Page:The drama of three hundred and sixty-five days.djvu/55

 spite of the occasional marauding of submarines, the offal of fighting craft) keeping the oceans free to all ships except those of our enemies. And now, when we hear it said, as we sometimes do, that Great Britain holds only thirty-five miles of land on the battle-front in Flanders, let us lift our heads and answer, "Yes, but she holds thirty-five thousand miles of sea."

  THE PART PLAYED BY BELGIUM O of the earliest, and perhaps one of the most inspiring, of the flashes as of lightning whereby we saw the drama of the war was that which revealed the part played by Belgium. Has history any record of greater heroism and greater suffering? Such courage for the right! Such strength of soul against overwhelming odds and the criminal suddenness of surprise! Although the world has been told by Germany's spokesmen, including Herr Ballin, Prince von Bülow, and even Professor Harnack (all "honourable men," and the last of them a churchman), that down to a few days before the outbreak of hostilities "not one human being" among them had "dreamt of war," it is the fact that within a few hours of the dispatch of Germany's ultimatum to Belgium, before the ink of it could yet be dry and while the period of England's ultimatum in  51