No, not exactly ordinary, though we ourselves went back to a comfortable hotel, for the big city of Lille, which had shown trolley-cars and a certain amount of animation earlier in the day, was now, at dusk, like a city of the dead.  The chambermaid shrugged her shoulders with something about a “punition” and, when asked why they were punished, said that some French prisoners had been brought through Lille a week or two before, and “naturally, the people shouted ‘Vive la France!’”

So the military governor, as we observed next morning in a proclamation posted on the blank wall across the street, informing the inhabitants that they “apparently did not, as yet, understand the seriousness of the situation,” ordered the city to pay a ’fine of five hundred thousand francs, and the citizens for two weeks to go within doors at sundown and not stir abroad before seven next morning.  Another poster warned people that two English aviators had been obliged to come down within the city, that they were still at large, and that any one who hid them or helped them escape would be punished with death, in addition to which the commune would be punished, too.

It was through black and silent streets, therefore, that our troop was led from the hotel in which we were lodged to one in which we dined.  Here everything was warm and light and cheerful enough.  Boyish lieutenants, with close-clipped heads after the German fashion, were telling each other their adventures, and here and there were older officers, who looked as if war had worn them a bit, and they had come here to forget for a moment over a bottle of champagne and the talk of some old friend.  The bread was black and hard, but the other food as usual in France, with wine plenty and cheap, and even some of the round-shelled, coppery oysters—­captured somehow, in spite of blockades and bombardments—­just up from Ostend.  It was bedtime when we emerged into the black streets again, to discover, with something like surprise, a sky full of stars and a pale new moon.

The rest of that civilian tour was very civil, indeed—­a sort of loop-the-loop of Belgium, with scarce a pause for breath.  You can imagine that cosmopolitan menagerie trooping next morning up the stone stairs of the castle of the Counts of Flanders in Ghent; at noon inspecting old lace in Bruges, and people coming home from church, the German guard changing, and the German band playing in the central square; at two o’clock lunching in one of the Ostend summer hotels, now full of German officers; at four pausing for a tantalizing moment in Middelkerk, while the German guns we were not allowed to see on the edge of the town were banging away at the British at Nieuport down the beach.  Next day Brussels—­out to Waterloo, in a cloud of dust—­the Congo Museum—­the King’s palace at Laaken, an old servitor with a beard like the tall King Leopold’s leading these vandals through it, and looking unutterable things—­a word with the civil governor, here—­a charming lunch at a barracks, there—­in short, a wild flight behind the man with the precious “Ausweis.”