“You have now,” said one of us, seeking to brighten the growing embarrassment of the situation with a small jape.

Perhaps he did not understand.  Perhaps it was against the regulations for a colonel, in full caparison of sword and shoulder straps, to laugh at a joke from a dusty, wayworn, shabby stranger in a dented straw hat and a wrinkled Yankee-made coat.  At any rate this colonel did not laugh.

“You did quite right to report yourselves here and explain your purposes,” he continued gravely; “but it is impossible that you may proceed.  To-morrow morning we shall give you escort and transportation back to Brussels.  I anticipate”—­here he glanced quizzically at our aged mare, drooping knee-sprung between the shafts of the lopsided dogcart—­“I anticipate that you will return more speedily than you arrived.

“You will kindly report to me here in the morning at eleven.  Meantime remember, gentlemen, that you are not prisoners—­by no means, not.  You may consider yourselves for the time being as—­shall we say?—­guests of the German Army, temporarily detained.  You are at perfect liberty to come and go—­only I should advise you not to go too far, because if you should try to leave town tonight our soldiers would certainly shoot you quite dead.  It is not agreeable to be shot; and, besides, your great Government might object.  So, then, I shall have the pleasure of seeing you in the morning, shall I not?  Yes?  Good night, gentlemen!”

He clicked his neat heels so that his spurs jangled, and bowed us out into the dark.  The question of securing lodgings loomed large and imminent before us.  Officers filled the few small inns and hotels; soldiers, as we could see, were quartered thickly in all the houses in sight; and already the inhabitants were locking their doors and dousing their lights in accordance with an order from a source that was not to be disobeyed.  Nine out of ten houses about the square were now but black oblongs rising against the gray sky.  We had nowhere to go; and yet if we did not go somewhere, and that pretty soon, the patrols would undoubtedly take unpleasant cognizance of our presence.  Besides, the searching chill of a Belgian night was making us stiff.

Scouting up a narrow winding alley, one of the party who spoke German found a courtyard behind a schoolhouse called imposingly L’Ecole Moyenne de Beaumont, where he obtained permission from a German sergeant to stable our mare for the night in the aristocratic companionship of a troop of officers’ horses.  Through another streak of luck we preempted a room in the schoolhouse and held it against all comers by right of squatter sovereignty.  There my friends and I slept on the stone floor, with a scanty amount of hay under us for a bed and our coats for coverlets.  But before we slept we dined.

We dined on hard-boiled eggs and stale cheese—­which we had saved from midday—­in a big, bare study hall half full of lancers.  They gave us rye bread and some of the Prince de Caraman-Chimay’s wine to go with the provender we had brought, and they made room for us at the long benches that ran lengthwise of the room.  Afterward one of them—­a master musician, for all his soiled gray uniform and grimed fingers—­played a piano that was in the corner, while all the rest sang.