them, or the tearing, snorting motors; they
stroll abstractedly into the line of the motors and stand there; they
start and scatter, wild-eyed, with a sudden recrudescence of the terror
that has driven them here from their villages in the fields.

* * * * *

It seems incredible that I should be free to walk about like this. It is
as if I had cut the rope that tied me to a soaring air-balloon and found
myself, with firm feet, safe on the solid earth. Any bit of earth, even
surrounded by Germans, seems safe compared with the asphyxiation of that
ascent. And when the air-balloon wasn't going up it was as if I had lain
stifling under a soft feather-bed for more than a year. Now I've waked
up suddenly and flung the feather-bed off with a vigorous kick.

[_[7]Sunday, 4th._]

(I have no clear recollection of Sunday morning, because in the
afternoon we went to Antwerp; and Antwerp has blotted out everything
that went near before it.)

The Ambulance has been ordered to take two Belgian professors (or else
they are doctors) into Antwerp. There isn't any question this time of
carrying wounded. It seems incredible, but I am going too. I shall see
the siege of Antwerp and hear the guns that were brought up from Namur.

Somewhere, on the north-west horizon, a vision, heavenly, but
impalpable, aerial, indistinct, of the Greatest Possible Danger.

I am glad I am going. But the odd thing is that there is no excitement
about it. It seems an entirely fit and natural thing that the vision
should materialize, that I should see the shells battering the forts of
Antwerp and hear the big siege-guns from Namur. For all its
incredibility, the adventure lacks every element of surprise. It is
simply what I came out for. For here in Belgium the really incredible
things are the things that existed and happened before the War. They
existed and happened a hundred years ago and the memory of them is
indistinct; the feeling of them is gone. You have ceased to have any
personal interest in them; if they happened at all they happened to
somebody else. What is happening now has been happening always. All your
past is soaking in the vivid dye of these days, and what you are now you
have been always. I have been a War Correspondent all my life--_blasee_
with battles. The Commandant orders me into the front seat beside the
chauffeur Tom, so that I may see things. Even Tom's face cannot shake me
in my conviction that I a