own between Western Europe and the Hunnish
hordes. Unyielding and undiscouraged they have stood, for close on
three years, in winter and in summer, in heat and in cold, in snow and
in rain, holding the frontier of civilization. And I knew that it was
safe in their care.

VIII

WITH THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER

I had left the Belgian army late in the autumn of 1914, just at the
close of that series of heroic actions which began at Liege and ended
on the Yser, so that my return, two years later, was in the nature of
a home-coming. But it was a home-coming deeply tinged with sadness,
for many, oh, so many of the gallant fellows with whom I had
campaigned in those stirring days before the trench robbed war of its
picturesqueness, were in German prisons or lay in unmarked and
forgotten graves before Namur and Antwerp and Termonde. The Belgians
that I had left were dirty, dog-tired, and disheartened. They were
short of food, short of ammunition, short of everything save valor.
The picturesque but impractical uniforms they wore--the green tunics
and cherry-colored breeches of the Guides, the towering bearskins of
the gendarmes, the shiny leather hats of the Carabinieri--were foul
with blood and dirt.

As my car rolled across a canal bridge into that tiny triangle which
is all that remains of free Belgium, a trim-looking trooper in khaki
stepped from a sentry-box and, holding up an imperative hand,
demanded to see my papers. Had it not been for the rosette of
red-yellow-and-black enamel on his cap, and the colored regimental
facings on his collar, I should have taken him for a British soldier.

"To what regiment do you belong?" I asked him.

"The First Guides, monsieur," he replied, returning my papers and
saluting.

The First Guides! What memories the name brought back. How well I
remembered the last time that I had seen those gallant riders, the
pick and flower of the Belgian army, their comic-opera uniforms yellow
with dust, crouching behind the hedgerows on the road to Alost, a
pitifully thin screen of them, holding off the Germans while their
weary comrades tramped northward into Flanders on the great retreat.
It was not easy to make myself believe that this smart, khaki-clad
trooper before me belonged to that homeless band of rear-guard
fighters who had marked with their dead the line of retreat from the
Meuse to the Yser.

It was my first glimpse of the reconstituted Belgian army. In the two
years that i