six-thirty that our party started back for Ghent.

As we crawled across on all fours the remaining beams cracked
beneath our feet and the Belgian engineers called on us to hurry.
"Oh, Tiber! Father Tiber," we thought as the last of us got across;
but unlike Horatius at the bridge, we were on the right side when
engineers applied the match to a small charge of dynamite, and the
beams crashed and the remaining planks of Termonde's bridge
writhed and twisted in the rushing waters.

Twenty-seven miles away, when we whirled through the gates of
Ghent later in the evening, we said "Au revoir" to Verhagen and the
mendicant priest, and went to our rooms. At midnight came a rap at
the door; my gray-haired alderman broke into the room, bursting with
the latest news, his eyes aflame with excitement.

"Revanche!" he exclaimed dramatically; "our enemies have paid for it
in blood!"

Sure enough, after a few preliminary shells--a sort of here-we-come
salvo--the head of the German column had entered, and a party of
staff officers, for purposes of reconnaissance, immediately mounted
the spire of the only remaining church. The officers of the Ninth
German Army Corps swept the landscape with their glasses, but the
level plains gave nothing to their sight. They saw only the ashes of
Termonde, the river, and the straight stretch of sandy roads and
stucco hamlets beyond.

They did not notice a valley of covered ground and a quarter-mile
stretch of trees and shrubbery, where three squads of Belgian field