door of a little wine shop calling itself the Belgian Lion, began to
hiss and mutter, for among these people, as we knew already, the Uhlans
had a hard name.

At that a noncommissioned officer--a big man with a neck on him like a
bison and a red, broad, menacing face--turned in his saddle and dropped
the muzzle of his black automatic on them. They sucked their hisses
back down their frightened gullets so swiftly that the exertion
well-nigh choked them, and shrank flat against the wall; and, for all
the sound that came from them until he had holstered his hardware and
trotted on, they might have been dead men and women.

Just then, from perhaps half a mile on ahead, a sharp clatter of rifle
fire sounded--pop! pop! pop!--and then a rattling volley. We saw the
Uhlans snatch out their carbines and gallop forward past the battery
into the dust curtain. And as it swallowed them up we, who had come in
a taxicab looking for the war, knew that we had found it; and knew, too,
that our chances of ever seeing that taxicab again were most exceeding
small.

We had one hope--that this might merely be a reconnaissance in force,
and that when it turned back or turned aside we might yet slip through
and make for Brussels afoot. But it was no reconnaissance--it was
Germany up and moving. We stayed in Louvain three days, and for three
days we watched the streaming past of the biggest army we had ever seen,
and the biggest army beleaguered Belgium had ever seen, and one of the
biggest, most perfect armies the world has ever seen. We watched the
gray-clad columns pass until the mind grew numb at the prospect of
computing their number. To think of trying to count them was like
trying to count the leaves on a tree or the pebbles on a path.