course, from a military standpoint it was an affair of small
importance, but so far as colour and action and excitement were
concerned it was worth having gone to Belgium to see.

After the German occupation of Brussels, the first engagement of
sufficient magnitude to be termed a battle took place on August 25
and 26 in the Sempst-Elewyt-Eppeghem-Vilvorde region, midway
between Brussels and Malines. The Belgians had in action four
divisions, totalling about sixty thousand men, opposed to which was
a considerably heavier force of Germans. To get a clear conception
of the battle one must picture a fifty-foot-high railway embankment,
its steeply sloping sides heavily wooded, stretching its length across
a fertile, smiling country-side like a monstrous green snake. On this
line, in time of peace, the bloc trains made the journey from Antwerp
to Brussels in less than an hour. Malines, with its historic buildings
and its famous cathedral, lies on one side of this line and the village
of Vilvorde on the other, five miles separating them. On the 25th the
Belgians, believing the Brussels garrison to have been seriously
weakened and the German communications poorly guarded, moved
out in force from the shelter of the Antwerp forts and assumed a
vigorous offensive. It was like a terrier attacking a bulldog.

They drove the Germans from Malines by the very impetus
of their attack, but the Germans brought up heavy reinforcements,
and by the morning of the 26th the Belgians were in a most perilous
position. The battle hinged on the possession of the railway
embankment had gradually extended, each army trying to outflank
the other, until it was being fought along a front of twenty miles. At
dawn on the second day an artillery duel began across the
embankment, the German fire being corrected by observers in
captive balloons. By noon the Germans had gotten the range and a
rain of shrapnel was bursting about the Belgian batteries, which
limbered up and retired at a trot in perfect order. After the guns were
out of range I could see the dark blue masses of the supporting
Belgian infantry slowly falling back, cool as a winter's morning.
Through an oversight, however, two battalions of carabineers did
not receive the order to retire and were in imminent danger of being
cut off and destroyed.

Then occurred one of the bravest acts that I have ever seen. To
reach them a messenger would have to traverse a mile of open
road, swept by-shrieki