Monsieur Segotin's Story
was, I perceived, to be child's play to what was going now to happen in Belgium. Yes, I was decidedly relieved when my two little ones were carried out beyond the harbour mouth of Ostend."
"You had no confidence in the Belgian Army?" I asked.
"I had every confidence in the Belgian Army that it would do heroic things and prove itself worthy; but look you, my dear Monsieur, miracles of the kind you suggest do not happen. David's pebble laid Goliath low, yes. But you cannot with one lucky shot knock out an army like the army of those people. I knew that the Belgian Army would do what it could. But to the army of those people I knew it was no more than a mouthful. That it should have held them back as it did is sufficiently miraculous. I never expected a quarter so much. You see, I had studied this question, and I knew something, though only a little, of what the Germans had prepared for us. I believed that they would drive through Belgium as the waters of a burst dam drive through a village of straw huts. I believed that they would be in Paris within a week, for I never doubted of the road they would take. Belgium lay all open; the French-Belgian frontier lay all open. It was not in those people to neglect so rare a chance. And if they could smash France they could turn on Russia and smash her too, and then they would not give a pudding's end for the intervention of England. That was how I read the future. It was, for me, the end of the world, and
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