t
and courtyard closed, as if we were conspirators in Russian melodrama,
and then we slept.

The Germans were evidently much nearer than Paris had supposed, and we
should not have been greatly surprised to find them in the streets next
morning. It was an Algerian horseman, however, muffled up in his dingy
white and looking rather chilly, who was riding past the window as I
first looked out.

We went to the Mairie--not the grandfatherly old mayor this time, but a
sharp-eyed special commissioner of police.

"After all," said he, when we had put our case, "you want to get as near
the front as possible."

True, I answered, we did.

"Well," he said, with a gesture at once final and wholly French, "you
are already farther than that. You are inside the lines." He crossed
out the safe-conduct and on the laissez-passer wrote: "Good for
immediate return to Paris," and carefully set down the date. Half an
hour later we were well on the road to Crepy, with the thunder which had
drawn us hither rolling fainter and fainter in the north.

Chapter IV

The Fall Of Antwerp

The storm which was to burst over Antwerp the following night was
gathering fast when we arrived on Tuesday morning. Army motor-trucks
loaded with dismantled aeroplanes, and the less essential impedimenta
screamed through the streets bound away from, not toward, the front. The
Queen, that afternoon, was seen in the Hotel St. Antoine receiving the
good-bys of various friends. Consuls suddenly locked their doors and
fled. And the cannon rumbling along the eastern horizon as they had
rumbled, nearer and nearer, for a fortnight, were now beyond the outer
line of forts and within striking distance of the town. That night, an
hour or two after midnight, in my hotel by the water-front, I awoke to
the steady clatter of hoofs on cobblestones and the rumble of wheels. I
went to the window, on the narrow side street, black as all streets had
been in Antwerp since the night that the Zeppelin threw its first bombs,
and looked out. It was a moonlight night, clear and cold, and there
along the Quai St. Michael, at the end of the street, was an army in
retreat. They were Belgians, battered and worn out with their unbroken
weeks of hopeless fighting; cavalrymen on their tired horses,
artillerymen, heads sunk on their chests, drowsing on their lurching
caissons; the patient little foot-soldiers, rifles slung across their
shoulders, scuffling along in thei