Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Belgium, the Making of a Nation
Some thirty years ago, Ernest Lavisse, in answer to a request from some Belgian students, recalled in a picturesque and suggestive summary the chief events of Belgian history, and declared to his young correspondents, 'I know of no land which possesses more glorious memories than yours'. His words at once expressed his warm sympathy with them and emphasized the prominence of the part played by Belgium in European history. The words of the eminent historian came back to my memory in the early days of the war. Belgium has shown herself worthy of her glorious past; she has added one more to those many heroic pages which her annals contain.
I may, perhaps, be accused of having dwelt too little on those pages. I have done so on purpose, first from motives of discretion and secondly from scientific scruples. The grave preoccupations of the present hour do not dispense us from the demands of historical truth. We must not imitate the historians on the other side of the Rhine in making the great lines of the past converge towards the point of view which our present frame of mind imposes on us. There is a risk of distorting their perspective in seeking to 'predict' as it were past events, that is to say seeking to estimate their importance by the measure of those which we see before us, to determine their significance by the consequences which have resulted from them, and to appreciate the former solely in the light of the latter. History does not lend itself to such a system of final causes; the method savours too much of Prussian organization.
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