st. pierrebrouck.
january 15, 1916.
my dear friend:
i am glad to hear that you have now completed the work you undertook of collecting, from our soldiers themselves, these accounts of the war. they will certainly help people to know, and to appreciate, what you so rightly call our heroic and valiant belgium.
you could not have employed your talent and activity in a better way. as it is not yet possible to write the history of the tragic days we are living, it is highly necessary to collect the most striking episodes, and to prevent the loss of testimony to which posterity can appeal when it wishes to judge the men and things of our times. the accounts that you have collected so patiently help us to live over again the whole campaign, from the startling revelation which the glorious days of liége were for many of us, down to the hard moments through which our army is passing in its victorious defence of the yser.
"the determined resistance," our king called it in his memorable speech to parliament. how we see this determined resistance in the magnificent enthusiasm of our soldiers, arresting, around the liége forts, the first wave of invaders, without troubling about the human torrent rolling onwards towards them from the whole of germany! how we see it, too, in the tragic episodes of the invasion, in the bold adventures of our volunteers, in those glorious deaths of which your book reminds us, deaths of which we cannot think without a pang at our hearts!
your accounts prove to us how the unanimous will of the nation galvanised the army and how the example of our chiefs, from the king down to the merest sub-lieutenant, encouraged and brought about the most noble self-sacrifices. these accounts prove to us, thanks to many details of episodes lived through during these eighteen months of war, what a quantity of virtues our magnificent little army, brave and studious as it is, held in reserve for the hour of danger.
well-known figures and deeply regretted friends are evoked in these pages by their sorrowful comrades. these rapid sketches, written in campaign diaries by those who shared the same dangers and sacrificed everything to the same cause, have a special value. the modesty of the man who tells the story is still another homage rendered to the whole corps, and it is to the army, to the traditional, disciplined, national force, that our admiration goes out, when we read of the fine deeds described in this book.
on reading it, the country will better understand the affection and respect it owes to the soldier from whom it may demand, some future day, all that those of our day have endured and given.
in your former book, you retraced for us the early life of leopold i., our first king. when i congratulated you on your conscientious work, in depicting for us the early days of the man who has very justly been called leopold the wise, i little thought that you would soon be the chronicler of the army of his grandson, acknowledged by the whole world, as the champion of loyalty and honour, the incarnation of an oppressed and valiant country.
how times have changed since then!
the horizon is brightening, though, and i hope that, in order to complete your work, you may be able to connect the past with the present and sketch for us the history of this gigantic struggle, in which the indomitable courage of the belgians, led by albert i., will have preserved, for our country, the independence, and the liberty that the political spirit of our fathers had won for it under the reign of leopold.
accept, my dear friend, my best wishes,
broqueville.
