We started early the next morning.  As there was some doubt about the propriety of my taking a Belgian military driver into the German lines I drove the car myself.  And, though nothing was said about a photographer, I took with me Donald Thompson.  Before we passed the city limits of Ghent things began to happen.  Entering a street which leads through a district inhabited by the working classes, we suddenly found our way barred by a mob of several thousand excited Flemings.

Above a sea of threatening arms and brandished sticks and angry faces rose the figures of two German soldiers, with carbines slung across their backs, mounted on work-horses which they had evidently hastily unharnessed from a wagon.  Like their unfortunate comrades of the motor-car episode, they too had strayed into the city by mistake.  As we approached the crowd made a concerted rush for them.  A blast from my siren opened a lane for us, however, and I drove the car alongside the terrified Germans.

“Quick!” shouted Van Hee in German.  “Off your horses and into the car!  Hide your rifles!  Take off your helmets!  Sit on the floor and keep out of sight!”

The mob, seeing its prey escaping, surged about us with a roar.  For a moment things looked very ugly.  Van Hee jumped on the seat.

“I am the American Consul!” he shouted.  “These men are under my protection!  You are civilians, attacking German soldiers in uniform.  If they are harmed your city will be burned about your ears.”

At that moment a burly Belgian shouldered his way through the crowd and, leaping on the running-board, levelled a revolver at the Germans cowering in the tonneau.  Quick as thought Thompson knocked up the man’s hand, and at the same instant I threw on the power.  The big car leaped forward and the mob scattered before it.  It was a close call for every one concerned, but a much closer call for Ghent; for had those German soldiers been murdered by civilians in the city streets no power on earth could have saved the city from German vengeance.  General von Boehn told me so himself.

A few minutes later, as playlets follow each other in quick succession on a stage, the scene changed from near tragedy to screaming farce.  As we came thundering into the little town of Sotteghem, which is the Sleepy Hollow of Belgium, we saw, rising from the middle of the town square, a pyramid, at least ten feet high, of wardrobe-trunks, steamer-trunks, bags, and suit-cases.  From the summit of this extraordinary monument floated a huge American flag.  As our car came to a halt there rose a chorus of exclamations in all the dialects between Maine and California, and from the door of a near-by cafe came pouring a flood of Americans.  They proved to be a lost detachment of that great army of tourists which, at the beginning of hostilities, started on its mad retreat for the coast, leaving Europe strewn with their belongings.  This particular detachment had been cut off in Brussels