TO WAR IN A TAXICAB
In a taxicab we went to look for this war. There were four of us, not
counting the chauffeur, who did not count. It was a regular taxicab,
with a meter on it, and a little red metal flag which might be turned
up or turned down, depending on whether the cab was engaged or at
liberty; and he was a regular chauffeur.
We, the passengers, wore straw hats and light suits, and carried no
baggage. No one would ever have taken us for war correspondents out
looking for war. So we went; and, just when we were least expecting it,
we found that war. Perhaps it would be more exact to say it found us.
We were four days getting back to Brussels, still wearing our straw
hats, but without any taxicab. The fate of that taxicab is going to be
one of the unsolved mysteries of the German invasion of Belgium.
From the hour when the steamer St. Paul left New York, carrying
probably the most mixed assortment of passengers that traveled on a
single ship since Noah sailed the Ark, we on board expected hourly to
sight something that would make us spectators of actual hostilities.
The papers that morning were full of rumors of an engagement between
English ships and German ships somewhere off the New England coast.
Daily we searched the empty seas until our eyes hurt us; but, except
that we had one ship's concert and one brisk gale, and that just before
dusk on the fifth day out, the weather being then gray and misty, we
saw wallowing along, hull down on the starboard bow, an English cruiser
with two funnels, nothing happened at all. Even when we landed at
Liverpool nothing happened to suggest that we had reached a country
actively engaged in war, unless you would list the presence of a few
khaki-clad soldiers on the landing stage and the painful absence of
porters to handle our baggage as evidences of the same. I remember
seeing Her Grace the Duchess of Marlborough sitting hour after hour on
a baggage truck, waiting for her heavy luggage to come off the tardy
tender and up the languid chute into the big dusty dockhouse.
I remember, also, seeing women, with their hats flopping down in their
faces and their hair all streaming, dragging huge trunks across the
floor; and if all of us had not been in the same distressful fix we
could have appreciated the humor of the spectacle of a portly high
dignitary of the United States Medical Corps shoving a truck piled high
with his belongings, and shortly afterward, with the help of his own
wife, loading them on the roof of an infirm and wheezy taxicab.
From Liverpool across to London we traveled through a drowsy land
burdened with bumper crops of grain, and watched the big brown hares
skipping among the oat stacks; and late at night we came to London. In
London next day there were more troops about than common, and recruits
were drilling on the gravel walks back of Somerset House; and the
people generally moved with a certain sober restraint, as people do who
feel the weight of a heavy and an urgent responsibility. Otherwise the
London of wartime seemed the London of peacetime.
So within a day our small party, still seeking to slip into the wings
of the actual theater of events rather than to stay so far back behind
the scenes, was aboard a Channel ferryboat bound for Ostend, and having
for fellow travelers a few Englishmen, a tall blond princess of some
royal house of Northern Europe, and any number of Belgians going home
to enlist. In the Straits of Dover, an hour or so out from Folkestone,
we ran through a fleet of British warships guarding the narrow
roadstead between France and England; and a torpedo-boat destroyer
sidled up and took a look at us.
Just off Dunkirk a French scout ship talked with us by the language
of the whipping signal flags; but the ordinary Channel craft came and
went without hindrance or seeming fear, and again it was hard for us to
make ourselves believe that we had reached a zone where the physical,
tangible business of war went forward.
And Ostend and, after Ostend, the Belgian interior--those were
disappointments too; for at Ostend bathers disported on the long,
shining beach and children played about the sanded stretch. And, though
there were soldiers in sight, one always expects soldiers in European
countries. No one asked to see the passports we had brought with us,
and the customs officers gave our hand baggage the most perfunctory of
examinations. Hardly five minutes had elapsed after our landing before
we were steaming away on our train through a landscape which, to judge
by its appearance, might have known only peace, and naught but peace,
for a thousand placid years.
It is true we saw during that ride few able-bodied male adults, either
in the towns through which we rushed or in the country. There were
priests occasionally and old, infirm men or half-grown boys; but of men
in their prime the land had been drained to fill up the army of defense
then on the other side of Belgium--toward Germany--striving to hold
the invaders in check until the French and English might come up. The
yellow-ripe grain stood in the fields, heavy-headed and drooping with
seed. The russet pears and red apples bent the limbs of the fruit trees
almost to earth. Every visible inch of soil was under cultivation,
of the painfully intensive European sort; and there remained behind
to garner the crops only the peasant women and a few crippled, aged
grandsires. It was hard for us to convince ourselves that any event
out of the ordinary beset this country. No columns of troops passed
along the roads; no camps of tents lifted their peaked tops above the
hedges. In seventy-odd miles we encountered one small detachment of
soldiers--they were at a railroad station--and one Red Cross flag.
As for Brussels--why, Brussels at first glance was more like a city
making a fête than the capital of a nation making war. The flags
which were displayed everywhere; the crowds in the square before
the railroad station; the multitudes of boy scouts running about;
the uniforms of Belgian volunteers and regulars; the Garde Civique,
in their queer-looking costumes, with funny little derby hats, all
braid-trimmed--gave to the place a holiday air. After nightfall, when
the people of Brussels flocked to the sidewalk cafés and sat at little
round tables under awnings, drinking light drinks _à la Parisienne_,
this impression was heightened.
We dined in the open air ourselves, finding the prices for food and
drink to be both moderate and modest, and able to see nothing on
the surface which suggested that the life of these people had been
seriously disturbed. Two significant facts, however, did obtrude
themselves on us: Every minute or two, as we dined, a young girl or an
old gentleman would come to us, rattling a tin receptacle with a slot
in the top through which coins for the aid of the widows and orphans of
dead soldiers might be dropped; and when a little later we rode past
the royal palace we saw that it had been converted into a big hospital
for the wounded. That night, also, the government ran away to Antwerp;
but of this we knew nothing until the following morning.
Next day we heard tales: Uhlans had been seen almost in the suburbs;
three German spies, disguised as nuns, had been captured, tried,
convicted and were no longer with us; sentries on duty outside the
residence of the American Minister had fired at a German aëroplane
darting overhead; French troops were drawing in to the northward and
English soldiers were hurrying up from the south; trainloads of wounded
had been brought in under cover of the night and distributed among the
improvised hospitals; but, conceding these things to be true, we knew
of them only at second hand. By the evidence of what we ourselves saw
we were able to note few shifts in the superficial aspects of the city.
The Garde Civique seemed a trifle more numerous than it had been the
evening before; citizen volunteers, still in civilian garb, appeared
on the streets in awkward squads, carrying their guns and side arms
clumsily; and when, in Minister Brand Whitlock's car, we drove out
the beautiful Avenue Louise, we found soldiers building a breast-high
barricade across the head of the roadway where it entered the Bois;
also, they were weaving barbed-wire entanglements among the shade
trees. That was all.
And then, as though to offset these added suggestions of danger, we
saw children playing about quietly behind the piled sandbags, guarded
by plump Flemish nursemaids, and smart dogcarts constantly passed and
repassed us, filled with well-dressed women, and with flowers stuck in
the whip-sockets.
The nearer we got to this war the farther away from us it seemed
to be. We began to regard it as an elusive, silent, secretive,
hide-and-go-seek war, which would evade us always. We resolved to
pursue it into the country to the northward, from whence the Germans
were reported to be advancing, crushing back the outnumbered Belgians
as they came onward; but when we tried to secure a _laissez passer_ at
the gendarmerie, where until then an accredited correspondent might get
himself a _laissez passer_, we bumped into obstacles.
In an inclosed courtyard behind a big gray building, among loaded
wagons of supplies and munching cart horses, a kitchen table teetered
unsteadily on its legs on the rough cobbles. On the table were pens and
inkpots and coffee cups and beer bottles and beer glasses; and about it
sat certain unkempt men in resplendent but unbrushed costumes. Joseph
himself--the Joseph of the coat of many colors, no less--might have
devised the uniforms they wore. With that setting the picture they made
there in the courtyard was suggestive of stage scenes in plays of the
French Revolution.
They were polite enough, these piebald gentlemen, and they considered
our credentials with an air of mildly courteous interest; but they
would give us no passes. There had been an order. Who had issued it,
or why, was not for us to know. Going away from there, all downcast
and disappointed, we met a French cavalryman. He limped along in his
high dragoon boots, walking with the wide-legged gait of one who had
bestraddled leather for many hours and was sore from it. His horse,
which he led by the bridle, stumbled with weariness. A proud boy scout
was serving as his guide. He was the only soldier of any army, except
the Belgian, we had seen so far, and we halted our car and watched him
until he disappeared.
However, seeing one tired French dragoon was not seeing the war; and
we chafed that night at the delay which kept us penned as prisoners
in this handsome, outwardly quiet city. As we figured it we might be
housed up here for days or weeks and miss all the operations in the
field. When morning came, though, we discovered that the bars were down
again, and that certificates signed by the American consul would be
sufficient to carry us as far as the outlying suburbs at least.
Securing these precious papers, then, without delay we chartered a
rickety red taxicab for the day; and piling in we told the driver to
take us eastward as far as he could go before the outposts turned
us back. He took us, therefore, at a buzzing clip through the Bois,
along one flank of the magnificent Forest of Soigne, with its miles of
green-trunked beech trees, and by way of the royal park of Tervueren.
From the edge of the thickly settled district onward we passed
barricade after barricade--some built of newly felled trees; some
of street cars drawn across the road in double rows; some of street
cobbles chinked with turf; and some of barbed wire--all of them, even
to our inexperienced eyes, seeming but flimsy defenses to interpose
against a force of any size or determination. But the Belgians appeared
to set great store by these playthings.
Behind each of them was a mixed group of soldiers--Garde Civique,
gendarmes and burgher volunteers. These latter mainly carried shotguns
and wore floppy blue caps and long blue blouses, which buttoned down
their backs with big horn buttons, like little girls' pinafores. There
was, we learned, a touch of sentiment about the sudden appearance
of those most unsoldierly looking vestments. In the revolution of
1830, when the men of Brussels fought the Hollanders all morning,
stopped for dinner at midday and then fought again all afternoon, and
by alternately fighting and eating wore out the enemy and won their
national independence, they wore such caps and such back-buttoning
blouses. And so all night long women in the hospitals had sat up
cutting out and basting together the garments of glory for their
menfolk.
No one offered to turn us back, and only once or twice did a sentry
insist on looking at our passes. In the light of fuller experiences
I know now that when a city is about to fall into an enemy's hands
the authorities relax their vigilance and freely permit noncombatants
to depart therefrom, presumably on the assumption that the fewer
individuals there are in the place when the conqueror does come the
fewer the problems of caring for the resident population will be. But
we did not know this mighty significant fact; and, suspecting nothing,
the four innocents drove blithely on until the city lay behind us and
the country lay before us, brooding in the bright sunlight and all
empty and peaceful, except for thin scattering detachments of gayly
clad Belgian infantrymen through which we passed.
Once or twice tired, dirty stragglers, lying at the roadside, raised a
cheer as they recognized the small American flag that fluttered from
our taxi's door; and once we gave a lift to a Belgian bicycle courier,
who had grown too leg-weary to pedal his machine another inch. He
was the color of the dust through which he had ridden, and his face
under its dirt mask was thin and drawn with fatigue; but his racial
enthusiasm endured, and when we dropped him he insisted on shaking
hands with all of us, and offering us a drink out of a very warm and
very grimy bottle of something or other.
All of a sudden, rounding a bend, we came on a little valley with
one of the infrequent Belgian brooks bisecting it; and this whole
valley was full of soldiers. There must have been ten thousand of
them--cavalry, foot, artillery, baggage trains, and all. Quite near us
was ranged a battery of small rapid-fire guns; and the big rawboned
dogs that had hauled them there were lying under the wicked-looking
little pieces. We had heard a lot about the dog-drawn guns of the
Belgians, but these were the first of them we had seen.
Lines of cavalrymen were skirting crosswise over the low hill at the
other side of the valley, and against the sky line the figures of
horses and men stood out clear and fine. It all seemed a splendid
martial sight; but afterward, comparing this force with the army into
whose front we were to blunder unwittingly, we thought of it as a
little handful of toy soldiers playing at war. We never heard what
became of those Belgians. Presumably at the advance of the Germans
coming down on them countlessly, like an Old Testament locust plague,
they fell back and, going round Brussels, went northward toward
Antwerp, to join the main body of their own troops. Or they may have
reached the lines of the Allies, to the south and westward, toward the
French frontier. One guess would be as good as the other.
One of the puzzling things about the early mid-August stages of the war
was the almost instantaneous rapidity with which the Belgian army, as
an army, disintegrated and vanished. To-day it was here, giving a good
account of itself against tremendous odds, spending itself in driblets
to give the Allies a chance to get up. To-morrow it was utterly gone.
Still without being halted or delayed we went briskly on. We had
topped the next rise commanding the next valley, and--except for a
few stragglers and some skirmishers--the Belgians were quite out of
sight, when our driver stopped with an abruptness which piled his
four passengers in a heap and pointed off to the northwest, a queer,
startled, frightened look on his broad Flemish face. There was smoke
there along the horizon--much smoke, both white and dark; and, even as
the throb of the motor died away to a purr, the sound of big guns came
to us in a faint rumbling, borne from a long way off by the breeze.
It was the first time any one of us, except McCutcheon, had ever heard
a gun fired in battle; and it was the first intimation to any of us
that the Germans were so near. Barring only venturesome mounted scouts
we had supposed the German columns were many kilometers away. A brush
between skirmishers was the best we had counted on seeing.
Right here we parted from our taxi driver. He made it plain to us,
partly by words and partly by signs, that he personally was not
looking for any war. Plainly he was one who specialized in peace and
the pursuits of peace. Not even the proffered bribe of a doubled or a
tripled fare availed to move him one rod toward those smoke clouds. He
turned his car round so that it faced toward Brussels, and there he
agreed to stay, caring for our light overcoats, until we should return
to him. I wonder how long he really did stay.
And I have wondered, in idle moments since, what he did with our
overcoats. Maybe he fled with the automobile containing two English
moving-picture operators which passed us at that moment, and from which
floated back a shouted warning that the Germans were coming. Maybe he
stayed too long and was gobbled up--but I doubt it. He had an instinct
for safety.
As we went forward afoot the sound of the firing grew clearer and more
distinct. We could now hear quite plainly the grunting belch of the
big pieces and, in between, the chattering voice of rapid-fire guns.
Long-extended, stammering, staccato sounds, which we took to mean rifle
firing, came to our ears also. Among ourselves we decided that the
white smoke came from the guns and the black from burning buildings or
hay ricks. Also we agreed that the fighting was going on beyond the
spires and chimneys of a village on the crest of the hill immediately
ahead of us. We could make out a white church and, on past it, lines of
gray stone cottages.
In these deductions we were partly right and partly wrong; we had hit
on the approximate direction of the fighting, but it was not a village
that lay before us. What we saw was an outlying section of the city of
Louvain, a place of fifty thousand inhabitants, destined within ten
days to be turned into a waste of sacked ruins.
There were fields of tall, rank winter cabbages on each side of the
road, and among the big green leaves we saw bright red dots. We had
to look a second time before we realized that these dots were not the
blooms of the wild red poppies that are so abundant in Belgium, but
the red-tipped caps of Belgian soldiers squatting in the cover of the
plants. None of them looked toward us; all of them looked toward those
mounting walls of smoke.
Now, too, we became aware of something else--aware of a procession
that advanced toward us. It was the head of a two-mile long line of
refugees, fleeing from destroyed or threatened districts on beyond. At
first, in scattered, straggling groups, and then in solid columns, they
passed us unendingly, we going one way, they going the other. Mainly
they were afoot, though now and then a farm wagon would bulk above
the weaving ranks; and it would be loaded with bedding and furniture
and packed to overflowing with old women and babies. One wagon lacked
horses to draw it, and six men pulled in front while two men pushed
at the back to propel it. Some of the fleeing multitude looked like
townspeople, but the majority plainly were peasants. And of these
latter at least half wore wooden shoes so that the sound of their feet
on the cobbled roadbed made a clattering chorus that at times almost
drowned out the hiccuping voices of the guns behind them.
Occasionally there would be a man shoving a barrow, with a baby and
possibly a muddle of bedclothing in the barrow together. Every woman
carried a burden of some sort, which might be a pack tied in a cloth or
a cheap valise stuffed to bursting, or a baby--though generally it was
a baby; and nearly every man, in addition to his load of belongings,
had an umbrella under his arm. In this rainy land the carrying of
umbrellas is a habit not easily shaken off; and, besides, most of these
people had slept out at least one night and would probably sleep out
another, and an umbrella makes a sort of shelter if you have no better.
I figure I saw a thousand umbrellas if I saw one, and the sight of them
gave a strangely incongruous touch to the thing.
Yes, it gave a grotesque touch to it. The spectacle inclined one
to laugh, almost making one forget for a moment that here in this
spectacle one beheld the misery of war made concrete; that in the lorn
state of these poor folks its effects were focused and made vivid;
that, while in some way it touched every living creature on the globe,
here it touched them directly.
All the children, except the sick ones and the very young ones, walked,
and most of them carried small bundles too. I saw one little girl, who
was perhaps six years old, with a heavy wooden clock in her arms. The
legs of the children wavered under them sometimes from weakness or
maybe weariness, but I did not hear a single child whimper, or see a
single woman who wept, or hear a single man speak above a half whisper.
They drifted on by us, silent all, except for the sound of feet and
wheels; and, as I read the looks on their faces, those faces expressed
no emotion except a certain numbed, resigned, bovine bewilderment. Far
back in the line we met two cripples, hobbling along side by side as
though for company; and still farther back a Belgian soldier came, like
a rear guard, with his gun swung over his back and his sweaty black
hair hanging down in his eyes.
In an undertone he was apparently explaining something to a little
bow-legged man in black, with spectacles, who trudged along in his
company. He was the lone soldier we saw among the refugees--all the
others were civilians.
Only one man in all the line hailed us. Speaking so low that we could
scarcely catch his words, he said in broken English:
"M'sieurs, the French are in Brussels, are they not?"
"No," we told him.
"The British, then--they must be there by now?"
"No; the British aren't there, either."
He shook his head, as though puzzled, and started on.
"How far away are the Germans?" we asked him.
He shook his head again.
"I cannot say," he answered; "but I think they must be close behind us.
I had a brother in the army at Liège," he added, apparently apropos of
nothing. And then he went on, still shaking his head and with both arms
tightly clasped round a big bundle done up in cloth, which he held
against his breast.
Very suddenly the procession broke off, as though it had been chopped
in two; and almost immediately after that the road turned into a street
and we were between solid lines of small cottages, surrounded on all
sides by people who fluttered about with the distracted aimlessness
of agitated barnyard fowls. They babbled among themselves, paying
small heed to us. An automobile tore through the street with its horn
blaring, and raced by us, going toward Brussels at forty miles an hour.
A well-dressed man in the front seat yelled out something to us as he
whizzed past, but the words were swallowed up in the roaring of his
engine.
Of our party only one spoke French, and he spoke it indifferently. We
sought, therefore, to find some one who understood English. In a minute
we saw the black robe of a priest; and here, through the crowd, calm
and dignified where all others were fairly befuddled with excitement,
he came--a short man with a fuzzy red beard and a bright blue eye.
We hailed him, and the man who spoke a little French explained our
case. At once he turned about and took us into a side street; and even
in their present state the men and women who met us remembered their
manners and pulled off their hats and bowed before him.
At a door let into a high stone wall he stopped and rang a bell. A
brother in a brown robe came and unbarred the gate for us, and our
guide led us under an arched alley and out again into the open; and
behold we were in another world from the little world of panic that
we had just left. There was a high-walled inclosure with a neglected
tennis court in the middle, and pear and plum trees burdened with
fruit; and at the far end, beneath a little arbor of vines, four
priests were sitting together.
At sight of us they rose and came to us, and shook hands all round.
Almost before we knew it we were in a bare little room behind the
ancient Church of Saint Jacques, and one of the fathers was showing us
a map in order that we might better understand the lay of the land;
and another was uncorking a bottle of good red wine, which he brought
up from the cellar, with a halo of mold on the cork and a mantle of
cobwebs on its sloping shoulders.
It seemed that the Rev. Dom. Marie-Joseph Montaigne--I give the
name that was on his card--could speak a little English. He told us
haltingly that the smoke we had seen came from a scene of fighting
somewhere to the eastward of Louvain. He understood that the Prussians
were quite near, but he had seen none himself and did not expect they
would enter the town before nightfall. As for the firing, that appeared
to have ceased. And, sure enough, when we listened we could no longer
catch the sound of the big guns. Nor did we hear them again during
that day. Over his glass the priest spoke in his faulty English,
stopping often to feel for a word; and when he had finished his face
worked and quivered with the emotion he felt.
"This war--it is a most terrible thing that it should come on Belgium,
eh? Our little country had no quarrel with any great country. We
desired only that we should be left alone.
"Our people here--they are not bad people. I tell you they are very
good people. All the week they work and work, and on Sunday they go to
church; and then maybe they take a little walk.
"You Americans now--you come from a very great country. Surely, if the
worst should come America will not let our country perish from off the
earth, eh! Is not that so?"
Fifteen minutes later we were out again facing the dusty little square
of Saint Jacques; and now of a sudden peace seemed to have fallen on
the place. The wagons of a little traveling circus were ranged in the
middle of the square with no one about to guard them; and across the
way was a small tavern.
All together we discovered we were hungry. We had had bread and cheese
and coffee, and were lighting some very bad native cigars, when the
landlord burst in on us, saying in a quavering voice that some one
passing had told him a squad of seven German troopers had been seen in
the next street but one. He made a gesture as though to invoke the
mercy of Heaven on us all, and ran out again, casting a carpet slipper
in his flight and leaving it behind him on the floor.
So we followed, not in the least believing that any Germans had really
been sighted; but in the street we saw a group of perhaps fifty Belgian
soldiers running up a narrow sideway, trailing their gun butts behind
them on the stones. We figured they were hurrying forward to the other
side of town to help hold back the enemy.
A minute later seven or eight more soldiers crossed the road ahead of
us and darted up an alley with the air and haste of men desirous of
being speedily out of sight. We had gone perhaps fifty feet beyond
the mouth of this alley when two men, one on horseback and one on a
bicycle, rode slowly and sedately out of another alley, parallel to the
first one, and swung about with their backs to us.
I imagine we had watched the newcomers for probably fifty seconds
before it dawned on any of us that they wore gray helmets and gray
coats, and carried arms--and were Germans. Precisely at that moment
they both turned so that they faced us; and the man on horseback lifted
a carbine from a holster and half swung it in our direction.
Realization came to us that here we were, pocketed. There were armed
Belgians in an alley behind us and armed Germans in the street before
us; and we were nicely in between. If shooting started the enemies
might miss each other, but they could not very well miss us. Two of our
party found a courtyard and ran through it. The third pressed close up
against a house front and I made for the half-open door of a shop.
Just as I reached it a woman on the inside slammed it in my face and
locked it. I never expect to see her again; but that does not mean that
I ever expect to forgive her. The next door stood open, and from within
its shelter I faced about to watch for what might befall. Nothing
befell except that the Germans rode slowly past me, both vigilantly
keen in poise and look, both with weapons unshipped.
I got an especially good view of the cavalryman. He was a tall, lean,
blond young man, with a little yellow mustache and high cheek-bones
like an Indian's; and he was sunburned until he was almost as red as
an Indian. The sight of that limping French dragoon the day before had
made me think of a picture by Meissonier or Detaille, but this German
put me in mind of one of Frederic Remington's paintings. Change his
costume a bit, and substitute a slouch hat for his flat-topped lancer's
cap, and he might have cantered bodily out of one of Remington's
canvases.
He rode past me--he and his comrade on the wheel--and in an instant
they were gone into another street, and the people who had scurried to
cover at their coming were out again behind them, with craned necks and
startled faces.
Our group reassembled itself somehow and followed after those two
Germans who could jog along so serenely through a hostile town. We did
not crowd them--our health forbade that--but we now desired above all
things to get back to our taxicab, two miles or more away, before our
line of retreat should be cut off. But we had tarried too long at our
bread and cheese.
When we came to where the street leading to the Square of Saint Jacques
joined the street that led in turn to the Brussels road, all the people
there were crouching in their doorways as quiet as so many mice, all
looking in the direction in which we hoped to go, all pointing with
their hands. No one spoke, but the scuffle of wooden-shod feet on
the flags made a sliding, slithering sound, which some-way carried a
message of warning more forcible than any shouted word or sudden shriek.
We looked where their fingers aimed, and, as we looked, a hundred
feet away through a cloud of dust a company of German foot soldiers
swung across an open grassplot, where a little triangular park was,
and straightened out down the road to Brussels, singing snatches of a
German marching song as they went.
And behind them came trim officers on handsome, high-headed horses, and
more infantry; then a bicycle squad; then cavalry, and then a light
battery, bumping along over the rutted stones, with white dust blowing
back from under its wheels in scrolls and pennons.
Then a troop of Uhlans came, with nodding lances, following close
behind the guns; and at sight of them a few men and women, clustered at
the door of a little wine shop calling itself the Belgian Lion, began
to hiss and mutter, for among these people, as we knew already, the
Uhlans had a hard name.
At that a noncommissioned officer--a big man with a neck on him like
a bison and a red, broad, menacing face--turned in his saddle and
dropped the muzzle of his black automatic on them. They sucked their
hisses back down their frightened gullets so swiftly that the exertion
well-nigh choked them, and shrank flat against the wall; and, for all
the sound that came from them until he had holstered his hardware and
trotted on, they might have been dead men and women.
Just then, from perhaps half a mile on ahead, a sharp clatter of rifle
fire sounded--pop! pop! pop!--and then a rattling volley. We saw the
Uhlans snatch out their carbines and gallop forward past the battery
into the dust curtain. And as it swallowed them up we, who had come in
a taxicab looking for the war, knew that we had found it; and knew,
too, that our chances of ever seeing that taxicab again were most
exceeding small.
We had one hope--that this might merely be a reconnoissance in force,
and that when it turned back or turned aside we might yet slip through
and make for Brussels afoot. But it was no reconnoissance--it was
Germany up and moving. We stayed in Louvain three days, and for three
days we watched the streaming past of the biggest army we had ever
seen, and the biggest army beleaguered Belgium had ever seen, and one
of the biggest, most perfect armies the world has ever seen. We watched
the gray-clad columns pass until the mind grew numb at the prospect
of computing their number. To think of trying to count them was like
trying to count the leaves on a tree or the pebbles on a path.
They came and came, and kept on coming, and their iron-shod feet
flailed the earth to powder, and there was no end to them.