A GERMAN – RIDDEN CITY

Greymouth Evening Star, 2 July 1915, Page 7

A GERMAN - RIDDEN CITY

BRUSSELS UNDER THE ENEMY REGIME. “A :SHAME TO CALL THEM [• ' ANIMALS.” ' LONDON, May 11. " London is at once so large and so 0 small a place that anything may hap- ’ pen at the least disturbed of times, j And these are not in that happy cate--0 gory. • • <’■* There came into the London office of the “Auckland Star” this week a small, exquisitely trim Belgian woman, » whom ', the writer remembered as a particularly cultured queenly hostess in her beautifhl house in Brussels. There she knew all that there was to be known of Brussels society, all,.the iris and outs of the bickerings and ambitions of politics, the history of the unsuccessful struggles to introduce compulsory education, the secret of the Belgians’ faint dislike 1 of the .Flemish and detestation of most things German, and could; talk with remarkable [. understanding- of the —to a New Zealander—somewhat complicated phases of Belgian social life. And now, after having lived for six 1 months under a Germ an regime in Brussels, here she is with her two children, a girl of fourteen, and a boy of eight, in England, a refugee, her husband having had to flee, the country when the enemy came into occupation, ; most of their means gone. And Brussels, that no one could see but love, a city containing some of the most delicate treasures in architecture, preciously preserved, that Europe can show, is unhurt, comparatively undisturbed perhaps, when one remembers what lias happened elsewhere in strick- ■ eri Belgium. i “Buf. what a town! It is Bruxelles, but none of it is any longer ours, and do we not know it every hour of the 1 day!” THE NEW BRUSSELS. Remembering her li v. of the open air, the delightful expeditions she would take with all of us to Tervueren in the magnificent Foret de Soignes, the cheery holidays spent at Namur‘and Dinant, I asked how the days weie lived through in the new Brussels. “To go out was to see sigh Is to sicken,” she replied, “and all day wo kept within our houses—grateful, grateful indeed to have our houses still, for no exaggeration is made of the accounts of brutalities in lire country towns amongst the poor country people. There were no glaring wholesale atrocities in Bruxelles. At heart the Germans are cowards, and they dare not violate Bruxelles-—there are too many people there ; but we have tasted evidences of their ‘kultur’ every day. “They are barbarians,' animals—we have to see it and believe it. Before, I, in common with most others, though I felt I could never like Germans, thought them a homely, peace-loving people. But now it is a shame to call them animals even. Where they cannot kill or outrage, they seem to delight in inhuman mischief. One beautiful bouse I knew in Bruxelles a body of German soldiers entered and sacked ; ami, before they left, they smeared the tapestried walls of the largest rooms from ceiling to floor with jam from the larders. One day another lot of German soldiers passed a dairy just outside the town, kept by an old woman. They dashed in, brought out into (He centre of the streets the seventy pounds of butter they found there, and tramnled it into the road. TERRIBLE HUMOUR. “And a great joke—it seems actually one to them—was the sentencing of my brother (who had first had to produce a meal for all of them) at Namur to death in his own house because they swore he had firearms in the place. He was actually pinned against the wall to prepare for death, but, being a perfect German linguist, demanded that they search the house. They agreed to this, but could not resist completely sacking every room they passed through, tearing down the curtains and jabbing their swords through furniture. They found nothing, of course ; but thev locked my brother in one room and his wife in another, allowing neither to see the other, but telling each, for forty-eight hours, that the other was to be killed, and then they just opened the doors and set them free. “For the laws of sanitation the German soldiery knows no resptet whatever, and the streets of the beautiful city to-day might be in the possession pt bands of wild animals,” she said with a white, horrified face. “Indeed never could we want to think of Germans again!” she protested. She explained that at least it seemed that she could no longer keep her children there, though thousands of Belgians feel it their duty to try to stav. “THE KING—HE IS A MAN.” The heroic M. Max, the intrepid burgomaster, or Lord Mayor, as we should call him, is still prisoner in Germany; “He snapped his fingers at all their commands, and at last went too far. It is a pity. We needed him in the city.” “The King—he is a man, is he not!” A terrible time is ahead for Brussels. (“How wonderful ai'e the English colonies to help us so!” she put in). All who could possibly find the money stored their cellars with food to last for months when the Germans entered, but when lids is gone, more must be got from outside. The little shops are all closed; there is not such a thing as a telephone, a taxicab, a regular post of any certain means of communication with the outside world left in Brussels. “Just from day to day the people are all living,” she said (and it came with special pathos from one who had known the brilliant, happy, busy existence of normal Brussels! “just thankful to be alive. But- the time will come when they will.be put out of our city, those barbarian Germans.” Her eloquent white face and burning brown eyes will remain with me, and her proud words—“ They Belgians under their feet.”