The civilians who were wandering, foot-loose and free, about the theatre of operations were by no means confined to the representatives of the Press; there was an amazing number of young Englishmen and Americans who described themselves as “attaches” and “consular couriers” and “diplomatic messengers,” and who intimated that they were engaged in all sorts of dangerous and important missions.  Many of these were adventurous young men of means who had “come over to see the fun” and who had induced the American diplomatic representatives in London and The Hague to give them dispatches of more or less importance—­ usually less than more—­to carry through to Antwerp and Brussels.  In at least one instance the official envelopes with the big red seals which they so ostentatiously displayed contained nothing but sheets of blank paper.  Their sole motive was in nearly all cases curiosity.  They had no more business wandering about the war-zone than they would have had wandering about a hospital where men were dying.  Belgium was being slowly strangled; her villages had been burned, her fields laid waste, her capital was in the hands of the enemy, her people were battling for their national existence; yet these young men came in and demanded first-row seats, precisely as though the war was a spectacle which was being staged for their special benefit.

One youth, who in his busy moments practised law in Boston, though quite frankly admitting that he was only actuated by curiosity, was exceedingly angry with me because I declined to take him to the firing-line.  He seemed to regard the desperate battle which was then in progress for the possession of Antwerp very much as though it was a football game in the Harvard stadium; he seemed to think that he had a right to see it.  He said that he had come all the way from Boston to see a battle, and when I remained firm in my refusal to take him to the front he intimated quite plainly that I was no gentleman and that nothing would give him greater pleasure than to have a shell explode in my immediate vicinity.

For all its grimness, the war was productive of more than one amusing episode.  I remember a mysterious stranger who called one morning on the American Consul at Ostend to ask for assistance in getting through to Brussels.  When the Consul asked him to be seated he bowed stiffly and declined, and when a seat was again urged upon him he explained, in a hoarse whisper, that sewn in his trousers were two thousand pounds in bank-notes which he was taking through to Brussels for the relief of stranded English and Americans—­hence he couldn’t very well sit down.

Of all the horde of adventurous characters who were drawn to the Continent on the outbreak of war as iron-filings are attracted by a magnet, I doubt if there was a more picturesque figure than a little photographer from Kansas named Donald Thompson.  I met him first while paying a flying visit to Ostend.  He blew into the Consulate there wearing an American army shirt, a pair of British officer’s riding-breeches, French puttees and a Highlander’s forage-cap, and carrying a camera the size of a parlour-phonograph.  No one but an American could have accomplished what he had, and no American but one from Kansas.  He had not only seen war, all military prohibitions to the contrary, but he had actually photographed it.