and good food, and good art--like
their own Rubenses and Van Dycks.

There was no business, not a ship moving in the Scheldt. All who worked
at all were helping prepare for the possible siege; those who didn't
crowded the sidewalk cafes, listening to tales from the front, guessing
by the aid of maps whither, across the silent, screened southwest, the
German avalanche was spreading.

"Treason," "betrayal," "savagery," were on everybody's lips. For
Antwerp, you might say, had been "half German"; many of its rich and
influential men were of German origin, although they had lived in
Belgium for years. And now the Belgians felt they had lived there as
spies, and the seizure of Belgium was an act long and carefully planned.
One was told of the finding of rifles in German cellars, marked
"Preserves," of German consuls authorized to give prizes for the most
complete inventories of their neighborhoods turned in by amateur spies.

Speaking to one man about the Rubens "Descent from the Cross" still
hanging in the cathedral, I suggested that such a place was safe from
bombardment. He looked up at the lace-like old tower, whose chimes,
jangling down through leaping shafts and jets of Gothic stone, have so
long been Antwerp's voice. "They wouldn't stop a minute," he said.

All eastern Belgium was cut off. Brussels, to which people run over for
dinner and the theatre, might have been in China. Meanwhile Antwerp
seemed safe for the time and I returned to Ghent, got a train next day
as far south as Deynze, where the owner of a two-wheeled Belgian cart
was induced to take me another thirty kilometres on down to Courtrai.
It was rumored that there had been a battle at Courtrai--it was, at any
rate, close to the border and the German right wing and in the general
line of their advance.

We rattled along the hard highroad, paved with Belgian blocks, with a
well-pounded dirt path at the side for bicycles, between almost
uninterrupted rows of low houses and tiny fields in which men and women
both were working. Other carts like ours passed by, occasional heavy
wagons drawn by one of the handsome Belgian draft-horses, and now and
then a small loaded cart, owner perched on top, zipping along behind a
jolly Belgian work dog--pulling as if his soul depended on it and
apparently having the time of his life. Every one was busy, not a foot
of ground wasted; a more incongruous place into which to force the waste
and lawlessness of war