he hotels and
cafes where the officers and the War Correspondents come and go. Through
all that coming and going you get the sense of the old foreign town that
was dreaming yesterday. People are sitting outside the restaurants all
round the Place, drinking coffee and liqueurs as if nothing had
happened, as if Antwerp were far-off in another country, and as if it
were still yesterday. Mosquitoes come up from the drowsy canal water
and swarm into the hotels and bite you. I found any number of mosquitoes
clinging drowsily to my bedroom walls.

But there are very few women among those crowds outside the restaurants.
There are not many women except refugees in the streets, and fewer still
in the shops.

I have blundered across a little cafe with an affectionately smiling and
reassuringly fat proprietress, where they give you _brioches_ and China
tea, which, as it were in sheer affection, they call English. It is not
as happy a find as you might think. It is not, in the circumstances,
happy at all. In fact, if you have never known what melancholy is and
would like to know it, I can recommend two courses. Go down the Grand
Canal in Venice in the grey spring of the year, in a gondola, all by
yourself. Or get mixed up with a field ambulance which is not only doing
noble work but running thrilling risks, in neither of which you have a
share, or the ghost of a chance of a share; cut yourself off from your
comrades, if it is only for a week, and go into a Belgian cafe in
war-time and try to eat _brioches_ and drink English tea all by yourself.
This is the more successful course. You may see hope beyond the gondola
and the Grand Canal. But you will see no hope beyond the _brioche_ and
the English tea.

I walk about again till it is time to go back to the Hotel. So far, my
emancipation has not been agreeable.

[_Evening. Hotel de la Poste._]

I dined in the crowded restaurant, avoiding the War Correspondents,
choosing a table where I hoped I might be unobserved. Somewhere through
a glass screen I caught a sight of Mr. L.'s head. I was careful to avoid
the glass screen and Mr. L.'s head. He shall not say, if I can possibly
help it, that I am an infernal nuisance. For I know I haven't any
business to be here, and if Belgium had a Kitchener I shouldn't be here.
However you look at me, I am here on false pretences. In the eyes of Mr.
L. I would have no more right to be a War Correspondent (if I were one)
than I have to be on a fi