Monsieur Segotin's Story
are, there will be none of our children in summer on these sands. Only theirs. Ours will be working as slaves in their great factories. And yours, Monsieur? And yours? What will be the lot of yours, when Blankenberghe is in Germany? Well, let us hope it may not be in our time."
I need hardly say how much the old gentleman amused me with his blood-curdling suggestions, nor how ready I was with arguments to prove that he was utterly mistaken. In those days nothing was easier than to blow the German danger away down the wind. But this is beside the question at present, when we know what we know; and I can serve no useful purpose by insisting further upon my own folly.
Ever since the war began I had naturally been wondering what had come of it to my poor old friend M. Segotin. That he was ruined like every other Belgian I felt no doubt at all; that he was dead I very much feared—unless it be that I hoped it. For to a man with the passionate love of his own country which was his, death would, I felt, be very desirable in these latter days. That he had not come to England in the great migration I was pretty certain. He knew my address, and would surely have communicated with me had he come over the North Sea. Of course I had no means of finding out anything about him. His little home town of Saint Hilaire had been swallowed up within a few days by the tide of invasion. I had not been in Belgium in the summer of 1914. I supposed, though, that he would have been at Blankenberghe
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