XI FRENCH THOUGHT BACk of the War-I XII FRENCH THOUGHT BACK OF THE WAR-II. XIII WAR CONDITIONS IN ENGLAND: A CONTRAST. XIV BRITISH THOUGHT Back of the WAR-I WHAT IS BACK OF THE WAR "WE I ON THE DOORStep of WAR* ́E WERE part of those who held back the Germans at Antwerp while the bulk of the Belgian army were getting away. Then we ourselves left. For a night and a day we floundered in swamps and marshes. We did not know where we were, where to go, or what to do. We became discouraged. 'What's the use?' we said to one another. 'Let us get over into Holland.' And so we did. And here we are." Thus spoke a Belgian private soldier, one of the fifteen thousand gathered in one intern camp near Zeist, a town of Holland. On an open plot of ground, slightly elevated above the fields below, is this corral of the disarmed thousands. A barbed-wire fence, perhaps half a mile long and less than a quarter of a mile wide, incloses the ground and roughly built barracks and other houses where these out-of-the-war Belgian soldiers are confined. No trees are nearer the inclosure than half a mile. Back and forth, outside the * Written at The Hague, December 26-27, 1914. |