As we sped through the level lanes of poplars, challenged as usual
by every Belgian regular or Garde Civique who could boast a uniform,
the smooth green meadows of Flanders with their trim hamlets of
stucco and tile seemed to deny the reports of savagery we had heard
the night before. We had been told, and we had read, of German
atrocities, and we had talked with survivors of Louvain. There was
pillage, burning, and looting in Louvain, we had agreed, but the
cruelty to women and children was the better part myth. And at all
events, there was a semblance of cause for that. Perhaps there had
been more resistance, more sniping by citizens than generally known,
and perhaps the German side had not been fully explained.

Then suddenly Termonde lay before us. The center of the bridge was
gone. Splintered timber sticking on end lay in the mud at the river's
side, along with iron beams torn by the charges of dynamite. The
current was choked with masses of steel and wood. We crawled
across some temporary beams reconstructed by Belgian engineers,
and entered the ruins with a handful of Termonde's citizens who had
come back for the first time to see what was left of their homes.

"I will take you to the center," said Verhagen. "That is where my
house was."

A quarter of a mile behind us, as the alderman sat upon a rock
beside the gravestone, lay the thin neck of the Upper Scheldt, less
than one hundred yards wide at this point, where it curved between
the lines of charred and flattened buildings. We could still see the
rush of water tumbling and splashing through the wreckage of the
bridge we had just crossed. Twice it had been dynamited and twice
rebuilt in part, so that at present a single line of slippery beams,
suspended a few feet above the water and supported by some heavy
wire, was all that remained between ourselves and the retreating road
to Ghent. From the direction of Alost came the desultory boom of
German guns; across the stream behind us the Belgian outposts
whiled away the time with cigarettes and cards. Shaggy horses dozed
against the gun trucks, and the men of artillery, some stretched at full
length in the sun, others sitting bolt upright with arms folded, slept
soundly on the gun carriages. We could hear the stream gurgling. We
could hear the creak of a lazy windmill, and, coming somewhere from
the smoking piles, the hideous howl of starving hounds. Of other
human sounds there were none except