By four o’clock all the Belgian troops were withdrawn except a thin screen to cover the retreat.  As I wished to see the German advance I remained on the railway embankment on the outskirts of Sempst after all the Belgians, save a picket of ten men, had been withdrawn from the village.  I had my car waiting in the road below with the motor running.  As the German infantry would have to advance across a mile of open fields it was obvious that I would have ample time in which to get away.  The Germans prefaced their advance by a terrific cannonade.  The air was filled with whining shrapnel.  Farmhouses collapsed amid puffs of brown smoke.  The sky was smeared in a dozen places with the smoke of burning hamlets.  Suddenly a soldier crouching beside me cried, “Les Allemands!  Les Allemands!” and from the woods which screened the railway-embankment burst a long line of grey figures, hoarsely cheering.  At almost the same moment I heard a sudden splutter of shots in the village street behind me and my driver screamed, “Hurry for your life, monsieur!  The Uhlans are upon us!” In my desire to see the main German advance it had never occurred to me that a force of the enemy’s cavalry might slip around and take us in the flank, which was exactly what had happened.  It was three hundred yards to the car and a freshly ploughed field lay between, but I am confident that I broke the world’s record for the distance.  As I leaped into the car and we shot down the road at fifty miles an hour, the Uhlans cantered into the village, the sunlight striking on their lance-tips.  It was a close call.

The retreat from Malines provided a spectacle which I shall never forget.  For twenty miles every road was jammed with clattering cavalry, plodding infantry, and rumbling batteries, the guns, limbers, and caissons still covered with the green boughs which had been used to mask their position from German aeroplanes.  Gendarmes in giant bearskins, chasseurs in uniforms of green and yellow, carabineers with their shiny leather hats, grenadiers, infantry of the line, guides, lancers, sappers and miners with picks and spades, engineers with pontoon-wagons, machine-guns drawn by dogs, ambulances with huge Red Cross flags fluttering above them, and cars, cars, cars, all the dear old familiar American makes among them, contributed to form a mighty river flowing towards Antwerp.  Malines formerly had a population of fifty thousand people, and forty-five thousand of these fled when they heard that the Germans were returning.  The scenes along the road were heart-rending in their pathos.  The very young and the very old, the rich and the well-to-do and the poverty-stricken, the lame and the sick and the blind, with the few belongings they had been able to save in sheet-wrapped bundles on their backs or piled in push-carts, clogged the roads and impeded the soldiery.  These people were abandoning all that they held most dear to pillage and destruction.  They were completely terrorized by the Germans.  But the Belgian army was not terrorized.  It was a retreating army but it was victorious in retreat.  The soldiers were cool, confident, courageous, and gave me the feeling that if the German giant left himself unguarded a single instant little Belgium would drive home a solar-plexus blow.