te," he said in his twisted English. "I
start for Ostend to take winter garments for my two small daughters,
which are there at school, and they arrest me--these Germans--and keep
me two days in a cowshed, and then bring me back here and put me here in
this so-terrible-a-place for two weeks; and all for nothing at all."

"Didn't you have a pass to go through the lines?" I asked. "Perhaps
that was it."

"I have already a pass," he said; "but when they search me they find in
my pockets letters which I am taking to people in Ostend. I do not know
what is in those letters. People ask me to take them to friends of
theirs in Ostend and I consent, not knowing it is against the rule.
They read these letters--the Germans--and say I am carrying news to
their enemies; and they become very enrage at me and lock me up. Never
again will I take letters for anybody anywhere.

"Oh, sirs, if you could but see the food we eat here! For dinner we have
a stew--oh, such a stew!--and for breakfast only bread and coffee who is
not coffee!" And with both hands he combed his whiskers in a despair
that was comic and yet pitiful.

He was standing there, still combing, as we came away.

Chapter 16

Louvain the Forsaken

It was Sunday when I saw Louvain in the ashes of her desolation. We
were just back then from the German trenches before Antwerp; and the
hollow sounds of the big guns which were fired there at spaced intervals
came to our ears as we rode over the road leading out from Brussels,
like the boomings of great bells. The last time I had gone that way the
country was full of refugees fleeing from burning villages on beyond.
Now it was bare, except for a few baggage trains lumbering along under
escort of shaggy gray troopers. Perhaps I should say they were gray-
and-yellow troopers, for the plastered mud and powdered dust of three
months of active campaigning had made them of true dirt color.

Oh, yes; I forgot one other thing: We overtook a string of wagons fitted
up as carryalls and bearing family parties of the burghers to Louvain to
spend a day among the wreckage. There is no accounting for tastes. If
I had been a Belgian the last thing I should want my wife and my baby to
see would be the ancient university town, the national cradle of the
Church, in its present state. Nevertheless there were many
excursionists in Louvain that day.

The Germans had taken down the bars and sight-seers came by autobusses
from