At Antwerp, with two French friends who accompanied me on my journey through Belgium, I walked into a middle-class café at midday. I ordered a steak with fried potatoes and my friends ordered pork chops. Without any question about tickets we were served. We added bread, cheese, and butter to complete the meal and washed it down with draft light beer. Later in the day we took supper in the same café--an egg omelette, fried potatoes, bread, cheese, and butter. And the cost of both meals together was less than the cost of the steak alone in Roubaix.
The policy of the Germans appears to be to interfere as little as possible with the everyday life of the country. The fruits of this policy are seen in a remarkable degree in Brussels. All day long the main streets of the city are full of bustle and all the outward manifestations of prosperity.
Women in short, fashionable skirts, with high-topped fancy boots, stroll completely at their ease along the pavement, studying the smart things with which the drapers' shop windows are dressed. Jewelers' shops, provision stores, tobacconists, and the rest show every sign of "business as usual." I bought at quite a reasonable price a packet of Egyptian cigarettes, bearing the name of a well-known brand of English manufacture, and I recalled how, not many miles away in harassed France, I had seen rhubarb leaves hanging from upper windows to dry, so that the French smoker might use them instead of the tobacco which he could not buy. Even the sweetstuff shops had well-stocked windows.
[Sidenote: Theaters and cinema palaces open.]
The theaters, music halls, cinema palaces, and cafés of Brussels were open and crowded. On the second night of my visit I went with my two French companions to the Théâtre Molière and heard a Belgian company in Paul Hervieu's play, "La Course du Flambeau." The whole building was packed with Belgians, thoroughly enjoying the performance. So far as I could tell, the only reminder that we were in the fallen capital of an occupied country was the presence in the front row of the stalls of two German soldiers, whose business, so I learned, was to see that nothing disrespectful to Germany and her armies was allowed to creep into the play.