and brothers. They were doing it quite simply, not drawn by any appeal, nor compelled by any order. Every other cart I met was driven by a woman. Women were herding the cattle. There was a woman at the cashier’s desk of the bank in the town where I went to get some money changed. One of my friends, who has large interests in the south of France, told me that his man of business was at the Dardanelles. “His wife looks after my property in his place. She is astonishingly intelligent and capable.” Everywhere the same tranquil stoicism, the same entire absence of complaint. A battalion of territorials marched past. They were not young men. All of them had had fixed duties and habits which were now broken up. Yet they submitted without a murmur, marching along the hot and dusty road with an energy which revealed in them also the same sense of compelling necessity. That, to my mind, gives to this war its pathetic side. It has all the imposing grandeur of the vital forces of nature; it is the heroic movement of a country which defies death, which is not meant to die. Nor will she allow Belgium to die--the Belgium to whom the sergeant paid his tribute, and whose “we must” rang out with such poignant firmness under the German menace. It was not for life alone that Belgium fought, but for honour and for justice. No Frenchman lives who does not feel this, and who does not merge his own cause in that of the indomitable subjects of Belgium’s indomitable King. PAUL BOURGET _de l’Académie Française_ [Illustration: _LÉON BONNAT_ PEGASUS FROM A PENCIL AND PEN-AND-INK SKETCH] [Illustration: à Madame Wharton hommage très respectueux. L^{éon} Bonnat ] _JOSEPH CONRAD_ POLAND REVISITED I I have never believed in political assassination as a means to an end, and least of all if the assassination is of the dynastic order. I don’t know how far murder can ever approach the efficiency of a fine art, but looked upon with the cold eye of reason it seems but a crude expedient either of impatient hope or hurried despair. There are few men whose premature death could influence human affairs more than on the surface. The deeper stream of causes depends not on individualities which, like the mass of mankind, are carried on by the destiny which no murder had ever been able to placate, divert or arrest.