THE STEAM ROLLER
The Steam Roller, the final method, now operating in Belgium to flatten
her for all time, is the most deadly and universal of the three. It is a
calculated process to break the human spirit. People speak as if the
injury done Belgium was a thing of the past. It is at its height now.
The spy system with its clerks, waiters, tourists, business managers,
reached directly only some thousands of persons. The atrocities wounded
and killed many thousands of old men, women, and children. But the
German occupation and sovereignty at the present moment are
denationalizing more than six million people. The German conquerors
operate their Steam Roller by clever lies, thus separating Belgium from
her real friends; by taxation, thus breaking Belgium economically; by
enforced work on food supplies, railways, and ammunition, thus forcing
Belgian peasants to feed their enemy's army and destroy their own army,
and so making unwilling traitors out of patriots; by fines and
imprisonment that harass the individual Belgian who retains any sense of
nationality; by official slander from Berlin that the Belgians are the
guilty causes of their own destruction; and finally by the fact of
sovereignty itself, that at one stroke breaks the inmost spirit of a
free nation.
I was still in Ghent when the Germans moved up to the suburbs.
"I can put my artillery on Ghent," said the German officer to the
American vice-consul.
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