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While Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Russia, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, etc., live the same life, are one in thought, Great Britain lives in her superb insularity. If she had any moment of supreme anxiety during the War, it was in the spring and summer of 1917 during the terrible threat of the destruction of her shipping by submarines and the inability of construction to keep pace with it.
But we are in ignorance of his most active years, when he was exposed to the greatest dangers and hardships, and when he became perfected in the military art, as in the case of Caesar amid the marshes and forests of Gaul and Belgium.
We know what this attitude costs them. We know, from the report of those few men who have been sent back to Belgium from the Western front and from the German camps, the tortures to which the modern slaves are being subjected. These men were so ill, so worn out, that their family scarcely recognised them, and greeted them with tears, not with laughter.
The siege was raised on the 4th of July, 1635, and Belgium was saved for that time to Philip IV. At the capture of Breda, in 1637, the Irish were again honourably conspicuous, and yet more so in the successful defence of Arras, the capital of Artois, three years later.
It has been calculated that the ancient Irish monks held from the sixth to the ninth century thirteen monasteries in Scotland, seven in France, twelve in Armoric Gaul, seven in Lotharingia, eleven in Burgundy, nine in Belgium, ten in Alsatia, sixteen in Bavaria, fifteen in Rhaetia, Helvetia, and Suevia, besides several in Thuringia and on the left bank of the Rhine.
German art was represented by 580 fine paintings, including all the German schools that have gained celebrity; as the Bavarian in Munich the Saxon in Dresden and many others. Holland, Belgium, Russia, Spain, Austria, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Canada had their share in the splendid effect, likewise.
They may have a vision of the ashes of Louvain University, the ruin of Rheims Cathedral, wrought by ruthless German hands. Then the church in Quebec will measure up to the church in Belgium and in France. Then the village cure will say to his young men: "Go! Fight! It is for the glory of God and the good of the world. It is for the Christian religion and the life of free Canada."
In money matters, too, the chief plenipotentiaries can hardly be acquitted of something akin to niggardliness toward the country which had saved theirs from a catastrophe. Down to the month of May, 1921, two and a half milliard francs was the maximum sum allotted to Belgium by the Supreme Council.
Only valets are tolerated at the head of it: its army is added to the French army; twenty thousand Swiss are drafted in Switzerland and made to fight against the Swiss and the friends of Switzerland. Belgium, incorporated with France, is subjected to the conscription.
He did for the first time for Europe what Akbar did in his day for India. In forty-five years he headed fifty-three campaigns against all sorts of enemies. He fought the Saxons, the Danes, the Slays, the Arabs, the Greeks, and the Bretons. What is now France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Spain, and most of Italy were under his kingship.
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