Certainly we are not vandals who would wantonly destroy the splendid things of art, as our enemies have claimed." He was plainly a sincere man and he was much in love with his work; that, too, was easy to see.

Afterward, though, the thought came to us that, if Belgium was to become a German state by right of seizure and conquest, he was saving these masterpieces of Vandyke and Rubens, not for Belgium, but for the greater glory of the Greater Empire.
However, that was beside the mark.

What at the moment seemed to us of more consequence even than rescuing holy pictures was that all about us were sundry hundreds of thousands of men, women and children who did not need pictures, but food.

You had only to look at them in the streets to know that their bellies felt the grind of hunger.

Famine knocked at half the doors in that city of Brussels, and we sat in the glittering cafe of the Palace Hotel and talked of pictures! We called on Minister Brand Whitlock, whom we had not seen--McCutcheon and I--since the Sunday afternoon a month and a half before when we two left his official residence in a hired livery rig for a ride to Waterloo, which ride extended over a thousand miles, one way and another, and carried us into three of the warring countries.