"A Dendermonde," (to Termonde), answered Verhagen, sizing us up
as strangers, and using French instead of the local Flemish dialect.

"You know the road?"

"Yes, well," said Verhagen; and so, partly because of charity and
partly because we could have him as a useful guide, we took him into
the car.

As we sped through the level lanes of poplars, challenged as usual
by every Belgian regular or Garde Civique who could boast a uniform,
the smooth green meadows of Flanders with their trim hamlets of
stucco and tile seemed to deny the reports of savagery we had heard
the night before. We had been told, and we had read, of German
atrocities, and we had talked with survivors of Louvain. There was
pillage, burning, and looting in Louvain, we had agreed, but the
cruelty to women and children was the better part myth. And at all
events, there was a semblance of cause for that. Perhaps there had
been more resistance, more sniping by citizens than generally known,
and perhaps the German side had not been fully explained.

Then suddenly Termonde lay before us. The center of the bridge was
gone. Splintered timber sticking on end lay in the mud at the river's
side, along with iron beams torn by the charges of dynamite. The
current was choked with masses of steel and wood. We crawled
across some temporary beams reconstructed by Belgian engineers,
and entered the ruins with a handful of Termonde's citizens who had
come back for the first time to see what was left of their homes.

"I will take you to the center," said Verhagen. "That is where my