Down through that mass of fugitives pushed a London motor-bus ambulance
with several wounded British soldiers, one of them sitting upright,
supporting with his right hand a left arm, the biceps, bound in a
blood-soaked tourniquet, half torn away. They had come in from the
trenches, where their comrades were now waiting, with their helpless
little rifles, for an enemy, miles away, who lay back at his ease and
pounded them with his big guns. I asked them how things were going, and
they said not very well. They could only wait until the German
aeroplanes had given the range and the trenches became too hot, then
fall back, dig themselves in, and play the same game over again.

Following them was a hospital-service motor-car, driven by a Belgian
soldier and in charge of a young British officer. It was his present
duty to motor from trench to trench across the zone of fire, with the
London bus trailing behind, and pick up wounded. It wasn't a
particularly pleasant job, he said, jerking his head toward the distant
firing, and frankly he wasn't keen about it. We talked for some time,
every one talked to every one else in Antwerp that morning, and when he
started out again I asked him to give me a lift to the edge of town.

Quickly we raced through the Place de Meir and the deserted streets of
the politer part of Antwerp, where, the night before, most of the shells
had fallen. We went crackling over broken glass, past gaping cornices
and holes in the pavement, five feet across and three feet deep, and
once passed a house quietly burning away with none to so much as watch
the fire. The city wall, along which are the first line of forts, drew
near, then the tunnel passing under it, and we went through without
pausing and on down the road to Malines. We were beyond the town now,
bowling rapidly out into the flat Belgian country, and, clinging there