What I have written is not inspired by even the least touch of discouragement. The breakneck advance on the German right seems to me not the stride of conquerors, but the mad hurry of columns flung forward in a frenzied gamble. Sursum corda! But let us remember that all alliances need delicate handling. Belgium is in agony. A stroke, swift and generous, such as suggested, will recall her, and all her people, to the glorious courage of Liége. Antwerp, and the field army now sheltered about it, have still a great part to play. BELGIUM IN PEACE WORK OF THREE GENERATIONS--COMPARISONS WITH IRELAND--SOME MEMORIES It is an irony characteristic of this scurvy and disastrous time that Belgium should have first found her way to the general imagination of these countries through the waste redness of war. Peace was her whole being. For eighty years, trusting to the good faith of Europe, she had pursued an economical evolution without parallel. For national defence she had relied on that most solemn treaty of the nineteenth century. Even a little time ago, even since Agadir, her army, although unsuspectedly alert in technique, was still a jest of vaudeville. In temper and fibre, the Belgian people was the least militarist on the Continent. It is true that in recent years, wise foreseeing men of arms and men of politics, troubled by the audacity of Prussian apostles of conquest like Bernhardi, had begun to take alarm. Brialmont, the great engineer, had fortified Liége against Germany, and improved the defences of Namur against France. He had also, of course, planned the new entrenched position of Antwerp, the war-capital, and incidentally provided us with the first-class mystery of its subsequent easy fall. De Broqueville had carried a new army scheme which in due development would have given Belgium at need a million bayonets to defend her neutrality instead of three hundred thousand. King Leopold, couched like a super-spider behind his fine-drawn webs of diplomacy and finance, had made way for King Albert of the simpler gospel. But on the whole the temper of Belgium was not radically changed. When in 1912 the Kaiser, receiving General Heimburger, Governor of Liége, at Aix-la-Chapelle during manœuvres, expressed his astonishment at the improvement of the defences on the Belgo-German frontier, the latter had no stronger reply than: “Well, Majesty, we soldiers had a chance of getting something extra out of our Government, and we took it.” Neither your courteous and subtle Liégois, nor your genial and abundant citizen of Brussels, nor your four-square indomitable Flamand really believed that the treaty would ever be violated, or that he would ever be called on to die for his independence.