but
the good times were gone--"les beaux jours sont partis." Two others
drifted over and asked questions about the bombardment. She answered
politely enough, with the air of one to whom it was an old story now--
she had left on the second day, when the building across the way was
smashed, and walking, catching rides, stumbling along with the other
thousands, had got into Holland. As to why the city fell so quickly--
she pulled her shawl about her shoulders and murmured that there were
things people did not know, if they did they did not talk about them.

And the Germans--how were they? They had no complaints to make, the girl
said; the Germans were well behaved--"tres correct." Possibly, then--it
was our young Italian who put the question--the Belgians would just as
soon... I did not catch the whole sentence, but all at once something
flashed behind that non-committal cafe proprietress's mask. "Moi, je
suis fiere d'etre Belge!" said the girl, and as she spoke you could see
the color slowly burning through her pale face and neck--she was proud
to be a Belgian--they hoped, that one could keep, and there would come a
day, we could be sure of that--"un jour de revanche!"

But business is business, and people who run cafes must, as every one
knows, not long indulge in the luxury of personal feelings. The
officers turned up their fur collars, and we buttoned up our coats, and
she was sitting behind the counter, the usual little woman in black at
the cafe desk, as we filed out. Our captain paused as we passed, gave a
stiff little bow from the waist, touched his cap gallantly, and said:
"Bon jour, mademoiselle!" And the girl nodded politely, as cafe
proprietresses should, and murmured, blank as the walls in the Antwerp
streets: "Bon jour, monsieur!"

Chapter IX

The Road To Constantinople

Rumania and Bulgaria

The express left Budapest in the evening, all night and all next day
rolled eastward across the Hungarian plain, and toward dusk climbed up
through the cool Carpathian pines and over the pass into Rumania.

Vienna and the waltzes they still were playing there, Berlin and its
iron exaltation, slow-rumbling London--all the West and the war as we
had thought of it for months was, so to speak, on the other side of the
earth. We were on the edge of the East now, rolling down into the
Balkans, into that tangle of races and revenges out of which the first
spark of the war was flung.

Since coffee that