men there; we wait while the Commandant goes off in the dark to find his
friend's house.

The house stands in a garden somewhere beyond the railway station, up a
rough village street and a stretch of country road. It is about four in
the morning when we get there. A thin ooze of light is beginning to leak
through the mist. The mist holds it as a dark cloth holds a fluid that
bleaches it.

There is something queer about this light. There is something queer,
something almost inimical, about the garden, as if it tried to protect
itself by enchantment from the fifteen who are invading it. The mist
stands straight up from the earth like a high wall drawn close about the
house; it blocks with dense grey stuff every inch of space between the
bushes and trees; they are thrust forward rank upon rank, closing in
upon the house; they loom enormous and near. A few paces further back
they appear as without substance in the dense grey stuff that invests
them; their tops are tangled and lost in a web of grey. In this strange
garden it is as if space itself had solidified in masses, and solid
objects had become spaces between.

When your eyes get used to this curious inversion it is as if the mist
was no longer a wall but a growth; the garden is the heart of a jungle
bleached by enchantment and struck with stillness and cold; a tangle of
grey; a muffled, huddled and stifled bower, all grey, and webbed and
laced with grey.

The door of the house opens and the effect of queerness, of inimical
magic disappears.

Mr. E., our kind Dutch host, and Mrs. E., our kind English hostess, have
got up out of their beds to receive us. This hospitality of theirs is
not a little thing when you think that their house is to be invaded by
Germans, perhaps to-day.[34]

They do not allow you to think of it. For all you are to see of the
tragedy they and their house might be remaining at Ecloo in leisure and
perfect hospitality and peace. Only, as they see us pouring in over
their threshold a hovering twinkle in their kind eyes shows that they
are not blind to the comic aspect of retreats.

They have only one spare bedroom, which they offer; but they have filled
their drawing-room with blankets; piles and piles of white fleecy
blankets on chairs and sofas and on the floor. And they have built up a
roaring fire. It is as if they were succouring fifteen survivors of
shipwreck or of earthquake, or the remnants of a forlorn hope. To be
sure, we are flyi