A correspondent describing the fighting before Malines says:
“I could see dark blue masses of Belgian infantry falling back, cool as
on a winter’s morning. Through a mistake, two battalions of carbineers
did not receive the order to retire and were in imminent danger of
destruction. To reach them a messenger would have had to traverse a mile
of open road swept by shrieking shrapnel. A Colonel summoned a gendarme
and gave him the orders and he set spurs to his horse and tore down the
road, an archaic figure in towering bearskin. It was a ride into the
jaws of death.
“He saved his troops, but as they fell back the German gunners got the
range and dropped shell upon shell into the running column. Road and
fields were dotted with corpses in Belgian blue.
“At noon the Belgians and Germans were in places only fifty yards apart,
and the rattle of musketry sounded like a boy drawing a stick along the
palings of a picket fence. The railway embankment from which I viewed
the battle was fairly carpeted with corpses of infantrymen killed
yesterday. I saw peasants throw twelve into one grave.”