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.