; and about it
sat certain unkempt men in resplendent but unbrushed costumes. Joseph
himself--the Joseph of the coat of many colors, no less--might have
devised the uniforms they wore. With that setting the picture they made
there in the courtyard was suggestive of stage scenes in plays of the
French Revolution.

They were polite enough, these piebald gentlemen, and they considered
our credentials with an air of mildly courteous interest; but they would
give us no passes. There had been an order. Who had issued it, or why,
was not for us to know. Going away from there, all downcast and
disappointed, we met a French cavalryman. He limped along in his high
dragoon boots, walking with the wide-legged gait of one who had
bestraddled leather for many hours and was sore from it. His horse,
which he led by the bridle, stumbled with weariness. A proud boy scout
was serving as his guide. He was the only soldier of any army, except
the Belgian, we had seen so far, and we halted our car and watched him
until he disappeared.

However, seeing one tired French dragoon was not seeing the war; and we
chafed that night at the delay which kept us penned as prisoners in this
handsome, outwardly quiet city. As we figured it we might be housed up
here for days or weeks and miss all the operations in the field. When
morning came, though, we discovered that the bars were down again, and
that certificates signed by the American consul would be sufficient to
carry us as far as the outlying suburbs at least.

Securing these precious papers, then, without delay we chartered a
rickety red taxicab for the day; and piling in we told the driver to
take us eastward as far as he could go before the outposts turned us
back. He took us, therefore, at a buzzing clip through the Bois, along
one flank of the magnificent Forest of Soigne, with its miles of green-
trunked beech trees, and by way of the royal park of Tervueren. From
the edge of the thickly settled district onward we passed barricade
after barricade--some built of newly felled trees; some of street cars
drawn across the road in double rows; some of street cobbles chinked
with turf; and some of barbed wire--all of them, even to our
inexperienced eyes, seeming but flimsy defenses to interpose against a
force of any size or determination. But the Belgians appeared to set
great store by these playthings.

Behind each of them was a mixed group of soldiers--Garde Civique,
gendarmes