o we
took my motor in October and made a little tour of investigation in
Belgium.

That was a strange and memorable journey. The long run in the dripping
autumn afternoon along the Antwerp Road, where the miserable fugitives
were still trudging in thousands; the search for lodgings in the
stricken city, where most of the streets were silent and deserted as if
the plague had passed there, and the only bustling life was in the
central quarter, where "the field-gray ones" abounded; the closed shops,
the house-fronts shattered by shells, the great cathedral standing in
the moonlight, unharmed as far as we could see, except for one shell
which had penetrated the south transept, just where Rubens's "Descent
from the Cross" used to hang before it was carried away for safety--I
shall never forget those impressions.

The next morning, provided with permits which the German Military
Commandant had very courteously given us, we set out on our tour. The
journey became still more strange. The beautiful trees of the suburbs
were razed to the ground, the little villas stood empty, many of them
half-ruined. (Perhaps one of them belonged to our friend the
landscape-gardener.) We could see clearly the emplacements for the big
German guns, which had been secretly laid long before the war began,
concealed in cellars and beneath innocent-looking tennis-courts. The
ring-forts surrounding Antwerp were knocked to pieces, their huge
concrete gateways, their stone facings, their high earthworks, all
battered out of shape.

Town after town through which we passed lay half-destroyed or in
complete ruins. Wavre, Waelhem, Termonde, Duffel, Lierre, and many
smaller places were in various stages of destruction, burned or
shattered by shell fire and explosives. The heaps of bricks and stones
encumbered the streets so that it was hard to pick our way through. The
smell of decaying bodies tainted the air. The fields had been inundated
in the valleys; the water was subsiding; here and there corpses lay in
the mud. Old trenches everywhere; thousands of rudely heaped graves,
marked by two crossed sticks; miles on miles of rusty barbed-wire
defenses, with dead cows or horses entangled in them, slowly rotting,
haunted by the carrion crows.

Yet there were some people in the countryside. Now and then we saw a
woman or an old man digging in field or garden. We stopped at the front
yard of a little farmhouse, where the farmer's wife stood, and asked her
so