em.

By four o'clock all the Belgian troops were withdrawn except a thin
screen to cover the retreat. As I wished to see the German advance
I remained on the railway embankment on the outskirts of Sempst
after all the Belgians, save a picket of ten men, had been withdrawn
from the village. I had my car waiting in the road below with the
motor running. As the German infantry would have to advance
across a mile of open fields it was obvious that I would have ample
time in which to get away. The Germans prefaced their advance by
a terrific cannonade. The air was filled with whining shrapnel.
Farmhouses collapsed amid puffs of brown smoke. The sky was
smeared in a dozen places with the smoke of burning hamlets.
Suddenly a soldier crouching beside me cried, "Les Allemands! Les
Allemands!" and from the woods which screened the railway-
embankment burst a long line of grey figures, hoarsely cheering. At
almost the same moment I heard a sudden splutter of shots in the
village street behind me and my driver screamed, "Hurry for your
life, monsieur! The Uhlans are upon us!" In my desire to see the
main German advance it had never occurred to me that a force of
the enemy's cavalry might slip around and take us in the flank,
which was exactly what had happened. It was three hundred yards
to the car and a freshly ploughed field lay between, but I am
confident that I broke the world's record for the distance. As I leaped
into the car and we shot down the road at fifty miles an hour, the
Uhlans cantered into the village, the sunlight striking on their lance-
tips. It was a close call.

The retreat from Malines provided a spectacle which I shall never
forget. For twenty miles every road was jammed with clattering
cavalry, plodding infantry, and rumbling batteries, the guns, limbers,
and caissons still covered with the green boughs which had been
used to mask their position from German aeroplanes. Gendarmes in
giant bearskins, chasseurs in uniforms of green and yellow,
carabineers with their shiny leather hats, grenadiers, infantry of the
line, guides, lancers, sappers and miners with picks and spades,
engineers with pontoon-wagons, machine-guns drawn by dogs,
ambulances with huge Red Cross flags fluttering above them, and
cars, cars, cars, all the dear old familiar American makes among
them, contributed to form a mighty river flowing towards Antwerp.
Malines formerly had a population of fifty thousand people, and
forty-five thousan