ot seem to have very much
weight, but I left with a promise to look in again at the first
opportunity and to respond to any call the Rector might make.

From the seminary we drove out the Tirlemont road, to see if we could
get to that little town and see some of the fighting that was known to
be going on. At the edge of the town we came to a barricade of carts,
road-rollers and cobble stones, where we were courteously but firmly
turned back. Everybody was anxious to make it as nice as possible for
us, and one of the bright boys was brought forward to tell us in
English, so as to be more convincing. He smiled deprecatingly, and said:
"Verreh bad. Verreh sorreh. Oui mus' mak our office, not?" So we turned
and went back to town. They had told us that _nobody_ could go beyond
the barricade without an order from the _Commandant de Place_ at Louvain.
On the way back we decided that we could at least try, so we hunted
through the town until we found the headquarters of the Commandant.
A fierce-looking sergeant was sitting at a table near the door, hearing
requests for vises on _laisser-passers_. Everybody was begging for a
vise on one pretext or another, and most of them were being turned down.
I decided to try a play of confidence, so took our three cards and
walked up to his table, as though there could be no possible doubt of
his doing what I wanted. I threw our three _laisser-passers_ down in
front of him, and said in a business-like tone: "_Trois vises pour
Tirlemont, S.V.P._" My man looked up in mild surprise, viseed the three
papers without a word and handed them back in less time than it takes to
tell it. We sailed back to the barricade in high feather, astonished the
guard with our vise, and plowed along the road, weaving in and out among
ammunition wagons, artillery caissons, infantry, cavalry, bicyclists--all
in a dense cloud of dust. Troops were everywhere in small numbers.
Machine guns, covered with shrubbery, were thick on the road and in the
woods. There was a decidedly hectic movement toward the front, and it
was being carried out at high speed without confusion or disorder. It
was a sight to remember. All along the road we were cheered both as
Americans and in the belief that we were British. Whenever we were
stopped at a barricade to have our papers examined, the soldiers crowded
around the car and asked for news from other parts of the field, and
everybody was wild for newspapers. Unfortunately we had only a