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.