Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/176

 In literature, written in French, Brussels is to Paris something as Dublin is to London. The same gibes at the "Brussels Brogue," the same uneasy and all but indignant tremor when a great Belgian writer steps on the scene, the same grudged applause, finally the same adulation. It is a notable fact that most of the Belgians who have planted conquering banners in French literature are of Flemish stock—Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Rodenbach, Cammaerts. Their imagination is coloured by two traditions. Of Maeterlinck one need say nothing. Verhaeren is certainly one of our supreme living poets, perhaps the supreme poet of our civilisation. Rodenbach, more local, is for ever part of the beauty and sadness of Bruges. Cammaerts is known by his exquisite songs. Camille Lemonnier, the painter and author, is perhaps the most vital and abundant representative of the Walloon stream of influence.

Such is an inadequate outline, a cinema survey of the work and the place of Belgian in time of peace. Such was the little, great nation that William the Treaty-Breaker has violated and ravaged. When one remembers it all—memory on golden memory, remembers the black ruins where a year ago men laboured and prayed at peace with other men, remembers the slow building-up and the sudden devastation, eighty years gone in a fortnight—does not the heart harden against these metaphysi