he theatre of war on
bicycles, a precaution taken against spies. As he approached I
recognized Mr. J. Obels, the Belgian correspondent of the Chicago _Daily
News_, whom I had last seen under arrest near Brussels when the German
army first passed through Belgium. He told me he had been kept in prison
seventeen days by the German military governor of Brussels, but, once
released, was given every possible kind of pass. I was relieved to see
him alive and free.

As Obels left me to continue his journey to Dunkirk and on to London to
deliver his own "copy," he advised me to go directly to Furnes, the most
considerable town in what was left of Belgium, and have my passport
vised again. So I continued down the long, flat highway, bordered on
both sides by sunken fields, toward the cannonading I could now hear
ahead. The road had been fairly full of automobiles, motor-trucks,
motorcycles, and bicycles over its whole length, but it became crowded
now with the addition of a long string of Parisian motor-buses taking
several infantry regiments forward. A whole artillery division of yellow
French "Schneiders" also took up its share of the wide road, and at the
barricades there were traffic blockades lasting at times for ten
minutes.

[Sidenote: The road to Furnes.]

All the way from Dunkirk I had been struck by the character of the land.
As I approached Furnes, the dykes were being opened and half the fields
were already inundated. It seemed a poor country for military
operations. There were at most three highways, all defended. They could
only be taken at a price no army could afford, and any departure from
them meant being mired in the heavy fields, now being hastily harvested
of a bumper crop of sugar-beets: at one place a whole French regiment in
uniform was gathering the beets preparatory to inundation. With the
dykes open these fields would be covered with four feet of water half
the time. The only possible course for an army was over the sand-dunes,
which lay a mile to the north, looking like the imitation mountains you
see in the scenic-railways at every amusement resort in the United
States.

[Sidenote: Tommies' battles on the sand-dunes.]

A reservist with whom I walked a mile or so told me Dunkirk had never
been successfully attacked except over those sand-dunes, and the English
and French had fought some of the bloodiest battles of history there
against the Spanish, when they held Dunkirk. I doubt, though, that th