and men stood out clear and fine. It all seemed a splendid martial
sight; but afterward, comparing this force with the army into whose
front we were to blunder unwittingly, we thought of it as a little
handful of toy soldiers playing at war. We never heard what became of
those Belgians. Presumably at the advance of the Germans coming down on
them countlessly, like an Old Testament locust plague, they fell back
and, going round Brussels, went northward toward Antwerp, to join the
main body of their own troops. Or they may have reached the lines of
the Allies, to the south and westward, toward the French frontier. One
guess would be as good as the other.

One of the puzzling things about the early mid-August stages of the war
was the almost instantaneous rapidity with which the Belgian army, as an
army, disintegrated and vanished. To-day it was here, giving a good
account of itself against tremendous odds, spending itself in driblets
to give the Allies a chance to get up. To-morrow it was utterly gone.

Still without being halted or delayed we went briskly on. We had topped
the next rise commanding the next valley, and--except for a few
stragglers and some skirmishers--the Belgians were quite out of sight,
when our driver stopped with an abruptness which piled his four
passengers in a heap and pointed off to the northwest, a queer,
startled, frightened look on his broad Flemish face. There was smoke
there along the horizon--much smoke, both white and dark; and, even as
the throb of the motor died away to a purr, the sound of big guns came
to us in a faint rumbling, borne from a long way off by the breeze.

It was the first time any one of us, except McCutcheon, had ever heard a
gun fired in battle; and it was the first intimation to any of us that
the Germans were so near. Barring only venturesome mounted scouts we