V
THE ELECTION
"Ah! haughty city, wealthy city, selfish city, city of wolves so eager for their prey that they devour each other when there are no more sheep to shear to the bone! City conforming to the spirit of Darwin's law! Fecund city, but harsh mother! In your hypocritical corruption, your blatancy, your licentiousness, your opulence, your greedy instincts, your hatred of the poor, your fear of hirelings, you conjure up Carthage before me. Were you of Carthage, too, not filled with the prejudice against soldiers that Antwerp still maintains? Even Antwerpians whose sons are in the army are pitiless and harsh with troopers. In no other part of Belgium does one hear of terrible brawls between soldiers and the bourgoisie, of the ambushes where the slaughterers fall upon a drunken soldier on leave as he is returning to some barracks in the slums or a fort lost at the very end of a suburb.[1]
"Who have we at the head of Antwerp? Vain, stupid councillors, as inflated as were the magistrates of
- ↑ Attention must be called to the fact that this book was written before the introduction into Belgium of compulsory personal military service. The same observation applies to important passages in the third part, notably the chapter entitled Contumacy. G. E.
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