moment there is a peaceful village with war twenty, fifty miles away.
The next minute hell breaks loose. Houses are destroyed. Sleeping
children die in their cradles. The streets echo and reëcho with the
din of destruction. The reply of the anti-aircraft guns is feeble, and
at night futile. There is no bustle of escape. The streets are empty
and dead, and in each house people, family groups, noncombatants, folk
who ask only the right to work and love and live, sit and wait with
blanched faces.

More explosions, nearer still. They were trying for the _Mairie_,
which was round the corner.

In the corridor outside the dining room a candle was lighted, and the
English officer who had reassured me earlier in the evening came in.

"You need not be alarmed," he said cheerfully. "It is really nothing.
But out in the corridor it is quite safe and not so lonely."

I went out. Two or three Belgian officers were there, gathered round a
table on which was a candle stuck in a glass. They were having their
after-dinner liqueurs and talking of many things. No one spoke of what
was happening outside. I was given a corner, as being out of the
draft.

The explosion were incessant now. With each one the landlady
downstairs screamed. As they came closer, cries and French adjectives
came up the staircase beside me in a nerve-destroying staccato of
terror.

At nine-thirty, when the aëroplanes had been overhead for