University of Virginia Library

17. CHAPTER XVII
THE GERMANS IN BRUSSELS: 1915-1916

In the early spring of 1915, Vivie, anxious not to see her mother in utter penury, and despairing of any effective assistance from the Americans (very much prejudiced against her for the reasons already mentioned), took her mother's German and Belgian securities of a face value amounting to about £18,000 and sold them at her Belgian bank for a hundred thousand francs (£4,000) in Belgian or German bank notes. She consulted no one, except her mother. Who was there to consult? She did not like to confide too much to Colonel von Giesselin, a little too prone in any case to "protect" them. But as she argued with Mrs. Warren, what else were they to do in their cruel situation? If the Allies were eventually victorious, Mrs. Warren could return to England. There at least she had in safe investments £40,000, ample for the remainder of their lives. If Germany lost the War, the German securities nominally worth two hundred thousand marks might become simply waste paper; even now they were only computed by the bank at a purchase value of about one fifth what they had stood at before the War. If Germany were victorious or agreed to a compromise peace, her mother's shares in Belgian companies might be unsaleable. Better to secure now a lump sum of four thousand pounds in bank notes that would be legal currency, at any rate as long as the German occupation lasted. And as one never knew what might happen, it was safer still to have all this money (equivalent to a hundred thousand francs), in their own keeping. They

could live even in war time, on such a sum as this for four, perhaps five years, as they would be very economical and Vivie would try to earn all she could by teaching. It was useless to hope they would be able to return to Villa Beau-séjour so long as the German occupation lasted, or during that time receive a penny in compensation for the sequestration of the property.

The notes for the hundred thousand francs therefore were carefully concealed in Mrs. Warren's bedroom at the Hotel Impérial and Vivie for a few months afterwards felt slightly easier in her mind as to the immediate future; for, as a further resource, there were also the jewels and plate at the bank.

They dared hope for nothing from Villa Beau-séjour. Von Giesselin, after more entreaty than Vivie cared to make, had allowed them with a special pass and his orderly as escort to go in a military motor to the Villa in the month of April in order that they might bring away the rest of their clothes and personal effects of an easily transportable nature. But the visit was a heart-breaking disappointment. Their reception was surly; the place was little else than a barrack of disorderly soldiers and insolent officers. Any search for clothes or books was a mockery. Nothing was to be found in the chests of drawers that belonged to them; only stale food and unnameable horrors or military equipment articles. The garden was trampled out of recognition. There had been a beautiful vine in the greenhouse. It was still there, but the first foliage of spring hung withered and russet coloured. The soldiers, grinning when Vivie noticed this, pointed to the base of the far spreading branches. It had been sawn through, and much of the glass of the greenhouse deliberately smashed.

On their way back, Mrs. Warren, who was constantly in tears, descried waiting by the side of the road the widow of their farmer-neighbour, Madame Oudekens. She

asked the orderly that they might stop and greet her. She approached. Mrs. Warren got out of the car so that she might more privately talk to her in Flemish. Since her husband's execution, the woman said, she had had to become the mistress of the sergeant-major who resided with her as the only means, seemingly, of saving her one remaining young son from exile in Germany and her daughters from unbearably brutal treatment; though she added, "As to their virtue, that has long since vanished; all I ask is that they be not half-killed whenever the soldiers get drunk. Oh Madame! If you could only say a word to that Colonel with whom you are living?"

Mrs. Warren dared not translate this last sentence to Vivie, for fear her daughter forced her at all costs to leave the Hotel Impérial. Where, if she did, were they to go?

The winter of 1914 had witnessed an appalling degree of frightfulness in eastern Belgium, the Wallon or French-speaking part of the country more especially. The Germans seemed to bear a special grudge against this region, regarding it as doggedly opposed to absorption into a Greater Germany; whereas they hoped the Flemish half of the country would receive them as fellow Teutons and even as deliverers from their former French oppressors. Thousands of old men and youths, of women and children in the provinces south of the Meuse had been shot in cold blood; village after village had been burnt. Scenes of nearly equal horror had taken place between Brussels and Antwerp, especially around Malines. Von Bissing's arrival as Governor General was soon signalized by those dreaded Red Placards on the walls of Brussels, announcing the verdicts of courts-martial, the condemnation to death of men and women who had contravened some military regulation.

Yet in spite of this, life went on in Brussels once more--by von Bissing's stern command--as though the

country were not under the heel of the invader. The theatres opened their doors; the cinemas had continuous performances; there was Grand Opera; there were exhibitions of toys, or pictures, and charitable bazaars. Ten days after the fall of Antwerp char-à-bancs packed with Belgians drove out of Brussels to visit the scenes of the battles and those shattered forts, so fatuously deemed impregnable, so feeble in their resistance to German artillery.

Vivie, even had she wished to do so, could not have joined the sight-seers. As the subjects of an enemy power she and her mother had had early in January to register themselves at the Kommandantur and were there warned that without a special passport they might not pass beyond the limits of Brussels and its suburbs. Except in the matter of the farewell visit to the farm at Tervueren, Vivie was reluctant to ask for any such favour from von Giesselin, though she was curious to see the condition of Louvain and to ascertain whether her father still inhabited the monastic house of his order--she had an idea that he was away in Germany in connection with his schemes for raising the Irish against the British Government. Von Giesselin however was becoming sentimentally inclined towards her and she saw no more of him than was necessary to maintain polite relations. Frau von Giesselin, for various reasons of health or children, could not join him at Brussels as so many German wives had done with other of the high functionaries (to the great embitterment of Brussels society); and there were times when von Giesselin's protestations of his loneliness alarmed her.

The King of Saxony had paid a visit to Brussels in the late autumn of 1914 and had invited this Colonel of his Army to a fastuous banquet given at the Palace Hotel. The King--whom the still defiant Brussels Press, especially that unkillable La Libre Belgique, reminded

ironically of his domestic infelicity, by enquiring whether he had brought Signor Toselli to conduct his orchestra--was gratified that a subject of his should be performing the important duties of Secretary to the Brussels Government, and his notice of von Giesselin gave the latter considerable prestige, for a time; an influence which he certainly exercised as far as he was able in softening the edicts and the intolerable desire to annoy and exasperate on the part of the Prussian Governors of province and kingdom. He even interceded at times for unfortunate British or French subjects, stranded in Brussels, and sometimes asked Vivie about fellow-countrymen who sought this intervention.

This caused her complicated annoyances. Seeing there was some hope in interesting her in their cases, these English governesses, tutors, clerks, tailors' assistants and cutters, music-hall singers, grooms appealed to Vivie to support their petitions. They paid her or her mother a kind of base court, on the tacit assumption that she--Vivie--had placed Colonel von Giesselin under special obligations. If in rare instances, out of sheer pity, she took up a case and von Giesselin granted the petition or had it done in a higher quarter, his action was clearly a personal favour to her; and the very petitioners went away, with the ingratitude common in such cases, and spread the news of Vivie's privileged position at the Hotel Impérial. It was not surprising therefore that in the small circles of influential British or American people in Brussels she was viewed with suspicion or contempt. She supported this odious position at the Hotel Impérial as long as possible, in the hope that Colonel von Giesselin when he had realized the impossibility of using herself or her mother in any kind of intrigue against the British Government would do what the American Consul General professed himself unable or unwilling to do: obtain for them passports to proceed to Holland.

Von Giesselin, from December, 1914, took up among other duties that of Press Censor and officer in charge of Publicity. After the occupation of Brussels and the fall of Antwerp, the "patriotic" Belgian Press had withdrawn itself to France and England or had stopped publication. Its newspapers had been invited to continue their functions as organs of news-distribution and public opinion, but of course under the German Censorate and martial law. As one editor said to a polite German official: "If I were to continue the publication of my paper under such conditions, my staff and I would all be shot in a week."

But the large towns of Belgium could not be left without a Press. Public Opinion must be guided, and might very well be guided in a direction favourable to German policy. The German Government had already introduced the German hour into Belgian time, the German coinage, the German police system, and German music; but it had no intention, seemingly, of forcing the German speech on the old dominions of the House of Burgundy. On the contrary, in their tenure of Belgium or of North-east France, the Germans seemed desirous of showing how well they wrote the French language, how ready they were under a German regime to give it a new literature. Whether or not they enlisted a few recreants, or made use of Alsatians or Lorrainers to help them, it is never-the-less remarkable how free as a rule their written and printed French was from mistakes or German idioms; though their spoken French always remained Alsatian. It suffered from that extraordinary misplacement and exchange in the upper and lower consonants which has distinguished the German people--that nation of great philologists--since the death of the Roman Empire. German officers still said "Barton, die fous brie," instead of "Pardon, je vous prie" (if they were polite),

but they were quite able to contribute articles de fond to a pretended national Belgian press. Besides there was a sufficiency of Belgian "Sans-Patries" ready to come to their assistance: Belgian nationals of German-Jewish or Dutch-Jewish descent, who in the present generation had become Catholic Christians as it ranged them with the best people. They were worthy and wealthy Belgian citizens, but presumably would not have deeply regretted a change in the political destinies of Belgium, provided international finance was not adversely affected. There were also a few Belgian Socialists--a few, but enough--who took posts under the German provisional government, on the plea that until you could be purely socialistic it did not matter under what flag you drew your salary.

Von Giesselin was most benevolently intentioned, in reality a kind-hearted man, a sentimentalist. Not quite prepared to go to the stake himself in place of any other victim of Prussian cruelty, but ready to make some effort to soften hardships and reduce sentences. (There were others like him--Saxon, Thuringian, Hanoverian, Württembergisch--or the German occupation of Belgium might have ended in a vast Sicilian Vespers, a boiling-over of a maddened people reckless at last of whether they died or not, so long as they slew their oppressors.) He hoped through the pieces played at the theatres and through his censored, subsidized press to bring the Belgians round to a reasonable frame of mind, to a toleration of existence under the German Empire. But his efforts brought down on him the unsparing ridicule of the Parisian-minded Bruxellois. They were prompt to detect his attempts to modify the text of French operettas so that these, while delighting the lovers of light music, need not at the same time excite a military spirit or convey the least allusion of an impertinent or contemptuous kind towards the Central Powers. Thus the couplets

were changed to

These passionate lines of a political exile:

were rendered harmless as

The pleasure he took in recasting this doggerel--calling in Vivie to help him as presumably a good scholar in French--got on her nerves, and she was hard put to it to keep her temper.

Sometimes he proposed that she should take a hand, even become a salaried subordinate; compose articles for his subsidized paper, "L'Ami de l'Ordre" (nicknamed "L'Ami de L'Ordure" by the Belgians), "La Belgique," "Le Bruxellois," "Vers la Paix." He would allow her a very free hand, so long as she did not attack the Germans or their allies or put in any false news about military or naval successes of the foes of Central Europe. She might, for instance, dilate on the cruel manner in which the Woman Suffragists had been persecuted in England; give a description of forcible feeding or of police ferocity on Black Friday.

Vivie declined any such propositions. "I have told you already, and often," she said, "I am deeply grateful for all you have done for my mother and me. We might have been in a far more uncomfortable position

but for your kindness. But I cannot in any way associate myself with the German policy here. I cannot pretend for a moment to condone what you do in this country. If I were a Belgian woman I should probably have been shot long ago for assassinating some Prussian official--I can hardly see von Bissing pass in his automobile, as it is, without wishing I had a bomb. But there it is. It is no business of mine. As I can't get away, as you won't let us go out of the country--Switzerland, Holland--and as I don't want to go mad by brooding, find something for me to do that will occupy my thoughts: and yet not implicate me with the Germans. Can't I go and help every day in your hospitals? If you'll continue your kindness to mother--and believe me"--she broke off--"I do appreciate what you have done for us. I shall never forget I have met one true German gentleman--if you'll continue to be as kind as before, you will simply give instructions that mother is in no way disturbed or annoyed. There are Germans staying here who are odious beyond belief. If they meet my mother outside her room they ask her insulting questions--whether she can give them the addresses of--of--light women ... you know the sort of thing. I have always been outspoken with you. All I ask is that mother shall be allowed to stay in her own room while I am out, and have her meals served there. But the hotel people are beginning to make a fuss about the trouble, the lack of waiters. A word from you--And then if my mind was at ease about her I could go out and do some good with the poor people. They are getting very restive in the Marolles quarter--the shocking bad bread, the lack of fuel--Most of all I should like to help in the hospitals. My own countrywomen will not have me in theirs. They suspect me of being a spy in German pay. Besides, your von Bissing has ordered now that all Belgian, British, and French wounded shall be taken to the German Red Cross. Well: if you want to be kind, give me an introduction there. Surely it would be bare humanity on your part to let an Englishwoman be with some of those poor lads who are sorely wounded, dying perhaps"--she broke down--"The other day I followed two of the motor ambulances along the Boulevard d'Anspach. Blood dripped from them as they passed, and I could hear some English boy trying to sing 'Tipperary--'"

"My tear Miss Warren--I will try to do all that you want--You will not do anything I want, but never mind. I will show you that Germans can be generous. I will speak about your mother. I am sorry that there are bad-mannered Germans in the hotel. There are some--what-you-call 'bounders'--among us, as there are with you. It is to be regretted. As to our Red Cross hospitals, I know of a person who can make things easy for you. I will write a letter to my cousin--like me she is a Saxon and comes from Leipzig--Minna von Stachelberg. She is but a few months widow, widow of a Saxon officer, Graf von Stachelberg who was killed at Namur. Oh! it was very sad; they were but six months married. Afterwards she came here to work in our Red Cross--I think now she is in charge of a ward..."

So Vivie found a few months' reprieve from acute sorrow and bitter humiliation. Gräfin von Stachelberg was as kind in her way as her cousin the Colonel, but much less sentimental. In fact she was of that type of New German woman, taken all too little into account by our Press at the time of the War. There were many like her of the upper middle class, the professorial class, the lesser nobility to be found not only in Leipzig but in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfort, Halle, Bonn, München, Hannover, Bremen, Jena, Stuttgart, Cologne--nice to look at, extremely modern in education and good manners, tasteful in dress,

speaking English marvellously well, highly accomplished in music or with some other art, advocates of the enfranchisement of women. The War came just too soon. Had Heaven struck down that epilept Emperor and a few of his ministers, had time been given for the New German Woman to assert herself in politics, there would have been no invasion of Belgium, no maltreatment of Servia. Germany would have ranged herself with the Western powers and Western culture.

Minna von Stachelberg read her cousin's note and received the worn and anxious-looking Vivie like a sister ... like a comrade, she said, in the War for the Vote ... "which we will resume, my dear, as soon as this dreadful Man's war is over, only we won't fight with the same weapons."

But though kind, she was not gushing and she soon told Vivie that in nursing she was a novice and had much to learn. She introduced her to the German and Belgian surgeons, and then put her to a series of entirely menial tasks from which she was to work her way up by degrees. But if any English soldier were there and wanted sympathy, she should be called in to his ward ... From that interview Vivie returned almost happy.

In the hot summer months she would sometimes be allowed to accompany Red Cross surgeons and nurses to the station, when convoys of wounded were expected, if there was likelihood that British soldiers would be amongst them. These would cheer up at the sound of her pleasant voice speaking their tongue. Yet she would witness on such occasions incongruous incidents of German brutality. Once there came out of the train an English and a French soldier, great friends evidently. They were only slightly wounded and the English soldier stretched his limbs cautiously to relieve himself of cramp. At that moment a German soldier on leave came up and spat in his face. The Frenchman felled the German with

a resounding box on the ear. Alarums! Excursions! A German officer rushed up to enquire while the Frenchman was struggling with two colossal German military policemen and the Englishman was striving to free him. Vivie explained to the officer what had occurred. He bowed and saluted: seized the soldier-spitter by the collar and kicked him so frightfully that Vivie had to implore him to cease.

Moreover the Red Placards of von Bissing were of increasing frequency. As a rule Vivie only heard what other people said of them, and that wasn't very much, for German spies were everywhere, inviting you to follow them to the dreaded Kommandantur in the Rue de la Loi--a scene of as much in the way of horror and mental anguish as the Conciergerie of Paris in the days of the Red Terror. But some cheek-blanching rumour she had heard on a certain Monday in October caused her to look next day on her way home at a fresh Red Placard which had been posted up in a public place. The daylight had almost faded, but there was a gas lamp which made the notice legible. It ran:

CONDAMNATIONS

Par jugement du 9 Octobre, 1915, le tribunal de campagne a prononcé les condamnations suivantes pour trahison commise pendant l'état de guerre (pour avoir fait passer des recrues à l'ennemi):

• 1° Philippe BAUCQ, architecte à Bruxelles;
• 2° Louise THULIEZ, professeur à Lille;
• 3° Edith CAVELL, directrice d'un institut médical à Bruxelles;
• 4° Louis SEVERIN, pharmacien à Bruxelles;
• 5° Comtesse JEANNE DE BELLEVILLE, à Montignies.

À LA PEINE DE MORT

* * * * *

Vivie then went on to read with eyes that could hardly take in the words a list of other names of men and women condemned to long terms of hard labour for the same offence--assisting young Belgians to leave the Belgium that was under German occupation. And further,

the information that of the five condemned to death, Philip Bauck and Edith Cavell had already been executed.

* * * * *

The monsters! Oh that von Bissing. How gladly she would die if she might first have the pleasure of killing him! That pompous old man of seventy-one with the blotched face, who had issued orders that wherever he passed in his magnificent motor he was to be saluted with Eastern servility, who boasted of his "tender heart," so that he issued placards about this time punishing severely all who split the tongues of finches to make them sing better. Edith Cavell--she did not pause to consider the fate of patriotic Belgian women--but Edith Cavell, directress of a nursing home in Brussels, known far and wide for her goodness of heart. She had held aloof from Vivie, but was that to be wondered at when there was so much to make her suspect--living, seemingly, under the protection of a German official? But the very German nurses and doctors at the Red Cross hospital had spoken of her having given free treatment in her Home to Germans who needed immediate operations, and for whom there was no room in the military hospitals--And for such a trivial offence as that--and to kill her before there could be any appeal for reconsideration or clemency. Oh what a nation! She would tend their sick and wounded no more.

She hurried on up the ascent of the Boulevard of the Botanic Garden on her way to the Rue Royale. She burst into von Giesselin's office. He was not there. A clerk looking at her rather closely said that the Herr Oberst was packing, was going away. Vivie scarcely took in the meaning of his German phrases. She waited there, her eyes ablaze, feeling she must tell her former friend and protector what she thought of his

people before she renounced any further relations with him.

Presently he entered, his usually rather florid face pale with intense sorrow or worry, his manner preoccupied. She burst out: "Have you seen the Red Placard they have just put up?"

"What about?" he said wearily.

"The assassination by your Government of Edith Cavell, a crime for which England--yes, and America--will never forgive you.... From this moment I--"

"But have you not heard what has happened to me? I am dismissed from my post as Secretary, I am ordered to rejoin my regiment in Lorraine--It is very sad about your Miss Cavell. I knew nothing of it till this morning when I received my own dismissal--And oh my dear Miss, I fear we shall never meet again."

"Why are they sending you away?" asked Vivie drily, compelled to interest herself in his affairs since they so closely affected her own and her mother's.

"Because of this," said von Giesselin, nearly in tears, pulling from a small portfolio a press cutting. "Do you remember a fortnight ago I told you some one, some Belgian had written a beautiful poem and sent it to me for one of our newspapers? I showed it to you at the time and you said--you said 'it was well enough, but it did not seem to have much point.'" Vivie did remember having glanced very perfunctorily at some effusion in typewriting which had seemed unobjectionable piffle. She hadn't cared two straws whether he accepted it or not, only did not want to be too markedly indifferent. Now she took it up and still read it through uncomprehendingly, her thoughts absent with the fate of Miss Cavell. "Well! what is all the fuss about? I still see nothing in it. It is just simply the ordinary sentimental flip-flap that a French versifier can turn out by the yard."

"It is far worse than that! It is a horrible--what the French call 'acrostiche,' a deadly insult to our people. And I never saw it, the Editor never saw it, and you, even, never guessed its real meaning![1] The original, as you say, was in typewriting, and at the bottom was the name and address of a very well-known homme de lettres: and the words: 'Offert à la rédaction de l'Ami de L'Ordre.' He say now, never never did he send it. It was a forgery. When we came to understand what it meant all the blame fall on me. I am sent back to the Army--I shall be killed before Verdun, so good-bye dear Miss--We have been good friends. Oh this War: this d-r-r-eadful War--It has spoilt everything. Now we can never be friends with England again."

He gave way to much emotion. Vivie, though still dazed with the reverberating horror of Edith Cavell's execution, tried to regain her mind balance and thank him for the kindness he had shown them. But it was now necessary to see her mother who might also be undergoing

a shock. As she walked up to their bedroom she reflected that the departure of von Giesselin would have to be followed by their own exile to some other lodging. They would share in his disgrace.

The next morning in fact the Belgian manager of the hotel with many regrets gave them a month's warning. The hotel would be required for some undefined need of the German Government and he had been told no one could be lodged there who was not furnished with a permit from the Kommandantur.

For three weeks Vivie sought in vain for rooms. Every suitable place was either full or else for reasons not given they were refused. She was reduced to eating humble pie, to writing once more to Gräfin von Stachelberg and imparting the dilemma in which they were placed. Did this kind lady know where a lodging could be obtained? She herself could put up with any discomfort, but her mother was ill. If she could help them, Vivie would humbly beg her pardon for her angry letter of three weeks ago and resume her hospital work. Minna von Stachelberg made haste to reply that there were some things better not discussed in writing: if Vivie could come and see her at six one evening, when she had a slight remission from work--

Vivie went. Out of hearing, Gräfin von Stachelberg--who, however, to facilitate intercourse, begged Vivie to call her "Minna,"--"We may all be dead, my dear, before long of blood-poisoning, bombs from your aeroplanes, a rising against us in the Marolles quarter--" said very plainly what she thought of Edith Cavell's execution. "It makes me think of Talleyrand--was it not?--who said 'It is a blunder; worse than a crime' ... these terrible old generals, they know nothing of the world outside Germany." As to her cousin, Gottlieb von Giesselin--"Really dear, if in this time of horrors one dare laugh at anything, I feel--oh it is too funny,

but also, too 'schokking,' as we suppose all English women say. Yet of course I am sad about him, because he is a good, kind man, and I know his wife will be very very unhappy when she hears--And it means he will die, for certain. He must risk his life to--to--regain his position, and he will be shot before Verdun in one of those dreadful assaults." Then she told Vivie where she might find rooms, where at any rate she could use her name as a reference. Also: "Stay away at present and look after your mother. When she is quite comfortably settled, come back and work with me--here--it is at any rate the only way in which you can see and help your countrymen."

One day in November when their notice at the hotel was nearly expired, Vivie proposed an expedition to her mother. They would walk slowly--because Mrs. Warren now got easily out of breath--up to the Jardin Bontanique; Vivie would leave her there in the Palm House. It was warm; it was little frequented; there were seats and the Belgians in charge knew Mrs. Warren of old time. Vivie would then go on along the inner Boulevards by tram and look at some rooms recommended by Minna von Stachelberg in the Quartier St. Gilles.

Mrs. Warren did as she was told. Vivie left her seated in one of the long series of glass houses overlooking Brussels from a terrace, wherein are assembled many glories of the tropics: palms, dracaenas, yuccas, aloes, tree-ferns, cycads, screw-pines, and bananas: promising to be back in an hour's time.

Somehow as she sat there it seemed to Mrs. Warren it was going for her to be the last hour of fully conscious life--fully conscious and yet a curious mingling in it of the past and present. She had sat here in the middle of the 'seventies with Vivie's father, the young Irish seminarist, her lover for six months. He had a vague interest in botany, and during his convalescence after

his typhoid fever, when she was still his nurse, not yet his mistress, she used to bring him here to rest and to enjoy the aspect of these ferns and palms. What a strange variety of men she had known. Some she had loved, more or less; some she had exploited frankly. Some--like George Crofts and Baxendale Strangeways--she had feared, though in her manner she had tried to conceal her dread of their violence. Well! she had taken a lot of money off the rich, but she had never plundered the poor. Her greatest conquest--and that when she was a woman of forty--was the monarch of this very country which now lay crushed under the Kaiser's heel. For a few months he had taken a whimsical liking to her handsome face, well-preserved figure, and amusing cockney talk. But he had employed her rather as the mistress of his menus plaisirs, as his recruiting agent. He had rewarded her handsomely. Now it was all in the dust: her beautiful Villa Beau-séjour a befouled barrack for German soldiers. She herself a homeless woman, repudiated by the respectable British and Americans more or less interned in this unhappy city.

Not much more than a year ago she had been one of the most respected persons in Brussels, with a large income derived from safe investments. Now all she had for certain was something over three thousand pounds in bank notes that might turn out next month to be worthless paper. And was she certain even of them? Had Vivie before they left the hotel remembered to put some, at least, of this precious sum on her person? Suppose, whilst they were out, looking for a fresh dwelling place, the hotel servants or the police raided her bedroom and found the little hoard of notes? This imagined danger made her want to cry. They were so friendless now, she in particular felt so completely deserted. Had she deserved this punishment by Fate? Was there after all a God who minded much about the sex foolishnesses and

punished you for irregularities--for having lovers in your youth, for selling your virtue and inducing other women to sell theirs? Was she going to die soon and was there a hereafter?' She burst out crying in an abandonment of grief.

An elderly gardener who had been snipping and sweeping in the next house came up and vaguely recognized her as a well-known Bruxelloise, a good-natured lady, a foreigner who, strange to say, spoke Flemish. "Ach," he said, looking out where he thought lay the source of her tears, at the dim view of beautiful Brussels through the steamy glass, "Onze arme, oude Brüssel." Mrs. Warren wept unrestrainedly. "Madame is ill?" he enquired. Mrs. Warren nodded--she felt indeed very ill and giddy. He left her and returned shortly with a small glass of Schnapps. "If Madame is faint--?" She sipped the cordial and presently felt better. Then they talked of old times. Madame had kept the Hotel Leopold II in the Rue Royale? Ah, now he placed her. A superb establishment, always well-spoken of. Her self-respect returned a little. "Yes," she said, "never a complaint! I looked after those girls like a mother, indeed I did. Many a one married well from there." The gardener corroborated her statement, and added that her clientèle had been of the most chic. He had a private florist's business of his own and he had been privileged often to send bouquets to the pensionnaires of Madame. But Madame was not alone surely in these sad times. Had he not seen her come here with a handsome English lady who was said to have been--to have been--fortunately--au mieux with one of the German officials?

"That was my daughter," Mrs. Warren informed him with pride.... "She is a lady who has taken a high degree at an English University. She has been an important person in the English feminist movement. When this dreadful war is over, I and my daughter will--"

At this juncture Vivie entered. "Mother, I hope you haven't missed me, haven't been unwell?" she said, looking rather questioningly at the little glass of Schnapps, only half of which had been drunk.

"Well yes, dear, I have. Terrible low spirits and all swimmy-like. Thought I was going to faint. But this man here has been so kind "--her tears flowed afresh--"We've bin talking of old times; he used to know me before--"

Vivie: "Quite so. But I think, dear, we had better be going back. I want to talk to you about the new rooms I've seen. Are you equal to walking? If not perhaps this kind man would try to get us a cab...?"

But Mrs. Warren said it was no distance, only round the corner, and she could well walk. When they got back she would go and lie down. Vivie, reading her mother's thoughts, pressed a five-franc note into the gardener's not reluctant palm, and they regained the Rue Royale.

But just as they were passing through the revolving door of the Hotel Impérial, a German who had been installed as manager came up with two soldiers and said explosively: "Heraus! Foutez-nous le camp! Aout you go! Don't show your face here again!"

"But," said Vivie, "our notice doesn't expire till the end of this week...!"

"Das macht nichts. The rooms are wanted and I won't have you on the premises. Off you go, or these soldiers shall take you both round to the Kommandantur."

"But our luggage? Surely you will let me go up to our room and pack it--and take it away? We..."

"Your luggage has been packed and is in the corridor. If you send round for it, it shall be delivered to your messenger. But you are not to stop on the premises another minute. You understand?" he almost shrieked.

"But--"

For answer, the soldiers took them by the shoulders and whirled them through the revolving door on to the pavement, where a crowd began to collect, as it does in peace or war if you cough twice or sneeze three times in Brussels. "Englische Hure! Englische Küpplerin," shouted the soldiers as they retreated and locked the revolving door. Mrs. Warren turned purple and swayed. Vivie caught her round the waist with her strong arm.... Thus was Mrs. Warren ejected from the once homely inn which she had converted by her energy, management and capital into the second most magnificent hostelry of Brussels; thus was Vivie expelled from the place of her birth....

Hearing the shouting and seeing the crowd a Belgian gendarme came up. To him Vivie said, "Si vous êtes Chrétien et pas Allemand--" "Prenez garde, Madame," he said warningly--"Vous m'aiderez à porter ma mère à quelqu' endroit ou elle peut se remettre..."

He assisted her to carry the inert old woman across the street and a short distance along the opposite pavement. Here, there was a pleasant, modest-looking tea-shop with the name of Walcker over the front, and embedded in the plate glass were the words "Tea Rooms." These of course dated from long before the war, when the best Chinese tea was only four francs the demi-kilo and the fashion for afternoon tea had become established in Brussels. Vivie and her mother had often entered Walcker's shop in happier days for a cup of tea and delicious forms of home-made pastry. Besides the cakes, which in pre-war times were of an excellence rarely equalled, they had been drawn to the pleasant-looking serving woman. She was so English in appearance, though she only spoke French and Flemish. Behind the shop was a cosy little room where the more intimate clients were served with tea; a room with a look-out into a little square of garden. Thither Mrs. Warren was carried or supported. She

regained consciousness slightly as she was placed on a chair, opened her eyes, and said "Thank you, my dears." Then her head fell over to one side and she was dead--seemingly....

The agent de police went away to fetch a doctor and to disperse the crowd of ketjes[2] and loafers which had transferred itself from the hotel to the tea-shop. The shop woman, who was one of those angels of kindness that turn up unexpectedly in the paths of unhappy people, called in a stout serving wench from the kitchen, and the three of them carried Mrs. Warren out of the inner tea-room into the back premises and a spare bedroom. Here she was laid on the bed, partially undressed and all available and likely restoratives applied.

The doctor when he came pronounced her dead, thought it was probably an effusion of blood on the brain but couldn't be certain till he had made an autopsy.

"What am I to do?" said Vivie thinking aloud....

"Why, stay here till all the formalities are over and you can find rooms elsewhere," said Mme. Trouessart, the owner-servant of the tea-shop. "I have another spare room. For the moment my locataires are gone. I know you both very well by sight, you were clients of ours in the happy days before the War. Madame votre mère was, I think, the gérante of the Hotel Édouard-Sept when I first came to manage here. Since then, you have often drunk my tea. Je me nomme 'Trouessart' c'est le nom de mon mari qui est ... qui est--Vous pouvez diviner où il est, où est à present tout Belge loyal qui peut servir. Le nom Walcker? C'était le nom de nom père, et de plus est, c'était un nom Anglais transformé un peu en Flamand. Mon arrière-grand-père etait soldat Anglais. Il se battait à Waterloo. For me, I spik no English--or ver' leetle."

She went on to explain, whilst the doctors occupied themselves with their gruesome task, and Vivie was being persuaded to take some nourishment, that her great grandfather had been a soldier servant who had married a Belgian woman and settled down on the site of this very shop a hundred years ago. He and his wife had even then made a specialty of tea for English tourists. She, his great grand-daughter, had after her marriage to Monsieur Trouessart carried on the business under the old name--Walker, made to look Flemish as Walcker.

Vivie when left alone suddenly thought of the money question. She remembered then that before going out to look for rooms she had transferred half the notes from their hiding-place to an inner pocket. They were still there. But what about her luggage and her mother's, and the remainder of the money? In her distress she wrote to Gräfin von Stachelberg. Minna came over from her hospital at half past six in the evening. By that time the doctor had given the necessary certificate of the cause of death, and an undertaker had come on the scene to make his preparations.

Minna went over to the Hotel Impérial with Vivie. Appearing in her Red Cross uniform, she was admitted, announced herself as the Gräfin von Stachelberg, and demanded to know what justification the manager could offer for his extraordinary brutality towards these English ladies, the result of which had been the death of the elder lady. The manager replied that inasmuch as the All Highest himself was to arrive that very evening to take up his abode at the Hotel Impérial, the hotel premises had been requisitioned, etc., etc. He still refused absolutely to allow Vivie to proceed to her room and look for her money. She might perhaps be allowed to do so when the Emperor was gone. As to her luggage he would have it sent over to the tea-shop. (The money, it might be noted, she never recovered. There were many

things also missing from her mother's trunks and no satisfaction was ever obtained.)

So there was Vivie, one dismal, rainy November evening in 1915; homeless, her mother lying dead in a room of this tea-shop, and in her own pocket only a matter of thirty thousand francs to provide for her till the War was over. A thousand pounds in fluctuating value was all that was left of a nominal twenty thousand of the year before.

But the financial aspect of the case for the time being did not concern her. The death of her mother had been a stunning shock, and when she crossed over to the hotel--what irony, by the bye, to think she had been born there thirty-nine years ago, in the old inn that had preceded the twice rebuilt hotel!--when she crossed the street with Minna, it had been with blazing, tearless eyes and the desire to take the hotel manager and his minions by the coat collar, fling them into the street, and assert her right to go up to her room. But now her violence was spent and she was a broken, weeping woman as she sat all night by the bedside of her dead mother, holding the cold hand, imprinting kisses on the dead face which was now that of a saintly person with nothing of the reprobate in its lineaments.

* * * * *

The burial for various reasons had to take place in the Cemetery of St. Josse-ten-Noode, near the shuddery National Shooting Range where Edith Cavell and numerous Belgian patriots had recently been executed. Minna von Stachelberg left her hospital, with some one else in charge, and insisted on accompanying Vivie to the interment. This might have been purely "laïc"; not on account of any harsh dislike to the religious ceremony on Vivie's part; only due to the fact that she knew no priest or pastor. But there appeared at the grave-side to make a

very suitable and touching discourse and to utter one or two heartfelt prayers, a Belgian Baptist minister, a relation of Mme. Trouessart.

Waterloo left many curious things behind it. Not only a tea-shop or two; but a Nonconformist nucleus, that intermarried, as Sergeant Walker or Walcker had done, with Belgian women and left descendants who in the third generation--and by inherent vigour, thrift, matrimony and conversion--had built up quite a numerous congregation, which even grew large enough and rich enough to maintain a mission of its own in Congoland. Kind Mme. Trouessart (née Walcker), distressed and unusually moved at the sad circumstances of Mrs. Warren's death, had called in her uncle the Baptist pastor (who also in some unexplained way seemed to hold a brief for the Salvation Army). He prayed silently by the death-bed which, under the circumstances, was more tactful than open intercession. He helped greatly over all the formalities of the funeral, and he took upon himself the arrangement of the ceremony, so that everything was done decorously, and certainly to the satisfaction of the Belgians, who attended. Such people would be large-minded in religion--you might be Protestant, if you were not Catholic, or you might be Jewish; but a funeral without some outward sign of faith and hope would have puzzled and distressed them.

To Vivie's great surprise, there was a considerable attendance at the ceremony. She had expected no more than the company of Minna--an unprofessing but real Christian, if ever there were one, and the equally Christian if equally hedonist Mme. Trouessart. But there came in addition quite a number of shopkeepers from the Rue Royale, the Rues de Schaerbeek, du Marais, de Lione, and de l'Association, with whom Mrs. Warren had dealt in years gone by. "C'etait une dame très convenable," said one purveyor, and the others agreed. "Elle me paya

écus sonnants," said another, "et toujours sans marchander." There was even present a more distinguished acquaintance of the past: a long-retired Commissaire de Police of the Quartier in which Mrs. Warren's hotel was situated.

He appeared in the tightly-buttoned frock-coat of civil life, with a minute disc of some civic decoration in his button hole, and an incredibly tall chimney-pot hat. He came to render his respectueux hommages to the maîtresse-femme who had conducted her business within the four corners of the law, "sans avoir maille à partir avec la police des moeurs."

Mrs. Warren at least died with the reputation of one who promptly paid her bills; and the whole assistance, as it walked slowly back to Brussels, recalled many a deed of kindness and jovial charity on the part of the dead Englishwoman.

* * * * *

Vivie, on sizing up her affairs, got Monsieur Walcker, the Baptist pasteur, to convey a letter to the American Consulate General. Walcker was used to such missions as these, of which the German Government was more or less cognizant. The Germans, among their many contradictory features, had a great respect for religion, a great tolerance as to its forms. They not only appreciated the difference between Jews and Christians, Catholics and Lutherans, but between the Church of England and the various Free Churches of Britain and America. The many people whom they sentenced to death must all have their appropriate religious consolation before facing the firing party. Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists were all provided for; there was a Church of England chaplain for the avowed Anglicans; but what was to be done for the Free Churches and Nonconformist sects of the Anglo-Saxons? They were not represented by any captive

pastor; so in default this much respected Monsieur Walcker, the Belgian Baptist, was called in to minister to the Nonconformist mind in its last agony. He therefore held a quasi-official position and was often entrusted with missions which would have been dealt with punitorily on the part of any one else. Consequently he was able to deliver Vivie's communication to the American Consul-General with some probability of its being sent on. It contained no further appeal to American intervention than this: that the Consul-General would try to convey to England the news of her mother's death to such-and-such solicitors, and to Lewis Maitland Praed A.R.A. in Hans Place.

She went to the Brussels bank a fortnight after her mother's death whilst still availing herself of the hospitality of Madame Trouessart: to withdraw the jewellery and plate which she had deposited there on her mother's account. But there she found herself confronted with the red tape of the Latin which is more formidable, even, than that of the land of Dora at the present day. These deposited articles were held on the order of Mrs. Warren; they could not be given up till her will was proved and letters of administration had been granted. So that small resource in funds was withheld, at any rate till some time after peace had been declared. However she had a thousand pounds (in notes) between her and penury, and the friendship of Minna von Stachelberg. She would resume her evening lessons in English--Madame Trouessart had found her several pupils--and she would lodge--as they kindly invited her to do--with the Baptist pastor and his wife in the Rue Haute. And she would help Minna at the hospital, and hope to be rewarded with the opportunity of bringing comfort and consolation to the wounded British prisoners.

Thus, with no unbearable misery, she passed the year 1916. There were short commons in the way of food,

and the cold was sometimes cruel. But Madame Walcker was a wonderful cook and could make soup from a sausage skewer, and heaped édredons on Vivie's bed. Vivie sighed a little over the Blue Placards which announced endless German victories by land and sea; and she gasped over the dreadful Red Placards with their lists of victims sentenced to death by the military courts. She ground her teeth over the announcement of Gabrielle Petit's condemnation, and behind the shut door of Minna's small sitting-room--and she only shut the door not to compromise Minna--she raved over the judicial murder of this Belgian heroine, who was shot, as was Edith Cavell, for nothing more than assisting young Belgians to escape from German-occupied Belgium.

She witnessed the air-raids of the Allies, when only comforting papers were dropped on Brussels city, but bombs on the German aerodromes outside; and she also saw the Germans turn their guns from the aeroplanes--which soared high out of their reach or skimmed below range--on to thickly-inhabited streets of the poorer quarters, to teach them to cheer the air-craft of the Allies!

She beheld--or she was told of--many acts of rapine, considered cruelty and unreasoning ferocity on the part of German officials or soldiers; yet saw or heard of acts and episodes of unlooked-for kindness, forbearance and sympathy from the same hated people. Von Giesselin, after all, was a not uncommon type; and as to Minna von Stachelberg, she was a saint of the New Religion, the Service of Man.