hout, Wespelaer, Rotselaer, and Holsbeek. The Belgians
lay to the north-east of this line, their left resting on Aerschot and
their centre at Meerbeek. Between the opposing armies stretched
the Malines-Louvain canal, along almost the entire length of which
fighting as bloody as any in the war took place.

To describe this battle--I do not even know by what name it will be
known to future generations--would be to usurp the duties of the
historian, and I shall only attempt, therefore, to tell you of that
portion of it which I saw with my own eyes. On the morning of
September 13 four Belgian divisions moved southward from
Malines, their objective being the town of Weerde, on the Antwerp-
Brussels railway. It was known that the Germans occupied Weerde
in force, so throughout the day the Belgian artillery, masked by
heavy woods, pounded away incessantly. By noon the enemy's
guns ceased to reply, which was assumed by the jubilant Belgians
to be a sign that the German artillery had been silenced. At noon the
Belgian First Division moved forward and Thompson and I, leaving
the car in front of a convent over which the Red Cross flag was
flying, moved forward with it. Standing quite by itself in the middle of
a field, perhaps a mile beyond the convent, was a two-story brick
farmhouse. A hundred yards in front of the farmhouse stretched the
raised, stone-paved, tree-lined highway which runs from Brussels to
Antwerp, and on the other side of the highway was Weerde.
Sheltering ourselves as much as possible in the trenches which
zigzagged across the field, and dashing at full speed across the
open places which were swept by rifle-fire, we succeeded in
reaching the farmhouse. Ascending to the garret, we broke a hole
through the tiled roof and found ourselves looking down upon the
battle precisely as one looks down on a cricket match from the
upper tier of seats at Lord's. Lying in the deep ditch which bordered
our side of the highway was a Belgian infantry brigade, composed of
two regiments of carabineers and two regiments of chasseurs a
pied, the men all crouching in the ditch or lying prone upon the
ground. Five hundred yards away, on the other side of the highway,
we could see through the trees the whitewashed walls and red
pottery roofs of Weerde, while a short distance to the right, in a
heavily wooded park, was a large stone chateau. The only sign that
the town was occupied was a pall of blue-grey vapour which hung
over it and