when the French or the Spanish came into
Flanders; just such villages, just such housewives slamming shutters
close--you can see them now in old Flemish pictures.

Slowly doors and windows opened, heads poked out. The little street
filled, the knots of people gathered again. We walked up and down, the
linen merchant flinging out his arms and his reassurances more and more
vigorously. Half an hour passed, and then, all at once, it came again.
And this time it was real. The Germans were coming!

Down the straight, paved highway, a mile or so away, at the farther end
of an avenue of elms which framed them like a tunnel, was a band of
horsemen. They were coming at an easy trot, half a dozen in single file
on either side of the road. We could see their lances, held rakishly
upstanding across the saddle, then the tail of the near horse whisking
to and fro. One, crossing over, was outlined against the sky, and those
who could see whispered: "One is standing sidewise!" as if this were
somehow important. Tears rolled down the cheeks of the women huddled
inside the door before which we stood.

Coming nearer and nearer up that long tunnel of trees, like one of those
unescapable things seen in dreams, the little gray spot of moving
figures grew to strange proportions--"the Germans!"--front of that
frightful avalanche. A few hundred yards away they pulled down to a
walk, and slowly, peering sharply out from under their helmets, entered
the silent street. Another moment and the leader was alongside, and we
found ourselves looking up at a boy, not more than twenty he seemed,
with blue eyes and a clean-cut, gentle face. He passed without a look
or word, but behind him a young officer, soldier-like and smart in the
Prussian fashion, with a half-opened map in his hand, asked the way to a
near-by village. He took the linen merchant's direction without pausing
and the horses swung down the side street. "Do you speak English?" he
called back, as if, in happier times, we might have been friends, and,
without waiting for an answer, trotted on into the growing dusk.

They were but one of hundreds of such squads of light cavalry--uhlans
for the most part--ranging all over western Belgium as far as Ostend, a
dozen or so men in hostile country, prepared to be cut to pieces if they
found the enemy they were looking for, or to be caught from ambush at
any time by some squad of civic guards. But as one watched them
disappear down th