progress, each time he had arrived
just after the last shot was fired. He assured me very earnestly that
he would go back to Michigan Boulevard quite contentedly if he
could see just one battle. I am glad to say that his perseverance
was finally rewarded and that he saw his battle. He never told me
just how much of the thousand pounds he took back to Chicago
with him, but from some remarks he let drop I gathered that he had
found battle-hunting an expensive pastime.

One of the great London dailies was represented in Belgium by a
young and slender and very beautiful English girl whose name, as a
novelist and playwright, is known on both sides of the Atlantic. I
met her in the American Consulate at Ghent, where she was pleading
with Vice-Consul Van Hee to assist her in getting through the
German lines to Brussels. She had heard a rumour that Brussels
was shortly going to be burned or sacked or something of the sort,
and she wanted to be on hand for the burning and sacking. She had
arrived in Belgium wearing a London tailor's idea of what constituted
a suitable costume for a war correspondent--perhaps I should say
war correspondentess. Her luggage was a model of compactness: it
consisted of a sleeping-bag, a notebook, half a dozen pencils--and
a powder-puff. She explained that she brought the sleeping-bag
because she understood that war correspondents always slept in
the field. As most of the fields in that part of Flanders were just
then under several inches of water as a result of the autumn rains,
a folding canoe would have been more useful. She was as insistent
on being taken to see a battle as a child is on being taken to the
pantomime. Eventually her pleadings got the better of my judgment
and I took her out in the car towards Alost to see, from a safe
distance, what promised to be a small cavalry engagement. But the
Belgian cavalry unexpectedly ran into a heavy force of Germans,
and before we realized what was happening we were in a very warm
corner indeed. Bullets were kicking up little spurts of dust about us;
bullets were tang-tanging through the trees and clipping off twigs,
which fell down upon our heads; the rat-tat-tat of the German
musketry was answered by the angry snarl of the Belgian machine-guns;
in a field near by the bodies of two recently killed cuirassiers
lay sprawled grotesquely. The Belgian troopers were stretched flat
upon the ground, a veteran English correspondent was giving a
remarkable imi