The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918 — John Shaqi
The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918Various
History
The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918
Various
American periodicals
teachers of minor rank, and a very few Belgians. Opinion in Holland rose
in disgust, and an unpleasant life awaits the Dutch instructors if they
ever dare return to the land of their birth. They have been canny enough
to make sure of pensions from the German government, in view of the
probability that they will in the near future be men without a country.
On April 5, 1916, the German Chancellor, making a curious mixture of
cynicism and hypocrisy, in a speech before the Reichstag, promised that
the Imperial Government would help the Flemish population to free itself
from "the preponderance of French culture." The Germans no doubt
expected some backing from the Flamingant societies, the trustees of the
Flemish endowment funds, and the former political supporters of the
Flemish movement. In this they have been disappointed, for their conduct
has aroused protest upon protest from all these quarters. It is
difficult to determine, from the boasts in the German newspapers and the
denials of exiled Belgians, just how many teachers and students had been
scraped together by the beginning of 1917, but the faculty was a motley
collection of German, Dutch and Belgian nonentities, and there were less
than three students for every teacher. To-day there is only one student
in agriculture, the subject that would naturally be most sought in a
Flemish university. Of all the war-babies, this University of Ghent is
surely the most anæmic. Yet if we are to believe General von Bissing in
the speech in which he declared it alive and viable, "The God of War
held it at the baptismal font with naked sword in hand!" This is _echt
Deutsch_ in taste and feeling. And while these proceedings were solemnly
going on, the deportation of workmen from Ghent was beginning; on the
very day of inauguration, husbands and fathers were being torn from
their families to suffocate in German salt-mines, to sweat and faint in
German collieries, to dig and die in German trenches. Has the world ever
seen a more revolting instance of hypocrisy? I happened to be in
Courtrai one morning when a number of Flemish wives and mothers were
herded into the jail there, from the village of Sweveghem, because their
men had refused to make barbed wire for the Germans. International law
forbids a conqueror to compel the vanquished to produce munitions of
war, but what of that!
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