Not in cemetery, not in ruined town, not among wounded, coming broken from the battle, as on that red day at Heyst-op-den-Berg.
A brooding soul--mist is in the air of Brussels. It creeps, it creeps. It gets into the bones, into the brain, into the heart. Even when one laughs one feels the ghostly visitant. All the joy has gone from life. The vision is clouded. To look at anything you must see Germans first.
Its very quietness takes on some clammy quality associated with graves.
Movement and life go on all round. People walk, talk, eat, drink, take the trams, shop. But all the while the Germans are there, the Germans are in their hotels, their houses, their palaces, their public buildings, Town Hall, Post Office, Palais de Justice, in their trams, in their cafés, in their restaurants--
It is like being at home, in one's beloved home with one's beloved family all around one, and every room full _of cockroaches_!
Repellant, unforgettable, was the spectacle of the Germans strutting and posing on the steps of the beautiful Palais de Justice.
So ill did they fit the beauty of their background, that all the artist in one writhed with pain. Like some horrible vandal attempt at decoration upon pure and flawless architecture these coarse, brutish figures stood with legs apart, their flat round caps upon their solemn yokel faces giving them the aspect of a body of convicts, while behind them reared those noble pillars, yellow and dreamlike, suffering in horror, but with chaste dignity, the polluting nearness of the Hun.
The more one studies Hun physiognomy and physique, the more predominant grow those first impressions of the Cult of the Brute. Brutish is the clear blue eye, with the burning excited brain revealing itself in flashes such as one might see in the eye of a rhinoceros on the attack. Brutish is the head, so round and close cropped, resembling no other animal save German. Brutish are the ears flapping out so redly. The thick necks and incredibly thick legs have the tenacious look of elephants.
And oh, their little ways, their little ways!
In the Salle Du Tribunal de Commerce they put up clothes-lines, and hung their shirts and handkerchiefs there, while a bucket stood in the middle of the beautiful tesselated floor. And then, in exquisite taste, to give the Belgians a treat, this interior has been photographed and forced into an extraordinary little newspaper published in Brussels, printed in French but secretly controlled by the Germans, who splatter it with their photographs in every conceivable (and inconceivable) style.