ns must
have been puzzled by this development, for they had counted on being
able to advance safely up to the range of the forts, feeling sure that
the Belgians had no powerful field guns of this sort.

We were introduced to the officers commanding the battery, and watched
their work for nearly two hours. One of the officers was Count Guy
d'Oultremont, adjutant of the Court, whom I had known in Brussels. He
was brown as a berry, had lost a lot of superfluous flesh, and was
really a fine-looking man. He had been in Namur, and had got away with
the Belgian troops who went out the back door into France and came home
by ship.

After we had been watching a little while, an aeroplane came circling
around, evidently to spot the place where these deadly cannon were. It
cruised around for some time in vain, but finally crossed straight
overhead. As soon as we were located, the machine darted away to spread
the news, so that the big German guns could be trained on us and silence
the battery; but the Belgians were Johnny-at-the-rat-hole again, and he
was winged by rifle fire from a crowd of soldiers who were resting near
the headquarters. They killed the observer and wounded the pilot
himself, to say nothing of poking a hole in the oil tank. The machine
volplaned to earth a few hundred yards from where we were, and the pilot
was made prisoner. The machine was hauled back to the village and
shipped on the first outgoing train to Antwerp as a trophy.

We were leaving the battery and were slipping and sliding through the
cabbages on our way back to the road, when we met the King on foot,
accompanied only by an aide-de-camp, coming in for a look at the big
guns. He stopped and spoke to us and finally settled down for a real
talk, evidently thinking that this was as good a time as any other he
was likely to find in the immediate future.

After talking shop with the two colonels, he turned to me for the latest
gossip. He asked me about the story that the German officers had drunk
his wine at the Palace in Laeken. I told him that it was generally
accepted in Brussels, and gave him my authority for the yarn. He
chuckled a little and then said, in his quiet way, with a merry twinkle:
"You know I never drink anything but water." He cogitated a minute and
then, with an increased twinkle, he added: "And it was not very good
wine!" He seemed to think that he had quite a joke on the Germans.

As we talked, the sound of firing came from the