through fear for their own skins, would tell us nothing--was that at
Maubeuge the onward-pressing Germans had caught up with the withdrawing
columns of the Allies and were trying to bottle the stubborn English
rear guard. For once the gossip of the privates and the noncommissioned
officers proved to be true. There was fighting that day near Maubeuge--
hard fighting and plenty of it; but, though we got within five miles of
it, and heard the guns and saw the smoke from them, we were destined not
to get there.

Strung out, with the bicycles in front, we went down the straight white
road that ran toward the frontier. After an hour or two of steady going
we began to notice signs of the retreat that had trailed through this
section forty-eight hours before. We picked up a torn shoulder strap,
evidently of French workmanship, which had 13 embroidered on it in faded
red tape; and we found, behind the trunk of a tree, a knapsack, new but
empty, which was too light to have been part of a German soldier's
equipment.

We thought it was French; but now I think it must have been Belgian,
because, as we subsequently discovered, a few scattering detachments of
the Belgian foot soldiers who fled from Brussels on the eve of the
occupation--disappearing so completely and so magically--made their way
westward and southward to the French lines, toward Mons, and enrolled
with the Allies in the last desperate effort to dam off and stem back
the German torrent.

Also, in a hedge, was a pair of new shoes, with their mouths gaping open
and their latchets hanging down like tongues, as though hungering for
feet to go into them. But not a shred or scrap of German belongings--
barring only the empty bottles--did we see.