There wasn’t much sleep for any one that night.  The bombardment kept on until morning, lulled slightly, as if the enemy might be taking breakfast, then it continued into the, next day.  And now the city—­a busy city of nearly four hundred thousand people—­emptied itself in earnest.  Citizens and soldiers, field-guns, motor-trucks, wheelbarrows, dog-carts, hay-ricks, baby-carriages, droves of people on foot, all flowing down to the Scheldt, the ferries, and the bridge.  They poured into coal barges, filling the yawning black holes as Africans used to fill slave-ships, into launches and tugs, and along the roads leading down the river and southwestward toward Ostend.

One thought with a shudder of what would happen if the Germans dropped a few of their shells into that helpless mob, and it is only fair to remember that they did not, although retreating Belgian soldiers were a part of it, and one of the German aeroplanes, a mere speck against the blue, was looking calmly down overhead.  Nor did they touch the cathedral, and their agreement not to shell any of the buildings previously pointed out on a map delivered to them through the American Legation seemed to be observed.

Down through that mass of fugitives pushed a London motor-bus ambulance with several wounded British soldiers, one of them sitting upright, supporting with his right hand a left arm, the biceps, bound in a blood-soaked tourniquet, half torn away.  They had come in from the trenches, where their comrades were now waiting, with their helpless little rifles, for an enemy, miles away, who lay back at his ease and pounded them with his big guns.  I asked them how things were going, and they said not very well.  They could only wait until the German aeroplanes had given the range and the trenches became too hot, then fall back, dig themselves in, and play the same game over again.

Following them was a hospital-service motor-car, driven by a Belgian soldier and in charge of a young British officer.  It was his present duty to motor from trench to trench across the zone of fire, with the London bus trailing behind, and pick up wounded.  It wasn’t a particularly pleasant job, he said, jerking his head toward the distant firing, and frankly he wasn’t keen about it.  We talked for some time, every one talked to every one else in Antwerp that morning, and when he started out again I asked him to give me a lift to the edge of town.

Quickly we raced through the Place de Meir and the deserted streets of the politer part of Antwerp, where, the night before, most of the shells had fallen.  We went crackling over broken glass, past gaping cornices and holes in the pavement, five feet across and three feet deep, and once passed a house quietly burning away with none to so much as watch the fire.  The city wall, along which are the first line of forts, drew near, then the tunnel passing under it, and we went through without pausing and on down the road