At the churches, service was held and the crowds were so great that not an additional person could have entered one of the buildings. That was the point. The churches were so full that the police could not get in. At least twelve thousand people were supposed to have been in the largest church. The Germans raged but were helpless. At the Cathedral the ordinary service was held and then the Dean announced that at eleven o'clock a funeral service would be held for the Belgian soldiers who had fallen in the war. It was sung by Cardinal Le Mercier with great pomp and dignity. The Cardinal sang the service in a voice shaken by emotion and then delivered a patriotic address which stirred the very souls of the thousands present.

On the national holiday, despite the German prohibition, they were celebrating their resistance and the Germans could not interfere! They sang the national song, and suddenly there rang through the building a shout "Long live the King!" And despite requests that no demonstration be made, a tremendous shouting and cheering rose, swelled, broke, and reëchoed through the vast spaces of the Cathedral. "Long live the King! Long live Belgium! Long live the Queen! Long live the Cardinal ! Long live the Army!" Hats were thrown in the air, handkerchiefs were wildly shaken, people wept, laughed, fell on each others' necks. The soul of Belgium, repressed for two years, suddenly burst the bonds placed upon it by the German government and gave voice to its true feeling.

The end of the war made known the fact that the principal author and publisher of La Libre Belgique was M. Eugène van Doren, aided by several Belgian journalists, the chief of whom were M. Victor Jourdain and M. van de Kercheve. At the beginning the printing offered no great difficulty because the Germans did not know what was going on. The delivery of the papers was

the great problem. M. van Doren and his wife put them in envelopes without names on them and delivered them personally to a number of people who distributed them personally to friends. No name was put on the paper and only a very few people knew from whom it came. They

merely knew that their own copy came from a friend.

When the third number was printed, a new press had to be found. The police had already discovered the identity of the first. M. van Doren bought the necessary material with great caution and installed the plant in an abandoned house in a little town outside Brussels. Two professional printers, the Allaer brothers, did the work. Phillipe Baucq delivered alone between four and five thousand copies of the paper each time, making the trips at night on a bicycle. BRITISH POSTER TO AROUSE SYMPATHY When the Germans forbade the

French Pictorial Service

FOR BELGIAN REFUGEES

use of the bicycle, he had to walk and at one time walked two days without a rest. Presently M. van Doren decided to set up the type in his first plant but to print the paper in a second plant at another village at some distance. Here was the automobile feature. He was, however, very soon compelled to carry the matrix on a trolley car. One day, when he himself was carrying some four thousand copies of the paper, some German

soldiers obligingly lifted the bundle for him and set it on his shoulder.

The paper was so popular and so many copies were demanded that it became necessary to have a larger printing press, and the problem to get that press set up and enough blank paper on which to print was difficult to solve. The printing was being done in a house fairly surrounded by Germans and there was a reward of twenty thousand dollars for the discovery of the office of the paper. To deaden the noise of the press M. van Doren built a brick room around it. He left for a door a little hole in one corner through which he crawled on hands and knees. This opened into what seemed to be quite an ordinary shop and was hidden there by a pile of boxes and old iron.

After the great celebration of the national holiday in 1916, the German spies ferreted him out. The plant had to be broken up in great haste and transferred. Some few more copies were issued, but then M. van Doren had to flee and take refuge with relatives and friends, lying in hiding for several months. But the paper did not stop. One man after another took it up, each for a short time. Baucq, who had so faithfully distributed it for so long, was captured by the Germans and shot, and many other men, who at one time or another had aided in the printing or the circulation, spent long terms in prison. But despite the extraordinary rewards offered and the terrible penalties dealt out, not one individual in the whole of Belgium, who had anything to do with the paper or who received a copy, ever in any way by word or look betrayed what he knew. Belgium might be crushed but she could not be conquered.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE WAR IN THE AIR

THE air service became, as soon as the armies dug underground, the most important factor in the war. The aëroplane became the eyes of the army. On it the artillery fire entirely depended at all times. Upon it the army must rely for knowledge of the existence and whereabouts of any assault. The all important portion of the air service was, therefore, its least dramatic and the one about which least has been said. The observation of the enemy's batteries and lines was undertaken partly by observation balloons, anchored within the Allied lines, and able to see with accuracy all of the smaller and nearer enemy artillery. The larger enemy guns, located, of course, several miles away, were ferreted out by the slow, heavy aëroplanes, carrying at least the pilot and his observer, and equipped with camera and wireless. This branch of the service was the fundamental factor, and performed what the British called "ceiling work." On it almost every phase of the combat depended.

Another phase of air work was the bombardment of enemy territory. Munition factories, railroad junctions, railroad yards far in the rear of the lines were commonly the targets, and a few well-directed bombs might do enough damage, it was thought, to prevent some movement at the front; might interfere with a stream of supplies or with the manufacture of munitions long enough to be of some consequence. It is not yet proved, however, that the bom