Page:Karl Liebknecht - Militarism (1917).djvu/168

 136 ner, sang the Marseillaise, hissed their officers, etc., led to the Flemish soldiers being sent to the Walloon districts and vice versa, and finally brought about the decision not to use the standing army at all. Since 1902 the proletarian soldiers of Belgium have ceded the honorable role of acting the watch-dog to capitalism, the part of a "flying sentry before the money-chest of the employers," at least as far as the interior militarism is concerned, to the constabulary and civic guard, as previously set forth. To protect their sacred exploiting privileges the bourgeoisie were now at all events obliged to exert themselves and risk their own skins—if such a danger can be said to exist at all in face of unarmed crowds. Elsewhere we have described that the civic guard does excellent work in the fight against the interior enemy.

In France the history of the class-struggle has been written with rivers of blood. We will not conjure up the hecatombs of the three days' battle of July, 1830; nor the 10,000 that died in the