KING ALBERT OF BELGIUM.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1677, 20 February 1917, Page 4

KING ALBERT OF BELGIUM.

DISTRESS OVER SLAVE RAIDS

No event since the war began has caused King Albert of Belgium such extreme distress as the recent slave raids, by which his people in hundreds of thousands are being shipped on bondage in Germany.

If the ruin of Belgium stands out in pathetic, relief from the general tragedy of the war, the figure of King Albert stands equally apart from among those who have been thrown into prominence by the catastrophe. Long before his coming to the throne, there was not a man in Belgium more in sympathy with the people who work and who suffer than this King, who has toiled in coal mines, spent days with enginedrivers in their engines, and interested himself in every feature of his country's labours. From the first day of the war he has been at the head of his troops. Everywhere and always he has really been chief in command, first in the line of lire where shot and shell fell alike on the great or humble. When the field forces were in central Belgium between Louvain and Namur, he went from point to point talking familiarly with the officers, examining everything. Later, when the Belgian army left the entrenched Malines, and advanced to what had been Louvain, King Albert marched at the head of his troops, and went down into the trenches beside his soldiers. When Antwerp fell, it is said that the last shot of that heroic defence was fired by King Albert.

He has long since seen his country under the iron heel of the invader, its people, rich and poor alike, kept alive by bread and soup kitchens, its liberties gone, its people hardly daring to breathe lest the “frightfulness’ that has laid waste* Louvain, Ternumde, Dinant, and a score of other thriving towns, should become universal. To-day he has to witness a greater horror still, his people rounded into gangs at the point of the bayonet, families torn asunder, and shipped .away like cattle to German labour camps.