ere commandeered by the military authorities to
ferry across soldiers and wounded there was slim chance for
noncombatants. Above the noise of bomb and shrapnel Belgian gunboats
added to the confusion by cannonading big boats along the quay. This
was done in order that the Germans might not make use of them for the
pursuit. It speaks volumes for my military knowledge that for a brief
moment I imagined the Germans had embarked upstream and were going to
make a river battle of it.

By this time the American correspondents had left the Queen's, going
in different directions for different purposes. Hunt and Thompson, I
later learned, went to the American Consulate, where they stayed
during the German entry.

For a moment I see-sawed up and down the river bank, remembering
I had left my handbag at the Queen's, but, infinitely more important,
that my knapsack with money belt and diary were in the keeping of a
peripatetic acquaintance somewhere along the crowded piers
downstream. Without that gold, the thousands of miles to New York
seemed doubly long. When I at last got back to the barge office a
dock-hand pointed to a bench in the corner; there to my intense relief
lay the knapsack, where my kind English intelligence officer had left it.

A little later I managed to clamber on a river barge laden nearly
to the sinking point with Antwerp's peaceful burghers and their
dumb-looking women and children. Slowly--very slowly--we steamed out
of the haze of powder and oil-laden smoke, through long lines of
gunboats and a flotilla of drifting scows packed to the gunwales like
our own, and past Fort St. Philippe, whose garrison were at that
moment heaving tons of powder into the river.

A few miles farther downstream they landed us on the northern bank
of the Scheldt near the little town of Liefkenshack. Here I began a few
miles of walking, occasionally varied by ox-cart locomotion.

I was traveling with nothing but a knapsack (my suitcase had to be
abandoned) and therefore moving faster than the crowd. At one
point, for the sake of company, I joined a group and took a turn at
shoving the family wheel-barrow. They poured out thanks in the
guttural Flemish tongue, then loaded me with bread and bits of
mouldy pie. When that was not accepted they feared for their
hospitality. They talked and I talked, with a result that was hardly
worth the effort. Finally, after a conference, one of the group
disappeared into the crowd