NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 60, Issue 132, 15 March 1940, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

burgomaster max.

Tributes to the memory or Burgomaster Max, the first citizen of Brussels at the time of the German invasion of Belgium in 1,914, were paid by M fimile Cammaents in a recent broadcast. M. Max died on November 6, “Like most popular figures, M. Max had his legend,” said M. Cammaertsi “So many stories were circuited during the first weeks of the German occupation that it has become difficult to discriminate between what is folklore and what is not. We may wonder, for instance, whether, when the new Governor of Belgium flung his revolver on the Conference table, the Burgomaster laid his fountain pen alongside it, or whether when the Germans ordered a hundred beds to be prepared for them at the Town Hall he really retorted that he would have a hundred and one beds ready, foi them and for himself; but we know that he refused again and again to be intimidated and that he insisted on sleeping in his own Hotel de Ville, to watch over his unwelcome guests. Arrest and deportation to Germany did not succeed in breaking his spirit. When he was allowed to correspond with his friends, after several months of imprisonment, his letters showed the same determination which he had displayed during the first weeks of the war. It is easy to understand that on his return, in November, 1918, M. Max was greeted in Brussels as a national hero. It is not -so easy to understand how this popularity never left him during the last 20 years. M. Max became*an institution. He took a mqre active part in national politics after entering Parliament as a Liberal Leader, but the centre of his interest, remained to the last the good old town in which he was born, which he had done so much to preserve in the hour of danger, and in. which his memory will long be honoured as that of a brave and honest man and a great citizen.”