Here was a sombre dining-room with decanters and glasses, bedrooms with satin down quilts spread over the foot of the bed, and adjoining one of them a dressing-room with pomades and perfumes and rows of boots just as its owner had left it.  Who he might be, why we should be here, how our mysterious, conductor—­who knew no one in Villers-Cotteret and had but landed there himself that night—­had arranged this occupation, was beyond finding out.  At the moment, with military motor-trucks rumbling past outside, soldiers coming and going in the court and tramping about in the room overhead—­an extension of the adjoining house—­one scarcely thought of trying to find out.  One merely accepted it, enchained by that uplifted finger and “Leave it to me!” For a time we talked under the dining-room light, with doors bolted and wooden shutters on street and courtyard closed, as if we were conspirators in Russian melodrama, and then we slept.

The Germans were evidently much nearer than Paris had supposed, and we should not have been greatly surprised to find them in the streets next morning.  It was an Algerian horseman, however, muffled up in his dingy white and looking rather chilly, who was riding past the window as I first looked out.

We went to the Mairie—­not the grandfatherly old mayor this time, but a sharp-eyed special commissioner of police.

“After all,” said he, when we had put our case, “you want to get as near the front as possible.”

True, I answered, we did.

“Well,” he said, with a gesture at once final and wholly French, “you are already farther than that.  You are inside the lines.”  He crossed out the safe-conduct and on the laissez-passer wrote:  “Good for immediate return to Paris,” and carefully set down the date.  Half an hour later we were well on the road to Crepy, with the thunder which had drawn us hither rolling fainter and fainter in the north.

Chapter IV

The Fall Of Antwerp

The storm which was to burst over Antwerp the following night was gathering fast when we arrived on Tuesday morning.  Army motor-trucks loaded with dismantled aeroplanes, and the less essential impedimenta screamed through the streets bound away from, not toward, the front.  The Queen, that afternoon, was seen in the Hotel St. Antoine receiving the good-bys of various friends.  Consuls suddenly locked their doors and fled.  And the cannon rumbling along the eastern horizon as they had rumbled, nearer and nearer, for a fortnight, were now beyond the outer line of forts and within striking distance of the town.  That night, an hour or two after midnight, in my hotel by the water-front, I awoke to the steady clatter of hoofs on cobblestones and the rumble of wheels.  I went to the window, on the narrow side street, black as all streets had been in Antwerp since the night that the Zeppelin threw its first bombs, and