You get used to shells in time, it seems, and, deciding that you either are or are not going to be hit, dismiss responsibility and leave it all to fate.  I must admit that in my brief experience I was not able to arrive at this restful state.  We reached at last the city gate through which we had left Antwerp, and the motor came to a stop just at the inner edge of the passage under the fort, and I said good-by to the young Englishman ere he started back for the trenches again.

“Well,” he called after me as I started across the open space between the gate and the houses, a stone’s throw away, “you’ve had an experience anyway.”

I was just about to answer that undoubtedly I had when—­ “Tzee-ee-ee-er-r”—­a shell just cleared the ramparts over our heads and disappeared in the side of a house directly in front of us with a roar and a geyser of dust.  Neither the motor nor a guest’s duty now detained me, and, waving him good-by, I turned at right angles and made with true civilian speed for the shelter of a side street.

The shells all appeared to be coming from a southeast direction, and in the lee of houses on the south side of the street one was reasonably protected.  Keeping close to the house-fronts and dodging—­rather absurdly, no doubt—­into doorways when that wailing whistle came up from behind, I went zigzagging through the deserted city toward the hotel on the other side of town.

It was such a progress as one might make in some fantastic nightmare—­as the hero of some eerie piece of fiction about the Last Man in the World.  Street after street, with doors locked, shutters closed, sandbags, mattresses, or little heaps of earth piled over cellar windows; streets in which the only sound was that of one’s own feet, where the loneliness was made more lonely by some forgotten dog cringing against the closed door and barking nervously as one hurried past.

Here, where most of the shells had fallen the preceding night, nearly all the houses were empty.  Yet occasionally one caught sight of faces peering up from basement windows or of some stubborn householder standing in his southern doorway staring into space.  Once I passed a woman bound away from, instead of toward, the river with her big bundle; and once an open carriage with a family in it driving, with peculiarly Flemish composure, toward the quay, and as I hurried past the park, along the Avenue Van Dyck—­where fresh craters made by exploding shells had been dug in the turf—­the swans, still floating on the little lake, placidly dipped their white necks under water as if it were a quiet morning in May.

Now and then, as the shell’s wail swung over its long parabola, there came with the detonation, across the roofs, the rumble of falling masonry.  Once I passed a house quietly burning, and on the pavement were lopped-off trees.  The impartiality with which those far-off gunners distributed their attentions was disconcerting.  Peering down one of the up-and-down streets before crossing it, as if a shell were an automobile which you might see and dodge, you would shoot across and, turning into a cosey little side street, think to yourself that here at least they had not come, and then promptly see, squarely in front, another of those craters blown down through the Belgian blocks.