f this building, if the weather was fine, you
could almost see its church-spires."

He walked across to the window and, pressing his face against the
pane, stared out across the fog-hung lowlands. He so stood for some
minutes and when he turned I noticed that tears were glistening in his
eyes.

"My wife and children are over there in Ostend," he explained, in a
voice which he tried pathetically hard to control. "At least, they
were there two years ago last August. They had gone there for the
summer. I was in Brussels when the Germans crossed the frontier, and I
at once joined the army. I have never heard from my family since. It
is very hard, monsieur, to be so near them--they are only thirty
kilometres away--and not be able to see them or to hear from them, or
even be able to learn whether they are well or whether they have
enough to eat."

It is a terrible thing, this prison wall within which the Germans have
shut up the people of Belgium. How terrible it is one cannot realize
until he has known those whose dear ones are confined _incommunicado_
within that prison. I wish I might bring home to you, my friends, just
what it means. How would _you_ feel to stand on the banks of the
Hudson and look across into New Jersey and know that, though over
there, a few miles away, were your homes and those that you hold most
dear, you could no more get word to them, or they to you, than if they
were in Mars? And how would you feel if you knew that Englewood and
Morristown and Plainfield and the Oranges, and a dozen other of the
pretty Jersey towns, were but heaps of blackened ruins, that the
larger cities were garrisoned by brutal German soldiery and ruled by
heartless-German governors, and that thousands of women and
girls--perhaps _your_ wife, _your_ daughters among them--had been
dragged from their homes and taken God knows where? How would you feel
then, Mr. American?

* * * * *

After an hour's wait my officer, profuse in his apologies, arrived in
a beautifully appointed limousine, beside which the British staff-car
in which I had come looked cheap and very shabby. At the very
beginning of the war the Belgian military authorities commandeered
every car they could lay their hands on, and though many have been
worn out and hundreds were lost during the retreat, they are still
rather better supplied with luxurious cars than any of the other
armies.

"There will be a moon to-night," said my