m merely setting out once more on my usual,
legitimate, daily job.

It is all so natural that you do not wonder in the least at this really
very singular extension of your personality. You are not aware of your
personality at all. If you could be you would see it undergoing
shrinkage. It is, anyhow, one of the things that ceased to matter a
hundred years ago. If you could examine its contents at this moment you
would find nothing there but that shining vision of danger, the siege of
Antwerp, indistinct, impalpable, aerial.

Presently the vision itself shrinks and disappears on the north-west
horizon. The car has shot beyond the streets into the open road, the
great paved highway to Antwerp, and I am absorbed in other matters: in
Car 1 and in the chauffeur Tom, who is letting her rip more and more
into her top speed with every mile; in M. C----, the Belgian Red Cross
guide, beside me on my left, and in the Belgian soldier sitting on the
floor at his feet. The soldier is confiding some fearful secret to
M. C---- about somebody called Achille. M. C---- bends very low to catch
the name, as if he were trying to intercept and conceal it, and when he
_has_ caught it he assumes an air of superb mystery and gravity and
importance. With one gesture he buries the name of Achille in his breast
under his uniform. You know that he would die rather than betray the
secret of Achille. You decide that Achille is the heroic bearer of
dispatches, and that we have secret orders to pick him up somewhere and
convey him in safety to Antwerp. You do not grasp the meaning of this
pantomime until the third sentry has approached us, and M. C---- has
stopped for the third time to whisper "Ach-ille!" behind the cover of
his hand, and the third sentry is instantly appeased.

(Concerning sentries, you learn that the Belgian kind is amiable, but
that the French sentry is a terrible fellow, who will think nothing of
shooting you if your car doesn't stop dead the instant he levels his
rifle.)

Except for sentries and straggling troops and the long trains of
refugees, the country is as peaceful between Ghent and Saint Nicolas as
it was last week between Ostend and Ghent. It is the same adorable
Flemish country, the same flat fields, the same paved causeway and the
same tall, slender avenues of trees. But if anything could make the
desolation of Belgium more desolate it is this intolerable beauty of
slender trees and infinite flat land, the beauty of a