Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1914. UNDAUNTED BELGIUM

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 61, 9 September 1914, Page 6

Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1914. UNDAUNTED BELGIUM

The gallantry of the opposition presented by tho Belgians to the vastly superior forces of the German invaders was the outstanding feature of the opening days of the war. The advance of the Russian millions into East Prussia and Galicia, and the rapid march of the Germans upon the French capital, have since tended to distract attention from the Belgian campaign, which is of less crucial importance now that the enemy have broken through. But the idea that the Belgians would be cowed or discouraged by the fall of their capital, the sacking and burning of other ancient and beautiful cities, and a policy of looting and murder not far removed from the methods of the Huns and the Vandals, has been completely dispelled. Not since the Thirty Years' War, says Mr. Asquith, has Europe witnessed such horrors as those to which Belgium has been subjected by the soldiers of the Kaiser. As all the campaigns of Marlborough. ol Frederick the Great, and of Napoleon, have taken place since then, Mr. Asquith's statement constitutes a terrible indictment of the spirit in which the war is being carried on by the Germans. In the Thirty Years' War Germany herself was the chief sufferer. A characteristic episode of the hideous struggle was the turning loose of Wallenstoin upon the country with an army of 50,000 men, for which he was to receive no pay except what they could make out of the inhabitants. It is to this saturnalia of brigandage, murder, and arson that Mr. Asquith has to go back in order to find a parallel to the manner in which war is being carried on in Belgium by what is, in some respects, tho most cultured nation of Europe. No wonder that its present enterprise is exciting the envy of the Turk, whom the New" York World's cartoonist has depicted as sharpening his scimitar and declaring that he too must do something for culture. The unbroken spirit with which Belgium has faced these appalling manifestations of Christian culture, as expounded by tho Prussian military caste, is amazing. She endures,' but is by no means content with a passive resistance. Though the legions have passed over her, she is not crushed, and instead of submitting she dares the invader to treat Antwerp and her other remaining strongholds as he has already treated Louvain and M alines — if he can. It is clear that those who supposed that neither the barbarities of Alva nor the invincible spirit with which they were defied by the people of the Netherlands could ever be repeated in Europe have need to revise their judgment. It is true that the use of the rack and the stake has not been, authorised by the German General Staff, but in other reapects they are reviving, without the excuse of a religious feud, cruelties which civilisation deemed itself to have left three centuries behind. Within the last few days Malines, Termonde, and Dinant have been added to the list which began with Liege and Louvain ; and details of the outrages committed by soldiers of the finest army in the world — men described by an eye-witness as "drunk with blood, not liquor" — have been pouring in. At Termonde 4000 Belgians succeeded in maintaining a splendid fight against 20,000 Germans, who Buffered severely, and, after reducing the town to ashes, were compelled to abandon it. The discomfiture of the Germans was in a large degree due to a desperate measure which also recalls the warfare of an earlier day. By cutting the dykes the Belgians flooded the country, and gave the Germans the terrible task of rescuing their guns from water that reached to their waist* while exposed to a heavy fire. It was by a similar device that Louis XIV, was compelled to beat a hasty retreat from Termonde in 1667. Nearly a century previously the siege of Leyden was raised by tho same means, the inundation actually enabling Admiral Boisot to sail a fleet over meadows and hedgerows and orchards to' the relief of the beleaguered city. "Should God, m his wrath, doom us to destruction and deny us all relief," was the message of the starving burghers to the Spaniard in their darkest hour, "even then will we maintain ourselves for ever against your entrance. When the last hour has come, with our hands we will set fire to the city, and perish — men, women, and children together — in the flames, rather than suffer our homes to be polluted and our liberties to be crushed." The spirit of tho citizens of Leyden is animating tho defence of Belgium to-day. Great Britain and her daughter States have only to display the same courage and determination as the little country they have undertaken te tafnead, und Ui?i.-e van be noudgu& S£-t&-th&-i6iue t