a woman
about to become a mother, and that she fell in the Rue de l'Eglise.
A German lieutenant saw the trouble, put her on a stretcher made of
window shutters, and called the German army doctor. She was sent
to a field hospital and tenderly cared for until she and the child could
be moved. Such incidents in strange relief, told by men who had lost
everything, lent corroboration, if such were necessary, to the burden
of their story of the relentless destruction of the town itself.

Our little band was the first to enter the ruins of Termonde after its
abandonment by the Ninth German Army Corps. And by a coincidence, we
were the last to leave. That very evening, at precisely the time we
were crawling across the broken timbers that spanned the Scheldt and
connected us with Belgium-owned Belgium, the Germans again pumped heavy
artillery fire into the town. This was later known as the second German
bombardment and occupation of Termonde. Because of superior artillery
range, the attack had the cruel advantage of the man who can strike and
still stay out of reach. On that evening at six-thirty, the Teutons
sent a few warning shells into the debris, and then the first column of
scouts entered simultaneously by the two southern gates. It was just at
six-thirty that our party started back for Ghent.

As we crawled across on all fours the remaining beams cracked
beneath our feet and the Belgian engineers called on us to hurry.
"Oh, Tiber! Father Tiber," we thought as the last of us got across;
but unlike Horatius at the bridge, we were on the right side when
engineers applied the match to a small charge of dynamite, and the
beams crashed and the remaining planks of Termonde's bridge
writhed and twisted in the rushing waters.

Twenty-seven miles away, when we whirled through the gates of
Ghent later in the evening, we said "Au revoir" to Verhagen and the
mendicant priest, and went to our rooms. At midnight came a rap at
the door; my gray-haired alderman broke into the room, bursting with
the latest news, his eyes aflame with excitement.

"Revanche!" he exclaimed dramatically; "our enemies have paid for it
in blood!"

Sure enough, after a few preliminary shells--a sort of here-we-come
salvo--the head of the German column had entered, and a party of
staff officers, for purposes of reconnaissance, immediately mounted
the spire of the only remaining church. The officers of the Ninth
German Army Corps swept the landscap