from the book : 'A Women's Experience in the Great War'

'In Antwerp

during and after the Siege'

by Louise Mack, 1915

An Australian Lady Reporter Stays Behind

British troops arrive in Antwerp in London buses

“The English Are Coming"

I am back in Antwerp and the unexpected has happened.

We are besieged.

The siege began on Thursday.

The mental excitement of these last days passes all description.

And yet Antwerp is calm outwardly, and but for the crowds of peasants, pouring into the city with their cows and their bundles, one would hardly know that the Germans were really attacking us at last.

The Government has issued an order that anyone who likes may leave Antwerp; but once having done so no one will be permitted to return; and that quite decides us; we will remain.

All day long the cannon are booming and pounding; sometimes they sound so near that one imagines a shell must have burst in Antwerp itself; and sometimes they grow fainter, they are obviously receding.

Or so we tell ourselves hopefully.

We are always hopeful; we are always telling each other that things are going better.

Everyone is talking, talking, talking.

Everyone is asking, "What do you think? Have you heard any news?"

Everyone is saying, "But of course it will be all right!"

"The Germans have been driven back five kilometres," says one civilian.

"Have you heard the news? The Germans have been driven back six kilometres!" says another.

And again: "Have you heard the good news? Germans driven back seven kilometres!"

And at last a curious mental condition sets in.

We lose interest in the cannon, and we go about our business, just as if those noises were not ringing in our ears, even as we sit at dinner in our hotel.

There is one little notice pasted up about the hotel that, simply as it reads, fills one with a new and more active terror than shell-fire: —

"Il n'y a pas d'eau!"

This is because the German shells have smashed the Waterworks at Wavre S. Catherine. And so, in the meantime, Antwerp's hotels are flooded with carbolic, and we drink only mineral waters, and wait (hopeful as ever) for the great day when the bathrooms will be opened again.

These nights are stiflingly hot. And the mosquitoes still linger. Indeed they are so bad sometimes that I put eucalyptus oil on my pillow to keep them away. How strange that all this terrific firing should not have frightened them off!

I come to the conclusion that mosquitoes are deaf. The curious thing is, no one can tell, by looking at Antwerp, that she is going through the greatest page in all her varied history. Her shops are open. People sit at crowded cafés sipping their coffee or beer. A magnificent calm prevails. There is no sense of active danger. The lights go out at seven instead of eight. By ten o'clock the city is asleep, save for the coming and going of clattering troops over the rough-flagged streets and avenues. Grapes and pears and peaches are displayed in luxuriant profusion, at extraordinarily low prices. Fish and meat are dearer, but chickens are still very cheap. The "Anversois" still take as much trouble over their cooking, which is uncommonly good, even for Belgium.

And then on Saturday, with the sharpness and suddenness of lightning, the terrible rumour goes round that Antwerp is going to surrender,—yes, surrender—rather than run the risk of being destroyed like Louvain, and Termonde, and Aerschot.

The Legation has received orders that the Government is about to be moved to Ostend. Crowds of people begin to hurry out of Antwerp in motor cars, until the city looks somewhat like London on a Sunday afternoon, half-empty, and full of bare spaces, instead of crowded and animated as Antwerp has been ever since the Government moved here from Brussels.

And then, on Sunday, comes a change.

The news spreads like wild-fire that the Legations have had their orders countermanded early in the morning.

They are to wait further instructions.

Something has happened. THE ENGLISH ARE COMING !

 

Monday

A golden, laughing day is this 5th of October.

As I fly along in my car I soon sense a new current, vivid and electric, flowing along with the stream of Belgian life.

Oh, the change in the sad, hollow-eyed Belgian officers and men! They felt that help was coming at last. All this time they had fought alone, unaided. There was no one who could come to them, no one free to help them. And the weeks passed into months, and Liége, and Louvain, and Brussels, and Aerschot, and Namur, and Malines, and Termonde have all fallen, one by one. And high hopes have been blighted, and the enemy in its terrific strength has swept on and on, held back continually by the ardour and valour of the little Belgian Army which is still indomitable at heart, but tired, very tired. Haggard, hollow-eyed, exhausted, craving the rest they may not have, these glorious heroes revive as if by magic under the knowledge that other troops are coming to help theirs in this gargantuan struggle for Antwerp. The yellow khaki seems to sweep along with the blue uniforms like sunlight. But the gentle-faced, slow-speaking English are humble and modest enough, God knows!

"It's the high-explosive shells that we mind most," says a Belgian Lieutenant to an English Tommy.

"P'raps we'll mind them too," says Tommy humbly. "We ain't seen them yet!"

At the War Office, Count Chabeau has given me a special permit to go to Lierre.

Out past Mortsell, I notice a Belgian lady standing among a crowd of soldiers. She wears black. Her dress is elegant, yet simple. I admire her furs, and I wonder what on earth she is doing here, right out in the middle of the fortifications, far from the city. Belgian ladies are seldom seen in these specified zones.

Suddenly her eyes meet mine, and she comes towards me, drawn by the knowledge that we are both women.

She leans in at my car window. And then she tells me her story, and I learn why she looks so pale and worried.

Just down the road, a little further on, in the region in which we may not pass, is her villa, which has been suddenly requisitioned by the English. All in a hurry yesterday, Madame packed up, and hurried away to Antwerp, to arrange for her stay there. This morning she has returned to fetch her dogs.

But voilà! She reaches this point and is stopped. The way is blocked. She must not go on. No one can pass without a special laisser-passer; which she hasn't got.

So here, hour after hour, since six o'clock in the morning, she stands, waiting pitifully for a chance to get back to her villa and take away her dogs, that she fears may be starving.

"Mes pauvre chiens!" she keeps exclaiming.

And now a motor car approaches from the direction of Lierre, with an English officer sitting beside the chauffeur.

I tell him the story of the dogs and ask what can be done.

The officer does not reply.

He almost looks as if he has not heard.

His calm, cool face shows little sign of anything at all.

He merely turns his car round and flashes away along the white tree-shadowed and cannon-lined road that he has just traversed.

Ten minutes go by, then another ten.

Then back along the road flashes the grey car.

And there again is Colonel Farquharson, cool, calm, and unperturbed.

And behind him, in the car, barking joyfully at the sight of their mistress, are three big dogs.

"Mais comme les Anglais sont gentils!" say the Belgian soldiers along the road.

 

Out of the burning town of Lierre that same day a canary and a grey Congo parrot are tenderly handed over to my care by a couple of English Tommies who have found them in a burning house.

The canary is in a little red cage, and the Tommies have managed to put in some lumps of sugar.

"The poor little thing is starving!" says a Tommy compassionately. "It'll be better with you, ma'am."

I bring the birds back in my car to Antwerp.

But the parrot is very frightened.

He will not eat. He will not drink. He looks as if he is going to die, until I ask Mr. Cherry Kearton to come and see him. And then, voilà! The famous English naturalist bends over him, talks, pets him, and in a few minutes "Coco" is busy trimming Cherry Kearton's moustache with his little black beak, and from that very moment the bird begins to recover.

As I write the parrot and canary sit here on my table, the parrot perching on the canary's cage.

The boom of cannon is growing fainter and fainter as the Germans appear to be pushed further and further back; the canary is singing, and the grey parrot is cracking nuts; and I think of the man who rescued them, and hope that all goes well with him, who, with death staring him in the face, had time and thought to save the lives of a couple of birds. His name he told me was Sergeant Thomas Marshall of Winston Churchill's Marines.

He said: "If you see my wife ever, you can tell her you've met me, ma'am."

 

Tuesday

It is Tuesday now. At seven o'clock in the morning old sad-eyed Maria knocks at my door.

"Good news, Madame! Malines has been retaken!"

That is cheering. And old Maria and myself, like everyone else, are eager to believe the best.

The grey day, however, is indescribably sombre.

From a high, grassy terrace at the top of the hotel I look out across the city towards the points where the Germans are attacking us. Great black clouds that yet are full of garish light float across the city, and through the clouds one, two, three, four aeroplanes can be seen, black as birds, and moving continually hither and thither, while far below the old town lies, with its towers and gilded Gothic beauty, and its dark red roofs, and its wide river running to meet the sea.

I go down to the War Office and see Commandant Chabeau. He looks pale and haggard. His handsome grey eyes are full of infinite sadness.

"To-day it would be wiser, Madame, that you don't go out of the city," he says in his gentle, chivalrous voice. "C'est trop dangereux!"

I want to ask him a thousand questions.

I ask him nothing, I go away, back to the hotel.

One o'clock, and we learn that the fighting outside is terribly hot.

Two o'clock.

Cars come flying in.

They tell us that shells are falling about five miles out, on Vieux Dieux.

Three o'clock.

A man rushes in and says that all is over; the last train leaves Antwerp to-night; the Government is going; it is our last chance to escape.

"How far is Holland?" asks someone.

"About half an hour away," he answers.

I listen dreamily. Holland sounds very near. I wonder what I am going to do. Am I going to stay and see the Germans enter? But maybe they will never enter. The unexpected will happen. We shall be saved at the eleventh hour. It is impossible that Antwerp can fall.

"They will be shelling the town before twenty-four hours," says one young man, and he calls for another drink. When he has had it he says he wishes he hadn't.

"They will never shell the town," says a choleric old Englishman. And he adds in the best English manner, "It could never be permitted!"

Outside, the day dies down.

The sound of cannon has entirely ceased.

One can hear nothing now, nothing at all, but the loud and shrill cries of the newsboys and women selling Le Matin d'Anvers and Le Métropole in the streets.

A strange hushed silence hangs over the besieged city, and through the silence the clocks strike six, and almost immediately the maître d’hôtel comes along and informs us that we ought to come in to dinner soon, as to-day the lights must go out at nightfall!

But I go into the streets instead.

It seems to me that the population of Antwerp has suddenly turned into peasants.

Peasants everywhere, in crowds, in groups, in isolated numbers. Bareheaded women, hollow-cheeked men, little girls and boys, and all with bundles, some pathetically small, done up in white or blue cloths, and some huge and grotesque, under which the peasants stagger along through the streets that were fashionable streets only just now, and now have turned into a sort of sad travesty of the streets of some distant village.

A curious rosy hue falls over the faces in the streets, the shop-windows glow like rubies, the gold on the Gothic buildings burns like crimson fire.

Overhead a magnificent sunset is spreading its banners out over the deserted city.

Then night falls; the red fades; Antwerp turns grey and sombre.

But the memory of that rose in the west remains, and in hope we wait, we are still waiting, knowing not what the morrow may bring forth.

 

Wednesday

Last night the moon was so bright that my two pets, rescued from the ruins of Lierre, woke up and began to talk.

Or was it the big guns that woke them, the canary, and the grey Congo parrot?

It might have been!

For sometimes the city seemed to shake all over, and as I lay in bed I wondered who was firing: Germans, Belgians, English, which?

About three o'clock, between dozing and listening to the cannon, I heard a new sound, a strange sound, something so awful that I almost felt my hair creep with horror.

It was a man crying in the room under mine.

Through the blackness of the hour before dawn a cry came stealing:

"Mon fils! Mon fils!"

Out of the night it came, that sudden terrific revelation of what is going on everywhere beneath the outward calm of this nation of heroes.

And one had not realised it because one had seen so few tears.

One had almost failed to understand, in the outer calm of the Belgians, what agony went on beneath.

And now, in the midnight, the veil is torn aside, and I see a human heart in extremis, writhing with agony, groaning as the wounded never groan, stricken, bleeding, prostrate, overwhelmed with the enormity of its sorrow.

"Mon fils! Mon fils!"

Since I heard that old man weeping I want to creep to the feet of Christ and the Mother of Christ, and implore Their healing for these poor innocent broken hearts, trodden under the brutal feet of another race of human beings.

 

At four, unable to sleep, I rose and dressed and went downstairs.

In the dim, unswept palm court I saw a bearded man with two umbrellas walking feverishly up and down, while the sleepy night porter leaned against a pillar yawning, watching for the cab that the chass had gone to look for. It came at last, and the bearded gentleman, with a sigh, stepped in, and drove away into the dusky dawn, a look of unutterable sadness seeming to cloak his face and form as he disappeared.

"Il est triste, ce monsieur la," commented our voluble little Flemish porter. "He is a Minister of the Government, and he must leave Antwerp, he must depart for Ostend. His boat leaves at five o'clock this morning."

"So the Government is really moving out," I think to myself mechanically.

A little boy runs in from the chill dawn-lit streets.

It is only half-past four, but a Flemish paper has just come out.—Het Laatste Nieuws.

The boy throws it on the table where I sit writing to my sister in England, who is anxious for my safety.

I struggle to find out what message lies behind those queer Flemish words.

De Toestand Te Antwerpen Is Zeer Ernstig.

What does it mean?

Zeer Ernstig?

Is it good? Is it bad? I don't know the word.

I call to the night porter, and he comes out and translates to me, and as I glean the significance of the news I admire that peasant boy's calm.

"La situation à Anvers est grave" he says. "The Burgomaster announces to the population that the bombardment of Antwerp and its environs is imminent. It is understood, of course" (translating literally), "that neither the threat nor the actual bombardment will have any effect on the strength of our resistance, which will continue to the very last extremity!"

So we know the worst now.

Antwerp is not to hand herself over to the Germans. She is going to fight to the death. Well, we are glad of it! We know it is the only thing she could have done!

 

And now the hotel wakes right up, and dozens of sleepy, worn, hollow-cheeked officers and soldiers in dirty boots come down the red-carpeted stairs clamouring for their café- au-lait.

The morning is very cold, and they shiver sometimes, but they are better after the coffee and I watch them all go off smoking cigarettes.

Poor souls! Poor souls!

After the coffee, smoking cigarettes, they hurry away, to. ...

The day is past sunrise now, and floods of golden light stream over the city, where already great crowds are moving backwards and forwards.

Cabs drive up continually to the great railway station opposite with piles of luggage, and I think dreamily how very like they are to London four-wheelers, taking the family away to the seaside!

And still the city remains marvellously calm, in spite of the ever-increasing movements. People are going away in hundreds, in thousands. But they are going quietly, calmly. Processions of black-robed nuns file along the avenues under the fading trees. Long lines of Belgian cyclists flash by in an opposite direction in their gay yellow and green uniforms. The blue and red of the French and English banners never looked brighter as the wind plays with them, and the sunlight sparkles on them, while the great black and red and. gold Belgian flags lend that curious note of sombre dignity to the crowded streets.

But not a word of regret from anyone. That is the Belgian way.

Belgians all, to-day I kneel at your feet.

Oh God, what those people are going through!

God, what they are suffering and to suffer! How can they bear it? Where do they get their heroism? Is it—it must be—from Above!

 

The City is Shelled

That day, seated in wicker chairs in the palm court, we held a counsel of war, all the War-Correspondents who were left. The question was whether the Hotel Terminus was not in too dangerous a position. Its extreme nearness to the great railway station made its shelling almost inevitable when the bombardment of the city began in earnest. We argued a lot. One suggested one hotel, one another. To be directly northward was clearly desirable, as the shells would come from southward.

Mr. Cherry Kearton, Mr. Cleary, and Mr. Marshall, decided on the Queen's Hotel, somewhere near the quay. Their point was that it would be easier to get away from there. Mr. Robinson and Mr. Phillips refused to change from the Terminus. Mr. Fox, Mr. Lucien Arthur Jones, and myself chose the Wagner, as being in the most northerly direction, the farthest away from the forts, and the nearest to the Breda Gate, which led to Holland. In the moonlight, after dinner, taking my canary with me, I moved to my new quarters, accompanied to the doors by that little band of Englishmen, Cherry Kearton carrying my parrot. It was then ten o'clock.

Strange things were to happen before we met again.

Precisely at eleven the first shell fell. Whiz! It fled in a fury across the sky and burst somewhere in the direction of the Cathedral. As it exploded I shut my eyes, clenched my hands, and sank on the floor by my bedside, saying to myself, "God, I'm dead!"

And I thought I was too.

The enormity of that sound-sensation seemed to belong to a transition from this world to the next. It scarcely seemed possible to pass through that noise and come out alive.

That was the first shell, and others followed quickly. The Hotel was alive immediately. Sleep was impossible. I crept down into the vestibule. It was all dark, save for one little light at the porter's door! I got a chair, drew it close to the light and sat down. I had a note-book and pencil, and to calm and control myself and not let my brain run riot I made notes of exactly what people said. I sat there all night long!

Every now and then the doors would burst open and men and women would rush in.

Once it was two slim, elegant ladies in black, with white fox stoles, who had run from their house because a shell had set fire to the house next door.

They came into the pitch-black vestibule, moving about by the little point of light made by their tiny electric torch. They asked for a room. There was none. So they asked to sit in the dark, empty restaurant, and as I saw them disappear into that black room where many refugees were already gathered, sleeping on chairs and floors and tables I could not help being amazed at the strangeness of it all, the unlikeness of it all to life,—these two gently-nurtured sisters with their gentle manners, their white furs, their electric light, gliding noiselessly along the burning, beshelled streets, and asking for a room in the first hotel they came to without a word about terror, and with expressions on their faces that utterly belied the looks of fright and terror that the stage has almost convinced us are the real thing.

Swing goes the door and in comes a man who asks the porter a question.

"Is Monsieur L. here?"

"Oui, Monsieur," replies the porter.

"Where is he?"

"He is in bed."

"Go to him and tell him that a shell has just fallen on the Bank of Anvers. Tell him to rise and come out at once. He is a Bank Official and he must come and help to save the papers before the bank is burned down! Tell him Monsieur M., the Manager, came for him."

Swing, and the Bank Manager has gone through the door again out into that black and red shrieking night.

Swing again, and three people hurry in, three Belgians, father, mother and a little fair- haired girlie, whom they hold by each hand, while the father cradles a big box of hard cash under one arm.

"The shells are falling all around our home!" they say.

The porter points to the restaurant door.

"Merci bien," and "Je vous remerci beaucoup," murmur father and mother.

They vanish into the dark, unlit restaurant with its white table-cloths making pale points athward the stygian blackness of the huge room.

Then an Englishman comes down the stairs behind me, flapping his Burberry rainproof overcoat. He is a War-Correspondent.

"What a smell!" he says to the porter. "Is gas escaping somewhere?"

"No, sir," says the porter, pulling his black moustache.

He is very distrait and hardly gives the famous War-Correspondent a thought.

"It is gas!" persists the War-Correspondent. "There must be a leakage somewhere."

He opens the door.

A horrible whiff of burning petroleum and smoke blows in, and a Belgian soldier enters also.

"What's the smell?" asks the War-Correspondent.

"The Germans are dropping explosives on the city, trying to set fire to it," answers the Belgian.

"Good lor, I must have a look!" says the War-Correspondent.

He goes out.

Two wounded officers come down the stairs behind me.

"Bill, please, porter. How much? We must be off now to the forts!"

"Don't know the bill," says the porter. "I'm new, the other man ran away. He didn't like shells. You can pay some other time, Messieurs!"

"Bien!" says the officers.

They swing their dark cloaks across their shoulders and pass out.

They come back no more, no, never any more.

Then an old, old man limps in on the arm of a young, ever-young Sister of Mercy.

"He is deaf and dumb," she says, "I found him and brought him here. He will be killed in the streets."

Her smile makes sunshine all over the blackness of that haunted hall; the mercy of it, the sweetness of it, the holiness are something one can never forget as, guiding the old man, she leads him into the dark restaurant and tends him through the night.

Then again the door swings open. "The petroleum tanks have been set on fire by the Belgians themselves!" says a big man with a big moustache. "This is the end." He is the proprietor himself. And here up from the stairs behind us that lead down into the cellars, comes his wife, wrapped in furs.

"Henri, I heard your voice. I am going. I cannot stand it. I shall flee to Holland with little Marie. Put me into the motor car. My legs will not carry me. I fear for the child so much!"

A kiss, and she and little Marie flee away through the madness of the night towards the Breda Gate and the safety of some Dutch village across the border.

Every now and then I would open the swing-doors and fly like mad on tip-toe to the corner of the Avenue de Commerce, and there, casting one swift glance right and left, I would take in the awful panorama of scarlet flames. They were leaping now over the Marchée Aux Souliers, the street which corresponds with our Strand. While I watched I heard the shrieking rush of one shell after another, any one of which might of course well have fallen where I stood.

But I knew they wouldn't. I felt as safe and secure there in that shell-swept corner as if I had been a child again, at home in silent, sleepy, faraway Australia!

The fact is when you are in the midst of danger, with shells bursting round you, and the city on fire, and the Germans closing in on you, and your friends and home many hundreds of miles away, your brain works in an entirely different way from when you are living safely in your peaceful Midlands.

Quite unconsciously, one's ego asserts itself in danger, until it seems that one carries within one a world so important, so limitless, and immortal, that it appears invincible before hurt or death.

This is an illusion, of course; but what a beautiful and merciful one!

When danger comes your way this illusion will begin to weave a sort of fairy haze around you, making you feel that those shrieking shells can never fall on you!

Seldom indeed while I was at the front did I hear anyone say, "I'm afraid." How deeply and compassionately considerate Nature is to us all! She has supplied us with a store of emotional glands, and fitted us up with many a varying sensation, of which curiosity is the liveliest and strongest. Then when it comes to a race between Fear and Curiosity, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred Curiosity wins hands down. In real danger our curiosity, and our unconscious but deep-seated belief in the ego, carry us right over the frightful terrors that we imagine we should feel were we thinking the thing out quietly in a safe land. Then, we tremble and shiver! Then, we remember the word "Scream." Then, we understand the meaning of fear! Then, we run (in our thoughts) into caves and cellars. But when the real thing comes we put our heads out of the windows, we run out into the streets, we go towards danger and not away from it, driven thither by the mighty emotion of Curiosity, which, when all is said and done, is one of the most delightful because the most electrifying of all human sensations.

Is this brutal? Is it hard-hearted? Is it callous, indifferent, cruel? No! For it bears no relation to our feelings for other people, it only relates to our own sensations about ourselves. When a group of wounded Belgians comes limping along, you look into their hollow, blackened faces, you feel your heart break, and all your soul seems to dissolve in one mighty longing to die for these people who have sacrificed their all for you; and you run to them, you help them all you can, you experience a passionate desire to give them everything you have, you turn out your pockets for them, you search for something, anything, that will help them.

No! You are not callous because you are curious! Quite the reverse, in fact. You are curious because you are alive, because you dwell in this one earth, and because you are created with the "sense" that you have a right to see and hear all the strange and wonderful things, all the terrors as well as all the glories that go to make up human existence.

Not to care, not to want to see, not to want to know, that is the callousness beyond redemption!

 

left : civilians leaving the city

right : burning oil tanks

 

Thursday

Thursday is a queer day, a day of no beginning and no ending.

It is haunted by such immense noise that it loses all likeness to what we know in ordinary life as "a day"—the thing that comes in between two nights.

It is, in fact, nothing but one cataclysmal bang and shriek of shells and shrapnel. The earth seems to break open from its centre every five minutes or so, and my brain begins to formulate to itself a tremendous sense of height and space, as well as of noise, until I feel as though I am in touch with the highest skies as well as with the lowest earth, because things that seem to belong essentially to earth are now happening in the skies.

The roof of the world is now enacting a rôle that is just as strange and just as surprising as if the roof of a theatre had suddenly begun to take part in a drama.

One looks above as often as one looks below or around one.

Flinging themselves forward with thin whinging cries like millions of mosquitoes on the attack, the shrapnel rushes perpetually overhead, and the high-explosive shells pour down upon the city, deafening, stupefying, until at last, by the very immensity of their noise, they gradually lose their power to affect one, even though they break all round.

Instead of listening to the bombardment I find myself listening crossly to the creaking of our lift, which makes noises exactly like those of the shrapnel outside.

In fact, when I am in my bedroom, and the lift is going up and down, I really don't know which is lift and which is shrapnel.

 

Seven o'clock on Thursday morning.

The bombardment goes on fiercely, but I forget about it here in the big, bare, smoky café, because I cannot hear the lift.

A waiter brings me some coffee and I stand and drink it and look about me.

The café is surrounded with glass doors, and through these doors I see thousands and thousands of people hurrying for dear life along the roads.

As time goes on their numbers increase, until they are flowing by as steadily as some ceaseless black stream moving Holland-wards.

Men, women, children, nuns, priests, motor cars, carriages, cabs, carts, drays, trolleys, perambulators, every species of human being and of vehicle goes hurrying past the windows, and always the vehicles are laden to the very utmost with their freight of human life.

One's brain reels before the immensity of this thing that is happening here; a city is being evacuated by a million inhabitants; the city is in flames and shells are raining down on it; yet the cook is making soup in the kitchen. . . .

Among the human beings struggling onwards towards the Breda Gate which will lead them to Holland, making strange little notes in the middle of the human beings, I see every now and then some poor pathetic animal, moving along in timid bewilderment—a sheep—a dog—a donkey—a cow —a horse—more cows perhaps than anything, big, simple, wondering cows, trudging along behind desolate little groups of peasants with all their little worldly belongings tied up in a big blue-and-white check handkerchief, while crash over their heads goes on the cannonading from the forts, and with each fresh shock the vast concourse of fleeing people starts and hurries forward.

It seems to me as though the End of the World will be very like to-day.

A huge gun-carriage, crowded with people, is passing. It is twenty feet long, and drawn by two great, bulky Flemish horses. Sitting all along the middle, with great wood stakes fixed along the edges to keep them from falling out, are different families getting away into Holland. Fathers, mothers, children. Two men go by with a clothes-basket covered with a blanket. Dozens of beautiful dogs, bereft of their collars in this final parting with their masters, run wildly back and forth along the roads. A boy with a bicycle is wheeling an old man on it. Three wounded blue and scarlet soldiers march along desolately, carrying brown paper parcels. Belgian Boy Scouts in khaki, with yellow handkerchiefs round their necks, flash past on bicycles. A man pushes a dog-cart with his three children and his wife in it, while the yellow dog trots along underneath, his tongue out. A black-robed priest rides by, mounted on a great chestnut mare, with a scarlet saddle cloth.

All the dramas of Æschylus pale into insignificance before this scene. . . .

It is more than a procession of human beings. It is a procession of broken hearts, of torn, bleeding souls, and ruined homes, of desolate lives, of blighted hopes, and grim, grey despair—grim, grey despair in a thousand shapes and forms; and ever It hurries along the roads, ever It blocks the hotel windows, casting its thick shadows as the sun rises in the heavens, defying the black smoke palls that hang athwart the skies.

Sometimes I find tears streaming down my cheeks, and as they splash on my hands I look at them stupidly, and wonder what they are, and why they come, for no one can think clearly now. Once it is the sight of a little, young, childlike nun, guarding an old, tottering, white-bearded man who is dumb as well as deaf, and who can only walk with short, little, halting steps.

Is she really going to try and get him to Holland, I wonder?

 

The Endless Day

Years seem to have passed.

Yet it is still Thursday morning, ten o'clock.

The horror darkens.

We know the worst now. Antwerp is doomed. Nothing can save her, poor, beautiful, stately city that has seemed to us all so utterly impregnable all these months.

The evacuation goes on desperately, but the crowds fleeing northwards are diminishing visibly, because some five hundred thousands have already gone.

The great avenues, with their autumn-yellow trees and white, tall, splendid houses, grow bare and deserted.

Over the city creeps a terrible look, an aspect so poignant, so pathetic, that it reminds me of a dying soldier passing away in the flower of his youth.

The very walls of the high white houses, the very flags of the stony grey streets seem to know that Antwerp has fallen victim to a tragic fate; her men, women, and children must desert her; her homes must stand silent, cold and lonely, waiting for the enemy; her great hotels must be emptied; her shops and factories must put up their shutters; all the bright, gay, cheerful, optimistic life of this city that I have grown to love with an indescribable tenderness during the long weeks that I have spent within her fortified area is darkened now with despair.

Of the ultimate arrival of the Germans there is no longer any doubt, whether they take the town on a surrender, or by bombardment, or by assault.

I put on my hat and gloves, and go out into the streets. Oh, God! What a golden day!

Unbearable is the glitter of this sunlight shining over the agony of a nation!

 

I Decide To Stay

For the moment the bombardment has ceased entirely. These little pauses are almost quaint in their preciseness.

One can count on them quite confidently not to be broken by stray shells.

And in the pause I am rushing along the Avenue de Commerce, trying to get round to the hotel where all my belongings are, when I run into three Englishmen with their arms full of bags, and overcoats, and umbrellas, and for a moment or two we stand there at the corner opposite the Gare Central all talking together breathlessly.

It was only last night at seven o'clock that we all dined together at the Terminus; but since then a million years have rolled over us; we have been snatched into one of History's most terrific pages; and we all have a burning breathless Saga of our own hanging on our lips, crying to be told aloud before the world.

We all fling out disjointed remarks, and I hear of the awful night in that quarter of the city.

"How are you going to get away?"

"And you, how are you going to get away?”

The tall, slight young man with the little dark moustache is Mr. Jeffries of the Daily Mail, who has been staying at the Hotel de l'Europe. With him is the popular Mr. Perry Robinson of the Times. The third is Mr. P. Phillips of the Daily News.

"I have just come from the Etat Majeur," Mr. Jeffries tells me hurriedly. "There is not a ghost of a hope now! Everyone has gone. We must get away at once."

"I am not going," I say. For suddenly the knowledge has come to me that I cannot leave the greatest of my dramas before the curtain rolls up in the last scene. In vain they argue, tell me I am mad. I am not going.

So they say good-bye and leave me.

 

The City Surrenders

Antwerp has surrendered!

It is Friday morning. All hope is over. The Germans are coming in at half-past one.

"Well," says Mr. Lucien Arthur Jones at last, at the end of a long discussion between him and Mr. Frank Fox and myself, "if you have really decided to stay, I'm going to give you this key! It belongs to the house of some wealthy Belgians who have fled to England. There is plenty of food and stores of all kind in the house. If need be, you might take shelter there!"

And he gave me the key and the address, and I,—luckily for myself,—I remembered it afterwards.

With a queer little choke in my throat, I stood on the hotel door-step, watching those two Englishmen on their bicycles whirling away down the Avenue de Commerce.

In a moment they were swallowed up from my sight in the black pall of cloud and smoke that hung above the city, dropping from the leaden skies like long black fringes, and hovering over the streets like thick funeral veils.

So they were gone!

The die was cast. I was alone now, all alone in the fated city.

At first, the thought was a little sickening.

But after a minute it gave me a certain amount of relief, as I realised that I could go ahead with my plans without causing anyone distress.

To feel that those two men had been worrying about my safety, and were worrying still, was a very wretched sensation. They had enough to think of on their own account! Somehow or other they had now to get to a telegraph wire and send their newspapers in England the story of Antwerp's fall, and the task before them was Herculean. The nearest wires were in Holland, and they had nothing but their bicycles.

Turning back into the big, dim, deserted restaurant, I went to look for the old patronne, whose black eyes dilated in her sad, old yellow face at the sight of me in my dark blue suit, and white veil floating from my little black hat.

"What, Madame! But they told me les deux Anglais have departed. You have not gone with them?"

"Listen, Madame! I want you to help me. I am writing a book about the War, and to see the Germans come into Antwerp is something I ought not to miss. I want to stay here!"

"Mais, c'est dangereux, Madame! Vous êtes Anglaise !"

"Well, I'm going to change that; I'm going to be Belgian. I want you to let me pretend I'm a servant in your hotel. I'll put on a cap and apron, and I'll do anything you like; then I'll be able to see things for myself. It'll only be for a few hours. I'll get away this afternoon in the motor. But I must see the incoming of the Germans first!"

The old woman seemed too bewildered to protest, and afterwards I doubted if she had really understood me from the way she acted later on.

Just at that moment Henri drove up in the motor, and came to a standstill in front of the hotel.

The poor fellow looked more dead than alive. His pie-coloured face was hollow, his lips were dry, his eyes standing out of his head. He was so exhausted that he could scarcely step out of the car.

"I am sorry I am late," he groaned, "but it was impossible, impossible."

"You needn't worry about me, Henri," I whispered to him reassuringly. "I'm not going to try to get out of Antwerp for several hours. In fact, I am going to wait to see the Germans come in!"

Henri showed no surprise. There was no surprise left in him to show.

"Bon!" he said. "Because, to tell you the truth, Madame, I wouldn't go out of the city again just now. I couldn't do it. Getting to Holland, indeed," he went on, between gasps as he drank off one cup of coffee after another, "it's like trying to get through hell to get to Paradise. I've been seven hours driving about four miles there and back. It was horrible, it was unbelievable ... the roads are blocked so thick that there are no roads left. A million people are out there, struggling, fighting, and trying to get onwards, lying down on the earth fainting, dying."

And he suddenly sat down upon a chair, and fell fast asleep.

The sharp crack, crack of rifle fire woke him about five minutes later, and we all rushed to the door to see what was happening.

Oh, nerve-racking sight!

Across the grey square, through the grey-black morning, dogs were rushing, their tongues out.

The gendarmes pursuing them were shooting them down to save them the worse horrors of starvation that might befall them if they were left alive in the deserted city at the mercy of the Germans.

Madame X, a sad, distinguished-looking woman, a refugee from Lierre, whose house had been shelled, and who was destined to play a strange part in my story later on, now came over to us, and implored Henri to take her old mother in his car round to the hospital.

"She is eighty-four, ma pauvre mère I We tried to take her to Holland, but it was impossible. But now that the bombardment has ceased and the worst is over, it seems wiser to remain. In the hospital the mère will be surely safe! As for us, my husband and I, truly, we have lost our all. There is nothing left to fear!"

I offered to accompany the old lady to the hospital, and presently we started off. Henri and I, and the old wrinkled Flemish woman, and the buxom young Flemish servant, Jeanette.

 

in the Marché des Souliers in Antwerp - putting out the fires

 

We drove along the Avenue de Commerce, down the Avenue de Kaiser, towards the hospital. The town was dead. Not a soul was to be seen. The Marché aux Souliers was all ablaze; I saw the Taverne Royale lying on the ground. Next to it was the Hotel de l'Europe, bomb-shattered and terrific in its ruins. I thought of Mr. Jeffries of the Daily Mail and shivered; that had been his hotel. The air reeked with petroleum and smoke. At last we got to the hospital.

The door-step was covered with blood, and red, wet blood was in drops and patches along the entrance.

As I went in, an unforgettable sight met my eyes.

I found myself in a great, dim ward, with the yellow, lurid skies looking in through its enormous windows, and its beds full of wounded and dying soldiers; and just as I entered, a white-robed Sister of Mercy was bending over a bed, giving the last unction to a dying man. Some brave petit Belge, who had shed his life-blood for his city, alas, in vain!

All the ordinary nurses had gone.

The Sisters of Mercy alone remained.

And suddenly it came to me like a strain of heavenly music that death held no terrors for these women; life had no fears.

Softly they moved about in their white robes, their benign faces shining with the look of the Cross.

In that supreme moment, after the hell of shot and shell, after the thousands of wounded and dead, after the endless agonies of attack and repulse and attack and defeat and surrender, something quite unexpected was here emerging, the essence of the Eternal Feminine, the woman supreme in her sheer womanhood; and like a bright bird rising from the ashes, the spirit of it went fluttering about that appalling ward.

The trained and untrained hospital nurses, devoted as they were, and splendid and useful beyond all words, had perforce fled from the city, either to accompany their escaping hospitals, or beset by quite natural fears of the Huns' brutality to their kind.

But the Sisters of Mercy had no fears. The Cross stood between them and anything that might come to them.

And that was written in their faces, their shining gentle faces. . . .

Ah yes, the Priests and the half-forgotten Sisters of Mercy have indeed come back to their own in this greatest of all Wars!

Moving between the long lines of soldiers' beds I paused at the side of a little bomb- broken Belgian boy whose dark eyes opened suddenly to meet mine.

I think he must have been wandering, poor little child, and had come back with a start to life. And seeing a face at his bedside he thought, perhaps, that I was German.

In a hoarse voice he gasped out, raising himself in terror:

"Je suis civil!" Poor child, poor child!

The fright in his voice was heart-breaking. It said that if the "Alboches" took him for a soldat, they would shoot him, or carry him away into Germany.

I bent and kissed him.

"Je suis civil!"

He was not more than six years old.

 

In another room of the hospital I found about forty children, little children varying from six months to five years. Some gentle nuns were playing with them.

"Les pauvres petites!" said one of the sisters compassionately. "They've all been lost, or left behind; there's no one to claim them, so we have brought them here to look after them."

And the baby gurgled and laughed, and gave a sudden leap in the sweet nun's arms.

 

Out of the hospital again, over the blood-stained doorstep, and back into the car.

There were a few devoted doctors and priests standing about in silence in the flower- wreathed passage entrance to the hospital. They were waiting for The End, waiting for the Germans to come in.

I can see them still, standing there in their white coats, or long black cassocks, staring down the passage.

A great hush hung over everything, and through the hush we slid into the awful streets again, with the houses lying on the ground.

Before we had gone far, we heard shouts, and turning my head I discovered some wounded soldiers, limping along a side-road, who were begging us to give them a lift towards the boat.

We filled the car so full that we all had to stand up, except those who could not stand.

Bandaged heads and faces were all around me, while bandaged soldiers rode on the foot-board, clinging to whatever they could get hold of, and then we moved towards the quay. It was heartbreaking to have to deny the scores of limping, broken men who shouted to us to stop, but as soon as we had deposited one load we went back and picked up others and ran them back to the quay, and that we did time after time. A few of the men were our own Tommies, but most were Belgians. Backwards and forwards we rushed, backwards and forwards, and now that dear Henri's eyes were shining, his sallow, pie-coloured face was lit up, he no longer looked tired and dull and heavy, he was on fire with excitement. And the car raced like mad backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, venturing right out towards the forts and back again to the quay, until at last reaction set in with Henri and he was obliged to take the car back to the hotel, where he fell in a crumpled heap in a corner of the restaurant.

As we came in the patronne handed me a note. "While you were out," she said, looking at me sorrowfully, "M. Fox and M. Jones returned on their bicycles to look for you."

Then I read Mr. Fox's kind message.

"We have managed to secure passages on a special military boat for Flushing that leaves at half-past eleven and of course we have got one for you. We have come back for you, but you are not here. Your car has arrived, so you will be all right, I hope. You have seen the bombardment through, bravo!"

I was glad they had got away. But for myself some absolutely irresistible force held me to Antwerp, and I now slipped quietly out of the hotel and started off on a solitary walk.

 

the rubble of destroyed buildings

 

A Solitary Walk

Surely, surely, this livid, copper-tinted noontide, hanging over Antwerp, was conceived in Hades as a presentation of the world's last day.

Indescribably terrible in tone and form, because of its unearthly qualities of smoke, shrapnel, petroleum-fumes, and broken, dissipated clouds, the darkened skies seemed of themselves to offer every element of tragedy, while the city lying stretched out beneath in that agony of silence, that lasted from twelve o'clock to half-past one, was one vast study in blood, fire, ruined houses, ruined pathways, smoke, appalling odours, heartbreak and surrender. The last steamer had gone from the Port. The last of the fleeing inhabitants had departed by the Breda Gate. All that was left now was the empty city, waiting for the entrance of the Germans.

Empty were the streets. Empty were the boats, crowded desolately on the Scheldt. Empty were those hundreds of deserted motor cars, heaped in great weird, pathetic piles down at the water's edge, as useless as though they were perambulators, because there were no chauffeurs to drive them. Empty was the air of sound except for the howling of dogs that ran about in terror, crying miserably for their owners who had been obliged to desert them. Through the emptiness of the air, when the dogs were not howling, resounded only a terrible, ferocious silence, that seemed to call up mocking memories of the noise the shells had been making incessantly, ever since two nights ago.

It was an hour never to be forgotten, an hour that could never, never come again.

I kept saying that to myself as I continued my solitary walk.

“Solitary walk!"

For the first time in a lifetime that bit of journalese took on a meaning so deep and elemental, that it went right down to the very roots of the language. The whole city was mine. I seemed to be the only living being left. I passed hundreds of tall, white, stately houses, all shattered and locked and silent and deserted. I went through one wide, deadly street after another. I looked up and down the great paralysed quays. I stared through the yellow avenues of trees. I heard my own footsteps echoing, echoing. The ghosts of five hundred thousand people floated before my vision. For weeks, for months, I had seen these five hundred thousand people laughing and talking in these very streets. And yesterday, and the day before, I had seen them fleeing for their lives out of the city—anywhere, anywhere, out of the reach of the shells and the Germans.

And I wondered where they were now, those five hundred thousand ghosts.

Were they still struggling and tramping and falling along the roads to Holland?

As I wondered, I kept on seeing their faces in these their doorways and at these their windows. I saw them seated at these their cafés, along the side-paths. I heard their rich, liquid Antwerp voices speaking French with a soft, swift rush, or twanging away at Flemish with the staccato insistence of Flanders. I felt them all around me, in all the deserted streets, at all the shuttered windows. It was too colossal a thing to realise that the five hundred thousand of them were not in their city any longer, that they were not hiding behind the silence and the shutters, but were out in the open world beyond the city gates, fighting their way to Holland and freedom.

And now I wondered why I was here myself, listening to my echoing footsteps through the hollow silences of the "Ville Morte."

Why had I not gone with the rest of them?

Then, as I walked through the dead city I knew why I was there.

It was because the gods had been keeping for me all these years the supreme gift of this solitary walk, when I should share her death-pangs with this city I so passionately loved.

That was the truth. I had been unable to tear myself away. If Antwerp suffered, I desired to suffer too. I desired to go hand in hand with her in whatever happened when the Germans came marching in.

Many a time before had I loved a city—loved her for her beauty, her fairness, her spirit, her history, her personal significance to me. Pietra Santa, Ravenna, Bibbiena, Poppi, Locarno, Verona, Florence, Venice, Rome, Sydney, Colombo, Aries, London, Parma, for one reason or another I have worshipped you all in your turn! One represents beauty, one work, one love, one sadness, one joy, one the escape from the ego, one the winging of ambition, one sheer aestheticism, one liquid, limpid gladness at discovering oneself alive.

But Antwerp was the first and only city that I loved because she let me share her sufferings with her right through the Valley of Death, right up to the moment when she breathed her last sigh as a city, and passed into the possession of her conquerors.

Suddenly, through the terrific, inconceivable lull, hurtling with a million memories of noises, I heard footsteps, heavy, dragging, yet hurried, and looking up a side-street opposite the burning ruins of the Chaussée de Souliers, I saw two Belgian soldiers, limping along, making towards the Breda Gate.

Both were wounded, and the one who was less bad was helping the other.

They were hollow-cheeked, hollow-eyed, starved, ghastly, with a growth of black beard, and the ravages of smoke and powder all over their poor faded blue uniforms and little scarlet and yellow caps.

They were dazed, worn-out, finished, famished, nearly fainting.

But as they hurried past me the younger man flung out one breathless question: "Est-ce que la ville est -prise?" It seemed to be plucked from some page of Homer.

Its potency was so epic, so immense, that I felt as if I must remain there for ever rooted to the spot where I had heard it. ...

It went thrilling through my being. It struck me harder than any shell, seeming to fell me for a moment to the ground. . . .

Then I rose, permeated with a sense of living in the world's greatest drama, and feeling, not seeing, Art and Life and Death and Literature inextricably and terribly, yet gloriously mixed, till one could not be told from the other. . . .

For he who had given his life, whose blood dropped red from him as he moved, knew not what had happened to his city. He was only a soldier! His was to fight, not to know. "Est-ce que la ville est prise?" It is months since then, but I still hear that perishing soldier's voice, breaking over his terrific query.

 

Presently, rousing myself, I ran onwards and walked beside the men, giving my arm to the younger one, who took it mechanically, without thanking me.

I liked that, and all together we hastened through the livid greyness along the Avenue de Commerce, towards the Breda Gate.

In dead silence we laboured onwards.

It was still a solitary walk, for neither of my companions said a word.

Only sometimes, without speaking, one of them would turn his head and look backwards, without stopping, at the red flames reflected in the black sky to northward.

Suddenly, to our amazement, we saw a cart coming down a side-street, containing a man and a little girl.

I ran like lightning towards it, terrified lest it should pass, but that man in the cart had a soul, he had seen the bleeding soldiers, he was stopping of himself, he offered to take me, too.

"Quick, quick, mes amis!" he said. "The Germans are coming in at the other end even now! The petite here was lost, and thanks to the Bon Dieu I have just found her. That is why I am so late."

As the soldiers crawled painfully into the little cart, I whispered to the elder one:

"Do you know where your King is, Monsieur?"

Ah, the flash in that hollow eye!

It was worth risking one's life to see it, and to hear the love that leapt into the Belgian's voice as he answered:

"Truly, I know not exactly! But wherever he is I do know this. Notre Roi est sur le Champ de Bataille."

Oh, beautiful speech!

"Sur le Champ de Bataille.!"

Where else would Albert be indeed?

"Sur le Champ de Bataille!"

I put it beside the Epic Question!

Together they lie there in my heart, imperishable, and more precious than any written poem!

 

German troops marching in Antwerp

 

Enter Les Allemands

It is now half-past one, and I am back at the hotel.

At least, my watch says it is half-past one.

But all the many great gold-faced clocks in Antwerp have stopped the day before, and their hands point mockingly to a dozen different times.

One knows that only some ghastly happening could have terrified them into such wild mistakes.

Heart-breaking it is, as well as appalling, to see those distracted timepieces, and their ignorance of the fatal hour.

Half-past one!

And the clocks point pathetically to eleven, or eight, or five.

Inside the great dim restaurant a pretence of lunch is going on between the little handful of people left.

Everybody sits at one table, the chauffeur, Henri, the refugees from Lierre, their maidservant, Jeannette, the proprietor, and his old sister, and his two little grandchildren, and their father, the porter, and a couple of very ugly old Belgians, who seem to belong to nobody in particular, and have sprung from nobody knows where.

We have some stewed meat with potatoes, a rough, ill-cooked dish.

This is the first bad meal I have had in Antwerp.

But what seems extraordinary to me, is that there should be any meal at all!

As we sit round the table in the darkness of that lurid noontide, the dead city outside looks in through the broken windows, and there comes over us all a tension so great that nobody can utter a word.

We are all thinking the same thing.

We are thinking with our dull, adled, clouded brains that the Germans will be here at any minute.

And then suddenly the waiter cries out in a loud voice from across the restaurant:

"LES ALLEMANDS!"

We all spring to our feet. We stand for a moment petrified.

Through the great uncurtained windows of the hotel we see one grey figure, and then another, walking along the side-path up the Avenue de Commerce.

"They have come!" says everyone.

After a moment's hesitation M. Claude, the proprietor, and his old sister, move out into the street, and mechanically I, and all the others follow as if afraid to be left alone within.

 

German cavalry in Antwerp

 

“My Son”

And now through the livid sunless silences of the deserted city, still reeking horribly of powder, shrapnel, smoke and burning petroleum, the Germans are coming down the Avenues to enter into possession.

Here they come, a long grey line of foot-soldiers and mounted men, all with pink roses or carnations in their grey tunics.

Suddenly, a long, lidded, baker's cart dashes across the road at a desperate rate, wheeled by a poor old Belgian, whose face is so wild, that I whisper as she passes close to me:

"Is somebody ill in your cart?"

Without stopping, without looking even, her haggard eyes full of despair, she mutters:

"Dead! My son! He was a soldat."

Then she hurries on, at a run now, to find a spot where she can hide or bury her beloved before the Germans are all over the city.

 

The Reception

A singular change now comes over the silent, deserted city.

First, a few stray Belgians shew on the side-paths. Then more appear, and more still, and as the procession of the Germans comes onwards through the town I discover little groups of men and women sprung out of the very earth it seems to me.

All along the Avenue de Commerce, gathered in the heavy greyness on the side-paths, are little straggling groups of Anversois.

As I look at them, I suddenly experience a sensation of suffocation.

Am I dreaming?

Or are they really smiling, those people, smiling to the Germans!

Then, to my horror, I see two old men waving gaily to that long grey oncoming line of men and horses.

And then I see a woman flinging flowers to an officer, who catches them and sticks them into his horse's bridle.

At that moment I realise I am in for some extraordinary experience, something that Brussels has not in the least prepared me for!

 

The Laughter of Brutes

Along the Avenue the grey uniforms are slowly marching, headed by fair, blue-eyed, arrogant officers on splendid roan horses, and the clang and clatter of them breaks up the silence with a dramatic sharpness—the silence that has never been heard in Antwerp since!

As they come onward, the Germans look from left to right.

I stand on the pavement watching, drawn there by some irresistible force.

Eagerly I search their faces, looking now for the horrid marks of the brute triumphant, gloating over his prey. But the brute triumphant is not there to-day, for these thousands of Germans who march into Antwerp on this historic Friday, are characterised by an aspect of dazed incredulity that almost amounts to fear.

They all wear pink roses, or carnations, in their coats, or have pink flowers wreathed about their horses' harness or round their gun-carriages and provision motors; and sometimes they burst into subdued singing; but it is obvious that the enormous buildings of Antwerp, and its aspect of great wealth, and solidarity, fairly take away their breath, and their eyes quite plainly say that they cannot understand how they come to be in possession of this great, rich, wonderful prize.

They look to left and right, their blue eyes full of curiosity. As I watch, I think of Bismarck's remark about London: "What a city to loot !"

That same thought is in the eyes of all these thousands of Germans as they come in to take possession of Antwerp, and they suddenly burst into song, "Pappachen," and "Die Wacht am Rhein."

But never very cheerily or very loudly do they sing.

I fancy at that moment, experiencing as they are that phase of naive and genuine amazement, the Germans are really less brute than usual.

And then, just as I am thinking that, I meet with my first personal experience of the meaning of "German brute."

A young officer has espied a notice-board, high above a cafe on the left.

A delighted grin overspreads his face and he quickly draws his companion's attention to it.

Together the two gaze smiling at the homelike words: "WINTER GARTEN” their blue eyes glued upon the board as they ride along.

The contrast between their gladness, and that old Belgian mother's agony, suddenly strikes through my heart like a knife.

The pathos and tragedy of it all are too much for me. To see this beloved city possessed by Germans is too terrible. Yes, standing there in the beautiful Avenue de Commerce, I weep as if it were London itself that the Germans were coming into, for I have lived for long unforgettable weeks among the Belgians at war, and I have learned to love and respect them above all peoples. And so I stand there in the Avenue with tears rolling down my cheeks, watching the passing of the grey uniforms, with my heart all on fire for poor ruined Belgium.

Then, looking up, I see a young Prussian officer laughing at me mockingly as he rides by.

He laughs and looks away, that smart young grey-clad Uhlan, with roses in his coat; then he looks back, and laughs again, and rides on, still laughing mockingly at what he takes to be some poor little Belgian weeping over the destruction of her city.

To me, that is an act of brutality, that, small as it may seem, counts for a barbarity as great as any murder.

Germany, for that brutal laugh, no less than for your outrages, you shall pay some day, you shall surely pay!

 

Germans on parade in the Grand'Place of Antwerp

 

Traitors

And now I see people gathering round the Germans as they come to a halt at the end of the Avenue. I see people stroking the horses' heads, and old men and young men smiling and bowing, and a few minutes later, inside the restaurant of my hotel, I witness those extraordinary encounters between the Germans and their spies. I hear the clink of gold, and see the passing of big German notes, and I watch the flushed faces of Antwerp men who are holding note-books over the tables to the German officers, and drinking beer with them, to the accompaniment of loud riotous laughter. That is the note struck in the first hour of the German entrance; and that is the note all the time as far as the German-Anversois are concerned. Before very long I discover that there must have been hundreds of people hiding away inside those silent houses, waiting for the Germans to come in. The horror of it makes me feel physically ill.

The procession comes to a standstill at last in front of a little green square by the Athene, and next moment a group of grey-clad officers with roses in their tunics are hurrying towards the hotel, and begin parleying with Monsieur Claude, our proprietor.

I expected to see him icily resolute against receiving them. But to my surprise he seems affable. He smiles. He waves his hand as he talks. He is eager, deferential, and quite unmistakably friendly, friendly even to the point of fawning. Turning, he flings open his doors with a bow, and in a few minutes the Germans are crowding into his great restaurants.

Cries of "Bier" resounded on all sides.

Outside, on the walls of the Theatre Flamand, the Huns are at it already with their endless proclamations.

"EINWOHNER VON ANTWERPEN !

"Das deutsche Heer betritt Euere Stadt als Sieger. Keinem Euerer Mitbuerger wird ein Leid geschehen und Euer Eigentum wird geschont werden, wenn ihr Euch jeder Feindseligkeit enthaltet.

"Jede Widersetzlichkeit dagegen wird nach Kriegsrecht bestraft und kann die Zerstoerung Euerer schoenen Stadt zur Folge haben.

"DER OBERBEFEHLSHABER DER DEUTSCHEN TRUPPEN."

 

"INWONERS VAN ANTWERPEN !

"Het Duitsche leger is als overwinnaar in uwe stad gekomen. Aan geen enkel uwer medeburgers zal eenig leed geschieden en uwe eigendommen zullen ongeschonden blijven, wanneer gij u allen van vijandelijkheden onthoudt.

"Elk verzet zal naar oorlogsrecht worden bestraft en kan de vernietiging van uwe schoone stad voor gevolg hebben.

"DE HOOFDBEVELHEBBER DER DUITSCHE TROEPEN."

 

"HABITANTS D'ANVERS !

"L'armée allemande est entrée dans votre ville en vainquer. Aucun de vos concitoyens ne sera inquiété et vos propriétés seront respectées a la condition que vous vous absteniez de toute hostilité.

"Toute resistance sera punie d'aprés les lois de la guerre, et peut entrainer la destruction de votre belle ville.

"LE COMMANDANT EN CHEF DES TROUPES CHEF ALLEMANDS."

 

What the Waiting Maid Saw

At this point, I crept down steathily into the kitchen and proceeded to disguise myself.

I put on first of all a big blue-and-red check apron. Then I pinned a black shawl over my shoulders. I parted my hair in the middle and twisted it into a little tight knot at the back, and I tied a blue-and-white handkerchief under my chin.

Looking thoroughly hideous I slipped back into the restaurant where I occupied myself with washing and drying glasses behind the counter.

It was a splendid point of observation, and no words can tell of the excitement I felt as I stooped over my work and took in every detail of what was going on in the restaurant.

But sometimes the glasses nearly fell from my fingers, so agonising were the sights I saw in that restaurant at Antwerp, on the afternoon of October 9th—the Fatal Friday.

I saw old men and young men crowding round the Germans. They sat at the tables with them drinking, laughing, and showing their note-books, which the Germans eagerly examined. The air resounded with their loud riotous talk. All shame was thrown aside now. For months these spies must have lived in terror as they carried on their nefarious espionage within the walls of Antwerp. But now their terror was over. The Germans were in possession. They had nothing to fear. So they drank deeply and more deeply still, trying to banish from their eyes that furtive look that marked them for the sneaks they were. Some of them were old greybeards, some of them were chic young men. I recognised several of them as people I had seen about in the streets of Antwerp during those past two months, and again and again burning tears gathered in my eyes as I realised how Antwerp had been betrayed.

As I am turning this terrible truth over in my mind I get another violent shock. I see three Englishmen standing in the middle of the now densely-crowded restaurant. At first I imagine they are prisoners, and a wave of sorrow flows over me. For I know those three men; they are the three English Marines who called in at this hotel yesterday; seeing that they were Englishmen by their uniforms I called to them to keep back a savage dog that was trying to get at the cockatoo that I had rescued from Lierre. They told me they were with the rest of the English Flying Corps at the forts. Their English had been perfect. Never for a minute had I suspected them!

And now, here they are still, in their English uniforms, and little black-peaked English caps, talking German with the Germans, and sitting at a little table, drinking, drinking, and laughing boisterously as only Germans can laugh when they hold their spying councils.

English Marines indeed!

They have stolen our uniforms somehow, and have probably betrayed many a secret. Within the next few hours I am forced to the conclusion that Antwerp is one great nest of German spies, and over and over again I recognised the faces of old men and young men whom I have seen passing as honest Antwerp citizens all these months.

Seated all by himself at a little table sits a Belgian General, who has been brought in prisoner.

In his sadness and dignity he makes an unforgettable picture. His black beard is sunk forward on his chest. His eyes are lowered. His whole being seem to be wrapt in a profound melancholy that yet has something magnificent and distinguished about it when compared with the riotous elation of his conquerors.

Nobody speaks to him. He speaks to nobody. With his dark blue cloak flung proudly across his shoulder he remains mute and motionless as a statue, his dark eyes staring into space. I wonder what his thoughts are as he sees before him, unashamed and unafraid now that German occupation has begun, these spies who have bartered their country for gold. But whatever he thinks, that lonely prisoner, he makes no sign. His dignity is inviolable. His dark bearded face has all the poignancy and beauty of Titian's "Ariosto " in the National Gallery in London.

He is a prisoner. Nobody looks at him. Nobody speaks to him. Nobody gives him anything to eat. Exhaustion is written on his face. At last I can bear it no longer. I pour out a cup of hot coffee, and take a sandwich from the counter. Then I slip across the Restaurant, and put the coffee and the sandwich on the little table in front of him. A look of flashing gratitude and surprise is in his dark sad eyes as they lift themselves for a moment. But I dare not linger. The Flemish maid, with the handkerchief across her head, hurries back to her tumblers.

Two little priests have been brought in as prisoners also.

But they chat cheerily with their captors, who look down upon them smilingly, showing their big white teeth in a way that I would not like if I were a prisoner!

None of the prisoners are handcuffed or surrounded. They do not seem to be watched. They are all left free. So free indeed, that it is difficult to realise the truth—one movement towards the door and they would be shot down like dogs!

In occupying a town without resistance the Germans make themselves as charming as possible. Obviously those are their orders from headquarters. And Germans always obey orders. Extraordinary indeed is the discipline that can turn the brutes of Louvain and Aerschot into the lamb-like beings that took possession of Antwerp. They asked for everything with marked courtesy, even gentleness. They paid for everything they got. I heard some of the poorer soldiers expressing their surprise at the price of the Antwerp beer.

"It's too dear!" they said.

But they paid the price for it all the same.

They always waited patiently until they could be served. They never grumbled. They never tried to rush the people who were serving them. In fact, their system was to give no trouble, and to create as good an impression as possible on the Belgians from the first moment of their entrance— the first moment being by far the most important psychologically, as the terrified brains of the populace are then most receptive to their impressions of the hated army, and anything that could be done to enhance and improve those impressions is more valuable then than at any other time.

Almost the first thing the Germans did was to find out the pianos.

It was not half an hour after they entered Antwerp when strains of music were heard, music that fell on the ear with a curious shock, for no one had played the piano here since the Belgian Government moved into the fortified town. They played beautifully, those Germans, and every now and then they burst into song. From the sitting-rooms in the Hotel I heard them singing to the "Blue Danube." And the "Wacht am Rhein" seemed to come and go at intervals, like a leitmotif to all their doings.

About four o'clock, Jeanette, the Flemish servant, whispered to me that Henri wanted to speak to me in the kitchen.

"A great misfortune has happened, Madame!" said Henri, agitatedly. "The Germans have seized my car. I shall not be able to take you out of Antwerp this afternoon. But courage! to-morrow I will find a cart or a fiacre. To-day it is impossible to do anything, there is not a vehicle of any kind to be had. But to-morrow, Madame, trust Henri! He will get you away, never fear!"

Half an hour after, the faithful fellow called to me again.

His pie-coloured face looked dark and miserable.

"The Germans have shut the gates all round the city and no one is allowed to go in and out without a German passport!" he said.

This was serious.

Relying on my experience in Brussels, I had anticipated being able to get away even more easily from Antwerp, because of Henri's motor car. But obviously for the moment I was checked.

As dusk fell and the lights were lit, I retired into the kitchen and busied myself cutting bread and butter, and still continuing my highly interesting observations. On the table lay piles of sausage, and presently in came two German officers, an old grey-bearded General, and a dashing young Uhlan Lieutenant.

"We want three eggs each," said the Uhlan roughly, addressing himself to me. "Three eggs, soft boiled, and some bread with butter, with much butter!"

I nodded but dared not answer.

And the red-faced young Lieutenant, thinking I did not understand, ground his heel angrily, and muttered "Gott!" when his eyes fell on the sausage, and his expression changed as if by magic.

"Wurst?" he ejaculated to the General. "Here there sausage is!"

It was quite funny to see the way these two gallant soldiers bent over the sausage, their eyes beaming with greedy joy, and in ten minutes every German was crying out for sausage, and the town was being ransacked in all directions in search of more.

 

Saturday

The saddest thing in Antwerp is the howling of the dogs.

Thousands have been left shut in the houses when their owners fled, and all day and night these poor creatures utter piercing, desolate cries that grow louder and more piercing as time goes on.

It is Saturday morning, October 10th.

Strange things have happened.

When I went to my door just now, I found it locked from the outside.

I have tried the other door. That is locked, too.

What does it mean, I wonder?

Here I am in a little room about twelve feet by six, with one window looking on to the back wall of one of the Antwerp theatres.

I can hear the sounds of fierce cannonading going on in the distance, but the noise within the hotel close at hand is so loud as to deaden the sounds of battle; for the Germans are running up and down the corridors perpetually, shouting, singing, stamping, and the pianos are going, too.

Nobody comes near me. I knock at both the doors, but gently, for I am afraid to draw attention to myself. Nobody answers. The old woman and the two little children have left the room on my right, the old man has left the room on my left. I am all alone in this little den. I dress as well as I can, but the room is just a tiny sitting-room; there are no facilities for making one's toilette. I have to do without washing my face. Instead, I rub it with Crême Floreine, and the amount of black that comes off is appalling.

Then I lie down at full length on my mattress and wonder what is going to happen next. Hour after hour goes by.

In a corner of the room I discover an English weekly history of the War, and lying there on my mattress I read many strange stories that seem somehow to mock a little at these real happenings. Then voices just outside in the corridor reach me. Out there two old Belgians are talking. "Ce sont les Anglais qui ne veulent fas rendre les forts!" says one.

They are discussing the fighting which still goes on fiercely in the forts around the city.

My head aches! I am hungry; and those big guns are making what the Kaiser would call World Noises.

Strange thoughts come over me, attacking me, like Samson Agonistes' "deadly swarm of hornets armed."

In a terrific conflict it doesn't seem to matter much which side is victorious, all hatred of the conquerors dies away; in fact the conquerors themselves may seem like deliverers since peace comes in with their entrance.

And I am weak and weary enough at this moment to wish les Anglais would give it up, let the forts be rendered, and let the cannons cease.

Anything for peace, for an end of slaughter, an end of terror, an end of this cruel soul- racking thunder.

Terrible thoughts . . . deadly thoughts.

Do they come to the soldiers, thoughts like these? Heaven help the poor fellows if they do!

They are more deadly than Death, for they attack only the immortal part of one, leaving the mortal to save itself while they blight and corrode the spirit.

 

I am weary. I have not slept for five nights, and I feel as if I shall never sleep again.

I daresay that's partly why I have been weak enough to wish for an end of noise.

It's five o'clock and darkness has set in.

Nobody has been near me, I'm still here, locked up in this little room.

I roam about like a caged animal. I look from the window. The blank back wall of the Antwerp Theatre meets my eye, but a corner of the hotel looks in also, and I can see three tiers of windows, so I hastily move away. In all those rooms there are Germans quartered now. What if they glanced down here and discovered me? I pull the curtains over the window, and move back into the room.

This is Saturday afternoon, October 10th, and all of a sudden a queer thought comes over me.

October 10th is my birthday.

I lie down on the mattress again, and my thoughts begin dreamily to revolve round an extraordinary psychic mystery that I became conscious of when I was little more than a baby in far-away Australia.

I became conscious at the age of four that I heard in my imagination the sounds of cannon, and I became certain too that those cannon were going to be real cannon some day.

Yes! All my life, ever since I could think, I have heard heavy firing in my ears, and have known I was going to be very close to battle, some far-off day or other.

Have other people been born with the same belief, I wonder?

I should like so much to know.

Gradually a vast area of speculative psychology opens out before me, and, like one walking in a world of dreams, I lose myself in its dim distances, seeking for some light, clear opening, wherein I can discover the secret of this extraordinary psychic or physiological mystery, that has hidden itself for a lifetime in my being. I say hidden itself; yet, though it has kept itself dark and concealed, it has always been teasing my sub- consciousness with vague queer hints of its presence, until at last I have grown used to it, and have even arranged a fairly comfortable explanation of its existence between my soul and myself.

I have told myself that it is something I can never, never understand. And that it is all the explanation I have ever been able to give to myself of the presence of this uninvited guest who has dwelt for a lifetime in the secret-chambers of my intuitions, who has hidden there, veiled and mysterious, never shewing a simple feature to betray itself— eye, lips, brow—always remaining unseen, unknown, uninvited, unintelligible—yet always potent, always softly disturbing one's belief in one's ordinary everyday life with that dull roar of cannon which seemed to visualize in my brain with an image of blinding sunlight.

Lying there on the bare mattress, on this drear October day which goes down to history as the day on which Germany set up her Governor in Antwerp, I begin to wonder if my sublimable consciousness has been trying, all these years, to warn me that danger would come to me some day to the sound of battle. And am I in that danger now? Is this the moment perhaps that the secret, silent guest has tried to shew me lay lurking in await for me, ready to make me fulfil my destiny in some dark and terrible way?

No. I can't believe it.

I can't see it like that.

I don't believe that that is what the roar of cannon has been trying to say to me all my life.

I can't sense danger—I won't. No, I mean I can't. My reason assures me there isn't any danger that is going to catch me, no matter how it may threaten.

And then the hornet flies to the attack. "It says, 'People who are haunted with pre- monitions nearly always disregard them until too late.' "

So occupied am I with these dreams and philosophings that I lie there in the darkness, forgetful of time and hunger, until I hear voices in the next room, and there is the old woman opening my door, and the two little yellow-haired children staring in at me curiously.

The old woman gives me some grapes out of a basket under her bed, and a glass of water.

"Pauvre enfant!" she says. "I am sorry I could bring you no food, but the Germans are up and down the stairs all day long, and I dare not risk them asking me, "Who is that for?"

"But why are you so afraid?" I ask. "Last night you were so nice to me. What has happened? Come, tell me the truth."

"Alors, Madame, I will tell you! You recollect that German who leaned over the counter for such a long time when you were washing glasses?"

"Yes" My lips felt suddenly dry as wood.

"Alors, Madame! He said to me, that fellow, “She never speaks!' "

"Who did he mean?"

"Alors, Madame, he meant you!"

(This then, I think to myself, is what happens to one when one is really frightened. The lips turn dry as chips. And all because a German has noticed me. It is absurd.)

I force a smile.

"Perhaps you imagine this," I said.

"No, because he said to me to-day, 'Where is that maedchen who never spoke?' "

"What did you say?"

"She is deaf," I told him. "She does not hear when anyone speaks to her!"

"So that is why you locked me up."

"C’est ca, Madame. It was my brother who wished it. He is very afraid. And now, Madame, good-night. I must put the little girls to bed."

"Well, I think this is ridiculous," I said. "How long am I to stay here?"

She shook her head, and began to unfasten little fair-haired Maria's black serge frock, pushing her out of my room as she did so, with the evident intention of locking me in again.

But just then someone knocked at the outer door.

It was Madame X. who came stealing in, drawing the bolt noiselessly behind her. I looked in her weary face, with its white hair, and beautiful blue eyes, and saw gentleness and sympathy there, and sincerity.

She said: "Mon Mari has been talking in the restaurant with a friend of his, a Danish Doctor, a Red Cross Doctor, Madame, you understand, and oh, he is so sorry for you, Madame, and he thinks he can help you to escape! He wants to come up and see you for a moment. I advise you to see him."

"Will you bring him up," I said.

"Immediately!"

The old patronne went on undressing the little girls, getting them hurriedly into bed and telling them to be quiet.

They kept shouting out questions to me, and whenever they did so their grandmother would smack them.

"Silence. Les alboches will hear you!"

But they were terribly naughty little girls.

Whenever I spoke they repeated my words in loud, mocking voices.

Their sharp little ears told them of my foreign accent, and they plucked at every strange note in my voice, and repeated it loud and shrill, but the grandmother smacked them into silence and pulled the bedclothes up over their faces.

Then a gentle tap, and Madame X. and the Danish Doctor came stealing in.

Ah! how piercing and pathetic was the look I cast on that tall stranger. I saw a young fair-haired man in grey clothes, with blue eyes, and an honest English look, quiet, kind, sincere, wearing the Red Cross badge on his arm! I looked and looked. Then I told myself he was to be trusted.

In English he said, "I heard there was an English lady here who wants to get away from Antwerp?"

I interrupted sharply.

"Please don't speak English! The Germans are always going up and down the corridor. They may hear!"

He smiled at my fears, but immediately changed into French to reassure me.

"No, no, Madame! You mustn't be alarmed. The Germans are too busy with themselves to think of anything else just now. And I want to help you. Your Queen Alexandra is a Dane. She is of my country, and she has kept the bonds very close and strong between Denmark and England. Yes, if only for the sake of Queen Alexandra I want to help you now. And I think I can do so. If you will pass as my sister I can get a pass for you from the Danish Consul, and that will enable you to leave Antwerp in safety."

"May I see your papers?" I asked him now. "I am sure you are sincere. But you understand that I would like to see your papers." "Certainly!"

And he brought out his papers of nationality and I saw that he was undoubtedly a Dane, working under the Red Cross for the Belgians.

When I had examined his papers I let him examine mine.

"And now I must ask you one thing more," he said. "I must ask for your passport. I want to shew it to my Consul, in order to convince him that you are really of British nationality. Will you give me your passport? I am afraid that without it my Consul may object to do this thing for me."

That was an agonized moment. I had been told a hundred times by a hundred different people that the one thing one should never do, never, never, never, not under any circumstances, was to part with one's passport. And here was this gentle Dane pleading for mine, promising me escape if I would give it. I looked up at him as he stood there, tall and grave. I was not quite sure of him. And why? Because he had spoken English and I still thought that was a dangerous thing to do. No, I was not quite sure. I stood there breathless, stupefied, trying to think. Madame X. watched me in silence. I knew that I must make up my mind one way or the other.

"Well, I shall trust you, " I said slowly. I put my passport into his hands.

His face lit up and I, watching in that agony of doubt, told myself suddenly that he was genuine, that was real gladness in his eyes.

"Ah, Madame, I do thank you so for trusting me!" His voice was moved and vibrant. He bent and kissed my hand. Then he put the passport in his pocket. "To-morrow at three o'clock I will come here for you. Trust me absolutely. I will arrange for a peasant's cart or a fiacre, and I will myself accompany you to the Dutch borders. Have courage—you will soon be in safety!"

Ten minutes after he had gone Monsieur Claude burst into the room.

His face was black as night and working with rage.

"What is this you have done?" he cried in a hoarse voice. "Il parle avec les allemands dans le restaurant!"

Horrible words!

It seems to me that as long as I live I shall hear them in my ears.

"It is not true." I cried. "It can't be true." "He is talking to the Germans in the Restaurant," he repeated. His rage was undisguised. He flung on the table a little packet of English papers that I had given him to hide for me. "Take these! I have nothing to do with you. You are my sister's affair, I have nothing to do with you at all!"

I rushed to him. I seized him by the arm. But he flung me off and left the room. In and out of my brain his words went beating, in and out, in and out. The thing was simple, clear. The Dane had gone down to betray me, and he had all the evidence in his hands. Oh, fool that I had been! I had brought this on myself. It was my own unaccountable folly that had led me into this trap. At any moment now the Germans would come for me. All was over. I was lost. They had my passport in their possession. I could deny nothing. The game was up.

I got up and looked at myself in the glass. The habit of a lifetime asserted itself, for all women look at themselves in the glass frequently, and at unexpected times. I saw a strange white face gazing at me in the mirror. "It is all up with you now! Are you ready for the end? Prepare yourself, get your nerves in order. You cannot hope to escape, it is either imprisonment or death for you! What do you think of that?"

And then, at that point, kindly Mother Nature took possession of the situation and sleep rushed upon me unawares. I fell on the mattress and knew no more, till a soft knocking at my door awoke me, and I saw it was morning. A light was filtering in dimly through the window blind.

I jumped up.

I was fully dressed, having fallen asleep in my clothes.

"Madame!" whispered a voice. "Open the door toute suite n'est-ce-pas." It was the old woman's voice.

I pulled away the barricading chair, and let her in.

Over her shoulder I saw a man.

It was no German, this!

It was dear pie-coloured Henri in a grey suit with a white-and-black handkerchief swathed round his neck.

Behind him were the two little girls.

"Quick, quick!" breathes the old woman, "you must go, Madame, you must go at once! My brother is frightened; he refuses to have you here any longer. He is terrified out of his life lest the Germans should discover that he has been allowing an English woman to hide in his house!"

She threw an apron on me, and hurriedly tied it behind me, then she brought out a big black shawl and flung it round my shoulders. Then she picked up the blue-and-white check handkerchief lying on the table, and nodded to me to tie it over my head.

"You must go at once, you must leave everything behind you. You must not take anything. We will see about your things afterwards. You must pass as Henri's wife. There! Take his arm! And you, Henri, take one of the little girls by the hand! And you, Madame, you take the other. There! Courage, Madame. Oh, my poor child, I am sorry for you!"

She kissed me, and pushed me out at the same time.

Next moment, hanging on to Henri's arm, I found myself outside in the corridor walking towards the staircase.

"Courage!" whispered Henri in my ear.

Suddenly I ceased to be myself; I became a peasant; I was Henri's wife. These little girls were mine. I leaned on Henri, I clutched my little girl's fingers close. I felt utterly unafraid. I thought as a peasant. I absolutely precipitated myself into the woman I was supposed to be. And in that new condition of personality I walked down the wide staircase with my husband and my children, passing dozens of German officers who were running up and down the stairs continually.

I got a touch of their system. They moved aside to let us pass, the poor little pie- coloured peasant, his anxious wife, the two solemn children with flowing hair.

The hall below was crowded with Germans. I saw their fair florid faces, their grim lips and blazing eyes. But I was a peasant now, a little Belgian peasant. Reality had left me completely. Fear was fled. The sight of the sunlight and the touch of the fresh air on my face as we reached the street set all my nerves acting again in their old satisfactory manner.

"Courage, Madame " whispered Henri.

"Don't call me Madame! Call me Louisa!" I whispered back. "Where are we going?"

"To a friend."

We turned the corner and crossed the street and I saw at once that Antwerp as Antwerp has entirely ceased to exist. Everywhere there were Germans. They were seated in the cafés, flying past in motor cars, driving through the streets and avenues just as in Brussels, looking as if they had lived there for ever.

Voici, Madame!" muttered Henri.

"Louisa!" I whispered supplicatingly.

 

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