Chapter I

The Germans Are Coming!

The Germans had already entered Brussels, their scouts were reported on the outskirts of Ghent; a little farther now, over behind the horizon wind-mills, and we might at any moment come on them.

For more than a fortnight we had been hurrying eastward, hearing, through cable despatches and wireless, the far-off thunder of that vast gray tide rumbling down to France.  The first news had come drifting in, four thousand miles away, to the little Wisconsin lake where I was fishing.  A strange herd of us, all drawn in one way or another by the war, had caught the first American ship, the old St. Paul, and, with decks crowded with trunks and mail-bags from half a dozen ships, steamed eastward on the all but empty ocean.  There were reservists hurrying to the colors, correspondents, men going to rescue wives and sisters.  Some were hit through their pocketbooks, some through their imaginations—­ like the young women hoping to be Red Cross nurses, or to help in some way, they weren’t sure how.

One had a steamer chair next mine—­a pale, Broadway tomboy sort of girl in a boyish sailor suit, who looked as if she needed sleep.  Without exactly being on the stage, she yet appeared to live on the fringe of it, and combined the slangy freedoms of a chorus girl with a certain quick wisdom and hard sense.  It was she who discovered a steerage passenger, on the Liverpool dock, who had lost his wife and was bringing his four little children back to Ireland from Chicago, and, while the other cabin passengers fumed over their luggage, took up a collection for him then and there.

“Listen here!” she would say, grabbing my arm.  “I want to tell you something.  I’m going to see this thing—­d’you know what I mean?—­for what it’ll do to me—­you know—­for its effect on my mind!  I didn’t say anything about it to anybody—­they’d only laugh at me—­d’you know what I mean?  They don’t think I’ve got any serious side to me.  Now, I don’t mind things—­I mean blood—­you know—­they don’t affect me, and I’ve read about nursing—­I’ve prepared for this!  Now, I don’t know how to go about it, but it seems to me that a woman who can—­you know—­go right with ’em—­jolly ’em along—­might be just what they’d want—­d’you know what I mean?”

One Russian had said good-by to a friend at the dock, he to try to get through this way, the other by the Pacific and Trans-Siberian.  The Englishman who shared my stateroom was an advertising man.  “I’ve got contracts worth fifty thousand pounds,” he said, “and I don’t suppose they’re worth the paper they’re written on.”  There were several Belgians and a quartet of young Frenchmen who played cards every night and gravely drank bottle after bottle of champagne to the glory of France.

Even the Balkans were with us, in the shape of a tall, soldier-like Bulgarian with a heavy mustache and the eyes of a kindly and highly intelligent hawk.  He was going back home—­“to fight?” “Yes, to fight.”