At a recent entertainment in a very poor quarter a pretty girl dressed as France appeared arm-in-arm with an actor got up like a British soldier, and there was immense applause; but when she started the tango with her companion she was hissed off the stage.
As for Paris: “Tenez,” said our friend, in conclusion, “I will give you a little instance. I was walking down the Rue de la Paix, when I heard a woman laugh out loud. Everyone in the street turned round to look at her.”
Of the thoughts of Germany what can be said? They need no pointing out. They are written in blood and fire from end to end of Belgium, and in a long stretch of once smiling France; in Servia, carried out by Hungarians and Austrians, under German orders; in Poland. They are written in the German Press for all the world to read: blasphemy, brag, bluster, hysterical hatred, insanity of futile threat, shameless asseveration of self-evident falsehood. “Do nations go mad?” an American paper has asked. Germany presents the appalling spectacle of a nation run to evil. It is not only the war party, the soldiery, the press, the learned professors. It is the very population itself. The soul of Germany is revealing its thoughts.
The lily-garden in the little Brussels by-street on the way to the Bois de la Cambre, if it is still in existence, must have ceased blooming before the Germans entered Brussels. Otherwise it is not likely that it should have escaped the fury of destruction which seizes them at the sight of anything pure and noble and beautiful.
We know how the Uhlan officers deliberately rode backwards and forwards over the blooming flower-beds in the great _Place_ upon the day of their entrance march.
We know how they stabled their horses in the world-famous conservatories of the Palace of Laecken--a custom they have practised at nearly every château in the country; how in that orgy which will for ever disgrace the name of the Duke of Brunswick the portrait of the young Queen of the Belgians, that royal flower of courage and devotion, was unspeakably insulted.
We know how whole regiments have trampled over straggling children in the village streets--these little flower blossoms, as the Japanese call them.