e-map and a guide-book in a
hotel bedroom a score or more of miles from the firing-line.

The Belgian field army consisted of six divisions and a brigade of
cavalry and numbered, on paper at least, about 180,000 men. I very
much doubt, however, if King Albert had in the field at anyone time
more than 120,000 men--a very large proportion of whom were, of
course, raw recruits. Now the Belgian army, when all is said and
done, was not an army according to the Continental definition; it
was not much more than a glorified police force, a militia. No one
had ever dreamed that it would be called upon to fight, and hence,
when war came, it was wholly unprepared. That it was able to offer
the stubborn and heroic resistance which it did to the advance of the
German legions speaks volumes for Belgian stamina and courage.
Many of the troops were armed with rifles of an obsolete pattern, the
supply of ammunition was insufficient, and though the artillery was
on the whole of excellent quality, it was placed at a tremendous
disadvantage by the superior range and calibre of the German field-
guns. The men did not even have the protection afforded by neutral-
coloured uniforms, but fought from first to last in clothes of blue and
green and blazing scarlet. As I stood one day in the Place de Meir in
Antwerp and watched a regiment of mud-bespattered guides clatter
past, it was hard to believe that I was living in the twentieth century
and not in the beginning of the nineteenth, for instead of serviceable
uniforms of grey or drab or khaki, these men wore the befrogged
green jackets, the cherry-coloured breeches, and the huge fur
busbies which characterized the soldiers of Napoleon.

The carabineers, for example, wore uniforms of bottle-green and
queer sugar-loaf hats of patent leather which resembled the
headgear of the Directoire period. Both the grenadiers and the
infantry of the line marched and fought and slept in uniforms of
heavy blue cloth piped with scarlet and small, round, visorless
fatigue-caps which afforded no protection from either sun or rain.
Some of the men remedied this by fitting their caps with green
reading-shades, such as undergraduates wear when they are
cramming for examinations, so that at first glance a regiment looked
as though its ranks were filled with either jockeys or students. The
gendarmes--who, by the way, were always to be found where the
fighting was hottest--were the most unsuitably uniformed of all, f