I felt like waking him up and saying sternly, “Look here, sonny, you’d better trot on home.  Your mother will be worried to death about you.”  I believe that four Belgian boy scouts gave up their lives in the service of their country.  Two were run down and killed by automobiles while on duty in Antwerp.  Two others were, I understand, shot by German troops near Brussels while attempting to carry dispatches through the lines.  One boy scout became so adept at this sort of work that he was regularly employed by the Government to carry messages through to its agents in Brussels.  His exploits would provide material for a boy’s book of adventure and, as a fitting conclusion, he was decorated by the King.

Anyone who went to Belgium with hard-and-fast ideas as to social distinctions quickly had them shattered.  The fact that a man wore a private’s uniform and sat behind the steering-wheel of your car and respectfully touched his cap when you gave him an order did not imply that he had always been a chauffeur.  Roos, who drove my car throughout my stay in Belgium, was the son of a Brussels millionaire, and at the beginning of hostilities had, as I think I have mentioned elsewhere, promptly presented his own powerful car to the Government.  The aristocracy of Belgium did not hang around the Ministry of War trying to obtain commissions.  They simply donned privates’ uniforms, and went into the firing-line.  As a result of this wholehearted patriotism the ranks of the Belgian army were filled with men who were members of the most exclusive clubs and were welcome guests in the highest social circles in Europe.  Almost any evening during the earlier part of the war a smooth-faced youth in the uniform of a private soldier could have been seen sitting amid a group of friends at dinner in the Hotel St. Antoine.  When an officer entered the room he stood up and clicked his heels together and saluted.  He was Prince Henri de Ligne, a member of one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Belgium and related to half the aristocracy of Europe.  He, poor boy, was destined never again to follow the hounds or to lead a cotillion; he was killed near Herenthals with young Count de Villemont and Philippe de Zualart while engaged in a daring raid in an armoured motorcar into the German lines for the purpose of blowing up a bridge.

When, upon the occupation of Brussels by the Germans, the capital of Belgium was hastily transferred to Antwerp, considerable difficulty was experienced in finding suitable accommodation for the staffs of the various ministries, which were housed in any buildings which happened to be available at the time.  Thus, the foreign relations of the nation were directed from a school-building in the Avenue du Commerce—­the Foreign Minister, Monsieur Davignon, using as his Cabinet the room formerly used for lectures on physiology, the walls of which were still covered with blackboards and anatomical charts.  The Grand Hotel was taken