Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 12644-h.htm or 12644-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/6/4/12644/12644-h/12644-h.htm) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/1/2/6/4/12644/12644-h.zip) THROUGH THE IRON BARS Two years of German occupation in Belgium BY EMILE CAMMAERTS ILLUSTRATED WITH CARTOONS BY LOUIS RAEMAEKERS MCMXVII CONTENTS. I. The Prison Gates II. The Lowered Flag III. The Poisoned Wells IV. The Sacking of Belgium V. The Modern Slave 1. The Creeping Tide 2. "By the Waters of Babylon" VI. The Olive Branch Through the Iron Bars I. THE PRISON GATES. The English-speaking public is generally well informed concerning the part played in the war by the Belgian troops. The resistance of our small field army at Liège, before Antwerp, and on the Yser has been praised and is still being praised wherever the tale runs. This is easy enough to understand. The fact that those 100,000 men should have been able to hold so long in check the forces of the first military Empire in Europe, and that a great number of them, helped by new contingents of recruits and led by their young King, should still be fighting on their native soil, must appeal strongly to the imagination. If it be told how the new Belgian army, reorganised and re-equipped after the terrible ordeal on the Yser, is at the present moment much stronger than at the beginning of the war, how it has been able lately to extend its front in Flanders, and how some of its units have rendered valuable help to the cause of the Allies in East Africa and even in Galicia, the story sounds like a fairy tale. There is, in the history of this unequal struggle, the true ring of legendary heroism; it seems an echo of the tale of David and Goliath, or of Jack the Giant Killer; it is full of the triumph of the spirit over the flesh, of independence and free will over fatalism and brute force, of Right over Might.