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 reconnaissance 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 reconnaissance—­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.

Chapter 3

Sherman Said It

Undoubtedly Sherman said it.  This is my text and as illustration for my text I take the case of the town of La Buissiere.

The Germans took the town of La Buissiere after stiff fighting on August twenty-fourth.  I imagine that possibly there was a line in the dispatches telling of the fight there; but at that I doubt it, because on that same date a few miles away a real battle was raging between the English rear guard, under Sir John French, of the retreating army of the Allies, falling back into France, and the Germans.  Besides, in the sum total of this war the fall of La Buissiere hardly counts.  You might say it represents a semicolon in the story of the campaign.  Probably no future historian will give it so much as a paragraph.  In our own Civil War it would have been worth a page in the records anyway.  Here upward of three hundred men on both sides were killed and wounded, and as many more Frenchmen were captured; and the town, when taken, gave the winners the control of the river Sambre for many miles east and west.  Here, also, was a German charge with bayonets up a steep and well-defended height; and after that a hand-to-hand melee with the French defenders on the poll of the hill.