From ‘The Starving Belgians’, The Spectator, 8 May 1915:
The two hundred thousand Belgian refugees who are being provided for in the United Kingdom have made us feel that the refugee question is part of our daily life. We hear of the refugees wherever we go; we see them; our everyday conversation is concerned with them. Yet our own preoccupying experience is but a fraction of the whole question of caring for the Belgians. It is humiliating to reflect how far the vividness of small daily impressions exceeds that of the greater things which have to be imagined. The conditions in Belgium at this moment challenge the imagination to bestir itself if ever events in history did. A brave little nation with a militia for an army, but a soul equal to any fate, stood in the way of a ruthless giant. It knew that it would suffer; that its beautiful cities, its manufacturing towns humming with industry, its highly farmed lands, would resound to the tramp of armed myriads of invaders. It knew that it would lose the flower of its manhood. But it held all these things worth while for honour. We trust, nevertheless, that no one thought quite so basely of his fellow men as to believe that the penalty extracted by Germany for honourable conduct would be so horribly cruel as it has been. One’s imagination is still too slow, too clumsy, or, it may be, too much number by a succession of infamies, to grasp what the facts about Belgium mean. Wave upon wave of refugees left the country, but seven million persons remained to brave out the situation. It is these people about whom we wish to write and one whose behalf we desire to appeal.
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