The ruins of
Termonde are only the outward and visible sign of what Germany has
attempted on Belgium for more than a generation.
Perhaps it was better that people should perish by the villageful in
honest physical death through the agony of the bayonet and the flame
than that they should go on bartering away their nationality by
piece-meal. Who knows but Albert saw in his silent heart that the only
thing to weld his people together, honeycombed as they were, was the
shedding of blood? Perhaps nothing short of a supreme sacrifice,
amounting to a martyrdom, could restore a people so tangled in German
intrigue, so netted into an ever-encroaching system of commerce,
carrying with it a habit of thought and a mouthful of guttural phrases.
Let no one underestimate that power of language. If the idiom has passed
into one, it has brought with it molds of thought, leanings of sympathy.
Who that can even stumble through the "_Marchons! Marchons_!" of the
"Marseillaise" but is a sharer for a moment in the rush of glory that
every now and again has made France the light of the world? So, when the
German phrase rings out, "Was wir haben bleibt Deutsch"--"What we are
now holding by force of arms shall remain forever German"--there is an
answering thrill in the heart of every Antwerp clerk who for years has
been leaking Belgian government gossip into German ears in return for a
piece of money.
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