t lanterns stamped
about the streets. From sheer nervousness after a day of
confinement some citizens, in spite of warnings, groped about the
more important avenues at night. Picture yourself on Broadway or
Tremont Street, with not a light on the street gleaming from a window,
and walking up and down with one hand on your wallet and the other
in the pocket where your Colt automatic ought to be.

Such, very briefly, was the condition of Antwerp at the time when we
arrived. That very evening word came in that the Belgian forces,
which had been engaged with the enemy for five consecutive days of
severe fighting, had retired behind the southern ramparts of the city.

During the night the stream of incoming wounded confirmed the news
of battle. In the moonlight, and later in the gray dawn, I watched the
long lines of Belgian hounds, pulling their rapid-fire guns out toward
the trenches. Many times later I was destined to see them. They
made a picturesque and stimulating sight--those faithful dogs of war
--fettered and harnessed, their tongues hanging out as they lay
patiently beneath the gun trucks awaiting the order to go into action,
or, when the word had been given, trotted along the dusty roads,
each pair tugging to the battle front a lean, gray engine of destruction.

For our purpose the best approach to Brussels was by way of Ghent.
Luther pushed on ahead while I was finishing a story. The following
morning, shouldering my knapsack, which now contained an extra
supply of army rations, and carefully stuffing my different sets of
credentials in different pockets (one for Belgian, one for German, and
one for English consumption), I crossed the River Scheldt and made
a slow and tortuous railway journey to Ghent.

Ghent lies thirty miles west of Antwerp. The trip took seven hours.
During the course of it I passed north of the Belgian lines and through
the western sector of forts, that is to say, Fort St. Nicholas, Fort
Haesdonck, and Fort Tete de Flandre. It was the same road along
which Winston Churchill's English marines and the remnant of the
Belgian forces retreated after the fall of Antwerp.

Ghent resounded with praises of its American Vice-Consul, Julius
Van Hee, a hair-trigger politician and a live wire if there ever was one.
Van Hee, with his intimate knowledge of four languages and the
Yankee knack of being on the right spot at the right time, twice saved
blood-shed in the streets of Ghent and in one