Slowly next morning we crept up the Mersey, past a rusty tramp outward bound, crowded with khaki-clad men.  All the shipping was tooting as she swept by, and the men cheering and waving their hats at the land they might never come back to.  The regular landing-stages were taken by transports, tracks were held for troop-trains, and it was night before we got down to London, where crowds and buses stormed along as usual and barytone soloists in every music-hall were roaring defiance to the Kaiser and reiterating that Britannia ruled the waves.

Into the fog of war that covered the Continent an army of Englishmen had vanished, none knew where.  Out of it came rumors of victories, but as I crossed the Strand that morning on the way to Charing Cross, a newsboy pushed an extra into the cab window—­the Germans were entering Brussels!  Yet we fought into the boat train just as if thousands of people weren’t fighting to get away from the very places we hoped to reach.

There were two business men in our coupe going to France, an elderly Irish lady, an intransigent Unionist, with black goggles and umbrella, hoping to get through to her invalid brother in Diest, and a bright, sweet-faced little Englishwoman, in nurse’s dark-blue uniform and bonnet, bound for Antwerp, where her sister’s convent had been turned into a hospital.  She told about her little east-coast town as we crossed the sunny Channel; we trailed together into the great empty station at Ostend and, after an hour or two, found a few cars getting away, so to speak, of their own accord.

The low checker-board Belgian fields drifted quickly past; then Bruges, with a wounded soldier leaning on the shoulders of two companions; then Ghent.  There was a great crowd about the station—­men thrown out of work, men in flat cloth caps smoking pipes—­the town just recovering from the panic of that afternoon.  Flags had been hauled down—­the American consul was even asked if he didn’t think it would be safer to take down his flag—­some of the civic guards, fearing they would be shot on sight if the Germans saw them in uniform, tore off their coats and threw them in the canal.  Others threw in cartridges, thousands of gallons of gasolene were poured on the ground, and everybody watched the church tower for the red flag which would signal that firing was about to begin.  Le Bien Public of Ghent, however, protested stoutly because its mail edition had been refused at the station: 

It is not alone on the field of battle that one must be brave.  For us civilians real courage consists in doing our ordinary duty up to the last.  In Limburg postmen made their rounds while Prussians inundated the region, and peasants went right along with their sowing while down the road troops were falling back from the firing-line.