Little Blegium dined out cinematically-speaking on the war and its privileged status as victim. For years it seems as though the Belgian knew how to produce no other kind of film except those displaying German atrocities nd elevating Belgian heroism. The Great War was also a means for this strange little country, rather artificially put together after the Napoleonic wars and consisting of two quite different populations speaking two quite different languages to somehow forge itself an almost equally artificial sense of nationalism constructed around its noble warrior-king (Albert I) the conception of it common sufferings at the kind of a common enemy.. The Belgians would go on churning out these films like so many services of moules frites, ever more weepy and lugubrious, long after the war and throughout the 1920s (the extremely weep ad lugubrious Tragédiie de Marchienne 1929 was remade as late as 1937).This is a joint Franco-Belgian film and very early in the war (most the Belgian films are in practice postwar) and, although typically propagnadist, is quite snappy and action-full. It also gives a picture of the war (the dreaded German Uhlan cavalry with the ri lances) which would be very much altered by the time it was over. Best of all however is the recollection of the wonderful "windmill" films of Alfred Machin (Le Moulin maudit of 1909 and L'Âme des moulins 1912).Alfred Machin, though French, was responsible for more or less creating from nothing, on behalf of Pathé, the Belgian and Dutch film industries and is one of the finest and most disconcerting of early film-makers, very very unjustly under-rated). He is also responsible for Belgium's only other really important contribution to the vocabulary of early cinema - torture by windmill. Enjoy!