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Beautiful Europe

Belgium


by

Joseph E. Morris




I.


It needs, indeed, an effort of the imagination at the moment of writing
to think of Belgium as in any sense a component part of "Beautiful
Europe." The unhappy "cockpit" of the Continent at the actual hour is
again in process of accomplishing its frightful destiny--no treaty, or
"scrap of paper," is potent to preserve this last, and weakest, of all
the nations of Western Europe from drinking to the dregs the cup of
ruin and desolation. Tragic indeed in the profoundest sense--in the
sense of Aristotle--more tragic than the long ruin of the predestined
house of Oedipus--is this accumulated tragedy of a small