All communications with foreign countries have been interrupted, and the papers must depend completely on the censor for news. The few items of correspondence which he could manage to get through from England and France were not allowed to be printed, and quotations from foreign papers are strictly forbidden. The German Government tried often with his paper, and with all the others of a certain importance, to convert them into Germanophile papers, offering large sums of money and great advantages of every kind. Such offers were naturally refused, and now the Germans have founded a new paper, the title of which sounds very Belgian, while the editor and staff have been carefully selected amongst people who are, at least as far as their name goes, thoroughly Belgian. This is now the leading organ of the Germanophil movement. "Many Belgians in London?" asked my friend, after a pause. "Too many," I could not help answering. "Oh, we know, we know. Twenty per cent. are perhaps _real_ refugees, and the others are slackers, or people who fancy that, after all, a season in London is the best way of dealing with the crisis. "I wonder if the young men who left Belgium on the pretext of enlisting, and who are now 'acting the referee' in London, know that we consider them a disgrace to our country? "If a man cannot fight with our King on the last bit of Belgian soil, his duty is to stick to his town, to his village, or to his country house. Especially if he is a man of wealth, and most Belgians now in London are fairly well off, there is plenty for him to do here." The very same thing was repeated to me by hundreds of people while I was in Belgium. A lady who ten or twelve years since has spent every winter in her beautiful villa in Bordighera, and who, for the first time, did not this year leave Brussels, where she is managing an emergency hospital for children, said to me: "When you go back to England, please tell the English that we Belgians do not want to be judged by those of us who are now in London enjoying themselves in theatres and night clubs. What they spend in an evening would be sufficient to keep one of our starving families for a week. We know, from some refugees who have come back, how even a number of young men are enjoying in England an idle life and a free and large hospitality. Such people should not be surprised if, when the war is over and they are back in Belgium, they are considered as outcasts. We shall not have any room for them in our society. They have deserted Belgium when she was most in need of them; they have made us look like cowards in the eyes of the country which has been helping us most gallantly, and they will not be surprised, I think, to be ostracised by the rest of their countryfolk.