little kingdom they
had lost.

A few days later I saw how Belgians were still fighting on their own
soil, miserable but magnificent, sick at heart but dauntless in spirit.

5

It was in Calais, to which I had gone back for a day or two, that I
found my chance to get into the firing lines in Belgium. I was sitting at
an open window with my two friends when I saw a lady's face in the
street. The last time I had seen it was in an old English mansion, filled
with many gallant and gentle ghosts of history, and with laughing girls
who went scampering out to a game of tennis on the lawn below the
terrace from which a scent of roses and climbing plants was wafted
up on the drowsy air of an English summer. It was strange to see one
of those girls in Calais, where such a different game was being
played. She had a gravity in her eyes which I had not seen before in
England, and yet, afterwards, I heard her laughter ring out within a
little distance of bursting shells. She had a motor-car and a pass to
the Belgian front, and a good, nature which gave me a free seat,
provided I was "jolly quick." I was so quick that, with a few things
scrambled into a handbag, I was ready in two shakes of a jiffy,
whatever that may be, and had only time to give a hasty grip to the
hands of the two friends who had gone along many roads with me in
this adventure of war, watching its amazing dramas. The Philosopher
and the Strategist are but shadows in this book, but though I left them
on the kerbstone, I took with me the memory of a comradeship which
had been good to have.

6

The town of Furnes, in Belgium, into which I came when dusk crept
into its streets and squares, was the headquarters of King Albert and
his staff, and its people could hear all day long the roll of guns a few
kilometres away, where the remnant of their army held the line of the
Yser canal and the trenches which barred the roads to Dixmude,
Pervyse and other little towns and villages on the last free patch of
Belgian soil. I drove into the Grande Place and saw the beauty of this
old Flemish square, typical of a hundred others, not less quaint and
with not less dignity, which had been smashed to pieces by German
guns. Three great buildings dominated its architecture--the Town Hall,
with a fine stately facade, and two ancient churches, with massive
brick towers, overshadowing the narrow old houses and timber-front
shops with stepped gables and wrought-iron signs. For