ng shrapnel and raked by rifle-fire. There was
about one chance in a thousand of a man getting to the end of that
road alive. A colonel standing beside me under a railway-culvert
summoned a gendarme, gave him the necessary orders, and
added, "Bonne chance, mon brave." The man, a fierce-moustached
fellow who would have gladdened the heart of Napoleon, knew that
he was being sent into the jaws of death, but he merely saluted, set
spurs to his horse, and tore down the road, an archaic figure in his
towering bearskin. He reached the troops uninjured and gave the
order for them to retreat, but as they fell back the German gunners
got the range and with marvellous accuracy dropped shell after shell
into the running column. Soon road and fields were dotted with
corpses in Belgian blue.

Time after time the Germans attempted to carry the railway
embankment with the bayonet, but the Belgians met them with
blasts of lead which shrivelled the grey columns as leaves are
shrivelled by an autumn wind. By mid-afternoon the Belgians and
Germans were in places barely a hundred yards apart, and the rattle
of musketry sounded like a boy drawing a stick along the palings of
a picket-fence. During the height of the battle a Zeppelin slowly
circled over the field like a great vulture awaiting a feast. So heavy
was the fighting that the embankment of a branch railway from
which I viewed the afternoon's battle was literally carpeted with the
corpses of Germans who had been killed during the morning. One
of them had died clasping a woman's picture. He was buried with it
still clenched in his hand. I saw peasants throw twelve bodies into
one grave. One peasant would grasp a corpse by the shoulders and
another would take its feet and they would give it a swing as though
it were a sack of meal. As I watched these inanimate forms being
carelessly tossed into the trench it was hard to make myself believe
that only a few hours before they had been sons or husbands or
fathers and that somewhere across the Rhine women and children
were waiting and watching and praying for them. At a hamlet near
Sempst I helped to bury an aged farmer and his son, inoffensive
peasants, who had been executed by the Germans because a
retreating Belgian soldier had shot a Uhlan in front of their
farmhouse. Not content with shooting them, they had disfigured
them almost beyond recognition. There were twenty-two bayonet
wounds in the old man's face. I know, for I counted th