I witnessed an example of the cool daring of these mitrailleuse drivers during the fighting around Malines.  Standing on a railway embankment, I was watching the withdrawal under heavy fire of the last Belgian troops, when an armoured car, the lean muzzle of its machine-gun peering from its turret, tore past me at fifty miles an hour, spitting a murderous spray of lead as it bore down on the advancing Germans.  But when within a few hundred yards of the German line the car slackened speed and stopped.  Its petrol was exhausted.  Instantly one of the crew was out in the road and, under cover of the fire from the machine-gun, began to refill the tank.  Though bullets were kicking up spurts of dust in the road or ping-pinging against the steel turret he would not be hurried.  I, who was watching the scene through my field-glasses, was much more excited than he was.  Then, when the tank was filled, the car refused to back!  It was a big machine and the narrow road was bordered on either side by deep ditches, but by a miracle the driver was able—­ and just able—­to turn the car round.  Though by this time the German gunners had the range and shrapnel was bursting all about him, he was as cool as though he were turning a limousine in the width of Piccadilly.  As the car straightened out for its retreat, the Belgians gave the Germans a jeering screech from their horn, and a parting blast of lead from their machine-gun and went racing Antwerpwards.

It is, by the way, a curious and interesting fact that the machine-gun used in both the Belgian and Russian armoured cars, and which is one of the most effective weapons produced by the war, was repeatedly offered to the American War Department by its inventor, Major Isaac Newton Lewis, of the United States army, and was as repeatedly rejected by the officials at Washington.  At last, in despair of receiving recognition in his own country, he sold it to Russia and Belgium.  The Lewis gun, which is air-cooled and weighs only twenty-nine pounds—­less than half the weight of a soldier’s equipment—­fires a thousand shots a minute.  In the fighting around Sempst I saw trees as large round as a man’s thigh literally cut down by the stream of lead from these weapons.

The inventor of the Lewis gun was not the only American who played an inconspicuous but none the less important part in the War of Nations.  A certain American corporation doing business in Belgium placed its huge Antwerp plant and the services of its corps of skilled engineers at the service of the Government, though I might add that this fact was kept carefully concealed, being known to only a handful of the higher Belgian officials.  This concern made shells and other ammunition for the Belgian army; it furnished aeroplanes and machine-guns; it constructed miles of barbed-wire entanglements and connected those entanglements with the city lighting system; one of its officers went on a secret mission to England and brought back with