fields, another German, I thought, fired at me. I heard the bullet--it
buzzed like a hornet. So then I ran away and found my son here; and we
came across the country, following the canals and avoiding the roads,
which were filled with German troops. When we had gone a mile we looked
back and there was much thick smoke behind us--our houses were burning,
I suppose. So last night we slept in the woods and all day we walked,
and to-night reached here, bringing with us nothing except the clothes
on our backs.

"I have no wife--she has been dead for two years--but in Brussels I have
two daughters at school. Do you think I shall be permitted to enter
Brussels and seek for my two daughters? This morning they told me
Brussels was burning; but that I do not believe."

Then, also, he told us in quick, eager sentences, lowering his voice
while he spoke, that a priest, with his hands tied behind his back, had
been driven through a certain village ahead of the Germans, as a human
shield for them; and that, in still another village, two aged women had
been violated and murdered. Had he beheld these things with his own
eyes? No; he had been told of them.

Here I might add that this was our commonest experience in questioning
the refugees. Every one of them had a tale to tell of German atrocities
on noncombatants; but not once did we find an avowed eye-witness to such
things. Always our informant had heard of the torturing or the maiming
or the murdering, but never had he personally seen it. It had always
happened in another town--never in his own town.

We hoped to hire fresh vehicles of some sort in Nivelles. Indeed, a
half-drunken burgher who spoke fair English, and who, because he had