l kindly report to me here in the morning at eleven. Meantime
remember, gentlemen, that you are not prisoners--by no means, not. You
may consider yourselves for the time being as--shall we say?--guests of
the German Army, temporarily detained. You are at perfect liberty to
come and go--only I should advise you not to go too far, because if you
should try to leave town tonight our soldiers would certainly shoot you
quite dead. It is not agreeable to be shot; and, besides, your great
Government might object. So, then, I shall have the pleasure of seeing
you in the morning, shall I not? Yes? Good night, gentlemen!"

He clicked his neat heels so that his spurs jangled, and bowed us out
into the dark. The question of securing lodgings loomed large and
imminent before us. Officers filled the few small inns and hotels;
soldiers, as we could see, were quartered thickly in all the houses in
sight; and already the inhabitants were locking their doors and dousing
their lights in accordance with an order from a source that was not to
be disobeyed. Nine out of ten houses about the square were now but
black oblongs rising against the gray sky. We had nowhere to go; and yet
if we did not go somewhere, and that pretty soon, the patrols would
undoubtedly take unpleasant cognizance of our presence. Besides, the
searching chill of a Belgian night was making us stiff.

Scouting up a narrow winding alley, one of the party who spoke German
found a courtyard behind a schoolhouse called imposingly L'Ecole Moyenne
de Beaumont, where he obtained permission from a German sergeant to
stable our mare for the night in the aristocratic companionship of a
troop of officers' horses. Through another streak of luck we preempted
a room in the schoolhouse and held it against all comers by right of
squatter sovereignty. There my friends and I slept on the stone floor,
with a scanty amount of hay under us for a bed and our coats for
coverlets. But before we slept we dined.

We dined on hard-boiled eggs and stale cheese--which we had saved from
midday--in a big, bare study hall half full of lancers. They gave us
rye bread and some of the Prince de Caraman-Chimay's wine to go with the
provender we had brought, and they made room for us at the long benches
that ran lengthwise of the room. Afterward one of them--a master
musician, for all his soiled gray uniform and grimed fingers--played a
piano that was in the corner, while all the rest sang.