se bayonet and steel
helmet the moonbeams played fitfully. The darkness, the silence, the
suggestion of mystery, the ancient buildings with their leaded windows
and their carved facades, the steel-capped soldier, all made me feel
that I had stepped back five hundred years and was in the Furnes of
Inquisition times.

Our visit to Furnes had delayed us, so it was well into the evening
before we drew up before the hotel in La Panne, where a room had been
reserved for me by the Belgian _Etat-Major_. A seaside resort in
midwinter is always a peculiarly depressing place, and La Panne was no
exception. Though every hotel and villa in the place was chock-a-block
with staff-officers, with nurses, and with wounded, the street-lamps
were extinguished, not a ray of light escaped from the heavily
curtained windows, and, to add to the general sense of melancholy, a
cold, raw wind was blowing down from the North Sea and a drizzling
rain had set in. Though La Panne is within easy range of the German
batteries, which could eliminate it with neatness and despatch, it
has, singularly enough, never been bombarded, nor has it been
subjected to any serious air raids. This is the more surprising as all
the neighboring towns, as well as Dunkirk, a dozen miles beyond, have
been repeatedly shelled and bombed. The only explanation of this
phenomenon is that the Germans do not wish to kill the Queen of the
Belgians--she was Princess Elisabeth of Bavaria, remember--who lives
with the King at La Panne. It is possible that this may be the correct
explanation. I remember that when I was in Brussels during the early
days of the German occupation, there occurred a serious collision
between Prussian and Bavarian troops, the latter asserting that the
ill-mannered North German soldiery had shown some disrespect to a
portrait of "unsere Bayerische Prinzessin." Why the Germans should
have any consideration for the safety of the Queen after the fashion
in which they have treated her country and her people, only a Teutonic
intellect could understand. But the exemption which La Panne has thus
far enjoyed has not induced its inhabitants to omit any precautions.
An ample number of bomb-proofs and dugouts have been constructed, and
at night over all the windows are tacked thick black curtains. For
they know the Germans.

La Panne is the last town on the Belgian littoral before you reach the
French frontier and the last villa in the town is occupied by the King