ateful to that Belgian lieutenant for his
mistake. Just how grateful I might have been had anything untoward
happened, I cannot say. But the excursion was worth all the risk, and
more.

On a bit of high ground stands what was once the tiny hamlet of
Oudstuyvenskerke--the ruins of two small white houses and the tower of
the destroyed church--hardly a tower any more, for only three sides of
it are standing and they are riddled with great shell holes.

Six hundred feet beyond this tower were the German trenches. The
little island was hardly a hundred feet in its greatest dimension.

I wish I could make those people who think that war is good for a
country see that Belgian outpost as I saw it that night under the
moonlight. Perhaps we were under suspicion; I do not know. Suddenly
the _fusees_, which had ceased for a time, began again, and with their
white light added to that of the moon the desolate picture of that
tiny island was a picture of the war. There was nothing lacking. There
was the beauty of the moonlit waters, there was the tragedy of the
destroyed houses and the church, and there was the horror of unburied
bodies.

There was heroism, too, of the kind that will make Belgium live in
history. For in the top of that church tower for months a Capuchin
monk has held his position alone and unrelieved. He has a telephone,
and he gains access to his position in the tower by means of a rope
ladder which he draws up after him.

Furious fighting has taken place again and again round the base of the
tower. The German shells assail it constantly. But when I left Belgium
the Capuchin monk, who has become a soldier, was still on duty; still
telephoning the ranges of the gun; still notifying headquarters of
German preparations for a charge.

Some day the church tower will fall and he will go with it, or it will
be captured; one or the other is inevitable. Perhaps it has already
happened; for not long ago I saw in the newspapers that furious
fighting was taking place at this very spot.

He came down and I talked to him--a little man, regarding his
situation as quite ordinary, and looking quaintly unpriestlike in his
uniform of a Belgian officer with its tasselled cap. Some day a great
story will be written of these priests of Belgium who have left their
churches to fight.

We spoke in whispers. There was after all very little to say. It would
have embarrassed him horribly had any one told him that he was a
heroic figu