it had been converted into a big hospital for
the wounded. That night, also, the government ran away to Antwerp; but
of this we knew nothing until the following morning.

Next day we heard tales: Uhlans had been seen almost in the suburbs;
three German spies, disguised as nuns, had been captured, tried,
convicted and were no longer with us; sentries on duty outside the
residence of the American Minister had fired at a German aeroplane
darting overhead; French troops were drawing in to the northward and
English soldiers were hurrying up from the south; trainloads of wounded
had been brought in under cover of the night and distributed among the
improvised hospitals; but, conceding these things to be true, we knew of
them only at second hand. By the evidence of what we ourselves saw we
were able to note few shifts in the superficial aspects of the city.

The Garde Civique seemed a trifle more numerous than it had been the
evening before; citizen volunteers, still in civilian garb, appeared on
the streets in awkward squads, carrying their guns and side arms
clumsily; and when, in Minister Brand Whitlock's car, we drove out the
beautiful Avenue Louise, we found soldiers building a breast-high
barricade across the head of the roadway where it entered the Bois;
also, they were weaving barbed-wire entanglements among the shade trees.
That was all.

And then, as though to offset these added suggestions of danger, we saw
children playing about quietly behind the piled sand-bags, guarded by
plump Flemish nursemaids, and smart dogcarts constantly passed and
repassed us, filled with well-dressed women, and with flowers stuck in
the whip-sockets.

The nearer we got to this war the farther away from us it seemed to be.
We began to regard it as an elusive, silent, secretive, hide-and-go-seek
war, which would evade us always. We resolved to pursue it into the
country to the northward, from whence the Germans were reported to be
advancing, crushing back the outnumbered Belgians as they came onward;
but when we tried to secure a laissez passer at the gendarmerie, where
until then an accredited correspondent might get himself a laissez
passer, we bumped into obstacles.

In an inclosed courtyard behind a big gray building, among loaded wagons
of supplies and munching cart horses, a kitchen table teetered
unsteadily on its legs on the rough cobbles. On the table were pens and
inkpots and coffee cups and beer bottles and beer glasses