The more there were of the Germans the fewer of them there would be to come back when the Allies, over the French border, fell on them.

This we conceived to be the mental attitude of the villagers and the peasants; but now they were different.

The difference showed in all their outward aspects--in their gaits; in their drooped shoulders and half-averted faces; and, most of all, in their eyes.

They had felt the weight of the armed hand, and they must have heard the boast, filtering down from the officers to the men, and from the men to the native populace, that, having taken their country, the Germans meant to keep it; that Belgium, ceasing to be Belgium, would henceforth be set down on the map as a part of Greater Prussia.
Seeing them now, I began to understand how an enforced docility may reduce a whole people to the level of dazed, unresisting automatons.
Yet a national spirit is harder to kill than a national boundary--so the students of these things say.

A little flash of flaming hate from the dead ashes of things; a quick, darting glance of defiance; a hissed word from a seemingly subdued man or woman; a shrill, hostile whoop from a ragged youngster behind a hedge--things such as these showed us that the courage of the Belgians was not dead.