later learned, went to the American Consulate, where they stayed
during the German entry.

For a moment I see-sawed up and down the river bank, remembering
I had left my handbag at the Queen's, but, infinitely more important,
that my knapsack with money belt and diary were in the keeping of a
peripatetic acquaintance somewhere along the crowded piers
downstream. Without that gold, the thousands of miles to New York
seemed doubly long. When I at last got back to the barge office a
dock-hand pointed to a bench in the corner; there to my intense relief
lay the knapsack, where my kind English intelligence officer had left it.

A little later I managed to clamber on a river barge laden nearly
to the sinking point with Antwerp's peaceful burghers and their
dumb-looking women and children. Slowly--very slowly--we steamed out
of the haze of powder and oil-laden smoke, through long lines of
gunboats and a flotilla of drifting scows packed to the gunwales like
our own, and past Fort St. Philippe, whose garrison were at that
moment heaving tons of powder into the river.

A few miles farther downstream they landed us on the northern bank
of the Scheldt near the little town of Liefkenshack. Here I began a few
miles of walking, occasionally varied by ox-cart locomotion.

I was traveling with nothing but a knapsack (my suitcase had to be
abandoned) and therefore moving faster than the crowd. At one
point, for the sake of company, I joined a group and took a turn at
shoving the family wheel-barrow. They poured out thanks in the
guttural Flemish tongue, then loaded me with bread and bits of
mouldy pie. When that was not accepted they feared for their