BRAVE BELGIANS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 22, 27 January 1915, Page 4

BRAVE BELGIANS.

A wonderfully expressive testimony to the nobility and bravery of the Belgians is given by Mr E. Alexander Powell, of the “New York World,” in the foreword to a book he has just written entitled “Fighting in Flanders.” He says :—“An American, I went to Belgium at the beginning of the war with an open mind. . . .

When I left Antwerp after the German occupation 1 was as pro-Belgian as though I had been born under the red-black-and-yellow banner. I had seen a country, one of the loveliest and most peaceable in Europe invaded by a ruthless and brutal soldiery, x had seen its towns and cities blackened by fire and broken by shell: I had seen its churches and its historic monuments destroyed; I had seen its highways crowded with hunted, homeless fugitives; I had seen its fertile fields strewn with the corpses of what had once been the manhood of the nation; 1 had seen its women left husbandless and its children left fatherless; I had seen what was once a garden of the Lord turned into a land of desolation; and I had seen its people—a people whom I, like the rest of the world, had always thought, as pleasure-lov-ing, inefficient, easy-going—l had seen this people, I say, aroused, resourceful, unafraid, and fighting, fighting, fighting. Do you wonder that they captured my imagination, and they won my admiration? I am pro-Bel-gian ; I admit it frankly. I should be ashamed to be anything else.”