- viers, banners waved above every house. Flags—flags—flags,
of many nations and designs, decorated the house-fronts, were draped on the balconies, were entwined in the windows, came like flames above the heads of marching crowds. Everywhere there was the sound of singing by multitudes, and through those weeks one song was always in the air, triumphant, exultant, intoxicating, almost maddening in its effect upon crowds and individuals—the old song of liberty and revolt: "La Marseillaise." With it, not so universal, but haunting in constant refrain between the outbursts of that other tune, they sang "La Brabançonne" of Belgium, and quaint old folk-songs that came to life again with the spirit of the people. Bells pealed from churches in which the Germans had left them by special favour. The belfry of Bruges had not lost its carillon. In Ghent when the King of the Belgians rode in along flower-strewn ways under banners that made one great canopy, while cheers swept up and around him, to his grave, tanned, melancholy face, unchanged by victory—so I had seen him in his ruined towns among his dead—I heard the great boom of the Cathedral bell. In Brussels, when he rode in later, there were many bells ringing and clashing, and wild cheering which to me, lying in an upper room, after a smash on the Field of Waterloo, seemed uncanny and inhuman, like the murmur of innumerable ghost-voices. Into these towns, and along the roads through Belgium to the Meuse, bands were playing and soldiers singing, and on each man's rifle was a flag or a flower. In every city there was carnival. It was the carnival of human joy after long fasting from the pleasure of life. Soldiers and civilians, men and women, sang together, linked arms, danced together, through many streets, in many towns. In the darkness of those nights of Armistice one saw the eyes of people, sparkling, laughing, burning;
