We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address

THROUGH THE IRON BARS

Two years of German occupation in Belgium

BY

EMILE CAMMAERTS

ILLUSTRATED WITH CARTOONS BY
LOUIS RAEMAEKERS

MCMXVII

CONTENTS

I. The Prison Gates

II. The Lowered Flag

III. The Poisoned Wells

IV. The Sacking of Belgium

V. The Modern Slave (1. The Creeping Tide)

V. The Modern Slave (2. "By the Waters of Babylon")

VI. The Olive Branch

Addendum: Cartoons by Louis Raemaekers

I.

The English-speaking public is generally well informed concerning thepart played in the war by the Belgian troops. The resistance of oursmall field army at Liège, before Antwerp, and on the Yser has beenpraised and is still being praised wherever the tale runs. This is easyenough to understand. The fact that those 100,000 men should have beenable to hold so long in check the forces of the first military Empire inEurope, and that a great number of them, helped by new contingents ofrecruits and led by their young King, should still be fighting on theirnative soil, must appeal strongly to the imagination.

If it be told how the new Belgian army, reorganised and re-equippedafter the terrible ordeal on the Yser, is at the present moment muchstronger than at the beginning of the war, how it has been able latelyto extend its front in Flanders, and how some of its units have renderedvaluable help to the cause of the Allies in East Africa and even inGalicia, the story sounds like a fairy tale. There is, in the history ofthis unequal struggle, the true ring of legendary heroism; it seems anecho of the tale of David and Goliath, or of Jack the Giant Killer; itis full of the triumph of the spirit over the flesh, of independence andfree will over fatalism and brute force, of Right over Might.

I feel confident that some day a poet will be able to sing this greatepic in verses which shall answer to the swinging rhythm of battle androll with the booming of a thousand guns. But, in the meantime, I shouldlike to say a few words about a much humbler, a much simpler, a muchmore familiar subject. It awakes no classical remembrances of Leonidasor Marathon. My heroes risk their lives, but they are not soldiers,merely prosaic "bourgeois" and workmen. They have no weapon, they cannotfight. They have only to remain cheery in adversity and patient in theface of taunts. They cannot render blow for blow, they have no sword toflourish against an insolent conqueror. They can only oppose a stoutheart, a loyal spirit, and an ironic smile to the persecutions to whichthey are subjected. They can do nothing—they must do nothing—only hopeand wait. But there are as much heroism and beauty in their blackfrock-coats and their soiled workmen's smocks as in the gayest and mostglittering uniforms.

It is the plain matter-of-fact story of Belgian life under German rule.