Service was normal in the cafes. To the accompaniment of music
and clinking glasses the dress-suited waiter served me a five-
course lunch for two francs. It was uncanny to see this blaze of life
while the city sat under the shadow of a grave disaster. At any
moment the gray German tide might break out of Brussels and
pour its turbid flood of soldiers through these very streets. Even
now a Taube hovered in the sky, and from the skirmish-line an
occasional ambulance rumbled in with its crimsoned load.

I chanced into Gambrinus' cafe and was lost in the babbling sea of
French and Flemish. Above the melee of sounds, however, I
caught a gladdening bit of English. Turning about, I espied a little
group of men whose plain clothes stood out in contrast to the
colored uniforms of officers and soldiers crowded into the cafe.
Wearied of my efforts at conversing in a foreign tongue, I went
over and said: "Do you really speak English!" "Well, rather!"
answered the one who seemed to act as leader of the group. "We
are the only ones now and it will be scarcer still around here in a
few days." "Why!" I asked.

"Because Ghent will be in German hands." This brought an
emphatic denial from one of his confreres who insisted that the
Germans had already reached the end of their rope. A certain
correspondent, joining in the argument, came in for a deal of
banter for taking the war de luxe in a good hotel far from the front.

"What do you know about the war?" they twitted him. "You've
pumped all your best stories out of the refugees ten miles from the
front, after priming them with a glass of beer."