The Henson Journals

[392]

13th Sunday after Trinity, August 17th, 1913. Brussels.

As soon as we had ordered ourselves into some decency of aspect after the degradations of travel, we walked to the English Church – 'the Church of the Resurrection' – and attended Mattins.

After tea in the Hotel (Hotel de l'Europe, Place Royale) we walked into the city descending by the steps adjacent, & admiring the fountains & flowers which adorn them. There has been much pulling down, & building up in this part of Brussels during the last two years. The effect will be to make this city equal in blank solid magnificence of masonry the City of London. But in both cases there has been vast destruction of the historical.

We attended service in St Gudule's – vespers presumably & Benediction. It was a festival of the Madonna, & her Image, a tawdry doll dressed in the height of sanctimonious fashion, was set out in the Church. The singing was loud and good, & the large congregation apparently reverent, though handicapped in this respect by a large invasion of tourists. Of course the chink of the money–box was frequent & energetic. A considerable proportion of the congregation remained to take part in a devotion to the Madonna, a Litany said before her image by priests, acolytes, & people.

[393]

We walked through the Park, which in the evening sunlight looked beautiful, the fountains were playing, & the flower–beds brilliant. We continued our walk along the Rue Royale as far as the Palais de Justice, in order that we might enjoy the fine prospect of the city which is commanded from the terrace. The photograph–selling touts were active & insistent. Their regulation, or even exstirpation [sic], would remove a nuisance, & earn the gratitude of tourists.

Outside our Hotel in the centre of the Place Royale there is a large modern equestrian statue of Godfry de Bouillon. The mind reels before the contrast which that Figure suggests! Surely our Saviour's bitter words to His contemporaries who built the tombs of those prophets whom their ancestors had murdered might be applied to the children of the French Revolution who raise statues to Crusaders, & promote the cult of Joan of Arc, yet labour to destroy from law & life every vestige of the principles which inspired their achievements. Of course, here in Brussels, the Revolution is held down by the reigning clericals as a wolf by the ears! There is a worse blot still on a City which has been adorned & made prosperous by the wealth coined from the infinite miseries of the Africans of the Congo.

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