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In short, on a beau faire, on a beau dire. If un enfant ne vous tient d'une maniere ou d'autre, I cannot admire it as I am expected to do; and what a difference that makes will be seen two months hence. Toutes mes affections parlent due meme principe. The Duchess offended me much by coming with a couronne civique, which is a chaplet of oak leaves. In England they are a symbol of loyalty.
Towards the Pont St. Michel is a continuation of the building ornamented with a bas-relief, at present denominated Le serment civique. At the top of a flight of steps, is an avant-corps, with four Doric columns, a balustrade above the entablature, four statues standing on a level with the base of the pillars, and behind, a square dome.
The flags which were displayed everywhere; the crowds in the square before the railroad station; the multitudes of boy scouts running about; the uniforms of Belgian volunteers and regulars; the Garde Civique, in their queer- looking costumes, with funny little derby hats, all braid-trimmed gave to the place a holiday air.
The Garde Civique seemed a trifle more numerous than it had been the evening before; citizen volunteers, still in civilian garb, appeared on the streets in awkward squads, carrying their guns and side arms clumsily; and when, in Minister Brand Whitlock's car, we drove out the beautiful Avenue Louise, we found soldiers building a breast-high barricade across the head of the roadway where it entered the Bois; also, they were weaving barbed-wire entanglements among the shade trees.
There is nothing in our educational curriculum that corresponds with the instruction civique of the French schools, nor have we the privilege which the Americans enjoy of carrying a copy of our organic Act of Government in our pockets, of reading it through in twenty minutes, and of hearing it incessantly expounded in the class-room and the Press, debated in the national legislature, and interpreted by the highest judicial tribunal in the land.
These were that no Belgian troops should occupy the city, that the Garde Civique should be disarmed and their weapons surrendered, and that the municipality should supply the German forces with specified quantities of provisions and other supplies the chief item, by the way, being a hundred thousand cigars.
His name appears at the fete civique held by English and Irish republicans at White's Hotel. There he sat beside Santerre, the famous brewer, and proposed, as a sentiment, "The approaching National Convention of Great Britain and Ireland."
When we were perhaps halfway to our destination we met a town bellman and a town crier, the latter being in the uniform of a Garde Civique.
It took half an hour of explanations to convince him that we were not German spies, that we really did know the password, and that we were merely having a joke though not, as we had planned, at his expense. The force of citizen soldiery known as the Garde civique has, so far as I am aware, no exact counterpart in any other country.
The bellringer would ply his clapper until he drew a crowd, and then the Garde Civique would halt in an open space at the junction of two or more streets and read a proclamation from the burgomaster calling on all the inhabitants to preserve their tranquillity and refrain from overt acts against the Germans, under promise of safety if they obeyed and threat of death at the hands of the Germans if they disregarded the warning.
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