re was an explosion just behind
us, a hideous noise overhead, as if the whole zenith had somehow been
ripped across like a tightly stretched piece of silk, and a shell from
the Belgian fort under which we had just passed went hurtling down long
aisles of air--farther--farther--to end in a faint detonation miles
away.

Out of sight in front of us, there was an answering thud, and--
"Tzee-ee-ee-er-r-r-ong!"--a German shell had gone over us and burst
behind the Belgian fort. Under this gigantic antiphony the motor-car
raced along, curiously small and irrelevant on that empty country road.

We passed great holes freshly made, neatly blown out of the macadam,
then a dead horse. There were plenty of dead horses along the roads in
France, but they had been so for days. This one's blood was not yet
dry, and the shell that had torn the great rip in its chest must have
struck here this morning.

We turned into the avenue of trees leading up to an empty chateau, a
field-hospital until a few hours before. Mattresses and bandages
littered the deserted room, and an electric chandelier was still
burning. The young officer pointed to some trenches in the garden. "I
had those dug to put the wounded in in case we had to hold the place,"
he said. "It was getting pretty hot."

There was nothing here now, however, and, followed by the London bus
with its obedient enlisted men doing duty as ambulance orderlies, we
motored a mile or so farther on to the nearest trench. It was in an
orchard beside a brick farmhouse with a vista in front of barbed-wire
entanglement and a carefully cleaned firing field stretching out to a
village and trees about half a mile away. They had looked very
interesting and difficult, those barbed-wire mazes and suburbs,
ruthlessly swept of trees and houses, when I had seen the Belgians
preparing for the siege six weeks before, and they were to be of about
as much practical use now as pictures on a wall.

There are, it will be recalled, three lines of forts about Antwerp--the
inner one, corresponding to the city's wall; a middle one a few miles
farther out, where the British now were; and the outer line, which the
enemy had already passed. Their artillery was hidden far over behind
the horizon trees, and the British marines and naval-reserve men who
manned these trenches could only wait there, rifle in hand, for an enemy
that would not come, while a captive balloon a mile or two away to the
eastward and