ksack and a
conspicuously foreign-looking bicycle, to the hospitalities of Dower
House. Mr. Van der Pant had escaped from Antwerp at the eleventh hour,
he had caught a severe cold and, it would seem, lost his wife and family
in the process; he had much to tell Mr. Britling, and in his zeal to
tell it he did not at once discover that though Mr. Britling knew French
quite well he did not know it very rapidly.

The dinner that night at the Dower House marked a distinct fresh step in
the approach of the Great War to the old habits and securities of
Matching's Easy. The war had indeed filled every one's mind to the
exclusion of all other topics since its very beginning; it had carried
off Herr Heinrich to Germany, Teddy to London, and Hugh to Colchester,
it had put a special brassard round Mr. Britling's arm and carried him
out into the night, given Mrs. Britling several certificates, and
interrupted the frequent visits and gossip of Mr. Lawrence Carmine; but
so far it had not established a direct contact between the life of
Matching's Easy and the grim business of shot, shell, and bayonet at the
front. But now here was the Dower House accomplishing wonderful idioms
in Anglo-French, and an animated guest telling them--sometimes one
understood clearly and sometimes the meaning was clouded--of men blown
to pieces under his eyes, of fragments of human beings lying about in
the streets; there was trouble over the expression _omoplate d'une
femme_, until one of the youngsters got the dictionary and found out it
was the shoulder-blade of a woman; of pools of blood--everywhere--and
of flight in the darkness.

Mr. Van der Pant had been in charge of the dynamos at the Antwerp Power
Station, he had been keeping the electrified wires in the entanglements
"alive," and he had stuck to his post until the German high explosives
had shattered his wires and rendered his dynamos useless. He gave vivid
little pictures of the noises of the bombardment, of the dead lying
casually in the open spaces, of the failure of the German guns to hit
the bridge of boats across which the bulk of the defenders and refugees
escaped. He produced a little tourist's map of the city of Antwerp, and
dotted at it with a pencil-case. "The--what do you call?--_obus_, ah,
shells! fell, so and so and so." Across here he had fled on his
_becane_, and along here and here. He had carried off his rifle, and hid
it with the rifles of various other Belgians between floor an