_Le brave Belge!_ One must be honest about him. If one lets his heart run away with his judgment he does his mind an injustice. A fellow-countryman who was in London and fresh from home in the eighth month of the war, asked me for my views of the relative efficiency of the different armies engaged.
“Do you mean that I am to speak without regard to personal sympathies?” I asked.
“You have mentioned them all except the Belgian army. I thought it was the bravest and best of all.”
“Is that what they think at home?” I asked.
This man of affairs, an exponent of the efficiency of business, was a sentimentalist when it came to war, as Anglo-Saxons usually are. The side which they favour--that is the efficient side. When I ventured to suggest that the Belgian army, in a professional sense, was hardly to be considered as an army, it was clear that he had ceased to associate my experience with any real knowledge.
In business he was one who saw his rivals, their abilities, the organisation of their concerns, and their resources of competition with a clear eye. He could say of his best personal friend: “I like him, but he has a poor head for affairs.” Yet he was the type who, if he had been a trained soldier, would have been a business man of war, who would have wanted a sharp, ready sword in a well-trained hand and to leave nothing to chance in a battle for the right. In Germany, where some of the best brains of the country are given to making war a business, he might have been a soldier who would rise to a position on the staff. In America he was the employer of three thousand men--a general of civil life.
“But look how the Belgians have fought!” he exclaimed. “They stopped the whole German army for two weeks.”
The best army was best because it had his sympathy. His view was the popular view in America: the view of the heart. America saw the pigmy fighting the giant rather than let him pass over Belgian soil. On that day when a gallant young king cried, “To arms!” all his people became gallant to the imagination.
When I think of Belgium’s part in the war I always think of the little Belgian dog, the _shipperke_, who lives on the canal boats. He is a home-staying dog, loyal, affectionate, domestic, who never goes out on the tow-path to pick quarrels with other dogs; but let anything on two or four feet try to go on board when his master is away and he will fight with every ounce of strength in him. The King had the _shipperke_ spirit. All the Belgians who had the _shipperke_ spirit tried to sink their teeth in the calves of the invader.