title had been much read
on the way over--had burst.

Slowly next morning we crept up the Mersey, past a rusty tramp outward
bound, crowded with khaki-clad men. All the shipping was tooting as she
swept by, and the men cheering and waving their hats at the land they
might never come back to. The regular landing-stages were taken by
transports, tracks were held for troop-trains, and it was night before
we got down to London, where crowds and buses stormed along as usual and
barytone soloists in every music-hall were roaring defiance to the
Kaiser and reiterating that Britannia ruled the waves.

Into the fog of war that covered the Continent an army of Englishmen had
vanished, none knew where. Out of it came rumors of victories, but as I
crossed the Strand that morning on the way to Charing Cross, a newsboy
pushed an extra into the cab window--the Germans were entering Brussels!
Yet we fought into the boat train just as if thousands of people weren't
fighting to get away from the very places we hoped to reach.

There were two business men in our coupe going to France, an elderly
Irish lady, an intransigent Unionist, with black goggles and umbrella,
hoping to get through to her invalid brother in Diest, and a bright,
sweet-faced little Englishwoman, in nurse's dark-blue uniform and
bonnet, bound for Antwerp, where her sister's convent had been turned
into a hospital. She told about her little east-coast town as we
crossed the sunny Channel; we trailed together into the great empty
station at Ostend and, after an hour or two, found a few cars getting
away, so to speak, of their own accord.

The low checker-board Belgian fields drifted quickly past; then Bruges,
with a wounded soldier leaning on the shoulders of two companions; then
Ghent. There was a great crowd about the station--men thrown out of
work, men in flat cloth caps smoking pipes--the town just recovering
from the panic of that afternoon. Flags had been hauled down--the
American consul was even asked if he didn't think it would be safer to
take down his flag--some of the civic guards, fearing they would be shot
on sight if the Germans saw them in uniform, tore off their coats and
threw them in the canal. Others threw in cartridges, thousands of
gallons of gasolene were poured on the ground, and everybody watched the
church tower for the red flag which would signal that firing was about
to begin. Le Bien Public of Ghent, however, protested stoutly beca