and burgher volunteers. These latter mainly carried shotguns
and wore floppy blue caps and long blue blouses, which buttoned down
their backs with big horn buttons, like little girls' pinafores. There
was, we learned, a touch of sentiment about the sudden appearance of
those most unsoldierly looking vestments. In the revolution of 1830,
when the men of Brussels fought the Hollanders all morning, stopped for
dinner at midday and then fought again all afternoon, and by alternately
fighting and eating wore out the enemy and won their national
independence, they wore such caps and such back-buttoning blouses. And
so all night long women in the hospitals had sat up cutting out and
basting together the garments of glory for their menfolk.

No one offered to turn us back, and only once or twice did a sentry
insist on looking at our passes. In the light of fuller experiences I
know now that when a city is about to fall into an enemy's hands the
authorities relax their vigilance and freely permit noncombatants to
depart therefrom, presumably on the assumption that the fewer
individuals there are in the place when the conqueror does come the
fewer the problems of caring for the resident population will be. But
we did not know this mighty significant fact; and, suspecting nothing,
the four innocents drove blithely on until the city lay behind us and
the country lay before us, brooding in the bright sunlight and all empty
and peaceful, except for thin scattering detachments of gaily clad
Belgian infantrymen through which we passed.

Once or twice tired, dirty stragglers, lying at the roadside, raised a
cheer as they recognized the small American flag that fluttered from our
taxi's door; and once we gave a lift to a Belgian bicycle courier, who
had grown too leg-weary to pedal his machine another inch. He was the
color of the dust through which he had ridden, and his face under its
dirt mask was thin and drawn with fatigue; but his racial enthusiasm
endured, and when we dropped him he insisted on shaking hands with all
of us, and offering us a drink out of a very warm and very grimy bottle
of something or other.

All of a sudden, rounding a bend, we came on a little valley with one of
the infrequent Belgian brooks bisecting it; and this whole valley was
full of soldiers. There must have been ten thousand of them--cavalry,
foot, artillery, baggage trains, and all. Quite near us was ranged a
battery of small rapid-fire guns