he took to London. When they were all aboard and started they found
there was no food except the hard ration biscuits of some Belgian
soldiers. They had portioned this out like shipwrecked people on a
raft.... The _mer_ had been _calme_; thank Heaven! All night they had
been pumping. He had helped with the pumps. But Mr. Van der Pant hoped
still to get a reckoning with the captain of that ship.

Mr. Van der Pant had had shots at various Zeppelins. When the Zeppelins
came to Antwerp everybody turned out on the roofs and shot at them. He
was contemptuous of Zeppelins. He made derisive gestures to express his
opinion of them. They could do nothing unless they came low, and if they
came low you could hit them. One which ventured down had been riddled;
it had had to drop all its bombs--luckily they fell in an open field--in
order to make its lame escape. It was all nonsense to say, as the
English papers did, that they took part in the final bombardment. Not a
Zeppelin.... So he talked, and the Britling family listened and
understood as much as they could, and replied and questioned in
Anglo-French. Here was a man who but a few days ago had been steering
his bicycle in the streets of Antwerp to avoid shell craters, pools of
blood, and the torn-off arms and shoulder-blades of women. He had seen
houses flaring, set afire by incendiary bombs, and once at a corner he
had been knocked off his bicycle by the pouff of a bursting shell....
Not only were these things in the same world with us, they were sitting
at our table.

He told one grim story of an invalid woman unable to move, lying in bed
in her _appartement_, and of how her husband went out on the balcony to
look at the Zeppelin. There was a great noise of shooting. Ever and
again he would put his head back into the room and tell her things, and
then after a time he was silent and looked in no more. She called to