oing back to the sorry shells that had been their homes.

An hour later we passed through the back lines of the German camp and
entered the town of Beaumont, to find that the General Staff of a German
army corps was quartered there for the night, and that the main force of
the column, after sharp fighting, had already advanced well beyond the
frontier. France was invaded.

Chapter 2

To War in a Taxicab

In a taxicab we went to look for this war. There were four of us, not
counting the chauffeur, who did not count. It was a regular taxicab,
with a meter on it, and a little red metal flag which might be turned up
or turned down, depending on whether the cab was engaged or at liberty;
and he was a regular chauffeur.

We, the passengers, wore straw hats and light suits, and carried no
baggage. No one would ever have taken us for war correspondents out
looking for war. So we went; and, just when we were least expecting it,
we found that war. Perhaps it would be more exact to say it found us.
We were four days getting back to Brussels, still wearing our straw
hats, but without any taxicab. The fate of that taxicab is going to be
one of the unsolved mysteries of the German invasion of Belgium.

From the hour when the steamer St. Paul left New York, carrying probably
the most mixed assortment of passengers that traveled on a single ship
since Noah sailed the Ark, we on board expected hourly to sight
something that would make us spectators of actual hostilities. The
papers that morning were full of rumors of an engagement between English
ships and German ships somewhere off the New England coast.

Daily we searched the empty seas until our eyes hurt us; but, except
that we had one ship's concert and one brisk gale, and that just before
dusk on the fifth day out, the weather being then gray and misty, we saw
wallowing along, hull down on the starboard bow, an English cruiser with
two funnels, nothing happened at all. Even when we landed at Liverpool
nothing happened to suggest that we had reached a country actively
engaged in war, unless you would list the presence of a few khaki-clad
soldiers on the landing stage and the painful absence of porters to
handle our baggage as evidences of the same. I remember seeing Her
Grace the Duchess of Marlborough sitting hour after hour on a baggage
truck, waiting for her heavy luggage to come off the tardy tender and up
the languid chute into the big dusty dockhouse.